J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was an English writer and scholar who taught Old and Middle English at the University of Oxford for most of his career and achieved worldwide fame as the author of the fantasy works The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), both set in his invented world of Middle-earth.¹³⁷ He was twice a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and specialized in the languages and literature of the Germanic and Northern past.⁷¹⁵

Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State (now part of South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Tolkien, a bank clerk, and Mabel Suffield, both originally from Birmingham.⁷¹⁸ When he was three his mother took him and his younger brother Hilary to visit family in England; the visit became permanent after his father died in South Africa in February 1896.⁷¹⁸ Mabel settled with her sons in the hamlet of Sarehole, just outside Birmingham, a rural landscape later credited as an inspiration for the Shire.¹⁸¹⁹

In 1900 Mabel was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and both boys were raised devout Catholics; she died of diabetes on November 14, 1904, leaving them orphaned.⁷¹⁸ The half-Spanish, half-Welsh priest Father Francis Morgan became their guardian and supported them materially and spiritually.⁷¹⁸ Tolkien won a scholarship to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where he excelled in Latin, Greek, Gothic, and later Finnish, and where he formed with three friends the Tea Club, Barrovian Society (T.C.B.S.), a circle that exchanged and criticized each other’s literary work.⁷¹⁸

While boarding in Birmingham, Tolkien met a fellow orphan, Edith Bratt, three years his senior; his guardian forbade contact until he came of age, and the pair were reunited and engaged when he turned twenty-one.⁷¹⁸ He went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1911, switching from Classics to English Language and Literature so as to pursue Germanic philology, Old Norse, Old English, and Welsh, and took a first-class degree in June 1915.¹⁸¹³

Tolkien enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers and married Edith in March 1916 before being sent to France, where he saw action in the First Battle of the Somme.¹⁴¹³¹⁸ Invalided home with trench fever, he began during his convalescence to write “The Lost Tales,” the heroic Elvish stories that were the forerunner of The Silmarillion and from which The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings eventually sprang.¹⁸ By the war’s end most of his closest T.C.B.S. friends, including Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, were dead.¹⁸¹⁷

After the Armistice Tolkien worked briefly on the Oxford English Dictionary as a lexicographer, then took up his first academic post as Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds in 1920, becoming a professor there in 1924.¹⁸¹³ In 1925 he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a fellow of Pembroke College, a chair he held until 1945, after which he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature until his retirement in 1959.¹⁸¹⁹¹³

His scholarly output was small but influential. With E. V. Gordon he produced a standard edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 1925, and in 1936 he delivered the British Academy lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, which overturned decades of critical thought on the Old English epic by arguing that it be read as a poem rather than mined for historical data.¹³¹⁸ He completed a translation of Beowulf in 1926 that was published posthumously in 2014, and he edited the Ancrene Wisse in 1962.¹³ His 1939 St Andrews lecture “On Fairy-Stories” later served as his justification for writing fantasy.¹⁸¹⁹

The Inklings

In 1926 Tolkien met C. S. Lewis, a colleague in the Oxford English Faculty, and the two discovered a shared love of northern myth.¹³¹⁸ They and other friends formed the Inklings, an informal literary group that met into the 1940s at the Eagle and Child pub and in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College to read aloud their works in progress.¹³ Tolkien dedicated the first edition of The Lord of the Rings to the Inklings and credited Lewis and the group with encouraging him to finish it.¹³¹⁸

Middle-earth and its languages

A lifelong devising of private languages underlay Tolkien’s fiction. In his 1931 essay A Secret Vice he described the hobby, which began in his early teens when he encountered the play-language Animalic invented by his cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon, and progressed through Nevbosh and his own Naffarin.⁹¹² His discovery of Welsh and then of a Finnish grammar — which he likened to “discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine” — became the chief influences on the Elvish tongues he constructed.⁹ He made his legendarium, which became The Silmarillion, partly to provide a world in which these invented languages could exist.¹³

The Hobbit, begun as a bedtime story for his four children, was published by George Allen & Unwin in 1937 with Tolkien’s own illustrations, maps, and dust jacket; its first print run sold out within three months.¹⁸¹⁴ The book was the world’s first introduction to Middle-earth, and its success prompted his publisher Stanley Unwin to ask for a sequel.⁸¹⁸ Over some fourteen years Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes — The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955).¹⁴²⁰

The mythology drew on Norse and Germanic language and legend, the literature of “the North,” and Tolkien’s own experiences in the First World War.²¹²²²³ The critic Tom Shippey argued that the roots of the entire mythology lie in the collective memory and fossilized language of the Northern peoples, the names of the dwarves in The Hobbit being drawn from Old Norse sources and the name Gandalf meaning “staff elf” in Old English.¹⁷

The German edition of The Hobbit became a minor episode in the history of the Nazi period. In 1938 the Berlin publisher Rütten & Loening, having been “Aryanized” under the Nuremberg Laws, wrote to ask Tolkien to certify his “Aryan descent” before producing a German translation.¹⁸ Tolkien drafted two replies, one of which sardonically noted that he was not of Indo-Iranian extraction and regretted that he appeared to have “no ancestors of that gifted people,” referring to the Jews; no German translation appeared until 1957.¹⁸

The surname Tolkien is of German origin, an anglicization of Tollkühn (“foolhardy”), and the family migrated to England from the eighteenth century.⁷⁶ Tolkien himself believed his ancestors had come from Saxony, but the genealogical researcher Ryszard Derdziński traced the family’s roots to Gdańsk and medieval Prussia, deriving the name from an Old Prussian word tulk, meaning “interpreter”.⁶¹⁰

Tolkien retired from his Oxford chair in 1959 and published the collection Tree and Leaf and the tale Smith of Wootton Major.¹⁴²⁰ His wife Edith died in 1971, and Tolkien died at Bournemouth on September 2, 1973, at the age of eighty-one, survived by four children.¹⁴¹³ His son Christopher, his literary executor, edited and published much of the unfinished legendarium, including The Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales (1980), and the twelve-volume The History of Middle-earth.¹⁴²⁰

In a 1997 British poll Tolkien’s work came top among readers asked to name the greatest book of the twentieth century, and his fiction has sold tens of millions of copies and been adapted by director Peter Jackson into award-winning film trilogies.⁷¹⁴ His life was itself the subject of the 2019 biographical film Tolkien.¹⁴