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J. R. R. Tolkien

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   CAPTION: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

   Tolkien in 1972, in his study at Merton Street, Oxford. Source:
   J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter.
       Born:      1892- 01-03
                  Bloemfontein, South Africa
       Died:      1973- 09-02
                  Bournemouth, England
   Occupation(s): author, academic, philologist
     Genre(s):    High fantasy

   John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE ( 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was
   an English writer and university professor who is best known as the
   author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was an Oxford
   professor of Anglo-Saxon language ( 1925 to 1945) and English language
   and literature ( 1945 to 1959). He was a strongly committed Roman
   Catholic. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis; they were both
   members of the informal literary discussion group known as the
   Inklings.

   In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's
   published fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumously
   published books, which taken together is a connected body of tales,
   fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an
   imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth (derived from the Old
   English word middangeard, the lands inhabitable by humans) in
   particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our
   own world. Tolkien applied the word legendarium to the totality of
   these writings. Most of the posthumously published books were compiled
   from Tolkien's notes by his son Christopher Tolkien.

   While fantasy authors such as William Morris, Robert E. Howard and E.
   R. Eddison preceded Tolkien, the great success and enduring influence
   of his works have led to him being popularly, if perhaps inaccurately,
   identified as the " father of modern fantasy literature". In any case,
   Tolkien's work has had an indisputable and lasting effect on the field
   and related media; many fantasy settings like Dungeons & Dragons and
   Warhammer Fantasy owe much of their mythology, directly or indirectly,
   to him.

   Tolkien's other published fiction includes stories not directly related
   to his legendarium, some of them originally told to his children.

Biography

The Tolkien family

   As far as is known, most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were
   craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in Saxony (Germany), but
   had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly
   and intensely English". The surname Tolkien is Anglicized from
   Tollkiehn (i.e. German tollkühn, "foolhardy"; the etymological English
   translation would be dull-keen, a literal translation of oxymoron). The
   surname Rashbold given to two characters in Tolkien's The Notion Club
   Papers is a pun on this.

   Tolkien's maternal grandparents, John and Edith Jane Suffield, lived in
   Birmingham and owned a shop in the city centre. The Suffield family had
   had a business in a building called Lamb House since 1812. From 1812
   William Suffield ran a book and stationery shop there; Tolkien's
   great-grandfather, also John Suffield, was there from 1826 with a
   drapery and hosiery business.

Childhood

   Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free
   State (now Free State Province, South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Tolkien
   (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield
   ( 1870– 1904). Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary
   Arthur Reuel, who was born on 17 February 1894.

   While living in Africa he was bitten by a baboon spider in the garden,
   an event which would have later parallels in his stories. Dr. Thornton
   S. Quimby cared for the ailing child after the rather nasty spider
   bite, and it is occasionally suggested that Doctor Quimby was an early
   model for characters such as Gandalf the Grey. When he was three,
   Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was
   intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in
   South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left
   the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with
   her parents in Stirling Road, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they
   moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village,
   later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and
   Moseley Bog and the Clent Hills and Malvern Hills, which would later
   inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and
   villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch and places such as
   his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his
   fiction.

   Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family,
   was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she
   awakened in her son the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young
   Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees. But his favourite lessons
   were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the
   rudiments of Latin very early. He could read by the age of four, and
   could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother got him lots of books
   to read. He disliked Treasure Island and The Pied Piper. He thought
   Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was amusing, but also
   thought that Alice's adventures in it were disturbing. But he liked
   stories about Native Americans, and also the fantasy works by George
   MacDonald. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a
   student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of
   King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham
   Palace. He later attended St. Philip's School and Exeter College,
   Oxford.

   His mother converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900 despite vehement
   protests by her Baptist family who then suspended all financial
   assistance to her. She died of complications due to diabetes in 1904,
   when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which they were
   then renting. For the rest of his life Tolkien felt that she had become
   a martyr for her faith, which had a profound effect on his own Catholic
   beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C.
   S. Lewis to Christianity, though Tolkien was greatly disappointed that
   Lewis chose to return to the Anglicanism of his upbringing.

