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J. R. R. Tolkien
1892 - 1973
J. R. R. Tolkien gained a reputation during the 1960s and 1970s
as a cult figure among youths disillusioned with war and the
technological age; his continuing popularity evidences his
ability to evoke the oppressive realities of modern life while
drawing audiences into a fantasy world.
Tolkien
was born on Jan. 3, 1892, the son of English-born parents in
Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State of South Africa, where
his father worked as a bank manager. To escape the heat and dust
of southern Africa and to better guard the delicate health of
Ronald (as he was called), Tolkien's mother moved back to
England with him and his younger brother when they were very
young boys. Within a year of this move their father, Arthur
Tolkien, died in Bloemfontein, and a few years later the boys'
mother died as well. The boys lodged at several homes from 1905
until 1911, when Ronald entered Exeter College, Oxford. Tolkien
received his B.A. from Oxford in 1915 and an M.A. in 1919.
During the interim he married his longtime sweetheart, Edith
Bratt, and served for a short time on the Western Front with the
Lancashire Fusiliers. While in England recovering from "trench
fever" in 1917, Tolkien began writing "The Book of Lost Tales, "
which eventually became The Silmarillion (1977) and laid the
groundwork for his stories about Middle-earth. After the
Armistice he returned to Oxford, where he joined the staff of
the Oxford English Dictionary and began work as a free-lance
tutor. In 1920 he was appointed Reader in English Language at
Leeds University, where he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on an
acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which
was completed and published in 1925. (Some years later, Tolkien
completed a second translation of this poem, which was published
posthumously.) The following year, having returned to Oxford as
Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien became
friends with a fellow of Magdalen College, C. S. Lewis. They
shared an intense enthusiasm for the myths, sagas, and languages
of northern Europe; and to better enhance those interests, both
attended meetings of "The Coalbiters, " an Oxford club, founded
by Tolkien, at which Icelandic sagas were read aloud.
During the rest of his years at Oxford - twenty as Rawlinson and
Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, fourteen as Merton Professor
of English Language and Literature - Tolkien published several
esteemed short studies and translations. Notable among these are
his essays "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936), "
Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale" (1934), and "On
Fairy-Stories" (1947); his scholarly edition of Ancrene Wisse
(1962); and his translations of three medieval poems: "Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight, " "Pearl, " and "Sir Orfeo" (1975).
As a writer of imaginative literature, though, Tolkien is best
known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, tales which were
formed during his years attending meetings of "The Inklings, "
an informal gathering of like-minded friends and fellow dons,
initiated after the demise of The Coalbiters. The Inklings,
which was formed during the late 1930s and lasted until the late
1940s, was a weekly meeting held in Lewis's sitting-room at
Magdalen, at which works-in-progress were read aloud and
discussed and critiqued by the attendees, all interspersed with
free-flowing conversation about literature and other topics. The
nucleus of the group was Tolkien, Lewis, and Lewis's friend,
novelist Charles Williams; other participants, who attended
irregularly, included Lewis's brother Warren, Nevill Coghill, H.
V. D. Dyson, Owen Barfield, and others. The common thread which
bound them was that they were all adherents of Christianity and
all had a love of story. Having heard Tolkien's first hobbit
story read aloud at a meeting of the Inklings, Lewis urged
Tolkien to publish The Hobbit, which appeared in 1937. A major
portion of The Fellowship of the Ring was also read to The
Inklings before the group disbanded in the late 1940's.
Tolkien retired from his professorship in 1959. While the
unauthorized publication of an American edition of The Lord of
the Rings in 1965 angered him, it also made him a widely admired
cult figure in the United States, especially among high school
and college students. Uncomfortable with this status, he and his
wife lived quietly in Bournemouth for several years, until
Edith's death in 1971. In the remaining two years of his life,
Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he was made an honorary fellow
of Merton College and awarded a doctorate of letters. He was at
the height of his fame as a scholarly and imaginative writer
when he died in 1973, though critical study of his fiction
continues and has increased in the years since.
A devout Roman Catholic throughout his life, Tolkien began
creating his own languages and mythologies at an early age and
later wrote Christian-inspired stories and poems to provide them
with a narrative framework. Based on bedtime stories Tolkien had
created for his children, The Hobbit concerns the reluctant
efforts of a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, to recover a treasure stolen
by a dragon. During the course of his mission, the hobbit
discovers a magical ring which, among other powers, can render
its bearer invisible. The ability to disappear helps Bilbo
fulfill his quest; however, the ring's less obvious faculties
prompt the malevolent Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, to seek it.
