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J. R. R. Tolkien

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"Tolkien" redirects here. For other uses, see Tolkien (disambiguation).
File:Jrrt 1972 pipe.jpg
J. R. R. Tolkien in 1972, in his study at Merton Street (from J. R. R. Tolkien. A Biography by H. Carpenter)

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is best known as the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and of English language and literature, also at Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was a strongly committed Roman Catholic. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, with whom he shared membership in the literary discussion group the Inklings.

In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's published fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumously published books about what he called a legendarium, a fictional mythology of the remote past of Earth, called Arda, and Middle-earth (from middangeard, the lands inhabitable by Men) in particular. Most of these works were compiled from Tolkien's notes by his son Christopher Tolkien. The enduring popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the "father of the modern high fantasy genre". Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children and not directly related to the legendarium.

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Writing

File:Jrrt lotr cover design.jpg
Cover design for the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien

Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of Túrin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand). Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. It was originally to be published along with the Lord of the Rings, but printing costs were very high in the post-war years, later leading to the Lord of the Rings being published in three books.[1] The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.

Tolkien was strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish mythology, the Bible, and Greek mythology.[2] The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include Beowulf, the Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, the Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga.[3] Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer, Oedipus, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas.[4] His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems. A major philosophical influence on his writing is King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy known as the Lays of Boethius.[5] Characters in The Lord of the Rings such as Frodo, Treebeard and Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks.

In addition to his mythological compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children.[6] He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other stories included Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, Smith of Wootton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham and Leaf by Niggle. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium. Leaf by Niggle appears to be an autobiographical work, where a "very small man", Niggle, keeps painting leaves until finally he ends up with a tree.[7]

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by C.S. Lewis to publish a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in 1937.[8] However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (published 1954–55). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.

Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings as a children's tale like The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing.[9]Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher, with some assistance from fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, organised some of this material into one volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title Unfinished Tales, and in subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth. All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency to be found between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book.[10]

The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian Library.Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and other manuscripts, including Farmer Giles of Ham, while the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.[11]

The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys.[12] In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted The Lord of the Rings "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC.[13] In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium".[14] In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited just to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK’s "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings (Der Herr der Ringe) to be their favourite work of literature.[15]

Languages

See also Languages of Middle-earth.

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialised in Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Icelandic as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918. In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged 33, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".[16]

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered west-midland Middle English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955 [17], "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)"

Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for the construction of artificial languages. The best developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which are at the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish and Greek [18]. A notable addition came in late 1945 with Numenorean, a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis myth, which by The Notion Club Papers ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language, and via the "Second Age" and the Earendil myth was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's twentieth-century "real primary world" with the mythical past of his Middle-earth.

Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: In 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends" [19].

The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's revival of the spellings dwarves and elvish (instead of dwarfs and elfish), which had not been in use since the mid-1800s and earlier. Other terms he has coined such as legendarium and eucatastrophe are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

Works inspired by Tolkien

Main article: Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien

In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which

The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. [20]

The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own drawings.[21]

But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving.

In 1946, he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of the Hobbit as "too Disnified",

Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.[22]

He was sceptical of the emerging fandom in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of The Lord of the Rings:

Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.[23]

And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman he writes,

I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.[24]

He went on to criticise the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future productions, he forbade that Disney should ever be involved:

It might be advisable […] to let the Americans do what seems good to them – as long as it was possible […] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).[25]

United Artists never made a film, though at least John Boorman was planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of The Lord of the Rings appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by Ralph Bakshi). The screenplay was written by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half of the story that is The Lord of the Rings.[26] In 1977 an animated TV production of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980 they produced an animated film titled The Return of the King, which covered some of the portion of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete. In 2001–3, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action films, directed by Peter Jackson.

Bibliography

Fiction and poetry

See also Poems by J. R. R. Tolkien.

Academic works

  • 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 168 pp.
  • 1925 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, co-edited with E.V. Gordon, Oxford University Press, 211 pp.; Revised edition 1967, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 232 pp.
  • 1925 Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography, published in The Review of English Studies, volume 1, no. 2, pp. 210-215.
  • 1925 The Devil's Coach Horses, published in The Review of English Studies, volume 1, no. 3, pp. 331-336.
  • 1929 Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiðhad, published in Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, Oxford, volume 14, pp. 104-126.
  • 1932 The Name 'Nodens' , published in Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, Oxford, University Press for The Society of Antiquaries.
  • 1932–34 Sigelwara Land parts I and II, in Medium Aevum, Oxford, volume 1, no. 3 (december 1932), pp. 183-196 and volume 3, no. 2 (june 1934), pp. 95-111.
  • 1934 Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale, in Transactions of the Philological Society, London, pp. 1-70 (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales)
  • 1937 Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, London, Humphrey Milford, 56 pp. (lecture on Beowulf criticism)
  • 1939 The Reeve's Tale: version prepared for recitation at the 'summer diversions', Oxford, 14 pp.
  • 1939 On Fairy-Stories (Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, given as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture)
  • 1944 Sir Orfeo, Oxford, The Academic Copying Office, 18 pp. (an edition of the medieval poem)
  • 1947 On Fairy-Stories, published in Essays presented to Charles Williams, Oxford University Press (essay, very central for understanding Tolkien's views on fastasy)
  • 1953 Ofermod and Beorhtnoth's Death, essays published with the poem The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son in Essays and Studies by members of the English Association, volume 6.
  • 1953 Middle English "Losenger": Sketch of an etymological and semantic enquiry, published in Essais de philologie moderne: Communications présentées au Congrès International de Philologie Moderne (1951), Les Belles Lettres.
  • 1962 Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle, Early English Text Society, Oxford University Press.
  • 1963 English and Welsh, in Angles and Britons: O'Donnell Lectures, University of Cardiff Press.
  • 1966 Jerusalem Bible (contributing translator and lexicographer)

Posthumous publications

See Tolkien research for essays and text fragments by Tolkien published in academic publications and forums.

