Tolkien - The Father of Fantasy Documentary

The man known to history as J. R. R. Tolkien was born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien on the 3rd of January 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa. At the time Bloemfontein lay in the Orange Free State, an independent colony which had been established by the Boer people of South Africa, so that the descendants of Dutch, German and French settlers could escape the oversight of the growing British colony in the region in the mid-nineteenth century. Tolkien’s father was Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on

the 18th of February 1857. The family’s rather unusual surname derives from their being descended from émigrés from the Prussian region of eastern Germany who migrated to Britain by the mid-eighteenth century. Arthur was a manager of the Bank of Africa in the Orange Free State when his young bride, Mabel Suffield of Birmingham, journeyed to the Cape so that they could be wed. Colonial South Africa at this time represented opportunity for young Europeans seeking their fortunes, as expanding gold

and diamond mining opportunities helped to create jobs in banking institutions, and so young Arthur, whose own father was a piano manufacturer in Birmingham before going bankrupt, journeyed there by ship to make his fortune in the 1880s. Tolkien’s mother, Mabel Suffield, was born in 1870. Mabel and Arthur’s engagement did not go quite as smoothly as planned, as her father John Suffield was suspicious of Arthur’s lineage, with its “recent” German immigrant roots. John Suffield’s preference for s

o-called “pure breed” Englishness was a common opinion at the time especially for wealthy or upper middle-class Britons, John may have also objected to the marriage because Mabel was thirteen years younger than Arthur. When they wed in 1891 in Cape Town he was in his mid-thirties, while she was just in her early twenties. Arthur and Mabel’s marriage, while seemingly the ideal middle-class lifestyle desired by many Britons during this period, was slightly estranged, as Arthur spent long hours in

the office or traveling for work. During this time, J. R. R. Tolkien was born in January 1892. Mabel gave birth to another son, Hilary Arthur Reuel, on the 17th of February 1894, however the boys were not destined to live out the rest of their boyhoods in South Africa. The young family, minus Arthur, decided to make the journey back to England, a move based on the common belief that the hot climates were not good for the English constitution, which is what Mabel and Arthur took to explain John R

onald’s sickly health at the time. This belief, coupled with the onset of a drought in South Africa, led Mabel to make the journey on the S. S. Guelph back to Birmingham in April 1895, where the young family would await the arrival of Arthur. However Arthur never arrived, as by the 15th of February 1896, he had contracted acute rheumatic fever and hemorrhaged to death. Mabel Tolkien proved to be a strong independent woman who sought only the best for her two children and attempted to give them t

he finest upbringing she could afford given the challenging circumstances after Arthur’s death. An educated woman herself, Mabel initially schooled her boys in Latin, French, and German, as well as providing them with all the story books they could read. Under Mabel’s excellent tutelage, Tolkien could read and write by the age of four and would soon begin his induction into studying different languages. Mabel moved her two sons all over England, both to find the boys the perfect school but also

to remove the family from under Mabel’s parents’ watchful and overly domineering gaze. In 1896, the three moved into Sarehole, a small village outside of the city of Birmingham in England. Tolkien’s time in Sarehole particularly impacted his growing interest in ecology and fierce love of trees and nature. This pastoral love can certainly be seen in his later stories such as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Sarehole Mill and the surrounding area became his inspiration for the creation of the

Shire, mentioned even in his introduction to The Lord of the Rings. He recalls playing in the yard of the mill, and being chased off by the angry miller, imagining trolls and playing in nature. Though now a suburb of Birmingham, at the time it was a true rural idyll, lush and quiet, and a stark contrast with the industrialised modernity of nearby Birmingham. Tolkien said that he had never even seen a car until the family had left there. When, years later, he discovered that the mill had fallen

into disrepair, and his childhood idyll had been, in his words, “shabbily destroyed” by the expanding city, his sadness was evident. Though he strenuously disliked allegory, it’s hard not to see a reflection of his love of nature running throughout his work – the heroes live in harmony with nature, and the villains corrupt and destroy. The trees themselves are often on the side of the heroes. The direct line of comparison between Sarehole and the Shire is clear. Another part of J. R. R.’s upbrin

ging which greatly affected his life and writing was his mother’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Much to the dismay of her Unitarian father, Mabel converted to Catholicism in June 1900 when J. R. R. was still just eight years of age. Like Arthur Tolkien’s German heritage, Catholicism did not align with Mabel’s father’s world view and Protestant religion, which was seen as the acceptable version of Christianity in Britain. Her conversion and subsequent estrangement from her family led Mabel to

make another move, this time to the Birmingham suburb called Moseley. Here, Tolkien met Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who was named after the famed founder of the Society of Jesus in the sixteenth century and who would become an important guardian figure in young Tolkien’s life. In 1904, Mabel again moved the family. Like their move from Bloemfontein, this move from the city to the country was again precipitated by illness. Young John Ronald and his brother Hilary had contracted measles and whoo

ping-cough, while Mabel herself had been diagnosed with diabetes. Unfortunately, at that time, there was not much that could be done for diabetes. The family moved near to Father Morgan so that he could help care for them all, but tragically, due to complications of her diabetes, Mabel fell ill and died on the 14th of November 1904 leaving J. R. R. and his younger brother as orphans. Father Morgan became guardian to the two boys after Mabel’s passing and the pair moved into their Aunt Beatrice’s

