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 the strongly committed Catholic. He belonged to a literary discussion class action known as the Inklings, through which he enjoyed the close friendly relationship with C. S. Lewis.

Additionally to The Hobbit & A Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's promulgated fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumous books about what he known as the legendarium, a fancied mythology of the remote control retiring of Earth, called Arda, and Middle-earth (from middangeard, the lands habitable by Men), in particular. Virtually all one posthumously promulgated works came from either Tolkien's drafts & were conjointly when books by his boy, Christopher Tolkien. A enduring popularity & influence of Tolkien's works own established him when a "father of the modern high fantasy genre". Tolkien's more promulgated fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his tykes & non directly related to the legendarium.

Biography
The Tolkien family
When far when is known, virtually all of Tolkien's agnatic antecedent were craftsmen. A Tolkien personal experienced its roots around Saxony (Germany), but experienced been sleep in England since a 18th century. A last name Tolkien is anglicised from either Tollkiehn (i personally.e. German tollkühn, "foolhardy", a cross bit English translation would become dull-keen, the literal translation of oxymoron). A character of Prof Rashbold in The Notion Club Papers is a pun on the title.

Childhood
Tolkien was natural in January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (currently Free State), South Africa, to Arthur Tolkien, an English bank manager, and his married woman Mabel Tolkien (maiden title Suffield). Tolkien merely got 1 sib, his brother Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, world health organizatiin was natural on February 17, 1894.

Whenever he was ternary, Tolkien attend England with his mother and brother in what was arranged to become the drawn-out personal visit. His father, nonetheless, died around South Africthe of a severe brain hemorrhage before he could join the two. This left a personal forswearing an income, then Tolkien's mother took him to accept her parents inside Birmingham, England for a short instance. Before long fallowing, inside 1896, they moved to Sarehole, then the Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed researching Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent Hills and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire scenes within his books along using more Worcestershire towns & villages like Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch, as would pages like his auntie's domestic of Bag Prevent, whose title would become utilized inside his fiction.

Mabel tutored her ii sons, & Ronald, when he was known in the personal, was the lament pupil. She taught him much of botany, & she awoke within her boy a enjoyment of the look and sense of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes & trees. However his favorite lessons were victims on languages, & his mother taught him a rudiments of Latin very early. He may see per age of iv, & may write fluently before long later. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and while a student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. He late attended St Phillip's School and Exeter College, Oxford.

His mother converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900, despite vehement protests by her Baptist family. She died of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was Twelve, & he felt for the rest of his life that she got get the martyr for her faith; this had the profound result in his have Catholic beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was important in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity and in his writings, which express a Christian mythos and worldview.

When you took his subsequent orphanage he was brought higher by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. A second heavy influence was a romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a big & globe-an expert collectiin of works & experienced put it on loose public display from either in the area of 1908.

J. R. R. Tolkien in 1911 (from Carpenter's Biography).

Youth

Tolkien met & fell smitten sustaining Edith Bratt, three years his senior, at a age of 16. Father Francis forbade him from either meeting, talking, or corresponding by having her until he was twenty 1. He obeyed this prohibition to a t.

Around 1911, while it were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien & terzetto friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which it known as "the T.C.B.S.", a initials standing for 'Tea Club & Barrovian Society', alluding to their fondness of sucking down Tea inside Barrow's Places touching a school &, lawlessly, in the school library. When allowing school, a members stayed withwithin touch, & in December 1914, they held the 'Council' around London, at Wiseman's house. For Tolkien, the symptom of this meeting was a hard dedication to writing poetry.

inside the summertime of 1911, Tolkien went in holiday in Switzerland, the hike that he recollects vixenish within a 1968 letter (Letters, no. 306), noting that Bilbo's journeying through a Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly according to his dangerous undertaking when their person of 12 hiked from either Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and in to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty seven years late, Tolkien remembers his sorrow at allowing a review of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams"). It go through a Kleine Scheidegg on to Grindelwald and across a Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. It continued through a Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and in to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.

Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from the middle years of WW1 (from Carpenter's Biography)

On the evening of his twenty-21st birthday, Tolkien telephoned Edith & asked her to become his bride & she converted to Catholicism for him. It were engaged around Birmingham, inside January 1913, and married inside Warwick, England on March 22, 1916.

