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: |
3 January 1892(1892--)
Bloemfontein, Orange Free State |
| Died: |
2 September 1973 (aged 81)
Bournemouth, England |
| Occupation: |
Author, Academic, Philologist |
| Nationality: |
British |
| Genres: |
High fantasy, Translation, Criticism |
| Debut works: |
The Hobbit, 1937 |
| Influences: |
George MacDonald, Germanic paganism,
Greco-Roman mythology, the Kalevala, the
Bible |
| Influenced: |
C. S. Lewis; other later authors of high fantasy
and fantasy in general |
| Signature: |
 |
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (3
January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was a English philologist,
writer and university professor, best known as the author of The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings. He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language
(Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon) from
1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English
language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a devout 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. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's son Christopher Tolkien published several works based heavily on his father's notes, these include
The Silmarillion and others, which taken together, form a connected body of
tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth (derived from an Anglicized form of Old Norse
Miðgarðr, the land inhabited by humans in Germanic
paganism) in particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our own world. Tolkien applied the word
legendarium to the totality of these writings.
While other authors such as William Morris,[1] George MacDonald,[1] Robert E.
Howard[1] and E. R. Eddison[1]
published fantasy works before Tolkien, the great success and enduring influence of his works have led to him being popularly
identified as the "father of modern fantasy literature",[2] usually with high fantasy in mind.
L. Sprague de Camp and others consider him the "father of modern fantasy" together
with sword and sorcery author Robert E.
Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian).[3][4] In any
case, Tolkien has had an indisputable and lasting effect on later
works, as well as on the genre as a whole.
Biography
Tolkien family origins
Most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in the German Kingdom of Saxony, but had been living in England since the
18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English".[5] The surname Tolkien is Anglicized from Tollkiehn (i.e. German
tollkühn, "foolhardy"; the etymological English translation would be dull-keen, a calque and an oxymoron). The surname Rashbold given to two characters in
Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers is a pun on
this.[6]
Tolkien's maternal grandparents, John and Edith Jane Suffield, were Baptists who lived in Birmingham and owned a shop
in the city centre. The Suffield family had run various businesses out of the same building, called Lamb House, since the early
1800s. Beginning in 1812 Tolkien's great-great grandfather William Suffield owned and operated a
book and stationery shop there; Tolkien's great-grandfather, also John Suffield, was there from 1826 with a drapery and hosiery business.[7]
Childhood
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892, in
Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now
Free State Province), part of what is now South Africa,
to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel,
née Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the
British bank he worked for. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on 17 February 1894.[8]
Ronald (left) and Hilary Tolkien in 1905 (from Carpenter's
Biography)
As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a baboon spider in the garden, an event which would
have later echoes 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 such characters as Gandalf the
Grey.[9] 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.[10] 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.[11] 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.[12]
Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil.[13] 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.[14] He could read by the
age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. 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 the fantasy works by
George MacDonald.[15] In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were
particularly important to him and to some of his later writings.[16] 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.[17] He later attended St. Philip's School and
Exeter College, Oxford.
J. R. R. Tolkien in 1911 (from Carpenter's
Biography)
Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family[18] who then stopped all financial assistance to her. She died of acute
complications of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage in
Rednal, which they were then renting. Mabel Tolkien was then about 34 years of age, about as long
as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could live with no treatment –
insulin would not be discovered until two decades later. For the rest of his own life Tolkien
felt that his mother had become a martyr for her Faith, which had a profound effect on his own
Catholic beliefs.[19] Tolkien's devout faith was
significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity, though Tolkien, a firm believer in the doctrine of Extra Ecclesiam Nulla Salus, was greatly disappointed that Lewis chose to return to the
Anglicanism of his upbringing.[20]
Prior to her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan of the
Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics.
J.R.R. Tolkien subsequently grew up 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
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 for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illicitly, in the school
library.[21] 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,[22] 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 remembered 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.[23]
Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform (from Carpenter's
Biography)
Tolkien graduated from the University of Oxford (where he was a member of
Exeter College) with a first-class degree in English language in 1915.