apartment in Birmingham to be closer to their school, King Edward’s. It was at King Edward’s that Tolkien first laid eyes on the Anglo-Saxon language, the spoken and written language used in much of Britain throughout the Early Middle Ages. Tolkien’s devotion to languages became a lifelong passion, both as a scholar and as an inventor of his own languages. Additionally, during these formative teen years, Tolkien met his future wife, Edith Bratt. Edith was born on the 21st of January 1889 and wa

s three years Tolkien’s senior. She was a skilled pianist, and like Tolkien, Edith was an orphan who lived in a boarding house in Birmingham. Subsequently, the pair struck up a friendship which grew into a romance. The puppy-love stage of their relationship, however, was short-lived, as Father Morgan, frustrated that Tolkien was devoting time to childish romance rather than his studies, forbade the pair from meeting again or even writing to one another, until Tolkien had turned twenty-one. Morga

n was particularly upset at the fact that Edith was a Protestant. This separation from Edith, while difficult, was not impossible, as it was eased by Tolkien’s close knit male friendship group and literary circles. While Tolkien indeed later had female pupils and female academic colleagues, it was his male dominated early environment that was to become the key part of Tolkien’s life and would also influence his work. For example, Tolkien and others in these circles would have the opportunity to

share their work before it was complete, let alone published. His friendship groups spent their time smoking pipes, workshopping original material, or reading famous works in their original Greek, Latin or Anglo Saxon. The first of Tolkien’s social groups was the “Tea Club,” formed in 1911 at King Edward’s when Tolkien was 19 years old. This club was founded by Tolkien and classmates such as Christopher Wiseman and R. Q. Gilson, among others. This group later became known as the “T. C. B. S.,” t

he B. S. inherited from “Barrow’s Stores” where the group would often meet. Many of the members of the Tea Club would meet their fate on the battlefields of France by the end of the decade, leaving what many scholars consider a lasting impression on Tolkien and his work, although he himself denied its influence in personal letters written to friends throughout the forties and fifties. Tolkien was admitted to the University of Oxford as an undergraduate in 1911, an admission which was only made p

ossible because of his receipt of a scholarship prize granted by the university: the Open Classical Exhibition to Exeter College. He won this award after a particular performance at King Edward’s, where he had been a member of the Debating Society. Through this he had demonstrated his linguistic abilities in Anglo-Saxon, Greek, and Gothic, while also referring to an ancient Germanic language, both spoken and written. Tolkien’s admittance to Oxford was but a humble beginning to a long relationshi

p with the university where he would one day be an esteemed Professor of English language, teaching philology, Anglo Saxon, and other related subjects. Tolkien had always had a fascination for languages, both learning and creating them. This would influence his literature including The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, in which he created entire languages. Similarly, he also became a renowned philologist. Philology is the study of languages and linguistics, often ancient languages. Academically,

during the time he was writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien published translations of stories and poetry such as the 14th century Middle English poem, Pearl. Oxford was also formative in other ways. The visitor to Britain’s oldest university even today is confronted by a series of ancient buildings and edifices which are like stepping back into history. Much of Tolkien’s life was lived here and the setting must have impacted on how he shaped and built the world of Middle Earth

in which The Lord of the Rings was set. Tolkien’s early years at Oxford were interrupted however by the outbreak of war across Europe. The First World War began on the 28th of July 1914 when the Empire of Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia. This regional conflict in the Balkans expanded in the days that followed into a pan-European conflict, with Britain declaring war on Germany only a few days later. After the First World War broke out, Tolkien was determined to finish his studies at Oxford

before enlisting. To be with his T. C. B. S. compatriots, Tolkien sought to join the Lancashire Fusiliers. As he finished his studies, Tolkien spent his time training to become an officer and writing a large quantity of poetry, some of which contained whimsical and botanical influences and themes. For example, in 1914 Tolkien wrote the poem “Goblin Feet” for Edith, which was a verse to celebrate her love of springtime. The next year it would become his first published piece of writing, appearin

g in Oxford Poetry. This was an important moment, although Tolkien later grew to hate the poem, referring to it as “the unhappy thing, representing all that I came (so soon after) to fervently dislike”, being a rather twee and infantilized version of elves and the like. Despite this retrospective dislike of some of his earlier work it was all formative and Tolkien’s poetry would be a major aspect of his later writings, with over sixty poems included in The Lord of the Rings. Of probably greater

literary significance around this time is his penning of ‘The Voyage of Éarendel the Evening Star’; another poem, but the first that is recognizably about Middle Earth, the world in which The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and so much of Tolkien’s other work was set. Three other poems about Éarendel were also written around this time, and burned themselves into his imagination to such a great extent that the character of Éarendel survived largely unchanged from that moment onwards – he even gets

a few mentions in The Lord of the Rings. You may remember Frodo and Sam using the phial of Galadriel, a pure and bright light to defeat Shelob. That light had been captured from Éarendel’s star. The wider legendarium which emerged over the years and decades to follow came initially from him “trying to find out” the story of Éarendel and his world, though that would have to wait a couple of years as the harshness of the real world hit home. Following his graduation from Oxford in 1915, Tolkien wa

s commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and, as in his youth, Tolkien moved around England, from Bedford to Staffordshire and elsewhere. He continued to train as a British officer, choosing to specialize in signaling, which included learning Morse code and how to transmit messages, a great fit for the language-minded man. At the same time, on the 22nd of March 1916, Tolkien and Edith Bratt, having known each other for years, were finally wed at a morning mass at St Mary

