J. R. R. Tolkien

British novelist and scholar

• Born: January 3, 1892
• Place of birth: Bloemfontein, Orange Free State (now Bloemfontein, South Africa)
• Died: September 2, 1973
• Place of death: Bournemouth, England

Tolkien communicated the sensibility of medieval epic and romance in his widely read mythopoetic fiction. He was an important medievalist long before he became much more famous and beloved for his widely read fantasy novels The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. In addition, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings became widely popular film trilogies between 2001 and 2014.

Early Life

J. R. R. Tolkien was born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien to Mabel Suffield and Arthur Reuel Tolkien on January 3, 1892. In 1895 the family moved to Birmingham, England, to be near Mabel’s family, but Arthur, a bank manager, died within the year. In 1900, Mabel scandalized the family by joining the Roman Catholic Church. After her early death in 1904, Tolkien and his brother, Hilary, lived in the house of a Mrs. Faulkner with another orphan named Edith Bratt. Tolkien and Bratt fell in love and were married in 1916 after Tolkien had completed his bachelor of arts at Exeter College, Oxford.

Tolkien then served as a signaling officer during World War I as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. In France he was felled by trench fever and was sent back to an English hospital, where he began his mythopoetic fiction. To the deaths of his parents and several other relatives while Tolkien was a young boy was added the loss of his fellow soldiers on and off the battlefields. The reality of mortality was established as one of the themes of both his scholarship and his fiction.

Following the war and the birth of his son, John, Tolkien worked with the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary and taught at Leeds University, where he and Eric Valentine Gordon completed the definitive edition of the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (ca. 1375–1400). In 1925 the Tolkiens returned with two more sons, Michael and Christopher, to Oxford, where they lived until 1968. Fascinated by and gifted with languages, Tolkien became the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and partly calmed the academic feuding in the English School between those more interested in early languages and those who studied the literature of later centuries. He continued his editing of medieval texts, including the Middle English poem Pearl (ca. 1375–1400) and the Ancrene Wisse (ca. 1224–35; an advice book for nuns), and published influential essays on the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf (ca. 1000). His essay “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) has retained its power over the decades and stresses two key themes in Tolkien’s work as both a medievalist and a writer of mythic narrative: mortality and the artist’s role in honoring and transmitting a sense of the past (a partial response to that mortality). Such work led to Tolkien being named Oxford's Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945. At the same time, he was busy with other writings besides his scholarship.

The reclusive but “clubbable” Tolkien became friends with another influential writer and scholar of the Middle Ages, C. S. Lewis. Although more handsome, Tolkien was not so athletic as Lewis, who was a vigorous walker and irrepressible talker. Both men, while generous of spirit, were argumentative and somewhat stubborn, especially during the weekly meetings of the Inklings, who gathered to discuss and critique their own writings. The group included Tolkien (Tollers), Lewis (Jack), Lewis’s brother Warren (Warnie), Robert Emlyn Havard, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, and Charles Williams. During these meetings, Tolkien first read, as he had to his wife and children, the early versions of his most beloved work, The Hobbit (1937).

Life’s Work

The Hobbit appeared after seventeen years of work, during which time Tolkien was well known almost exclusively to academic medievalists for his scholarly editing and literary criticism, although many thought the novel too limited in scope and quantity. Two years later he published “On Fairy Stories” (1939), something of a bridge between his scholarship and his fantasy writing that indicated the foundations (along with his fascination and expertise with the vocabulary and structure of languages as well as the northern European traditions of myth, epic, and saga) of the stories on which his fame among the general reading public continues to rest. This lecture, later published as a lengthy essay in Tree and Leaf (1964), is a charming, provocative, and essential essay for understanding the mythic foundations of Tolkien’s fantasy fiction and the spirit of much of his medieval scholarship.

Although considered a work of fiction for youngsters, The Hobbit is Tolkien’s most accessible narrative, perhaps because of the eccentric lovableness and inventive pluck of Bilbo Baggins and the wily cleverness of the dragon Smaug. Like the best of children’s stories and the myths of all people, The Hobbit contains clearly delineated heroes and villains, gives attention to minute and realistic details that anchor and make credible the marvelous and often terrifying adventures, and provides certainty about the final outcome. It also features compelling examples of bravery, loyalty, and generosity rewarded and treachery, vanity, and selfishness punished. Above all, it is a convincing story about learning unselfishness in a menacing and predatory world the necessary foundation of maturity.

Tolkien’s greatest accomplishment, The Lord of the Rings , is a sweeping work that was published in three volumes. The first two, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) and The Two Towers, were both published in the same year. The third volume, The Return of the King (1955), came the following year. Fifteen years in the making, the trilogy is structured as a “reverse quest,” to deliver and destroy rather than find and possess. In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins finds the evil Sauron’s “One Ring of Power.” In The Lord of the Rings, he passes the ring down to his cousin Frodo, who must return it to the volcano where it was forged to destroy it and end its power over Middle Earth. Tolkien presents his familiar theme of quiet, heroic duty, which is often tested by the vicious evil of Sauron’s minions (the Orcs) and the treacherous Gollum. The three books provide a panoramic narrative of vast and complex sweep. It is often most compelling in conveying the experience of fear or terror through expressionistic detail. Its epic heroism against difficult odds is sharpened by its emphasis on the essential powers of loyal love that eclipse weakness and failure, powerfully conveyed near the end of the narrative when Gollum seizes the ring from a weakened Frodo and his loyal friend Sam, only to fall to his and the ring’s destruction in the volcano.

After Tolkien’s death in 1973, his son Christopher edited The Silmarillion (1977), which had been started in a military hospital in 1917 and was essentially completed by 1923. It contains four shorter narratives and the “Quenta Silmarillion,” an orderly arrangement of the chronicles of the Three Ages of Middle Earth. It is dense and difficult, with a staggering number of characters. Considered by many to contain essential background to a fuller understanding of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, it cannot be read as an independent narrative.

Interspersed with these major fictions, and partly in response to their successes, came the other short narratives Farmer Giles of Ham (1949), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), Leaf by Niggle (1964), and Smith of Wootton Major (1967). The charm of these tales is accentuated by the writer’s accompanying illustrations, but they are not as accomplished, demonstrating that Tolkien’s narrative strengths are in sustained, multilayered, and lengthy stories with numerous competing characters.

The younger Tolkien also published his father’s early drafts of Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-Earth (1980), The Book of Lost Tales, Part I (1983), The Book of Lost Tales, Part II (1984), and The Lays of Beleriand (1985), but these have not had the remarkable popularity of the earlier works that Tolkien completed during his life.

Beginning in 2001, New Line Cinema released hugely successful film adaptations of all three of The Lord of the Rings books, directed by Peter Jackson. Hitting theaters in December 2001, the much-anticipated The Fellowship of the Ring went on to earn over $800,000,000 worldwide at the box office. The following year, The Two Towers was released, eventually grossing more than $900,000,000 worldwide before the film series wrapped up with The Return of the King in 2003, which broke a domestic single-day record in December by earning $34.1 million in sales in the United States alone. Though all three films were nominated for the Academy Award for best picture, among several others, only The Return of the King won that most prestigious title.

Attempting to further capitalize on the success of these films and the continued regard for the books, