English author and scholar J.R.R. Tolkien lived from 3 January 1892 to 2 September 1973. He wrote the epic fantasy novels The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit.
J.R.R. Tolkien served as a Fellow of Pembroke College and the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford from 1925 until 1945. He then relocated within the same university, where he served from 1945 until his retirement in 1959 as the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College. C. S. Lewis, a fellow member of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings, was close to Tolkien. On March 28, 1972, Queen Elizabeth II named him a Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Following Tolkien’s passing, his son Christopher wrote a number of books, including The Silmarillion, that were based on his father’s copious notes and unpublished manuscripts. These, along with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, comprise a cohesive collection of stories, poetry, made-up history, invented languages, and literary essays concerning the mythical realm of Arda and Middle-earth within it. J.R.R. Tolkien used the term “legenarium” to refer to the majority of these works between 1951 and 1955.
The enormous popularity of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings sparked a deep interest in the fantasy genre and ultimately led to an explosion of new fantasy books and authors, even though many other authors had already written works of fantasy before Tolkien. He is therefore considered to be among the most influential writers of all time and has been universally recognized as the “father” of contemporary fantasy fiction.
J.R.R. Tolkien Biography
As an Englishman, J.R.R. Tolkien considered himself to be. In London and Birmingham, his immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class artisans who produced and marketed watches, clocks, and pianos. His earliest known paternal grandfather, Michel Tolkien, was born in the East Prussian town of Kreuzburg, close to Königsberg, in 1620. The town was established during the medieval German eastward expansion.
The London company Erdley Norton, which sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien, was taken over by John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell in 1792. John Benjamin evidently never became a British citizen, but Daniel Gottlieb did so in 1794.
The two brothers were joined in London by additional German relatives. While some members of the same family as J.R.R. Tolkien reside in northern Germany, the majority of those with the surname Tolkien or a spelling similar to it are descended from those who were evacuated from East Prussia in 1945, at the end of World War II.
“Son/descendant of Tolk” is likely the meaning of the Low Prussian surname Tolkien, according to Ryszard Derdziński. J.R.R. Tolkien playfully made a “cameo” in The Notion Club Papers under the literally translated moniker Rashbold, mistakingly thinking that his last name was derived from the German term tollkühn, which means “foolhardy.” Derdziński, however, has shown that this is a fictitious etymology.
Tołkiny, a hamlet in East Prussia, is another possible origin. J.R.R. Tolkien knew that his family was German, but because he was “early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father,” he knew very little about the family’s past.
Arthur Reuel Tolkien, an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield, welcomed John Ronald Reuel Tolkien into the world on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State (later conquered by the British Empire; now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa). When Arthur was promoted to head the British bank he worked for’s Bloemfontein branch, the couple had already left England. Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, Tolkien’s younger brother, was born on February 17, 1894, and was his only sibling.
Although he acknowledged as an adult that he had no recollection of the incident, some people think that Tolkien’s stories later echoed his childhood experience of being bitten by a giant baboon spider in the garden. A young family servant brought the infant to Tolkien’s homestead and brought him back the following morning in a previous episode from his early years.
At the age of three, he embarked on what was supposed to be a long family vacation to England with his mother and brother. But before he could join them, his father passed away from rheumatic fever in South Africa.
Tolkien’s mother brought him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham, as the family was now without a source of income. They soon relocated to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), a Worcestershire village that was eventually annexed to Birmingham, in 1896. Along with neighboring towns and villages like Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch, as well as locations like his aunt Jane’s farm Bag End, which he used as the name of his fiction, he loved to explore Sarehole Mill, Moseley Bog, and the Clent, Lickey, and Malvern Hills, all of which would later serve as inspiration for scenes in his books.
At home, Mabel Tolkien educated her two children. Ronald, as his family called him, was an enthusiastic learner. She gave him a lot of botany lessons and rekindled his interest in the beauty and texture of plants. Tolkien enjoyed drawing trees and landscapes as a child, but his favorite classes were those that dealt with languages, and his mother taught him the basics of Latin at a very young age.
By the age of four, J.R.R. Tolkien was able to read, and shortly after, he was able to write with ease. His mother gave him permission to read a lot of books. He found Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland “amusing” and detested Treasure Island and “The Pied Piper.” The name “Red Indians” was once used to refer to Native Americans in adventure stories, and he enjoyed George MacDonald’s fantasy writings. Furthermore, Andrew Lang placed a great deal of importance on his “Fairy Books,” which can be seen in some of his later works.
Despite strong objections from her Baptist family, which halted all financial support for her, Mabel Tolkien was accepted into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900. When J. R. R. Tolkien was twelve years old in 1904, his mother passed away from severe diabetes at Fern Cottage near Rednal, where she was renting a home. She was then about 34 years of age, roughly as old as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment—insulin would not be found until 1921, two decades later. Nine years after she passed away, Tolkien wrote, “My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.”