’s Immaculate Church in Warwick. She had agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism in order to make their marriage work, a decision which caused a rift with her adoptive guardian. J. R. R. and Edith did not have long to celebrate their eventual union, as Tolkien would soon be shipped out to the Western Front in France. Tolkien landed at Calais on the 6th of June 1916. There, he was one of many fresh-faced troops arriving in France, following massive losses at the Battle of Verdun the previous Febru

ary. Tolkien’s company took part in the First Battle of the Somme, the offensive fought between French and British troops on one side and Germany on the other and which began on the 1st of July 1916. It lasted 141 days, with a combined total of almost one million casualties on both sides. The British suffered a loss of around 20,000 men on the first day of their infantry assault, one of the deadliest days in British military history. The war had brutal consequences for Tolkien’s friendship circl

e. In particular he lost members of his old social club, the T. C. B. S., including Rob Gilson and G. B. Smith, so that only Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman were left from their old band. Tolkien himself was removed from the action after taking ill with what was called “trench fever” during the conflict, a disease carried by lice in the trenches. It infected upwards of one-third of all British soldiers on the Western Front during the First World War and was characterized by severe headaches, a f

ever and muscle pains for days after incubation. After being moved to the rear lines and being cared for at a French hospital at Le Touquet, Tolkien was shipped back to England to recover, where he was reunited with Edith. Influenced by his experience in the trenches and his love of epics such as the Finnish origin story, the Kalevala, Tolkien began work on what he called The Book of the Lost Tales. Over the next few years he wrote many of the stories which would form the basis of The Silmarilli

on (his “legendarium”). The Fall of Gondolin was the first, then followed the other great tales of Beren and Luthien and The Children of Hurin. He also started more structured work on the creation of languages for his invented world. In truth, he had been inventing languages since his childhood, but now he was directly linking his philological creativity to his world-building. The work on all of these continued throughout his life, and though he did of course publish some completed works like Th

e Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, much of the rest of his creation remained in a state of constant revision through to his final days. Tolkien’s ambition at this time was no less than to produce an integrated mythology connected to the ‘feel’ of his land. Years later, in a letter to a potential publisher, he looked back and reminisced that “I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic, to the level of romantic fairy-story – the larger foun

ded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendour from the vast backcloths – which I could dedicate simply to: to England; to my country. It should possess the tone and quality that I desired, somewhat cool and clear, be redolent of our ‘air’ (the clime and soil of the North West, meaning Britain and the hither parts of Europe.” It should be noted that he caveated this idea in the letter by saying that he now thought it “absurd”. Nevertheless, the scale of Tolkien’s ambit

ion was clear – he wasn’t just creating a background for some stories, he was creating a vast mythological framework from which stories could emerge; his and others. Tolkien, meanwhile, had been discharged from hospital in October 1916 after two years of bed rest interspersed with some military postings throughout England. He would repeatedly fall ill once reposted and was often sent back to hospital to recuperate, whilst at this time, Edith and Tolkien began their family. Their first son, John

Francis Reuel, was born on the 16th of November 1917 and soon after that, the young family moved back to Oxford where Tolkien took a job as an assistant lexicographer. The First World War came to an end eventually in November 1918, after Germany surrendered following the outbreak of revolution back home in Berlin and other cities. Tolkien’s service in it had involved a wide range of stations, from the bloody developments of the Battle of the Somme to being stationed in England and deemed unfit f

or service from a medical standpoint. Nevertheless the violence and brutality, when combined with the subsequent Second World War many years later, would influence Tolkien’s writings, much as he always insisted that The Lord of the Rings was not intended as an allegorical account of the wars of the early twentieth century. Not long after the end of the war, in the summer of 1920, Tolkien applied and was appointed as a Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds. There Tolkien connected

with another young scholar, Eric Valentine Gordon. Gordon was a skilled philologist and scholar who could match Tolkien’s skill and wit in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, and so the two men clicked as close friends, eventually forming the Viking Club, where they would invent Anglo-Saxon songs and verses among other scholarly pastimes. Meanwhile, Tolkien’s family continued to expand. He and Edith had another son, Michael Hilary Reuel, who was born on the 22nd of October 1920, and a third boy, Christo

pher Reuel, who was born on the 21st of November 1924. Christopher would subsequently become a scholar in his own right many years later and would play an important part in editing and disseminating his father’s work. Around the time of Christopher’s birth, Tolkien applied for an Anglo-Saxon Professorship at his alma mater, the University of Oxford. This application was successful and Tolkien returned to Oxford where he would continue to lecture for much of the rest of his life. In 1926, the Tol

kiens moved to Northmoor Road. It was here that most of the work on The Hobbit was undertaken. Indeed, the family stayed in residence here for twenty-one years, one of the longest periods of time that Tolkien lived anywhere in a sustained fashion throughout his life. During this time, the Tolkien family was also completed with the birth of Priscilla on the 18th of June 1929. It is hard to understate the significance of Tolkien’s children to his life. He was a devoted father and would often send

illustrations to them and read them stories of his invented worlds. It probably goes too far to suggest, as some have, that J. R. R. wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings for John, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla, but there is no doubt that they would have been a factor in how he fashioned the world of Middle Earth and the characters who inhabited it. There is an element of childhood fairy tale throughout, while the novels also grapple with adult themes and provide moral lessons. Back in