Courtship and marriage
At the age of sixteen, Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith Mary Bratt, though she
was three years older. Father Francis, horrified that his young charge was romantically involved with a Protestant girl, prohibited him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was
twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter[24],
with one notable early exception which made Father Morgan threaten to cut short his University career if he did not stop.[25]
On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him.
Edith replied saying that she had already agreed to marry another man, but that she 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 engagement ring and
announced that she was marrying Tolkien instead.[26]
Following their engagement Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence.[27] They were formally engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, at Saint Mary Immaculate Catholic Church on
22 March 1916.[28]
World War I
As the United Kingdom was then engaged in fighting World
War I, Tolkien enlisted in the British Army and served as a Second Lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers.[29]
His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme. He came down with trench fever on
27 October 1916 and was evacuated to England on
8 November 1916.[30] Many of his dearest friends, including Gilson and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. In
later years, Tolkien indignantly declared that those who searched his works for parallels to the Second World War were entirely mistaken.
"One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now
often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be
involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my
close friends were dead."[31]
Tolkien's Webley .455 service revolver is currently on display as part of a
First World War exhibition in the Imperial War
Museum, London.[citation needed]
Aftermath
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, 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".[32]
This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien,
and Tolkien often referred to Edith as, "my Lúthien."[33]
Academic and writing 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.[34] 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.
While at Leeds he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and (with E. V. Gordon) a
definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both
becoming academic standard works for many decades. In 1925 he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at
Pembroke College, which chair he held until he was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945.[35]
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 was placed in 2002. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name 'Nodens', following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a
Roman Asclepieion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.[36] Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" had a lasting influence on Beowulf research.[37] Lewis E. Nicholson
said 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.[38] 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 in The Lord of
the Rings.[39] 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.)[40]
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 to be devouring the English
countryside. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of automobiles, preferring to ride
a bicycle.[41] This
attitude can be seen in his work, most famously in the portrayal of 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."[42]
Family life
John Ronald and Edith Tolkien had four children: 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). Tolkien was a very
devoted family man, shown by the fact that he sent his children letters from Father Christmas when they were young. There were
more characters added each year, such as the Polar Bear, Father Christmas' helper, the Snow Man, FC's gardener, Ilbereth the elf,
his secretary, and various other minor characters. The major characters would relate tales of Father Christmas' battles against
goblins who rode on bats and the various pranks committed by the
Polar Bear.
Retirement and old age
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and
literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that he regretted he had not chosen early retirement.[43] 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.[44] 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![45]
Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory[46] and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth on the south coast. Tolkien was awarded the Order
of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II at
Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972.
Death
Edith Tolkien died on 29 November 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 2 September 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
Lúthien
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 discovered in 1982. Tolkien Way in Stoke-on-Trent is
named after Tolkien's eldest 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.[47] There
is also a professorship in Tolkien's 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;
in 1943 he wrote "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically
understood, meaning abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) – or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy."[48]
Religion
As already given above, Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S.
Lewis from atheism to Christianity, although
Tolkien was greatly disappointed that Lewis chose to return to Anglicanism,[20] rather than becoming a Catholic like himself.
In the last years of his life, he became greatly disappointed by the reforms and changes implemented after the
Second Vatican Council, as his grandson Simon
Tolkien recalls,
"I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout
Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My
grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation
answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what
he believed to be right." [49]
He later voiced his support on several occasions for the Pre-Conciliar Tridentine
Mass in the Latin language, and spoke at traditionalist meetings - although he died in the early years of the Traditionalist movement.
[50]
Politics
The question of racist or racialist elements in Tolkien's
views and works has been the matter of some scholarly debate.[51] Christine Chism[52]
distinguishes accusations as falling into three categories: intentional racism,[53] unconscious Eurocentric bias, and an evolution from latent
racism in Tolkien's early work to a conscious rejection of racist tendencies in his late work.
Tolkien is known to have condemned Nazi "race-doctrine" and anti-Semitism as "wholly pernicious and unscientific".[54] He also said of apartheid in
his birthplace South Africa,
The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain.[55]
He also spoke out against it in his valedictory address to the University of Oxford in 1959,
I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of
all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.[56]
Tolkien had nothing but contempt for Adolf Hitler, whom he accused o
