John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontain, South Africa. When Tolkien was three, his mother Mabel brought him and his younger brother Hilary to England to visit her family and to escape the heat of South Africa. While in England, Mabel received word that Tolkien’s father, Arthur, had died. She moved the family to her parents’ home in Birmingham, England.

Arthur had little money and so Mabel was left with little money on which to live. In order to save money, when Tolkien was four, Mabel moved the family outside of Birmingham to Sarehole Mill. It was a beautiful spot and Ronald and his brother enjoyed playing near the Mill and in the countryside. The area would eventually be the inspiration for the Shire and the Miller and his son for Ted Sandyman and his boy. Mabel taught the boys herself. At four, Tolkien could read and write. He showed an amazing aptitude for language, learning Latin, French and German.

Once the boys were old enough to attend school, Mabel was forced to move back to Birmingham four years later, so that the boys would be close enough to walk to school. Ronald found the move distasteful, though he was glad to be attending King Edward’s School.

In 1900, Mabel decided to convert to Catholicism, a decision that was not well received by her family.  England was predominantly Protestant and Catholicism was not looked well upon by much of society. Mabel was consequently cut off by her family so that she was faced with even greater financial straights.

Things worsened when, in 1904, Mabel discovered that she had diabetes. She died in November of that year. Tolkien, to the end of his days, was convinced that her death was mainly due to her family’s poor treatment of her because of her conversion to Catholicism. In fact, he seems to have seen her as a martyr to the catholic faith.

A friend of the family, Father Francis Morgan, acted as a kind of guardian to the boys. For years, he had been a kind of adopted uncle to the two boys. They, however, lived with their Aunt and then later at a boarding house. Meanwhile, Tolkien continued to study at King Edward’s school where he received a classical education, studying Latin and Greek, and Anglo Saxon and (on his own) Gothic. He was later to learn German, Italian, Russian and Spanish, but his real love was for more ancient languages.

While living in the boarding house, Tolkien met a young woman, three years his senior, named Edith Bratt. The two fell in love, but Father Francis felt that Edith would distract Ronald from his studies and that he was too young to be involved in a romantic relationship. Edith and Ronald agreed, therefore, to stop communicating (Edith had moved away from Birmingham) until Ronald turned 21.  Ronald did contact Edith three years later on his 21^st birthday, only to discover that Edith was engaged to another. It was clear to him, however, that she was not in love with the man and so Ronald proceeded to woo her and eventually the two were married just prior to Ronald joining the war.

Growing up, Tolkien was a promising student. He entered Oxford at the age of 19 where he studied Classics and later Philology. World War I began while Tolkien was at Oxford, but he was able to sign up for a program that allowed him to continue his studies and then join the war once he graduated. While at Oxford, Tolkien fell more deeply in love with philology and old languages. He once described the “acute aesthetic pleasure” he derived from studying certain languages. From an early age, from seeing odd names on a coal truck (which he discovered were Welsh), he was enamoured by that language and wanted to learn it on top of the others he was already acquiring. Eventually, he did (both modern and medieval), and with it, he knew French, German, Greek, Latin, Italian, Finnish, Gothic, Old Norse, had a working knowledge of Russian, Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Lombardic.

When he was 23, he graduated from Oxford, got married and then was sent to France to serve with the Lancashire Fusilliares. His experiences in the war will be discussed in more detail in class. Thankfully, after some fighting, Tolkien was sent home with trench fever and was ill much of the time until the end of the war.

During the war, he began writing his earliest tales, the earliest forms of those which appeared in The Silmarillion, in particular, at this time he wrote “The Fall of Gondolin”. He not only wrote tales, but at this time Tolkien was inventing his own languages, a pass time he’d begun as a child.

Indeed, for Tolkien, his stories always started with language. He was intrigued by the form of words. He recalls writing a tale about a green dragon when a boy and showing it to his mother. The only comment he can recall she made was to say that one cannot write “a green great dragon” but a “great green dragon”. In writing a friend about this event years later, he said, that he wondered at the time why this was so and still does today. From that point on he doesn’t remember writing another tale for a long time, but he turned instead to linguistics. Eventually, as I said, this would lead him back to writing since words often led him to create stories. For instance, one day, years after the time we are not speaking of, while marking examination papers, he discovered a blank page in an exam booklet. He found himself writing on this blank page, “In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit”.  He claimed that “Names always generate a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like”.

Getting back to the events of his life, once the war was over and Tolkien had recuperated, he had a job with the Oxford English Dictionary. He then became a Reader of Literature at Leeds University in Northern English. Eventually, he became a Professor of Anglo-Saxon and later English Literature and Language at Oxford.

