John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 - September 2, 1973) was an author and Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and Professor of English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959. He also wrote fiction for his entire adult life, and this latter pursuit has enhanced his fame.
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He is best known as the author of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and its prequel, The Hobbit . The enduring popularity and influence of these Middle-earth works have led Tolkien to be considered the father of the modern high fantasy genre. He also did much critical work on Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He belonged to the literary discussion group The Inklings, and had a close friendship with C. S. Lewis.
Tolkien worked on the New English Dictionary, and was a professor of languages. His interest in linguistics inspired him to invent fifteen artificial languages (most famously the two Elvish languages from Lord of the Rings, Quenya and Sindarin), later elaborating an entire cosmogony and history of Middle-earth as background. Tolkien had some familiarity with the artificial language, Esperanto, which he learned at 17 years of age. Though he did not claim to be an Esperantist, he was quoted as promoting its use.
Biography
J. R. R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa; he attended King Edward's School, St. Phillip's Grammar School, and Oxford. His father died when he was a young child. His mother converted to Catholicism, despite the vehement protests of her family. She later died when he was a young teenager due to diabetes, but he felt for the rest of his life that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound affect on his own Catholic beliefs.
During his subsequent orphandom he met and fell in love with Edith Bratt (later to serve as his model for Luthien). Despite many obstacles, he was able to marry her, the first and truest love of his life. Tolkien joined the British Army during World War I. He served in the Lancashire Fusiliers, the most-decorated British unit in the war. He saw a number of his fellow servicemen, as well as several of his closest friends, lose their lives. He himself ended up in a military hospital, suffering from trench fever.
During his recovery he began to write an invented series of fairy tales, based upon his studies of mythology and folklore, that he called 'The Book of Lost Tales.' Scholars of his work say that the war influenced his writings; that he saw fantasy as a way to escape from the harsh reality of factories, machines, guns and bombs of the 20th century.
After the World War I Tolkien worked for a while with the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1920 he became the Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, but in 1925 he returned to Oxford as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon. In 1945 he moved to the Merton College of the Oxford University, becoming the Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959.
Writings
Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote yearly Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, creating a series of short stories, later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters.
Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular. Through the intercession of a former student, he published a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit (1937). Though intended for children, the book gained an adult readership as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher (Allen & Unwin) to convince Tolkien to work on a sequel. This prompted him to create his most famous work, the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), which the Encyclopaedia Britannica has called "richly inventive". The writing of this epic saga took nearly ten years, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings and of his closest friend, C. S. Lewis, who is known for his Narnia books.
While The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular with many students in the 1960s, and has remained highly popular since, many scholars (particularly those working in the field of Norse mythology), aware of Tolkien's sources, consider the work highly derivative. Tolkien at first thought that The Lord of the Rings would tell another children's tale like The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed a much older audience, drawing upon the immense back-story of Middle-earth that he had constructed and that eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and in other posthumous volumes.
The Lord of the Rings became, judged both by sales and surveys of readers, one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century. The influence of Tolkien weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings.
Work published in JRRT's lifetime:
1937 The Hobbit
1945 Leaf by Niggle (short story, non-Middle-earth)
1947 On Fairy-Stories (essay, not directly Middle-earth but significant)
1949 Farmer Giles of Ham (medieval fable, non-Middle-earth)
1954 The Fellowship of the Ring, part 1 of The Lord of the Rings
1954 The Two Towers, part 2 of The Lord of the Rings
1955 The Return of the King, part 3 of The Lord of the Rings
1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (poems)
1964 Tree and Leaf (On Fairy-Stories and Leaf by Niggle in book form)
1967 Smith of Wootton Major (non-Middle-earth)
1967 The Road Goes Ever On (a song cycle with the composer Donald Swann, long out of print but reprinted in 2002)
Tolkien continued to work upon the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher Tolkien,
with assistance from fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, organised some of this material into one volume,
published as The Silmarillion in 1977. Christopher Tolkien continued over subsequent years to publish
lots of background material on the creation of Middle-earth:
1977 The Silmarillion (the stories of the Elder Days, before the Lord of the Rings)
1980 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
1981 The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
1983 The Monsters and the Critics (an essay collection)
and culminating with The History of Middle-Earth series:
1983 The Book of Lost Tales 1
1984 The Book of Lost Tales 2
1985 The Lays of Beleriand
1986 The Shaping of Middle-Earth
1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings
1988 The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.1)
1989 The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.2)
1990 The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.3)
1992 Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.4)
1993 Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion v.1)
1994 The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion v.2)
1996 The Peoples of Middle-earth
Note that the History of the Middle-earth series contains many unfinished,
abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory versions of the stories.
Many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes, and letters are preserved in the library of the
Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.
Tolkien in Birmingham
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