J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien an English writer, poet and academic (1892-1973), best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings and as the creator, through decades of invented languages and legends, of the elaborate secondary world of Middle-earth. A professor of Anglo-Saxon and later of English language at Oxford, he is widely regarded as the founding father of modern high fantasy.

Early Life and Education

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where his father worked for a bank, and was taken to England as a small child after his father's death. His mother converted to Roman Catholicism and raised him in that faith, which remained central to his life. He was orphaned by the age of twelve and was placed under the guardianship of a priest of the Birmingham Oratory.

He showed early talent for languages, inventing private tongues and studying Latin, Greek and the older Germanic languages. He won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he read classics before turning to English language and literature, graduating in 1915. In 1916 he married Edith Bratt and shortly afterwards was sent to the Western Front as a signals officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers.

He fell ill with trench fever at the Somme and was invalided home, a stroke of fortune that probably saved his life while most of his close friends were killed. During convalescence he began to write the first fragments that would grow into his legendarium, including an early version of the tale of Gondolin. Service and loss left a permanent mark on his imagination.

Academic Career and Philology

After the war Tolkien worked on the staff of the New English Dictionary at Oxford before taking up academic posts at the University of Leeds, where he taught Old and Middle English and published a landmark edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, prepared with his colleague E. V. Gordon. He returned to Oxford in 1925 as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon.

In 1945 he was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, a chair he held until his retirement in 1959. He was a gifted if unconventional lecturer, famous for a dramatic recitation of the opening of Beowulf, and he published important scholarly essays on the poem and on medieval literature. His professional study of the older languages of the North fed directly into his fiction.

His philology was the doorway to his invention. Convincing that a language implies a history and a people who speak it, he constructed the Elvish tongues Quenya and Sindarin with their own grammars and etymologies, and then composed the mythology that gave them root. Scholarship and storytelling were for him a single continuous enterprise.

The Legendarium and Middle-earth

From the 1910s onward Tolkien built a vast cycle of connected tales about the creation of the world, the fallen powers known as Melkor and Sauron, and the long struggle of Elves, Men and Dwarves against darkness. Much of this material, including the tragic stories of Beren and Luthien and of Turin Turambar, remained unpublished in his lifetime and was later edited by his son Christopher.

He invented not only a world but its languages, genealogies, calendars and histories, writing annals and chronicles to make the setting internally consistent. The depth of this background gives his invented history a weight and plausibility rare in fantastic literature, and it is one reason later readers and scholars have treated the legendarium almost as a real body of tradition.

Central to the mythology is the tension between providence and free will, between the desire to preserve and the temptation to dominate. The recurring theme of eucatastrophe, the sudden joyous turn beyond hope, expressed his philosophy that the tales he loved were glimpses of a deeper and truer consolation. The legendarium occupied him for his entire adult life.

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings

The Hobbit, published in 1937, began as a story told to his own children and became one of the most beloved books of the twentieth century. It tells how the comfortable hobbit Bilbo Baggins is swept into an adventure quest for dwarf treasure, finding the Ring that would become the pivot of all that followed. Its success prompted his publisher to ask for a sequel.

That sequel grew over more than a decade into The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955. The work follows Frodo Baggins and his companions on the seemingly impossible errand of destroying the Ring in the fires of Mount Doom, interweaving a war of the whole world with intimate scenes of courage, friendship and loss. It broke the conventions of the novel by giving equal care to the grand history and the smallest lives.

The Ring itself is the moral centre of the book, a device that promises power and corrupts every bearer, so that the apparently weak and humble are the only ones able to carry it. Tolkien insisted the story was not allegory but an attempt to reach the oldest themes of courage, mortality and mercy, embodying a Christian understanding of pity and providence without speaking its name.

Influence and Legacy

The Lord of the Rings was a slow and then overwhelming success. Its paperback appearance in the United States in the mid-1960s turned it into a countercultural phenomenon and planted a readership that never faded. It has been voted among the greatest books of the century in many public polls and has been translated into dozens of languages.

Its influence reshaped popular fiction, inspiring generations of fantasy authors and creating the market for epic and heroic fantasy as a commercial genre. Films, radio plays, stage works and games have carried the story to audiences far beyond readers of the books, and film adaptations in the early twenty-first century brought Middle-earth to a global public.

Scholars value Tolkien as well for essays such as Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, which changed the study of Old English poetry, and for his service to philology. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and received honorary doctorates, yet he considered his mythology the work by which he wished to be judged. He died in 1973 and was buried with his wife in Oxford.

See also

• Middle-earth
• High fantasy
• Beowulf
• Quenya