|
Book Home  Books Information John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – September
2, 1973) is the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the
Rings.
He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and Oxford
University; he worked as reader in English language at Leeds from
1920 to 1925, as professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945,
and of English Language and Literature, also at Oxford, from 1945
to 1959. He was a strongly committed Catholic. He belonged to a literary
discussion group called the Inklings, through which he enjoyed a close
friendship with C. S. Lewis.
In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings,
Tolkien's published fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumous
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 posthumously
published works come from Tolkien's drafts and were put together as
books 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.
Writing
Tolkien's earliest literary ambition was to be a poet, but his primary
creative urge in his younger days was the invention of imaginary languages,
including early versions of what would later evolve into the Elvish
languages Quenya and Sindarin. Feeling that a language required a
people to speak it, and that a people would tell stories which influenced
and reflected their languages, he began writing (in English, but with
many names and terms from his invented languages) the mythology and
tales of a fictional people he associated with legendary fairies.
In later works, Tolkien's fairy-folk were replaced by Elves -- a name
he adapted from English folklore (with some regret, for he came to
consider the name misleading).
Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales, written while
recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several
themes - including the love story of Beren and Lúthien - that
were reused in successive mythologies. The two most prominent stories,
the tales of Beren/Luthien and 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 finished.
The story of this continuous re-drafting 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 folklore, the Bible, and Greek
mythology. Other inspirations included Babylon and Egypt. The works
most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include Beowulf,
Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, Plato's Atlantis, Volsunga saga and the
Hervarar saga [1]. Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer and Oedipus
as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. His borrowings
also came from numerous Middle English works and poems.
In addition to his mythological compositions, Tolkien
enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. 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,
and Smith of Wootton Major. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major,
like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from the mythological compositions.
Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become
popular but he was persuaded by a former student to publish a book
he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in 1937. 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.
Despite feeling 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 (1954–1955).
Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and
appendices for 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 long after The Silmarillion but
Tolkien infused the Silmarillion and Númenor myths into a new
mythology which is properly called The Middle-earth Mythology.
The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular with
students in the 1960s and has remained popular ever since, ranking
as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century,
judged by both sales and reader surveys. 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”. In 1999 a poll of Amazon.com
customers judged The Lord of the Rings to be their favorite book of
the millennium. In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd "greatest
Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC and in 2004 he was voted
35th in a list of the Greatest South Africans. He is the only person
to appear in both the British and South African Top 100. 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 (Herr der Ringe) to be their favorite
work of literature by a wide margin.
Tolkien at first thought that The Lord of the Rings
would tell another children's tale like The Hobbit, but it quickly
grew darker and more serious in the writing. 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 was a professional philologist, and the languages
and the mythologies he studied clearly left an imprint on his fiction.
In particular, the dwarves' names in the Hobbit, are taken from the
Völuspá of the Edda, while certain plot-elements (for
example: the thief stealing a cup from a dragon's hoard) are taken
from Beowulf. Tolkien was a recognised authority on Beowulf, and published
several important works on the poem. A previously unpublished translation
of Beowulf by Tolkien was found in 2004 and is being edited for publication
by Michael Drout. Many of the names Tolkien used in The Lord of the
Rings may be found in Middle English poems, The Bible, and other sources.
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. Christopher Tolkien continued
over subsequent years to publish background material on the creation
of Middle-earth. Note that the posthumous works such as The History
of Middle-earth and the Unfinished Tales contain unfinished, abandoned,
alternative and outright contradictory versions of the stories simply
because Tolkien kept inventing new mythologies which reused older
ideas over the course of decades.
There is no true consistency to be found between the
various works, not even 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 rewrite the entire book completely.
The library of 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,
manuscripts of many "lesser" books like the Farmer Giles
of Ham, and Tolkien fan material, while the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion
papers and Tolkien's academic work.
|
|