   During his subsequent orphanhood he was brought up by Father Francis
   Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory in the Edgbaston area of
   Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the
   Victorian tower of Edgbaston Waterworks, which may have influenced the
   images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence
   was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the
   Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a
   large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free
   public display from around 1908.

Youth

   Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith Mary Bratt at the age of
   sixteen, though she was three years his senior. Father Francis forbade
   him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was
   twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter.

   In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien
   and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman,
   formed a semi-secret society which they called "the T.C.B.S.", the
   initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to
   their fondness of drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and,
   illicitly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members
   stayed in touch, and in December 1914, they held a "Council" in London,
   at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong
   dedication to writing poetry.

   In the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip
   that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's
   journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the
   slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his
   adventures as their party of twelve hiked from Interlaken to
   Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren.
   Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembers his regret at leaving the
   view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the Silvertine (
   Celebdil) of my dreams"). They went across the Kleine Scheidegg on to
   Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They
   continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig,
   and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.
   Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from
   the middle years of WW1 (from Carpenter's Biography)
   Enlarge
   Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from
   the middle years of WW1 (from Carpenter's Biography)

   On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a
   declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. She replied saying
   that she was already engaged but had done so because she had believed
   Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct
   renewed their love; Edith returned her ring and chose to marry Tolkien
   instead. Following their engagement Edith converted to Catholicism at
   Tolkien's insistence. They were engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913,
   and married in Warwick, England, on 22 March 1916.

   After graduating from the University of Oxford (where he was a member
   of Exeter College) with a first-class degree in English language in
   1915, Tolkien joined the British Army effort in World War I and served
   as a second lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire
   Fusiliers. His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien
   served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme until
   he came down with trench fever on 27 October 1916 and was moved back to
   England on 8 November 1916. Many of his close friends, including Gilson
   and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. Tolkien's Webley
   .455 Service Revolver is currently on display in the Imperial War
   Museum, London in a World War I exhibition. During his recovery in a
   cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on
   what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of
   Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he
   had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was
   promoted to lieutenant. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull,
   one day he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and
   Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock:
   "We walked in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white
   flowers". This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren
   and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.

Career

   Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford
   English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology
   of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. In 1920 he
   took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of
   Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there, but in 1925 he returned
   to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a
   courtesy fellowship at Pembroke College.
   20 Northmoor Road, the former home of J.R.R. Tolkien in North Oxford.
   Enlarge
   20 Northmoor Road, the former home of J.R.R. Tolkien in North Oxford.

   During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two
   volumes of The Lord of the Rings, largely at 20 Northmoor Road in North
   Oxford, where a blue plaque can now be found. He also assisted Sir
   Mortimer Wheeler in the unearthing of a Roman Asclepieion at Lydney
   Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928. Of Tolkien's academic publications, the
   1936 lecture " Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" had a lasting
   influence on Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson noted that the
   article Tolkien wrote about Beowulf is "widely recognized as a turning
   point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the
   primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to the purely
   linguistic elements. He also revealed in his famous article how highly
   he regarded Beowulf; "Beowulf is among my most valued sources…" And
   indeed, there are many influences of Beowulf found in the Lord of the
   Rings. When Tolkien wrote, the consensus of scholarship deprecated
   Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than
   realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was
   addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular
   tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem.
   (Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at
   Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic
   elements.)

   In 1945, he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton
   Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained
   until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings
   in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. During the 1950s,
   Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son
   John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent. Tolkien had an intense dislike for the
   side effects of industrialization which he considered a devouring of
   the English countryside. For most of his adult life, he eschewed
   automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude is perceptible
   from some parts of his work such as the forced industrialization of The
   Shire in The Lord of the Rings.

   W. H. Auden was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of
   Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with The Lord of the Rings:
   Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work.
   Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, "I am […] very deeply in Auden's debt
   in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one
   of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and
   letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to
   do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it."