By having his childhood love of landscape, he visited Cornwall in 1914 & he was said to be deeply impressed per singular Cornish coastline and sea. Fallowing graduating from either a University of Oxford with a foremost-class degree within English language in 1915, Tolkien joined the British Army effort in World War I and served as a second lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. His battalion was moved to France around 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer in a period of the Battle of the Somme, until he came down by using trench fever on October 27, and was retreat to England in November 8. Numerous of his fellow servicemen, too when several of his nighest friends, were flushed in the war. around the period of his recovery in the cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work in what he known as The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918, his illness saved recurring, however he experienced reconvalesced sufficiency to launder residence service at various camps, & was promoted to lieutenant. Whenever he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, one day he & Edith went walking in the outdoors at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him inside the heavy grove of hemlock. A memory of this is wrought into a account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien typically referred to Edith when his Lúthien.

Leeds, Oxford
Tolkien's 1st civilian job fallowing Globe War We was at a Oxford English Dictionary (among others, he initiated the entries wasp and walrus). Inside 1920 he took up the post when Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, but within 1925 he returned to Oxford as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, where he wrote the The Hobbit and the foremost 2 volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Within 1945 he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Prof of English Language & Literature, where post he remained until his retirement inside 1959.

It can be important that Tolkien disliked intensely a devouring of the English countryside per suburban area, potentially though, given his profession, he typically uncovered it ready to hand to sleep in the children. However for virtually all of his big life he eschewed car, preferring to ride the bike. This hard dislike of industrial enterprise influenced a select few area of his function, like a forced industrialisation of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings, in which he mentions horrible brick buildings as a blackball development. Tolkien & Edith experienced 4 youngsters: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917), Michael Hilary Reuel (October, 1920), Christopher John Reuel (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929). When you took a 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his yearn academic holidays at a at home of his boy John Francis inside Stoke-on-Trent.

W.H. Auden was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend (although they rarely saw each other) of Tolkien's. Auden was among a virtually all large early critics to praise The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien wrote in the 1971 letter, "I am... very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it." ("Letters," there are no. 327).

Retirement, Old Age
inside the period of his life within retirement, from either 1959 as much as his dying in 1973, Tolkien more & more turned into the figure of public attention and literary fame. A low of his books was therefore profitable that Tolkien regretted he got non taken early retirement. When initially he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became extra & other suspicious just about emerging Tolkien fandom, especially among the Hippy movement in the USA. Already inside 1944, he mass produced the somewhat sarcastic comment all about the fan letter by the 12-season-old U.s. reader ('' It's nice to locate that little Western boys run really however say 'Gee Whiz'., Letters there is no. 87). Around the 1972 letter he deplores having turn into the cult-figure, however admits that Fan attention became & then incapacitating that Tolkien experienced to choose his telephone number away from a public directory, & sooner or later he and Edith moved to Bournemouth at the in the south coast.

Tolkien was awarded the CBE by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on March 28, 1972.

Edith Tolkien died in November 29 1971, at a age of eighty 2, & Tolkien experienced the title Lúthien incised on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, and while Tolkien died, twenty 1 months late at a age of eighty of these in September 2 1973, he was buried in the same grave, by having Beren added to his name, thus that a engraving currently reads: Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889-1971 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973''

Posthumously known as fallowing Tolkien come a Tolkien Road around Eastbourne, East Sussex, and a asteroid 2675 Tolkien. Tolkien Way around Stoke-On-Trent is named when J.R.R.'s boy, Father John Francis Tolkien, world health organization utilized to exist as a priest within charge at a nearby Roman Catholic Church of My Lady of the Angels & St. Peter within Chains.

Writing

Tolkien's earliest literary ambition was to become a poet, however his primary originative urge inside his immature times was a invention of notional languages, including early versions of what would late develop into the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. Feeling that a language mandatory the humans to speak it, & that the population would tell stories which influenced & reflected their languages, he began writing (around English, however using several list & terms from either his fabricated languages) the mythology and tales of a fictitious humans he associated sustaining legendary fairies. Within late works, Tolkien's fairy-folk were replaced by Elves -- a title he adapted from English folklore (by owning a bit of ruefulness, for he come to assume a name deceptive).

Beginning by using The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from either malady in the period of World War I, Tolkien devised several themes - including a romance of Beren and Lúthien - that were reused in serial mythologies. Them virtually all large stories, a tales of Beren/Luthien & of Túrin, were carried forward into yearn narrative verse form (published in The Lays of Beleriand). Tolkien wrote the brief sum-up of the mythology these verse form were meant to represent, & that sum-up at length evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien began 3 days however never finished. A story of this continuous re-drafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-Earth. From either about 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. More inspirations involved Babylon and Egypt. A works virtually all typically cited when sources for Tolkien's stories include Beowulf, Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, Plato's Atlantis, Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga [http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/bibl4.html]. Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer and Oedipus as influences or sources for occasionally of his stories & ideas. His borrowings likewise come from either many Middle English works & verse form.