Prior to her passing, Mabel Tolkien had given her close friend Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory guardianship of her sons, with the responsibility of raising them to be devout Catholics. The effect of the man Tolkien usually referred to as “Father Francis” was described in a 1965 letter to his son Michael: “He was an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip.” He wasn’t, but he was. I learnt forgiveness and kindness from him first, and in the light of that, I burned through the ‘liberal’ darkness from which I had come, knowing more about ‘Bloody Mary’ than the Mother of Jesus, who the Romanists never spoke about except as a target of sinful idolatry.” Tolkien was raised in the Edgbaston neighborhood of Birmingham following the death of his mother. He went to King Edward’s School and then St. Philip’s School. After receiving a Foundation Scholarship in 1903, he went back to King Edward’s.
Youth
J.R.R. Tolkien first saw Animalic, a synthetic language created by his cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon, when he was in his early teens. He was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon at the time. They quickly lost interest in Animalic, but Mary and others—including Tolkien himself—created Nevbosh, a new and more sophisticated language. He would go on to create Naffarin, the next created language he worked with. Before 1909, Tolkien studied Esperanto. He wrote the “earliest example of one of his invented alphabets” in a sixteen-page notebook titled “The Book of the Foxrook” around June 10, 1909. Esperanto is used to write brief texts in this notebook.
Tolkien wrote a letter in 1968 recalling his summer vacation in Switzerland in 1911, stating that Bilbo’s trek across the Misty Mountains (“including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods”) is based directly on his own experiences as he and his group of twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and then on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. After fifty-seven years, Tolkien recalled his remorse at having to leave behind “the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams,” the vista of the endless snows of Silberhorn and Jungfrau. They crossed the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen after crossing the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald. They proceeded to Brig after crossing the Grimsel Pass, then on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt via the upper Valais.
He enrolled in Exeter College, Oxford, in October of the same year. After reading classics at first, he switched to English language and literature in 1913 and graduated with first-class honors in 1915. Joseph Wright, whose Primer of the Gothic Language had influenced Tolkien as a schoolboy, was one of his tutors at Oxford.
Tolkien Catholic Biography
One of the main reasons C. S. Lewis converted from atheism to Christianity was because of Tolkien’s Catholicism. The objective of life, he once wrote to Rayner Unwin’s daughter Camilla, was “to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks.” He wrote to his son Michael that “the Blessed Sacrament… you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that.” He was particularly devoted to the sacrament. As a result, he urged regular Holy Communion reception, writing to his son Michael once more that “communion is the only cure for sagging of fainting faith.”
Because of its honor and pride in holding the Blessed Sacrament, he thought the Catholic Church was the most authentic. During his final years, J.R.R. Tolkien opposed some liturgical reforms brought about by the Second Vatican Council. His main grievance was that the liturgy was conducted in English. Tolkien, who was versed in Latin, thought the English translations were awkward. He continued to respond to Mass in Latin as he grew older. However, Tolkien did not sign the Agatha Christie indult and, in compliance with the Council’s provisions, he was a lector at the Headington parish church Corpus Christi.
Tolkien Christian themes in Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien started writing his most well-known work, the epic novel The Lord of the Rings, which was first published in three volumes in 1954–1955, in response to a request for a sequel. The Lord of the Rings’ main story and appendices took Tolkien over ten years to write, and throughout that time, the Inklings—especially his best friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia—continued to support him. Although they are set in a period long after The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings share a common setting.
Tolkien first envisioned The Lord of the Rings as a children’s book in the vein of The Hobbit, but the prose soon became more somber and grim. Despite being a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it was written for an older readership and drew from Tolkien’s vast backstory of Beleriand, which he had built up over the years and which was eventually published posthumously in The Silmarillion and other books. The fantasy subgenre that emerged following the book’s popularity was greatly impacted by Tolkien.
According to reader surveys and sales, The Lord of the Rings is one of the most well-known works of fiction from the 20th century. It gained enormous popularity in the 1960s and has continued to do so ever since. The Lord of the Rings was named the “Best-loved Novel” in the United Kingdom in the BBC’s 2003 “Big Read” survey. According to a 2004 Australian ABC survey, The Lord of the Rings was chosen as “My Favorite Book” by Australians. The Lord of the Rings was voted the “book of the millennium” by Amazon.com customers in a 1999 survey. The only individual to be listed on both lists, Tolkien was ranked as the 92nd “greatest Briton” in a BBC poll in 2002 and 35th in SABC3’s Great South Africans in 2004. His appeal extends beyond the English-speaking world; according to a 2004 survey based on the UK’s “Big Read” survey, roughly 250,000 Germans named The Lord of the Rings as their favorite book.
The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien never thought his stories would be well-known, but in 1936, Susan Dagnall, who worked for the London publishing company George Allen & Unwin, happened to notice a book he had written for his own children a few years earlier. She convinced Tolkien to submit it for publication. The book was so well received by both children and adults when it was published a year later that the publishers asked Tolkien to write a sequel.