   Tolkien and Edith had four children: Rev. John Francis Reuel ( 17
   November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel (October
   1920–1984), Christopher John Reuel (born 21 November 1924) and
   Priscilla Anne Reuel (born 1929).

Retirement and old age

   During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973,
   Tolkien increasingly turned into a figure of public attention and
   literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that he
   regretted he had not taken early retirement. While at first he wrote
   enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became more and more
   suspicious of emerging Tolkien fandom, especially among the hippie
   movement in the United States. In a 1972 letter he deplores having
   become a cult-figure, but admits that

     even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than Chu-Bu and not
     much older than Sheemish) cannot remain entirely untickled by the
     sweet smell of incense!

   Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone
   number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved
   to Bournemouth on the south coast. Tolkien was awarded the CBE by Queen
   Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. His medal was
   stolen from his room later that night. The medal was returned much
   later^[ citation needed], but the thief was never identified.
   The grave of J. R. R. and Edith Tolkien, Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.
   Enlarge
   The grave of J. R. R. and Edith Tolkien, Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.

   Edith Tolkien died on November 29, 1971, at the age of eighty-two, and
   Tolkien had the name Lúthien engraved on the stone at Wolvercote
   Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died twenty-one months later on
   September 2, 1973, at the age of eighty-one, he was buried in the same
   grave, with Beren added to his name, so that the engravings now read:

          Edith Mary Tolkien · Luthien · 1889 – 1971
          John Ronald Reuel Tolkien · Beren · 1892 – 1973

   Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne,
   East Sussex, and the asteroid 2675 Tolkien. Tolkien Way in
   Stoke-on-Trent is named after Tolkien's son, Fr. John Francis Tolkien,
   who was the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our
   Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains. There is also a
   professorship in his name at Oxford.

Views

   Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and in his religious and political
   views he was mostly conservative, in the sense of favouring established
   conventions and orthodoxies over innovation and modernization.
   Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis
   from atheism to Christianity, though Tolkien was greatly disappointed
   that Lewis chose to return to Anglicanism, rather than becoming a Roman
   Catholic like himself. Tolkien became supportive of Francisco Franco
   during the Spanish Civil War when he learned the Republicans were
   destroying churches and killing priests and nuns. He believed that
   Hitler was less dangerous than the Soviets: he wrote in a letter during
   the Munich Crisis that he believed that the Soviets were ultimately
   responsible for the problems and that they were trying to play the
   British and the French against Hitler.

   Though some people's perceptions of Tolkien as a racist or racialist
   have been a matter of scholarly discussion, statements made by Tolkien
   during his lifetime would seem to disprove such accusations. He
   regarded Nazi anti-Semitism as "pernicious and unscientific". He also
   called the "treatment of colour" (i.e. apartheid) in his birthplace
   South Africa horrifying, and spoke out against it in a valedictory
   address to the University of Oxford in 1959.

   Tolkien, having lost most of his friends in the trenches of World War
   I, was opposed to war in general,^[ citation needed] stating near the
   end of the war that the Allies were no better than their opponents,
   behaving like Orcs in their calls for a complete destruction of
   Germany. He was horrified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and
   Nagasaki, referring to its creators as "lunatics" and "babel builders".
   He also was known to be forever embittered towards Nazism for
   appropriating the Germanic heritage which he had dedicated his life to
   studying and preserving, and perverting it to fit their own bigoted
   model of Aryan racial supremacy, a school of thought to which he had
   never subscribed, and which he surmised would forever taint Germanic
   culture by association. His writings also evidence a strong respect for
   nature, and he wrote disparagingly of the wanton destruction of forests
   and wildlife.

   Tolkien also once described himself as an anarchist, or rather
   anarcho-monarchist.

Writing

   Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from
   illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that were
   reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent
   stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of Túrin, were carried
   forward into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand).
   Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the legendarium these poems were
   intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The
   Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but
   never published. Tolkien hoped to publish it along with the Lord of the
   Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) got cold feet;
   moreover printing costs were very high in the post-war years, leading
   to the Lord of the Rings being published in three books. The story of
   this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History
   of Middle-earth. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to
   include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the
   legend of Atlantis.

