JRR Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien , better known by his pseudonym JRR Tolkien ( South Africa , January 3 , 1892 – Bournemouth , September 2 , 1973 ) was a British novelist, poet, philologist and university professor, known mainly for being the author of the classic works from high fantasy The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . He also worked as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University and Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College.

Popularly identified as the “father” of modern fantasy literature, or more specifically, of high fantasy. Tolkien’s works have inspired many other works of fantasy and have had a lasting effect on the entire field.

Summary

[ disguise ]

• 1 Biographical data
  • 1 Origins of the family
  • 2 Childhood
  • 3 Youth
  • 4 Maturity
  • 5 Death
• 2 Works
  • 1 Novels and novellas
  • 2 Novels and novellas collected by his son, Christopher Tolkien (1924-2020)
  • 3 Poems
• 3 Movie (2019) about JRR Tolkien
  • 1 Cast
• 4 Sources

Biographical data

Family origins

From what is known, most of Tolkien’s paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in the Saxon duchies that now form the state of Lower Saxony in Germany , although it had been based in England since the 18th century , adapting quickly and intensely to English culture.

The surname Tolkien is the anglicized form of the German Tollkiehn, whose origin lies in tollkühn (“daredevil”). In a letter written by his son, Christopher Tolkien (1924-2020), to the author and critic William Ready, he points out that “the name is of German origin, composed of “tol”, which means “crazy”, and “kühn”, “brave”; its global meaning would be “risky”. The etymological translation of this term in English would be dull-keen, an oxymoron . The surname Rashbold that appears in The Notion Club Papers is a play on words that alludes to the etymology of his last name.

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

Childhood

John Ronald Reuel was born in Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State (South Africa), on the night of Sunday, January 3, 1892. His parents were Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mabel Suffield, both from Great Britain. He received the same name as his paternal grandfather, John, because in his family it was customary to call his eldest son’s eldest son that name.

His uncle John who was the eldest of John Benjamin Tolkien’s children. He only had daughters, so Arthur decided to name his son after custom. Her middle name, Ronald, was given at Mabel’s wish, since she believed the baby was going to be a girl and she had planned to call her Rosalind, ending up with Ronald as her replacement. Reuel, which comes from ancient Hebrew and means “close to God,” was her father’s middle name. The child was baptized on January 31, 1892 in Bloemfontein Cathedral.

Some time later, when the boy began to walk, he was bitten by a tarantula in the garden of his house, an event that would have parallels in his stories.

On February 17, 1894, Ronald’s younger brother, Hilary Arthur Tolkien, was born.

Although Arthur wanted to stay in Africa , the climate there was detrimental to John’s health, so in 1895, when he was three years old, he moved with his mother Mabel and his brother Hilary to England, in what must have been a extended family visit, while his father remained in South Africa, in charge of the sale of diamonds and other precious stones for the Bank of England .

Arthur Tolkien’s intention was to reunite with his family in England, although he died on February 15 , 1896 of rheumatic fever. Arthur’s surprise death left his family without income, so Mabel had to take her children to live with her own family in Birmingham.

That same year they moved again to Sarehole (now Hall Green), then a small Worcestershire village , later absorbed by Birmingham . Ronald loved exploring nearby Moseley Bog and Sarehole Mill, as well as the Clent and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire passages in his works, along with other Worcestershire places such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch, and his aunt’s farm, Bag End, a name he would use in his fiction.

Mabel was in charge of the education of her two children, with Ronald (as he was known by his family) being a very dedicated student. Her great interest in botany came from Mabel’s teachings, which awakened in her son the pleasure of looking and feeling plants. Ronald enjoyed drawing landscapes and trees, but his favorite lessons were those related to languages, since his mother began teaching him the basics of Latin at such an early age.

In this way, he could already read at the age of four, and write fluently shortly after. In the same way, he entertained himself by inventing his own languages, such as “animalic”, created jointly with a cousin of his; the “nevbosh” (“new nonsense”); or the “naffarin”, based on Spanish.

Tolkien attended King Edward’s School in Birmingham and, while studying there, helped line the line for George V ‘s coronation parade , being placed just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace . He was later enrolled at St. Philip’s School and Exeter College, Oxford .

In 1900 Mabel converted, along with her two children, to Roman Catholicism, despite strong opposition from her Baptist family. In 1904, when Ronald was twelve, Mabel died from complications of diabetes – a very dangerous disease before insulin – at Fern Cottage, Rednal, where the family was renting. Throughout his life, Ronald lived convinced that his mother had been a true martyr for her faith, which made a deep impression on his own Catholic beliefs.

During their consequent orphanhood, Ronald and Hilary were educated by Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a Catholic priest at the Birmingham Oratory, located in the Edgbaston area. Father Francis was a priest of Jerez origin who had financially supported his mother after his conversion to Catholicism, and who had taught young Ronald the bases of the Spanish language that he would use in the creation of his Naffarin language. . The Oratory was almost in the shadow of the towers of Perrott’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks, which would inspire the images of the dark towers of Orthanc and Minas Morgul from The Lord of the Rings .

Another notable influence he received at this stage were the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood , many of whose works today belong to a renowned collection at the Birmingham Museums Art Gallery. who exposed them openly to the public since 1908.

Youth

In 1908, at the age of sixteen, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt at the orphanage, falling in love with her despite being three years younger. Father Xavier forbade Tolkien to meet, speak, or even correspond with her until he turned twenty-one, which the young man obeyed to the letter.

In 1911, while at King Edward’s School in Birmingham, Tolkien formed with three friends (Rob Wilson, Geoffrey Smith and Cristopher Wiseman) a semi-secret society known as the TC, BS, the initials of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. of tea and Barrovian society’), alluding to his hobby of drinking tea at Barrow’s Stores, near the school, as well as in the school’s own library (illegally).

After leaving school, members maintained contact, holding a “council” in London in December 1914 , at Wiseman’s home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong impulse to write poetry.

In the summer of 1911 Tolkien went on holiday to Switzerland , a trip he recalled in a letter in 1968 still very vividly, noting that Bilbo’s journey through the Misty Mountains (including “sliding down the slippery stones to The Pine Forest”) is directly based on his adventures with his group of twelve hiking companions from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on their camping in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien recalled his deep sorrow at abandoning the views of the perpetual snows of Jungfrau and Silverhorn, “the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams.”

After many obstacles and impediments from Father Francis (who wanted Tolkien to focus on finishing his studies in English Philology at Oxford with honors), finally on the same afternoon of his twenty-first birthday Tolkien wrote a letter to Edith declaring his love. and asking her if she wanted to marry him. She replied that she was already engaged, as she believed Tolkien had forgotten her. Meeting under a railway viaduct, they renewed their love again, after which Edith returned her engagement ring and decided to marry Tolkien. After becoming engaged in Birmingham in January 1913, Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien’s insistence, eventually marrying on 22 March 1916 in Warwick.

Before his marriage, his travels took him to Cornwall, where, due to his childhood love of landscapes, he was impressed by the sight of the unique Cornish coast and sea. Tolkien graduated with honors in 1915 from Exeter College, Oxford University, with a first-class degree in English, in English Linguistics and Literature up to Chaucer.

Upon graduation, Tolkien joined the British Army, which was then fighting in World War I (1914-1918) . He enlisted as a second lieutenant, specializing in sign language, in the 11th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers , which was sent to France in 1916. Tolkien served as a communications officer at the Battle of the Somme. until he fell ill due to the so-called “trench fever” on October 27, and was transferred to England on November 8. Many of his comrades in his unit, as well as many of his closest friends, died in the war.

During his convalescence in a cottage in Great Haywood (Staffordshire), he began work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales , beginning with The Fall of Gondolin . During the years of 1917 and 1918 he continued to relapse into his illness, although he had recovered sufficiently to do maintenance work in several camps, thus rising to the rank of lieutenant. When he was posted to Kingston upon Hull , one day he and Edith were walking through the woods of nearby Roos, when Edith began to dance for him in a dense grove of hemlocks, surrounded by white flowers.

This scene inspired the passage of Beren and Lúthien meeting, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien. Tolkien and Edith would have four children:

• John Francis Reuel Tolkien (November 17, 1917 – January 22, 2003, priest),
• Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (October 1920 – 1984),
• Christopher Tolkien (1924-2020) and
• Priscilla Anne Reuel Tolkien (1929-).

Maturity

Tolkien’s first civilian job after the war was as an assistant lexicographer in the writing of the famous Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked for two years mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin that began with the letter W, tracing their origin in High German, Middle German and even Old Norse.

In 1920 he held the position of non-tenured professor of English Language at the University of Leeds , where he reached the position of professor, reforming the teaching of this discipline with his teaching. At Leeds he met Eric Valentine Gordon, with whom he published what is considered the best edition to date of the anonymous Allliterative Revival work Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in Middle English in the late 14th century.