Oxford,Tolkien’s social and literary circles also expanded. One of Tolkien’s more well-known groups and clubs was the “Inklings.” In 1926, Tolkien met Clive Staples Lewis, better known as the famed C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, but known to his friends as “Jack.” Lewis was born on the 29th of November 1898, in Ireland. Although Narnia is often analyzed for its Christian allegories, Lewis himself had a turbulent and shifting relationship with Christianity. In fact, it was

Tolkien, a Catholic, who ironically inspired Lewis to rejoin the Church of England even though Tolkien himself thought much less of Protestantism than Catholicism. This debate between Catholicism and Protestantism has been and continues to be an issue particularly in Ireland. Lewis, an Irishman himself and a Protestant one at that, would have been wholly familiar with this struggle, growing and entering his adult years at a time when religious divisions had resulted in the partition of Ireland b

etween Roman Catholic south and Protestant north. Tolkien and Lewis experienced a long-lasting friendship, one of mutual respect and admiration, although they were distant from one another for long periods of time. Lewis’ growing Anglicanism was one cause of this distance. For his part, Tolkien’s Catholicism influenced his world and perspective, even though many claim that religion and literature do not go hand in hand, this was not the case with Tolkien, as some of his biographers state that Th

e Silmarillion is a deeply religiously reverent and spiritual work, and that Tolkien regarded writing The Lord of the Rings as a Christian duty and pursuit. Much of Tolkien’s sense of the religious importance of his work stemmed from his belief that he was not myth-making so much as uncovering the truth, much as an historian might. He created an in-world persona for himself as an academic uncovering stories of Middle Earth, to the extent that he even sometimes adopted this persona in replying to

letters from fans; engaging with their questions and theories by suggesting possible alternative interpretations of his own work and different ways of translating the languages that he had created. To Tolkien, his creation was not so much a different world but Earth in a different stage of imagination. As such, Tolkien saw it as his duty to uncover the truth within the myth, and to understand the human patterns in history. Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter wrote about this: “Just as speech

is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth.” One cannot understand the fictional world which Tolkien was constructing from the 1920s onwards and which would eventually result in the composition of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings without examining J. R. R.’s academic career. Tolkien’s work over several decades, whether briefly at Leeds, or primarily at Oxford focused on elements of Anglo-Saxon poetry and prose, epic elements of English and Norse myth which profoun

dly impacted on the manner in which he developed the world of Middle Earth. For instance, while he was at Leeds in the early-to-mid-1920s Tolkien worked on A Middle English Vocabulary, a dictionary of sorts of the English language as it was spoken and written between approximately 1100 and 1400, that is the period between the Norman Conquest and the first stirrings of the Renaissance in England. This, along with his work on the Anglo-Saxon English of the Early Middle Ages was highly significant

in shaping the language used in The Lord of the Rings and other works. Most notable in this respect is the overlap between the depiction of the elves in Middle Earth and some Anglo-Saxon writings which Tolkien not only studied, but taught on and edited. Similarly, Tolkien’s work at Leeds and Oxford involved study and publication on some of the foremost works of English epic poetry and prose. While still at Leeds he co-edited, along with E. V. Gordon, an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

, a fourteenth century chivalric romance tale concerning Sir Gawain, one of the knights of King Arthur’s Round Table. Elements of the Arthurian cycle might be said to have entered into Tolkien’s fantasy world in the shape of the Rohirrim or indeed of Aragorn as a kind of pseudo King Arthur. When he arrived back to Oxford in the mid-1920s Tolkien was working on an edition of the foremost Anglo-Saxon epic poem of them all, Beowulf. He never published the edition, which he finished in 1926, but he

gave a number of acclaimed lectures at the time which established his reputation as one of the foremost Beowulf scholars in the world. Studies of Tolkien’s work have tended to argue for the Dark Lord, Sauron, whom Tolkien made the main antagonist of The Lord of the Rings, as being approximate to Beowulf’s great nemesis, Grendel, in the Anglo-Saxon poem. Tolkien’s literary output in constructing the world of Middle Earth should be understood as an extension of the world of Anglo-Saxon and English

myth with which his life at Leeds and Oxford was concerned. It was probably in the summer of 1930 that this grand vision started to be grounded in a very simple story. In one of the most famous moments of inspiration in history, up there no doubt with Isaac Newton’s legendary theorizing of gravity after an apple fell out of a tree and hit him on the head, Tolkien was marking an exam paper when a sentence came to him fully formed. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. He quickly scribb

led it down on the back of the paper he was marking. It became the basis for a lengthy story concerning the character of Bilbo Baggins and The Hobbit emerged accordingly over the next few years. Still, even with this significant beginning, Tolkien was a writer in need of a critique and support group. This support network emerged more fully in the form of the “Inklings” in the early 1930s. Membership was irregular, especially when the Second World War broke out and members were scattered, or the

group was unable to meet in the pub due to wartime shortages. When the group was first inaugurated, members consisted of Tolkien, Lewis, Oxford doctor R. E. Harvard, Lewis’ brother Major Warren Lewis, the lawyer Owen Barfield, and a lecturer in English Literature at Reading University, Hugo Dyson. While they occupied an eclectic smattering of professions, the Inklings were bound together by their interest in literature and their Christianity. Given these bonds, Tolkien often showed early drafts

of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to the other Inklings. The Hobbit began as stories Tolkien told to his children. Some of these stories and poems went unwritten while others were never published. However, many of these stories were suggested by Tolkien to his publishers at one time or another as successor stories to The Hobbit. For example, Tolkien once wrote a playful poem called “The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,” named after one of Michael Tolkien’s dolls. In 1934, this poem was publishe

