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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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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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