The hobbits' attempt to destroy the ring, thereby denying Sauron
unlimited power, is the focal point of the Lord of the Rings
trilogy, which consists of the novels The Fellowship of the Ring
(1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King
(1955). In these books Tolkien rejects such traditional heroic
attributes as strength and size, stressing instead the capacity
of even the humblest creatures to prevail against evil.
The initial critical reception to The Lord of the Rings varied.
While some reviewers expressed dissatisfaction with the story's
great length and one-dimensional characters, the majority
enjoyed Tolkien's enchanting descriptions and lively sense of
adventure. Religious, Freudian, allegorical, and political
interpretations of the trilogy soon appeared, but Tolkien
generally rejected such explications. He maintained that The
Lord of the Rings was conceived with "no allegorical intentions
…, moral, religious, or political, " but he also denied that the
trilogy is a work of escapism: "Middle-earth is not an imaginary
world…. The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which
we now live." Tolkien contended that his story was
"fundamentally linguistic in inspiration," a "religious and
Catholic work" whose spiritual aspects were "absorbed into the
story and symbolism." Tolkien concluded, "The stories were made
… to provide a world for the languages rather than the reverse."
Throughout his career Tolkien composed histories, genealogies,
maps, glossaries, poems, and songs to supplement his vision of
Middle-earth. Among the many works published during his lifetime
were a volume of poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other
Verses from the Red Book (1962), and a fantasy novel, Smith of
Wootton Major (1967). Though many of his stories about
Middle-earth remained incomplete at the time of Tolkien's death,
his son, Christopher, rescued the manuscripts from his father's
collections, edited them, and published them. One of these
works, The Silmarillion, takes place before the time of The
Hobbit and, in a heroic manner which recalls the Christian myths
of Creation and the Fall, tells the tale of the first age of
Holy Ones and their offspring. Unfinished Tales of Numenor and
Middle-earth (1980) is a similar collection of incomplete
stories and fragments written during World War I. The Book of
Lost Tales, Part I (1984) and The Book of Lost Tales, Part II
(1984) deal respectively with the beginnings of Middle-earth and
the point at which humans enter the saga. In addition to these
posthumous works, Christopher Tolkien also collected his
father's correspondence to friends, family, and colleagues in
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981).
It is as a writer of timeless fantasy that Tolkien is most
highly regarded today. From 1914 until his death in 1973, he
drew on his familiarity with Northern and other ancient
literatures and his own invented languages to create not just
his own story, but his own world: Middle-earth, complete with
its own history, myths, legends, epics, and heroes. "His life's
work, " Augustus M. Kolich has written, "… encompasses a reality
that rivals Western man's own attempt at recording the
composite, knowable history of his species. Not since Milton has
any Englishman worked so successfully at creating a secondary
world, derived from our own, yet complete in its own terms with
encyclopedic mythology; an imagined world that includes a vast
gallery of strange beings: hobbits, elves, dwarfs, orcs, and,
finally, the men of Westernesse." His works - especially The
Lord of the Rings - have pleased countless readers and
fascinated critics who recognize their literary depth.
~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~<"((((((><~~~
Tolkien, J. R. R. (John Ronald Reuel, 1892–1973), British author
and scholar, best known for his works of fantasy, The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings. Though his first three years were spent
in South Africa, Tolkien and his younger brother Hilary grew up
in an English country village and, after 1900, in Birmingham,
where he attended King Edward's School. There he discovered a
love of languages—Old English, Gothic, Welsh, Finnish—and began
to invent his own. His widowed mother was disowned by her family
after her conversion to Catholicism, and when she died in 1904
she named as her two sons' guardian a friendly priest who lodged
them in a boarding house. At 16 Tolkien met and fell in love
with Edith Bratt, whom he married eight years later. After
obtaining a degree in English language and literature from
Oxford, he served in World War I as a signals officer. While he
was in the trenches of Flanders, he created a mythology and
world based on Elvish languages that he had invented to help
keep him sane. After the war, he went on to teach at the
University of Leeds and then at Oxford, where he remained until
his retirement, achieving an admirable reputation as a scholar
in Anglo Saxon and medieval literature. Among his important
works were a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight (1925) and his essay ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the
Critics’ (1936). In private, he worked on The Silmarillion, a
mythological epic of his imagined Middle Earth, and told stories
to his four children. One of the tales became The Hobbit (1937).