d in the Oxford Magazine and Tom Bombadil appeared in ‘the Lord of the Rings’. Another short children’s story from this period was called “Mr. Bliss,” which told the story of a man purchasing a car and his subsequent adventures. This was inspired by Tolkien’s own short-lived vehicle ownership, and was published posthumously in 1982. “Mr. Bliss” was a fully illustrated work, with the illustrations done by Tolkien himself, highlighting the fact that Tolkien was a visual artist as well as an accomp

lished scholar and writer. Specifically, Tolkien enjoyed mediums with a lighter touch such as watercolors, which he used to create illustrations for The Silmarillion in the 1920s, as well as maps and illustrations of Middle Earth which eventually made their way into The Hobbit. Children’s stories by other authors from his own childhood also influenced Tolkien when writing The Hobbit. For example, Tolkien and his children delighted in E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs. Edward Augus

tine Wyke-Smith was born in 1871. British-born, Wyke-Smith worked as an engineer throughout the European continent and America during the late 19th century. His children’s book The Marvellous Land of Snergs is about two children who enter a magical land where all orphaned children are cared for by mother-like figures. Snergs, who also live in this land, are notoriously short folks, like hobbits. It isn’t difficult to see where the influence was here and it is important to remember that while Tol

kien is generally acclaimed as the father of modern fantasy fiction today, he was also drawing on a good deal of influential writers who had preceded him. Importantly, Tolkien himself wrote about how the word hobbit was inspired by Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Sinclair Lewis was born in Minnesota in the United States on the 7th of February 1885. He is known for his rousing critiques of American capitalism in social satire novels like 1935’s It Can’t Happen Here. Babbitt tells the story of a middle-

class mediocre real estate salesman named George Babbitt who is forced to reevaluate his life and the meaning of his existence. Tolkien was inspired by the sound of the word “Babbitt,” and believed there was a comparison between the hobbits and the character Babbitt, particularly in what Tolkien called their “bourgeois smugness.” The Hobbit tells the story of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit who lives in a comfortable house at Bag End in the comfortable small town of Hobbiton, in the Shire, a region in M

iddle Earth where people live a quaint, essentially ‘English’ life. That is, until Bilbo, with the encouragement of Gandalf the wizard, gets involved with a company of dwarves who are trying to reclaim their homeland. There are indeed more than a few similarities between Tolkien and his protagonist Bilbo. Both Bilbo and Tolkien, like Sinclair’s George Babbitt, are comfortably middle-class and embody traits and lifestyle habits that are considered “respectable.” They are sensible people and middl

e-aged, and do not travel much. Indeed, Tolkien himself, whilst he loved to learn a myriad of languages as well as about different cultures, did not do much traveling to these places. In old age the only place he took holidays was to the English seaside, and even this he did not overly enjoy. As he admitted “I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good plain food (unrefrigerated).” Throughout the drafting process of the

Hobbit, many of the character names were changed. The head dwarf originally held the name of Gandalf before it was changed to Thorin, and Smaug the dragon was originally “Pryftan.” Tolkien chose many of the names from the mythological Icelandic collection of poetry and prose, the Elder Edda. This is a collection of Old Norse narrative poems of the High Middle Ages, generally derived from elements of Scandinavian and Icelandic myth. In addition to being inspired by Babbitt and the snergs, Tolkien

drew inspiration for The Hobbit from his own life. For example, “Bag End” was the name for his Aunt Jane’s farm in Worcestershire, England. The character of Gandalf was inspired by a postcard reproduction of J. Madelener’s artwork Der Berggeist, or the “mountain spirit.” The artwork showed an old man sitting in a forest, patiently attuned to the wildlife around him. Essentially the Shire is a romanticized version of England as Tolkien and many others during his day would have wished it to be. T

he Hobbit was nearly never finished, let alone published. As it was being written for his children and as they were steadily growing up, Tolkien saw no reason to finish the story. However, a former pupil of Tolkien’s named Elaine Griffiths read the story and thought it was wonderful. In 1936, she even gave the then unfinished manuscript to an employee of the publishing house Allen & Unwin to read. This employee was Susan Dagnall. After a slightly strenuous revision process by the perfectionist T

olkien, The Hobbit was published on the 21st of September 1937 and copies were sold out by December. After the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien hoped to publish The Silmarillion but, due to its initial confusing combination of poetry and prose as well as its great length, Allen & Unwin chose not to publish it. One of the most difficult aspects of the work for a publisher to market was the lack of a traditional narrative framework within The Silmarillion. Meanwhile, the fans practically screamed fo

r more hobbit-centered stories. The desire to fulfil the fans and his publisher’s desires for more hobbit stories mixed with his desire to use parts of the mythology laid out in The Silmarillion was what led Tolkien to begin what would become known as The Lord of the Rings. As with The Hobbit, many of the character names in The Lord of the Rings changed over time. Originally, Frodo Baggins was named Bingo Baggins, and he was Bilbo’s son. This was changed to make him Bilbo’s nephew. Other charact

ers, perhaps those who became the hobbits Merry and Pippin were Bingo’s cousins, Odo and Frodo. As with the names of The Hobbit characters, Tolkien drew on his life for inspiration. For example, the name “Gamgee” came from the colloquial name for cotton wool when he was growing up in Birmingham, and then Gaffer Gamgee was a nickname Tolkien gave to a curious old man he and his family met while on holiday in Cornwall in 1932. He named him “Gaffer Gamgee” for the way that he would gossip about loc