Audio recordings

  • 1967 Poems and Songs of Middle-Earth, Caedmon TC 1231
  • 1975 JRR Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)

Notes

  1. ^ Hammond, Wayne G. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Descriptive Biography, London: January 1993, Saint Pauls Biographies
  2. ^ Day, David (February 1, 2002). Tolkien's Ring. New York: Barnes and Noble. ISBN 1-586-63527-1. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  3. ^ As described by Christopher Tolkien in Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks Konung (Oxford University, Trinity College). B. Litt. thesis. 1953/4. [Year uncertain], The Battle of the Goths and the Huns, in: Saga-Book (University College, London, for the Viking Society for Northern Research) 14, part 3 (1955-6) [1]
  4. ^ Handwerk, Brian (March 1, 2004). "Lord of the Rings Inspired by an Ancient Epic" (HTML). National Geographic News. Retrieved 2006-03-13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  5. ^ Gardner, John (October 23 1977). "The World of Tolkien" (HTML). New York Times. Retrieved 2006-03-13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  6. ^ Phillip, Norman (2005). "The Prevalance of Hobbits" (HTML). New York Times. Retrieved 2006-03-12.
  7. ^ Site Editor (2005). "Leaf by Niggle - a symbolic story about a small painter" (HTML). Leaf by Niggle. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: |author= has generic name (help)
  8. ^ Times Editorial Staff (September 3, 1973). "J.R.R. Tolkien Dead at 81: Wrote "The Lord of the Rings"" (HTML). New York Times. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  9. ^ Times Editorial Staff (June 5, 1955). "Oxford Calling" (HTML). New York Times. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  10. ^ Martinez, Michael (December 7th, 2004). "Middle-Earth Revised, Again" (HTML). Merp.com. Retrieved 2006-03-13. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  11. ^ McDowell, Edwin (September 4, 1983). "Middle Earth Revisited" (HTML). New York Times. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  12. ^ Seiler, Andy (December 16, 2003). "'Rings' comes full circle" (HTML). USA Today. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  13. ^ Cooper, Callista (December 5, 2005). "Epic trilogy tops favorite film poll" (HTML). ABC News Online. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  14. ^ O'Hehir, Andrew (June 4, 2001). "The book of the century" (HTML). Salon.com. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  15. ^ Diver, Krysia (October 5, 2004). "A lord for Germany" (HTML). The Sydney Morning Herald. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  16. ^ (Letter dated 27 June 1925 to the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford, Letters, no. 7)
  17. ^ (Letters, no. 163)
  18. ^ (Letters, no. 144, 25 April 1954, to Naomi Mitchison)
  19. ^ (Letters, no. 180)
  20. ^ (Letters, no. 131)
  21. ^ Thygesen, Peter (Autumn, 1999). "Queen Margrethe II: Denmark's monarch for a modern age" (HTML). Scandinavian Review. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)
  22. ^ (Letters, no. 107)
  23. ^ (Letters, no. 144)
  24. ^ (Letters, no. 207)
  25. ^ (Letters, no. 13)
  26. ^ Canby, Vincent (November 15, 1978). "Film: 'The Lord of the Rings' From Ralph Bakshi" (HTML). New York Times. Retrieved 2006-03-12. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |year= (help)CS1 maint: year (link)

References

Further reading

A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:

  • Anderson, Douglas A., Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger, ed. (2004). Tolkien Studies, Vol 1.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: editors list (link)
  • Chance, Jane, ed. (2003). Tolkien the Medievalist. London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28944-0.
  • Chance, Jane, ed. (2004). Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader. Louisville: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-813-12301-1.
  • Flieger, Verlyn and Carl F. Hostetter, ed. (2000). Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30530-7. DDC 823.912. LC PR6039.
  • O'Neill, Timothy R. (1979). The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-28208-X.
  • Pearce, Joseph (1998). Tolkien: Man and Myth. London: HarperCollinsPublishers. ISBN 000-274018-4.
  • Shippey, T. A. (2000). J. R. R. Tolkien — Author of the Century. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-12764-X, ISBN 0-618-25759-4 (pbk).
  • Strachey, Barbara (1981). Journeys of Frodo: an Atlas of The Lord of the Rings. London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-049-12016-6.
  • Tolkien, John & Priscilla (1992). The Tolkien Family Album. London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-26-110239-7.
  • White, Michael (2003). Tolkien: A Biography. New American Library. ISBN 0451212428.
  • Carpenter, Humphrey (1979). The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. ISBN 0395276284.
  • Curry, Patrick (2004). Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity. ISBN 061847885X.
  • Duriez, Colin (2001). The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends. ISBN 1902694139. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Bruner, Kurt D. (2003). Finding God in the Lord of the Rings. ISBN 084238555X. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Duriez, Colin (2003). Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. ISBN 1587680262.

See also

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