Ioana Enache

An III, LLR-LLS, gr. 2.

Tolkien’s Personal Mythology1

Write a very short biography of a writer/poet arguing why his/her life is important to you. (1 page)

I have a soft spot for people who are driven by their inner fire. But I have a softer one for people who manage to make the fire part of their lives. All these words are (to say the least) an understatement when talking about J. R. R. Tolkien.

Just to make it clear, I am not a big fan of fantasy fiction and I barely know how to play any video games (scientists claim that these two issues are strictly related given their capacity to create compensatory universes), still one cannot help but feel amazed when Tolkien is on.

Fun fact: no one knew (and those who did could not care less) about the epic poem Beowulf until a professor at Oxford University noticed it. This professor was a good friend of C. S. Lewis, was teaching linguistic and was called J. R. R. Tolkien.

Actually the main reason why I chose Tolkien as the writer I want to write about is concerning something he once said. J. R. R. Tolkien grew up in Africa, the place where some of the descriptions in the Hobbit are inspired from. Other images came from his trips in beautiful places like Switzerland. He fell ill when he was a baby and the doctor who looked after him remained in Tolkien’s literature as the figure of Gandalf. His mother died when he was just ten, creating in little Tolkien contradictory views regarding religion. After that, he moved to England and the Northern mythology holds an important spot in his creations. Later, he became a linguistic professor at Oxford.

He invented an imaginary territory to the point when he needed to draw a map in order to give it the required coherence. He populated this space with creatures that have never existed until he thought about them, creatures like hobbits. And then, made them speak their own language, with its own morphology, syntax and so on. Most popular languages invented by Tolkien are Quenya and Sindarin.

So, I said there was this quote which made me chose Tolkien’s life. Once, while discussing the imaginary world he gave birth to, J. R. R. Tolkien talked about how he is unable to recall a moment, a single moment in his life, whether he was teaching, traveling or eating, when he did not think about the world he was building.

1 Ernst Kris’s term concerning psychotherapeutic literature shall not be disscused here, as tempting as it seems.