al news or the weather. However, most importantly, The Lord of the Rings was inspired by Tolkien’s love for England’s landscape, and the folks who populated the land. This admiration, and the holdover of his childhood love of trees, forests, and streams, inspired his stories. Whilst writing the first chapter about Bilbo Baggins’ birthday party went smoothly enough, Tolkien was slightly stumped on where the new story’s plot would go next. Given this limited planning, the story evolved quite natur

ally, with Tolkien adding a dangerous Black Rider to the beginning chapters. This was to become the ring wraiths. Interestingly, it was not until writing The Lord of the Rings that the ring that Bilbo steals from Gollum in The Hobbit became the one ring of power. Beforehand, there had been no such thing as “one ring to rule them all.” Any foreshadowing within The Hobbit about this was added during one of Tolkien’s many revisions. As he began to write the book which would eventually be released m

any years later as The Lord of the Rings trilogy, the world Tolkien lived in was yet again being ravaged by war. The end of the First World War, which J. R. R. had fought in so many years earlier, had created as many new problems as it had solved. In its aftermath many extremist political parties rose to power in countries like Italy, while the politics of the defeated nations such as Germany and Austria were highly unstable in the years following the end of the war. The situation became worse s

till following the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression which followed it, events which allowed for the rise of the Nazi Party led by Adolf Hitler in Germany in 1933. Years of escalating tensions followed as the Nazis rearmed Germany and prepared for a new war. As Tolkien set about writing the first stages of his work the life of England was thus being interfered with by events elsewhere on the continent, as Germany annexed Austria and then began making territorial demands on Czech

oslovakia and Poland. Eventually this endless aggression resulted in September 1939 in the outbreak of the Second World War, as Britain and France declared war on Germany in response to its invasion of Poland. This, though, was a war unlike most others. In it there was clearly a volatile aggressor which had abandoned any rules of military conduct or ethics of any kind. Between 1939 and 1945 the Nazis murdered millions of people across Europe and engaged in genocide against the continent’s Jews,

Romani people and others whom it deemed racially inferior such as the Poles and Czechs. More so than any other major European war the Second World War was a clash between good and evil. Unsurprisingly, given the nature of the war which was raging across Europe as Tolkien was writing much of The Lord of the Rings, many commentators have tended to view the epic saga as being an allegorical account of the Second World War. For instance, the character of Sauron could be taken to represent Adolf Hitl

er, an individual of consummate evil, while the orcs of the novels could effectively be an allegory of the German Wehrmacht, the Third Reich’s combined military forces. The two towers of the second novel of the trilogy could be perceived as being Nazi Germany and one of its allies, either Benito Mussolini’s Italy or the Empire of Japan which had turned the Pacific world into a warzone in much the same way Germany had Europe. Similarly, the fractious relationships between the respective powers of

Rohan, Gondor, the elves and the dwarves in The Lord of the Rings could be perceived as allegorical to the divisions between the various allied powers of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union who were otherwise very divided, but who found common cause to confront the greater evil posed by Nazi Germany from 1941 onwards. Many have suggested that Tolkien’s story’s dark turn to ring wraiths and the fiery pits of Mordor was perhaps due to this global context. However, Tolkien himself insi

sted at length in the Introduction to The Lord of the Rings, that he “cordially disliked allegory in all its manifestations” and although he recognized that writers’ experiences would be reflected in their work, his intention was that his story did not contain “any allegorical significance or contemporary political reference whatsoever.” There is another way of viewing The Lord of the Rings altogether. This involves the idea that the saga is effectively a parable about the processes of modernity

and how they had corrupted the world. Tolkien was profoundly influenced by the writings of William Morris, a nineteenth century British poet, artist, novelist, architect and conservationist who had rejected the forces of modernity and industrialization in Britain, instead championing British arts and crafts as they had been practiced prior to the Industrial Revolution which began in the mid-nineteenth century. Many elements of The Lord of the Rings are deeply critical of industrialization, part

icularly the sections in what would eventually become The Two Towers where Isengard rises to become an ally of Sauron and begins building an industrial army based on the destruction of the great forests of Middle Earth. In this sense Tolkien was heroising the Shire as the ideal of what England had been prior to the Industrial Revolution, whereas Sauron, his orcs and Isengard were the antithesis to this. The end product of these malign influences was Gollum himself, a figure ruined by the covetou

sness and materialism which industrialization and the emergence of a consumer society was creating. And then there are further influences still which might be said to have been present in Tolkien’s epic. For instance, many have suggested that his devout Roman Catholicism was evinced in the novels in the depiction of characters such as Frodo, Samwise Gamgee and Gollum, with Frodo being a Jesus-like character, Sam the equivalent of Peter the Apostle and Gollum as Judas Iscariot. However, the reali

ty is that the world of Middle Earth and the elements of Anglo-Saxon myth, Biblical story-telling, contemporary parallels with the First and Second World War, and commentary on the processes of industrialization, nationalism and modernity, were so vast and interwoven into the world Tolkien created that it is not possible to identify a single influence for his ideas. Indeed Tolkien originally conceived of the world of Middle Earth and began writing about it in the 1920s as a form of private mytho