In 1925 he returned to Oxford University as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. It would be during his stay in Pembroke that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings . Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become so popular, but it was his friend C. S. Lewis , a Catholic writer of much lower literary quality than Tolkien, who persuaded him to publish a book he had written for his children called The Hobbit . in 1937. However, the book in turn attracted adult readers, and became popular enough that the publisher, George Allen Unwin, asked Tolkien to write a sequel to the work.

Regarding academic publications, his 1936 lecture Beowulf: Monsters and Critics had a decisive influence on studies of the Beowulf myth. In 1928 Tolkien assisted Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavation of a Roman asclepeion in Lydney Park (Gloucestershire ) .

It was at Oxford that Tolkien became friends with the professor and writer C.S. Lewis (future author of The Chronicles of Narnia , a poor quality copy of Tolkien’s works), with whom he initially disagreed because of his religious convictions (Lewis was an agnostic). , and later became a Protestant), but who ended up being one of its main editors, along with the other members of the literary club they formed, the Inklings. Its members met on Fridays before lunch in The Eagle and Child pub, and on Thursday nights in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College to recite the works each composed, as well as romances and extracts from the great works. epics of Northern Europe.

In 1924, his third son, Christopher Tolkien (1924-2020), was born, who would be in charge of posthumously publishing all the manuscripts that his father had left scattered around the study in his house on Northmoor Road (and from where The Silmarillion , the Tales of unfinished works of Númenor and The History of Middle-earth) .

Four years later, in 1929, his daughter Priscilla was born (with whom he traveled to Venice , which he compared in charm to the now mythical Minas Tirith, the capital city of the Kingdom of Gondor).

Since his adolescence, Tolkien had begun to write a series of myths and legends about Middle Earth, which would later give rise to the Silmarillion – previously called The Book of Lost Tales (he was missing in his country a mythology of the character of the Greek , for example, and proposed to invent “a mythology for England”). It is assumed that these stories were inspired by a story published in 1927 by Edward Wyke-Smith entitled The Wonderful Country of the Snergs (also the Finnish Kalevala, the Scandinavian sagas and, in general, a bit of all European mythology of any origin). .

In 1957 Tolkien traveled to the United States to receive honorary degrees from major universities, such as Marquette (where the original manuscripts of his works are preserved today), Harvard…, but the trip had to be canceled because Edith fell ill. Tolkien retired two years later, in 1959, from his position at Oxford.

In 1965 the first edition of The Lord of the Rings came out in the United States. In 1968, the Tolkien family moved to Poole, near Bournemouth, after Edith’s death. On November 29, 1971, Tolkien returned to Oxford.

Honorary doctorate from several universities (National University of Ireland, University of Oxford , etc.); vice president of the Philological Society; Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 1969, when Tolkien was 81 years old (four years before his death), Queen Elizabeth II would award him the British Empire Cross. In his honor were founded, first of all, the American Mythopoeic Society, and the British Tolkien Society, and dozens of Tolkien Societies around the world.

He was a close friend of fellow writer C.S. Lewis and both were members of an informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on March 28, 1972.

Tolkien applied the word legendarium to most of his writings.

While writers such as William Morris , George R.R. Martin , Robert E. Howard and E.R. Eddison preceded Tolkien in the fantasy literary genre with works as famous and influential as Conan the Barbarian , the huge success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when published in the United States it led directly to the popular resurgence of the genre.

Death

He died in Bournemouth (United Kingdom) on September 2 , 1973 , aged 81.

After his death, Tolkien’s third son, Christopher (1924-2020), published a series of works based on his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin . These, along with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional stories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and more extensively about the continent known as Middle-earth.

Tombstone of the Tolkien couple, with the names of Beren and Lúthien.

The tomb of Tolkien and Edith, located in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, presents the names “Beren” and “Lúthien”, taken from the famous legend included in The Silmarillion about the love between these two beings of different natures and the theft, by the elven maiden Lúthien and the brave mortal Beren, of one of the Silmarils (the precious stones forged by the proud and arrogant as well as gifted noldo Fëanor with the light of Laurelin and Telperion, the Trees of Aman created by Yavanna ); this was drawn from the iron crown of Morgoth (or Melkor), the renegade Wala who challenged Eru, the One, during the Ainulindalë, the Music of the Ainur, and throughout the First Age of the Sun.