   Tolkien was strongly influenced by English history and legends which he
   often confessed his love for, but he also drew influence from Scottish
   and Welsh history and legends as well from many other European
   countries, namely Scandinavia and Germany. He was also influenced by
   Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish
   mythology and the Bible. The works most often cited as sources for
   Tolkien's stories include Beowulf, the Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, the
   Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga. Tolkien himself acknowledged
   Homer, Sophocles, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of
   his stories and ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle
   English works and poems. A major philosophical influence on his writing
   is King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of Boethius' Consolation of
   Philosophy known as the Lays of Boethius. Characters in The Lord of the
   Rings such as Frodo, Treebeard, and Elrond make noticeably Boethian
   remarks. Also, Catholic theology and imagery played a part in
   fashioning his creative imagination, suffused as it was by his deeply
   religious spirit.

   In addition to his mythopoetic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing
   fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas
   letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short
   stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters).
   Other stories included Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, Smith of Wootton Major,
   Farmer Giles of Ham and Leaf by Niggle. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton
   Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium. Leaf by
   Niggle appears to be an autobiographical allegory, in which a "very
   small man", Niggle, works on a painting of a tree, but is so caught up
   with painstakingly painting individual leaves or elaborating the
   background, or so distracted by the demands of his neighbour, that he
   never manages to complete it.

   Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he
   was persuaded by C.S. Lewis to publish a book he had written for his
   own children called The Hobbit in 1937. However, the book attracted
   adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher,
   George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

   Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted
   Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic
   three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (published 1954–55). Tolkien
   spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices
   for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant
   support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend Lewis, the
   author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the
   Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time
   long after it.

   Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale
   in the style of The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious
   in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an
   older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that
   Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw
   posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien's
   influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the
   success of The Lord of the Rings.

   Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his
   death. His son Christopher (with some assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay,
   later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of
   this material into one volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977.
   In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more
   fragmentary material under the title Unfinished Tales, and in
   subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material
   on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve volumes of The History of
   Middle-earth. All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned,
   alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always
   a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive
   version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency
   to be found between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most
   closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully
   integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965,
   while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have
   preferred to completely rewrite the entire book.

   The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee,
   Wisconsin, preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes and
   letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian Library.
   Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Lord of the Rings and
   The Hobbit, and other manuscripts, including Farmer Giles of Ham, while
   the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.

   The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has
   remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of
   fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader
   surveys. In the 2003 " Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord
   of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book".
   Australians voted The Lord of the Rings " My Favourite Book" in a 2004
   survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com
   customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book
   of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "
   greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was
   voted thirty-fifth in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person
   to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited just to the
   English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK’s "Big Read"
   survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings ( Der Herr
   der Ringe) to be their favourite work of literature.

   In September 2006, Christopher Tolkien, who had spent 30 years working
   on his father's unpublished manuscripts, announced that The Children of
   Húrin has been edited into a completed work for publication in 2007. J.
   R. R. Tolkien had first written what he called the Húrin's saga (and
   later the Narn) in 1918, and rewritten it several times, including as
   an epic poem, but never completed his mature, novelistic version.
   Extracts from the latter had been published before by Christopher
   Tolkien in "Unfinished Tales", with other texts appearing in The
   Silmarillion and his later literary investigations of The History of
   Middle-earth.


   J. R. R. Tolkien

     It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for
    presenting my father's long version of the legend of The Children of
            Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers.


   J. R. R. Tolkien

Languages

   Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are
   inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in
   Ancient Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old
   Icelandic as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English
   Dictionary from 1918, and is credited with having worked on a number of
   W words, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily. In 1920,
   he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, where he claimed credit
   for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty.
   He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English,
   various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English
   philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and
   Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for
   the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted
   that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "
   Viking Club".

   Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic
   significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of
   language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle
   tongue" in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his
   understanding of race and language. He considered west-midland Middle
   English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in
   1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland
   Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)"

   Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes
   overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output
   remained rather thin, was his affection for the construction of
   artificial languages. The best developed of these are Quenya and
   Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of
   much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a
   matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed
   from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an
   "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients
   from Finnish and Greek. A notable addition came in late 1945 with
   Adûnaic or Númenórean, a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour",
   connected with Tolkien's Atlantis legend, which by The Notion Club
   Papers ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language,
   and via the " Second Age" and the story of Eärendil was grounded in the
   legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's twentieth-century
   "real primary world" with the legendary past of his Middle-earth.

   Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated
   with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages:
   in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his
   lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a
   mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that " Volapük, Esperanto, Ido,
   Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages,
   because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".

   The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on
   the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on
   mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's revival
   of the spellings dwarves and elvish (instead of dwarfs and elfish),
   which had not been in use since the mid-1800s and earlier. Other terms
   he has coined such as eucatastrophe are mainly used in connection with
   Tolkien's work.

Works inspired by Tolkien

   In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes about his intentions
   to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which


   J. R. R. Tolkien

    The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope
       for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.


   J. R. R. Tolkien

   The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by
   Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes
   (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and
   Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road
   Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to
   The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who
   was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings.

   But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his
   works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly
   disapproving.

   In 1946, he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for
   the German edition of the Hobbit as "too Disnified",


   J. R. R. Tolkien

     Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun
              rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.


   J. R. R. Tolkien

   He was sceptical of the emerging fandom in the United States, and in
   1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition
   of The Lord of the Rings:


   J. R. R. Tolkien

    Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The
   Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction;
     but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make
                         some effort to improve it.


   J. R. R. Tolkien

   And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of
   The Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman he writes,


   J. R. R. Tolkien

       I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to
      understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an
   author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it
     would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no
         evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.


   J. R. R. Tolkien

   He went on to criticize the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene
   of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in
   principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film,
   stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to
   United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future
   productions, he forbade that Disney should ever be involved:


   J. R. R. Tolkien

   It might be advisable […] to let the Americans do what seems good to
     them — as long as it was possible […] to veto anything from or
       influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a
                            heartfelt loathing).


   J. R. R. Tolkien

   United Artists never made a film, though at least John Boorman was
   planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a
   live-action film which apparently would have been more to Tolkien's
   liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien
   Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie
   adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of The Lord of the Rings
   appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by Ralph
   Bakshi). The screenplay was written by the fantasy writer Peter S.
   Beagle. This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half
   of the story that is The Lord of the Rings. In 1977 an animated TV
   production of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980 they
   produced an animated film titled The Return of the King, which covered
   some of the portion of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to
   complete. In 2001–3, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as
   a trilogy of live-action films, augmented by digital animation,
   directed by Peter Jackson.

   Several Led Zeppelin songs include references to Tolkien's work
   including Ramble On (for example one line refers to "...the darkest
   depths of Mordor"), and the "Battle of Evermore" (which features a
   reference to the Ringwraiths).

Tolkien family tree




   John Suffield




   Joseph Benjamin Tolkien

   Mary Jane

































































   Jane

   Mabel
   1870–1904



   Arthur Reuel
   1857–1896 Mabel Grace Florence Wilfred Laurence






















































   Edith Bratt
   1889–1971

   John Ronald Reuel
   1892–1973















   Hilary Arthur Reuel
   1894–1976












































































                             John Francis Reuel
                                 1917–2003

   Michael Hilary Reuel
   1920–1984

   Faith Faulconbridge
   1928—

   Christopher John Reuel
   1924—

   Baillie Klass
   1941—

   Priscilla Anne Reuel
   1929—

   Gabriel
   1931—

   Julian
   1935—

   Paul
   1935—


































































































                                   Michael
                                1943— Joan
                               1945— Judith
                                1951— Simon
                                1959— Adam
                               1969— Rachel
                       1971— Christopher Angela Tim
                    1962— Nicolas Stephen Dominic Zoë

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