logy which he used to work out various ideas about philology, cosmology, mythology and various other aspects of both his professional and private life. Certainly it would be overly reductionist to assert that The Lord of the Rings is a straight forward allegorical statement about the Second World War. Its layers are too complex to permit such a reading of it. Writing The Lord of the Rings was a long and arduous process. It took twelve years, in fact, for Tolkien to write the story, plus another

four years to revise it and make it publishable. The lengthy manuscript was divided into three volumes after its completion: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. However, this was a decision which was made by the restrictions of the time. Originally Tolkien had composed the story as one whole story in six parts, but paper shortages in post-war Britain led the publishers to convince Tolkien it should be published as three books. Accordingly, the names of these t

hree volumes were artificial constructions, Tolkien himself disliked the title of the last book, because he believed it revealed too much of the ending. And so, he wanted “The War of the Ring” as a title instead. He also disliked “The Two Towers”, complaining to his publisher that he wasn’t completely sure which two towers the title referred to. The material which it consists of had originally been books three and four, which were entitled The Treason of Isengard and The Ring Goes East when Tolk

ien initially wrote those volumes. Part of the delay in publishing The Lord of the Rings was due to Tolkien, having written it, deciding that it was actually more of a sequel to his unpublished Silmarillion – a history and mythology of Middle Earth. He thus spent much time trying to convince the publishing house that The Silmarillion should be published alongside The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien had actually been trying to persuade them to publish the Silmarillion (or the Quenta Silmarillion, as h

e called it then) since 1937, but, as noted earlier, they had always resisted. Finally, a compromise was reached; Tolkien condensed much of the content into extensive appendices to The Return of the King. The larger Silmarillion was never published during his lifetime, although a few years after his death his son Christopher edited together his father’s drafts and notes and revisions into a final version and published that. The Fellowship of the Ring was published in August 1954, with the two se

quels following close behind in November 1954 and October 1955. Tolkien’s stories quickly became cult classics, launching fandoms throughout the world as early as the 1960s. Indeed as early as 1955 The Fellowship of the Ring was serialized for BBC Radio. Fans ever since have expanded on the source material itself. In the 1960s, a Tolkien Society was formed in London. People met for “hobbit picnics” where they dressed up as hobbits and other Middle Earth folk. The fame spread globally and a “Frod

o Society” was even formed in North Borneo, the obscure island of the East Indies miles away from the world in which Tolkien had lived and worked throughout his life. And all of this happened during Tolkien’s own lifetime, not to mention the extensive fandom that exists today. Tolkien spent much of the mid-to-late-1950s expanding the reach of The Lord of the Rings, working on translations of the text for publication in non-English speaking countries. However, despite this, he did not like the pe

rsonal fame that came with the popularity of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Tolkien home would receive phone calls from fans at all hours, with some people even showing up outside their house in the hope of meeting with the famed author in person. However, despite this dislike of the public attention he was attracting, Tolkien enjoyed answering fan mail with lengthy, detailed replies. Although, as he grew older, he would lose many of his replies somewhere in the house, only to find th

em later and send them on their way. Tolkien continued to write into his final days, whether revising The Silmarillion or creating new works. For example, Tolkien penned Smith of Wooton Major in the mid-1960s. This short story was a fairy tale about a man who swallowed a star and was transported to the land of Faery. Tolkien considered it a meditation on old age and aging. It was published by Allen & Unwin in 1967. Edith and J. R. R. moved to the seaside resort town of Bournemouth in 1968 when t

he couple were well into their seventies. By that time Edith, who was three years Tolkien’s senior, had been experiencing health problems that made managing and caring for their home quite difficult. They also wished to escape the attention which Tolkien generated in their old residence at Oxford, despite having retired from teaching several years earlier. The couple lived in southern England for three years, where Tolkien continued the undertaking of revision and reorganization of The Silmarill

ion in the hopes of finally finding a publisher who would agree to publish the text he had commenced working on over thirty years earlier. However, while Edith’s health was briefly improved by the seaside air, she eventually declined further. In the autumn of 1971 she was taken to hospital, where she suffered from an inflamed gallbladder and passed away on the 29th of November 1971 at 82 years of age. After Edith’s death, Tolkien moved back to Oxford after being invited by his old employer, Mert

on College, to live in a special set of rooms and being granted the special title of resident honorary Fellow of the college. The Carrs, husband and wife caretakers who lived on the floor beneath Tolkien’s rooms, were available to care for him and often took meals with him. Throughout the early 1970s, Tolkien was bestowed with several honorary degrees, including an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Oxford, which was not for his fiction, but rather for his academic endeavors in

language studies, his work on which had so greatly influenced the development of Middle Earth and the writing of The Lord of the Rings. Living out his final years in this manner, Tolkien developed a gastric bleeding ulcer and a chest infection and after a few days of illness in the hospital died on the 2nd of September 1973 at 81 years of age. A year earlier he had been awarded the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire for his literary work. Tolkien’s death in 1973 did not bring

an end to his publishing work. Much of what he had written on Middle Earth, indeed the majority of it, remained unpublished at the time of his death. It’s easy to forget that only The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published while he was alive as complete stories of Middle Earth. Both were wildly successful during his lifetime, but the other work which he had written on this world remained unpublished. In the years after his death, his son, Christopher Tolkien, took on the role as editor