While at Oxford, Tolkien enjoyed the fellowship of a group of creative friends.  An important influence in his life these friends met once a week at a local pub or in the college rooms of C.S. Lewis. Most were authors and because they would read their own works to each other, they called themselves “The Inklings” (playing on the fact that the used a great deal of ink but also felt that they were often working under creative inspiration (and thus getting inklings). Most of Tolkien’s work was first read to the Inklings before it was ever published.

While working as a professor, both at Leeds and Oxford, Tolkien published some scholarly texts as well as some poems, and continued to write his tales which became part of The Silmariliion. He’d always been very imaginative. Not only did he write poetry, but as his children were growing up, he wrote the children annual illustrated letters ‘from Santa Claus’, some of which were published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters. He also told them numerous bedtime stories.  The Hobbit, which, as I said, grew out of one sentence which contained a word (hobbit) which intrigued Tolkien, was one such story read to his children. The story was eventually written down and its manuscript passed around to friend. One reader, impressed by it, passed it on to a publisher-friend and soon Tolkien had a publishing contract.

The way that Tolkien’s imagination works is quite interesting and it is a point I shall probably bring up later. Not only was he inspired by languages, but ideas seemed to flow from him almost as if they were not his.  As “Carpenter stresses, Tolkien’s attitude [is that] of the explorer rather than the inventor: he finds out what his new words and strange references mean, as if his material had ‘a real extra-mental existence’” (Rogers 65). The story grew from that moment when he was marking exams. Tolkien makes it clear that he did not always know what turn his work would take, a point we’ll get into more later. When Frodo first meets Strider (originally called Trotter in the early drafts), Tolkien did not know anymore than Frodo who he was.

Eventually, The Hobbit was published in 1937 and was a huge success. Soon after, his publisher Stanley Unwin asked him to write a sequel. Tolkien began working on this project, but his work took on a life of its own and soon he found he was not writing a children’s book, but adult fiction. He spent years working on this new story and finally, in 1954-5, The Lord of the Rings was published. Tolkien was a meticulous writer, taking great pains over the setting and the stories details. He wrote and rewrote and polished his story as finely as possible. It took him 9 years to work out not only the story-line, but the geography, cartography, the languages (each race had its own) and the history of Middle Earth. Initially, he had wanted The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion to be published as one work, but his publisher did not accept this plan, fearing that the book would be too expensive and that The Silmarillion would not be as popular as The Lord of the Rings. Eventually, Unwin convinced Tolkien to publish The Lord of the Rings only and to divide it into three parts. The trilogy soon became immensely popular and has been voted by some as the best novel of the 20^th century.

Tolkien published a few shorter works in addition to his novels, such as “Farmer Giles of Ham”, “Smith of Wotton Major”. He lived to see his world of Middle Earth accepted by the reading public and in fact become the focus of a cult following in the 60's. Tolkien himself never understood the fanatical response to his works. However, he did enjoy the fact that others shared his love of his sub-creation of Middle Earth. Tolkien died in 1973 at the age of 81.

A Few Influences 

There are certain aspects of his character which clearly influence his works. First of all, Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic and his religious beliefs subtly permeate his works.  He followed his mother’s religion till the day he died and his wife even converted to Catholicism to marry him.  One cannot understand this work unless one understands something about his Christian beliefs.

This may surprise some of you. That is because, he does not heavy-handedly bash his readers over the head with his beliefs. Rather the latter inform the work. Indeed, Tolkien once told a friend, “I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like ‘religion’, to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism” (Letters 172) God is never mentioned in the trilogy (though, as we’ll see, he appears in The Silmarillion).The world of Middle-Earth is pre-Christian and indeed, almost pre-religious in the sense that man does not yet overtly worship God in temples or with rituals.

Another aspect of his character I have hinted at above. “Tollers”, as his friends called him, had a remarkable gift for languages. He had mastered Latin and Greek, which were part of the standard curriculum in an Arts education at that time. In addition, he learned a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably German, Anglo Saxon, Gothic, and later Finnish. If it weren’t for this vast knowledge of language, we would not have the middle earth we do.  As mentioned, Tolkien also made up his own languages (Carpenter 12), such as several elvish tongues (Sindarin, Quenya, Noldorin) dwarvish, Black speech, etc.. And five alphabets (Cirth, tengwar, etc.). He was careful about place and character names, making sure they fit the languages.

Another influence was his love of myth and what he calls ‘fairy stories’. We’ll discuss, briefly, some of the literary influences. I wish we had more time to look at the Eldar Edda, but we haven’t. Suffice it to say that Norse, Finnish and Classical myths, along with Anglo Saxon texts have influenced the work as Tolkien was steeped in these. Initially, Tolkien was motivated purely by fun in writing The Silmarillion.  He wished “‘that we had more of [mythology] left–something of the same sort that belonged to the English.’ It came into his mind ‘to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from the large and cosmogonic to the level of the romantic fairy-story. . .which I could dedicate simply: to England; to my country” (qtd in Rogers 30-1).