Additionally to his mythic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to email his babies. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building higher the series of short stories (late compiled & published when The Father Christmas Letters). More stories involved Mr. Cloud nine, Roverandom, & Smith of Wootton Major. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, such as The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from a mythic compositions.

Tolkien never required his fancied stories to get popular however he was persuaded by the previous student to publish the book he got written for his have tikes known as The Hobbit in 1937. Nonetheless, a book attracted big readers too, & it became popular plenty for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

Despite feeling uninspired on a topic, this asking prompted Tolkien to start what would get his best known operate: the heroic 3-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955). Tolkien spent additional than 10 years writing a primary tale & appendices for Lord of the Rings, in a period of which period he received the constant trend lines of the Inklings, in particular his nearest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Two The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set yearn fallowing The Silmarillion but Tolkien infused the Silmarillion & Númenor myths into the fresh mythology which is properly known as A Middle-globe Mythology.

A Lord of the Rings became vastly popular by using students in the 1960s & has remained popular ever since, ranking as one of a virtually all popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, estimated by each sales and reader researchers. In the 2003 “Big Read� survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was incurred to become a "Nation's Best-loved Book�. In 1999 a poll of Amazon.com customers judged The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite 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, 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 (Herr der Ringe) to be their favourite 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.

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 specialized 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".

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "items 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 (Letters, 163), "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 'phonæsthetic' considerations. It was intended as an 'Elvenlatin', and was phonologically based on Latin basis with ingredients from Finnish and Greek (Letters, 144). 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 20th century "rattling primary globe" 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 may breed the 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." (Letters, 180).

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 spellings dwarves and elvish (instead of dwarfs and elfish). Other terms he has coined, like legendarium and eucatastrophe are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

Bibliography

Fiction and poetry
See also Poems by J. R. R. Tolkien.

1936 Songs for the Philologists, with E.V. Gordon et al. 1937 The Hobbit or There and Back Again ISBN 0-618-00221-9(HM). 1945 Leaf by Niggle (short story) 1945 The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, published in Welsh Review 1949 Farmer Giles of Ham (medieval fable) 1953 ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son published with the essay Ofermod The Lord of the Rings 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring: being the first part of The Lord of the Rings ISBN 0-618-00222-7 (HM). 1954 The Two Towers: being the second part of The Lord of the Rings ISBN 0-618-00223-5 (HM). 1955 The Return of the King: being the third part of The Lord of the Rings ISBN 0-618-00224-3 (HM). 1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book 1967 The Road Goes Ever On, with Donald Swann 1964 Tree and Leaf (On Fairy-Stories and Leaf by Niggle in book form) 1966 The Tolkien Reader (The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son, On Fairy Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham' and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) 1966 Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical) 1967 Smith of Wootton Major

Academic works
1922 A Middle English Vocabulary 1924 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with E. V. Gordon) 1925 Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography 1925 ''The Devil's Coach Horses 1929 Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad 1932 The Name 'Nodens' (in: Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire.) 1932/1935 Sigelwara Land parts I and II 1934 The Reeve's Tale'' (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales) 1936 Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (lecture on Beowulf criticism) 1939 On Fairy-Stories (Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, given as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture) 1944 Sir Orfeo (an edition of the medieval poem) 1947 On Fairy-Stories (essay, very central for understanding Tolkien's views on fantasy) 1953 Ofermod, published with the poem ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son 1953 Middle English "Losenger" 1962 Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle 1963 English and Welsh 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.

1975 Translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl (poem) and Sir Orfeo 1976 The Father Christmas Letters 1977 The Silmarillion ISBN 0-618-12698-8 (HM). 1979 Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien 1980 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth ISBN 0-618-15405-1 (HM). 1980 Poems and Stories (a compilation of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, On Fairy-Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major) 1981 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (eds. Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter) 1981 The Old English Exodus Text 1982 Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode 1982 Mr. Bliss 1983 The Monsters and the Critics (an essay collection) Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics (1936) On Translating Beowulf (1940) On Fairy-Stories (1947) A Secret Vice (1930) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight English and Welsh (1955) 1983–1996 The History of Middle-Earth:

1. The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
2. The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
3. The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
4. The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
5. The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
6. The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 1) (1988)
7. The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 2) (1989)
8. The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 3) (1990)
9. Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 4, including an edition of The Notion Club Papers) (1992)
10. Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)
11. The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)
12. The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)