Urged by his publisher to produce a sequel, Tolkien began what
soon developed into something darker and far more complex, The
Lord of the Rings. The coming of World War II nearly halted his
slow progress, and only the encouragement of his friend C. S.
Lewis and his son Christopher enabled him to complete the three
volume work, published in 1954–5. The 1965 paperback publication
of ‘The Trilogy’ (as early enthusiasts named it) transformed it
into a best seller, particularly on college campuses. Tolkien
was still at work on The Silmarillion when he died; it was
published and edited by Christopher Tolkien in 1977.
As a child, Tolkien loved George MacDonald's ‘Curdie’ books and
the fairy tale collections of Andrew Lang. Although Bilbo
Baggins of The Hobbit is not the usual fairy tale
protagonist—not a handsome youngest son, but a plump, middle
aged hobbit of Middle Earth—he finds himself on a classic quest
journey with a group of dwarfs who hope to recover their
ancestral treasure from the dragon of the Lonely Mountain. His
first adventure, an encounter with three hungry trolls, is
closely modelled on those Scandinavian folk tales in which a
troll's attention is distracted till the rising sun turns him
into stone. His second—in the underground realm of the
goblins—recalls Curdie's exploits underground in The Princess
and the Goblin (1871). The ring of Invisibility that Bilbo finds
there seems at first no more than the usual handy magical
device. As the story progresses, however, it becomes more
original, more serious in tone, and more akin to saga and heroic
legend than to folk tale. The expected fairy tale outcome, in
which Bilbo would somehow slay the dragon and win the treasure,
is deliberately subverted. A minor character kills the dragon;
the unguarded treasure brings dwarfs, elves, and men to the
brink of war; and Bilbo's greatest heroic feat is not one of
violence but of renunciation, in which he risks his life to make
peace. He wins no princess and only a modest share of treasure;
his greatest reward is the new self he has realized and his rich
store of memories.
The Lord of the Rings amplifies and darkens the pattern of The
Hobbit. Again, a hobbit sets forth on a quest with his
companions, surviving many perilous adventures to reach a lonely
mountain. In this fairy tale novel for adults, however, an act
of renunciation becomes the goal. Bilbo's ring has been revealed
as a deadly Ring of Power, which its master Sauron is seeking.
He intends to enslave all of Middle Earth with it, and Bilbo's
nephew Frodo must reach the mountain where it was forged in
order to destroy it forever. Tolkien's work is equally
remarkable for the depth of its moral vision and the quality of
its imaginary world, whose complexity, detail, and consistency
create for the willing reader the illusion of a real yet
enchanted universe.
Both the cultural and the literary influence of Lord of the
Rings have been considerable. Adult fantasy, all but extinct
before its startling success, is today a flourishing mainstay of
the publishing industry. And although much post Tolkien fantasy
has been weakly imitative, some of today's most original
writers—including Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula K. Le Guin—have
acknowledged Tolkien as a source of inspiration. In Strategies
of Fantasy, Brian Attebery identifies The Lord of the Rings as
our ‘mental template’ for fantasy, suggesting that works we now
generally recognize as fantasy share its salient
characteristics: violation of natural law, comic structure (that
of the traditional fairy tale), and sense of wonder. In the late
1960s, the alternative reality of Middle Earth endeared Tolkien
to the counter culture, while the ease with which that reality
lends itself to role playing led to the creation of games like
‘Dungeons and Dragons’ and its successors, as well as the
pioneering text based computer game ‘Adventure’.
Tolkien is important not only as a practitioner but as a
theorist of fantasy. Two of his short tales, ‘Leaf by Niggle’
(in Tree and Leaf, 1964) and Smith of Wootton Major (1967) deal
symbolically with the nature of fantasy and the artist who
creates it. His influential 1939 essay ‘On Fairy Stories’
expresses analytically what ‘Leaf by Niggle’ says in story.
Tolkien argues that the fairy tale is not inherently ‘for
children’ but for adults as well. He defends the making of
imaginary worlds as divinely sanctioned ‘sub creation’, and
suggests that the special significance of the fairy tale lies in
its distinctive qualities of Fantasy, Escape, Recovery, and
Consolation. For Tolkien, the ‘eucatastrophe’, in which the
story turns suddenly from sorrow to joy, is the defining moment
of the fairy tale.
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This web page was last updated on:
16 December, 2008
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