Plays

Novels and novellas

• The Hobbit
• Leaf by Niggle
• Egidio, the farmer of Ham
• The Lord of the Rings , published in four volumes:
  • The Fellowship of the Ring
  • The two Towers
  • The return of the King
  • Appendices to The Lord of the Rings
• The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Poems from The Red Book
• Tree and Leaf, and the poem Mitopoeia
• The Blacksmith of Wootton Mayor
• Bliss
• Roverandom

Novels and novellas collected by his son, Christopher Tolkien (1924-2020)

• The Silmarillion
• Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle Earth
• The history of Middle Earth:
  • The Book of Lost Tales I
  • The Book of Lost Tales II
  • The Ballads of Beleriand
  • The formation of Middle Earth
  • The lost path and other writings
  • The return of the Shadow
  • The Betrayal of Isengard
  • The War of the Ring
  • Sauron defeated
  • Morgoth’s Ring
  • The Jewel War
  • The people of Middle Earth
  • The History of Middle-earth Index
• The Children of Húrin
• The legend of Sigurd and Gudrun

Poems

• “King Sheave”, published in 1987 as part of “The Lost Road”, in The Lost Road and Other Writings.
• “The Battle of the Eastern Field”
• “From the willow-filled banks of the immemorial Thames”
• “The Journey of Earendel, the Evening Star”
• «The call of the master»
• “Tinfang Warble”
• “Goblin Feet”
• «You and Me/and the Cottage of Lost Play»,
• “Kôr”
• «Kortirion among the trees»
• “Over Old Hills and Far Away.”
• “The Song of Aryador”
• “The Shores of Elfland.”
• “The happy sailors”
• “Narqelion”
• «Habbanan under the stars»
• «The Sorrowful City».
• “The Song of Eriol”
• “The Horns of Ulmo.”
• “The Lay of the Children of Húrin”
• “The Ballad of the Fall of Gondolin”
• “An employee’s complaint”
• «Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden»
• «Enigmata Saxonica Nuper Inventa Duo»
• “Why did the Man in the Moon descend in haste?”
• “Henry Bradley: December 3, 1845 – May 23, 1923”
• «An afternoon in Tavrobel»
• “The Lonely Island”
• “Princess Ni”
• «Light as linden leaves»
• “The Flight of the Noldor from Valinor”
• “The Lay of Leithian”
• “The Ballad of Earendel”
• “The land without a name”
• «Fastitocalón»
• «Iumbo».
• “The Ballad of Aotrou and Itroun”
• “Mythopoeia”
• «Progress in Bimble Town».
• “Lunatic”
• “Wandering”
• “Firiel.”
• Songs for the Philologists,
• “From One to Five.”
• «Syx mynet».
• “Ruddoc Hana.”
• «Ides Ælfscýne».
• “Bagmē Blōma.”
• «Éadig béo þu!».
• «Ofer wídne gársecg».
• «The Húru».
• “I Sat upon a Bench.”
• «Natura Apis»
• “The Root of the Boot.”
• «Frenchmen Froth».
• «Lit’ and Lang’»
• «The Dragon’s Visit».
• “Knocking at the Door: Lines induced by sensations when waiting for an answer at the door of an Exalted Academic Person.”
• “The Return of Beorhtnoth, Son of Beorhthelm”
• “Imram”, subtitled
• “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil”
• “Tom Bombadil’s Boat Ride”
• “Wandering”
• “Princess Mee”
• «The Man in the Moon was a little late»
• «The Man in the Moon descended quickly»
• “The stone troll”
• «Perry Winks»
• “Meowers”
• “Oliphant”
• «Fastitocalón»
• “Cat”
• “The Shadow Bride”
• “The treasure”
• “The sea bell”
• “The last ship”
• “Habia una vez”.
• Bilbo’s last song

Movie (2019) about JRR Tolkien

In 2019, the film Tolkien was released , with Nicholas Hoult playing the writer. The film focuses on his formative years to find his inspiration for The Lord of the Rings , when he was part of a group of students at King Edward College in Birmingham , and his time in the First War. World Cup (1914-1918) .

Along with Hoult appear Lily Collins – who plays his wife, Edith Bratt, with whom he fell in love when they were teenagers – and Derek Jacobi – who plays English professor Joseph Wright (1855-1930) -.

Dome Karukoski, the director of Tom of Finland and The Grouch, directed it .

Cast

• Nicholas Hoult as JRR Tolkien
  • Harry Gilby as teenage JRR Tolkien
• Lily Collins as Edith Bratt, Tolkien’s lifelong love and later wife, who served as inspiration for some of the characters in his most famous books.
  • Mimi Keene as teenage Edith Bratt.
• Colm Meaney as priest Francisco Javier Morgan, who kept Tolkien under his wings for decades.
• Derek Jacobi as linguist Joseph Wright (1855-1930).
• James MacCallum as Hilary Tolkien, younger brother of JRR Tolkien
  • William Bedward as young Hilary Tolkien.
• Pam Ferris (1948-) as Mrs. Faulkner.