By: Benedict S. Gombocz

J.R.R. Tolkien

Early Life John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3

January 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to English parents.

When he was three, his mother brought him and his younger brother, Hilary, back to England.

His father passed away shortly afterwards in South Africa; the family stayed in England and by the summer of 1896, his mother found a home in the hamlet of Sarehole, just outside Birmingham.

His family lived in refined poverty; they eventually moved to Moseley, a suburb of Birmingham just northwest of Sarehole.

Tolkien was only 12 when his mother died; he and his brother became wards of a Catholic priest.

Tolkien and his brother lived with aunts and in boarding homes afterward.

The division between Tolkien’s happier days in the rural landscape of Sarehole and his adolescent years in the industrial centre of Birmingham would be strongly felt in his later writings.

Education In his youth, Tolkien attended King

Edward’s School in Birmingham in 1910 and 1911, where he exceeded in classical and modern languages.

There are six known contributions Tolkien made in King Edward’s School Chronicle.

In 1911, he went to Exeter College, Oxford; there, he studied Classics, Old English, Germanic languages, Welsh, and Finnish.

He showed an aptitude for philology and began to create languages of his own.

Tolkien published his very first poem in 1913, titled From the many-willow'd margin of the immemorial Thames, in the Stapeldon Magazine of Exeter College.

World War I By the time Tolkien completed his

degree at Oxford in 1915, World War I erupted across Europe.

Tolkien enlisted in the military and was commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers, but did not see active duty for months.

During this period, he wrote the proem Goblin Feet, which was published in Oxford Poetry 1915.

When he learned he would be shipped out in March 1916, Tolkien married longtime friend Edith Bratt, the girl he wrote the poem for.

He was sent to serve on the Western Front and fought in Somme offensive; nearly all of his closest friends lost their lives.

Following four months in and out of the trenches, he became sick with typhus-like infection and was sent back to England; he served for the remainder of the war here.

Academic Career Tolkien’s first job was a lexicographer on New

English Dictionary; he helped to draft Oxford English Dictionary.

Tolkien wrote A Middle English Vocabulary, which was not published until 1922, but after it was published, some copies were accounted with first impressions of Kenneth Sisam’s book Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, which was published the year before.

In this time, Tolkien started on serious work on creating languages that he pictured was spoken by elves; these languages were based largely on Finnish and Welsh.

He also began his Lost Tales series, a mythic history of men, elves, and other creatures he made to give context for his “Elvish” languages.

He made the first public presentation of Lost Tales series when he read The Fall of Gondolin to an entertained audience at Exeter College Essay Club.

Later, Tolkien became a professor in English Language at University of Leeds, where got together with E. V. Gordon on famous edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Tolkien stayed at Leeds until 1925, when he took a position as an Anglo-Saxon teacher at Oxford University; here, he found time to make a number of contributions on different magazines and books like Gryphon Magazine, Microsm, TLS, and Leeds University Verse.

Tolkien at Oxford Tolkien spent the remainder of his career at

Oxford; he retired in 1959. Though he made little by today’s “publish or

perish” standards, Tolkien’s scholarly writings were of the highest degree; among his most influential works is his lecture “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics”.

At Oxford, he became one of the founding members of an informal group of like-minded Oxford peers “The Inklings” who got together for conservation, drinks, and readings from their works-in-progress; another important member was C.S. Lewis, who befriended Tolkien, becoming one of his closest peers.

Tolkien, a deeply religious Catholic, and Lewis, an agnostic, often debated religion and mythology’s rule.

In contrast to Lewis, who rejected myths and fairly tales, Tolkien firmly believed they have both moral and spiritual value.

As said by Tolkien, “The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the Universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairly tale?”.

“In a hole in the ground . . .” It was also during the years spent

at Oxford that Tolkien scribbled an unexplainable note in a student’s exam book: “In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit. “

Curious as to what a “Hobbit” was and why it should make its living in a hole, Tolkien started to make a story involving who inhabited a world known as Middle-earth.

This became a story he shared with his children; in 1936, a version of the story was brought to the attention of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (now part of Harper/Collins), who published it as The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, in 1937, becoming an immediate and enduring classic.

The Lord of the Rings Publisher Stanley Unwin was surprised by

the success of The Hobbit and asked for a sequel, which led into a multivolume epic.

Whereas The Hobbit made a hint at the history of Middle-earth that Tolkien made in his Lost Tales series (which by now he was naming The Silmarillion), the sequel was based largely on it.

Tolkien was so focused on getting every detail right that it took him over a decade to finish his 12-book series The Lord of the Rings, often leaving off writing the story for months at a time to solve a linguistic problem or historical inconsistency.

In 1954-1955, The Lord of the Rings appeared in three different parts: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King.

Whereas the book was happily received by the reading public, critical reviews were anything but neutral; some critics, like Philip Toynbee, expressed strong disapproval of its fantasy setting, archaic language, and utter earnestness.

Others, most notably W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis, highly praised it for its straightforward narrative, imagination, and Tolkien’s palpable love of language.

The Lord of the Rings – cont. Until it finally appeared in paperback, The Lord of the Rings did not

reach the climax of its popularity; Tolkien did not like paperbacks and did not authorize a paperback edition.

However, in 1965, Ace Books made full use of a legal loophole, publishing an unauthorized paperback version of The Lord of the Rings.

Within months, Ballantine published an official version of the book (with a somewhat angry note about respecting an author’s wishes).

The smaller cost of paperbacks and the publicity generated by the copyright dispute increased sales of the book significantly, particularly in the United States where it was fastly embraced by the counterculture of the 60s.

Almost 60 years after its publication, Tolkien’s epic tale has sold over 100 million copies and translated in over 25 languages.

Tolkien’s legacy The Lord of the Rings is a singular, contradictory writing. Written in a nearly old-fashioned form with unusual words and

uncertain historical details and lacking the modern importance on the “inner life”, it is disconcerted and anti-modern.

But at the same time, its gloomy environmentalism and fully seen alternative world are fairly modern; it has often been read, together as other things, as a parable of World War II and the Cold War, although Tolkien himself denied such an interpretation and maintained it was simply a story to be interpreted on its own terms.

However, its enduring interest lies not in its literary strangeness or straightforward action, rather in its beautifully seen world and the themes of loss, self-sacrifice, and friendship.

In its wake, the work of Tolkien not only left a host of sword-and-sorcery followers and devoted fans, but a living legacy in the hundreds of non-existing worlds that have since come alive in books and films.

Middle-earth after Tolkien J.R.R. Tolkien died on 2

September 1973; he was 81.

Tolkien’s death did not end Middle-earth for readers.

After he died, his son Christopher worked hard to finish his father’s work.

Christopher edited The Simarillion, seeing it published in 1977.

In 1980, he started to publish the remainder of his father’s unfinished writings, which resulted in the 12-volume History of Middle-earth series.

Quotes “All that is gold does not glitter, not all those who wander

are lost; the old that is strong does not wither, deep roots are not reached by the frost. From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless shall be king.”

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after.”

“It is the job that is never started that takes longest to finish.”

“I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend.”

“The wise speak only of what they know.”

Bibliography http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/abouttolki

en.htm