-in-chief of his father’s writings. The Silmarillion – the legendarium Tolkien always wanted published – was finally brought into print in 1977, upwards of half a century after Tolkien had first began musing on its publication. It is now a best-seller in its own right, having sold millions of copies. In the years that followed 12 further volumes of The History of Middle Earth, reconstructed from Tolkien Senior’s many notes, essays and random scribblings were edited and published. The three great

tales of the First Age which Tolkien had conceptualised – Beren and Luthien, the Children of Hurin and the Fall of Gondolin were also published posthumously. Films, radio adaptations and stage plays of Tolkien’s voluminous writings on Middle Earth also followed, and interest in the great man’s life and works kept growing. Although total sales figures are always hard to verify, particularly so because they do not take into account second and third-hand sales of books, The Lord of the Rings is of

ten estimated by industry experts to be the single best-selling novel of all time, beaten only in total book sales by The Bible, The Quran and Mao Zedong’s Little Red Book. Of these, though, it should be noted that The Bible and The Quran have been around for millennia and are the foundational texts of the world’s two largest religions, while the Little Red Book was issued by a totalitarian state that forced people to read it. As such, The Lord of the Rings is out on its own in terms of book sal

es based on people’s genuine appreciation of and interest in the text. The Hobbit is not far behind. The cultural reach of the Lord of the Rings and Middle Earth more broadly has been truly epic in scope. For instance, even before Tolkien’s death the Beatles, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr had been touted to play the lead roles in a film adaptation of the books, a project which would have combined one of the foremost bands in the world at that time with Tolkien’s ep

ic story. There is even a mention of both Mordor and Gollum in the song Ramble On, one of Led Zeppelin’s most memorable tracks. Similarly, since the publication of the books the major landmarks of Titan, the largest of the moons of the planet Saturn, have been named after geographical locations in Middle Earth. Equally adaptations of the stories of Middle Earth have had a huge cultural impact in recent decades. Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of The Lord of the Rings won between them the most O

scars of any film series, while the final film in the trilogy, The Return of the King, won eleven Oscars, the most won by any film ever, a distinction held jointly with the films Ben Hur and Titanic. Now the Amazon Prime Rings of Power TV series is bursting onto our screens as the biggest budget TV show ever made. But perhaps most tellingly, The Lord of the Rings effectively launched an entire genre of fantasy fiction on its own. George R. R. Martin, writer of Game of Thrones, openly acknowledge

s his debt to Tolkien, as do many others such as Robert Jordan, the creator of The Wheel of Time book series, a fantasy story which sought to parallel Tolkien in its epic scope and the detail of the world involved. Hobbits, orcs, elves and dwarves are now mainstream; recognised and understood across the world. Perhaps, despite his feelings to the contrary, Tolkien did indeed manage to create an inter-connected legendarium for his people. J. R. R. Tolkien was indeed one of the greatest authors of

the twentieth century. Between the 1920s and the 1950s he created an entire universe out of which The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarrilion and many other works emerged. These works effectively laid down the foundations for an entire genre of writing today, the fantasy novel. Many of the giants of this field, writers such as L. Sprague de Camp, Robert Jordan and others, have acknowledged Tolkien’s seminal role in creating the genre and in popularising it. Others have imitated his work

, but while others have borrowed and elaborated on his ideas, none have excelled over Tolkien himself. As a master of incorporating elements of earlier epics and lore into his writing and building up a vast nuanced worlds The Lord of the Rings and the wider history of Middle Earth remain the gold standard of the genre. It is doubtful that anybody else could have written these, as they reflected Tolkien’s own personal life, his experiences, his academic work and his attitudes towards family, frie

ndship and the society he lived in, both its good and bad elements. Back in 1961 Tolkien’s lifelong friend, C. S. Lewis, nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. It was something of a premature nomination, not because The Lord of the Rings was not deserving of such an award, but because the world of the 1960s was such that a story about elves, dwarves and hobbits wandering around a fictional world called Middle Earth wouldn’t have been considered the appropriate kind of work to receive a

Nobel Prize in the 1960s. Two of the awardees of that same award in the early 1960s were John Steinbeck, and Jean Paul Sartre, the French existentialist philosopher. When set against works like this Tolkien’s work might have been dismissed as a fairy tale, a work of fiction which didn’t reflect the world of the twentieth century and its concerns. But such a view does not fully appreciate the scope of historical inquiry which was involved in Tolkien’s work and the appreciation it showed for the

consequences of industrialisation and modernisation. All of these were involved in The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s other publications. As such if Tolkien were alive and writing today, it seems much more likely that he would have been awarded this, the most esteemed literary prize on earth during his lifetime. In an age where the relentless march of technology, industry and science seems to ever more drive a wedge between us and our past as well as the natural world, the stories of J.R.R Tolk

ien remind us of the importance of folklore, fairy tales and our connection with nature. Perhaps the lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s Ramble on summarise the emotions and atmosphere that Tolkien’s tales stir inside us, “years ago in days of old when magic filled the air.” His stories call to our sense of romance, our yearning for simpler quieter lives and our childlike yearnings for fairy tales of dragons, goblins and monsters large and small. Indeed, in the Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarilli

on and his other stories, Tolkien gifted the world a new folklore of legendary tales, that will doubtless continue to enchant and amaze countless generations to come, until Tolkien’s stories themselves become legend and his name becomes one for the ages. What do you think of J. R. R. Tolkien? Are his books among the greatest works of fiction of the entire 20th century, which should be preserved for future generations as their author intended and should Tolkien have been awarded the Nobel Prize i

n his own lifetime? Please let us know in the comment section and in the meantime thank you very much for watching.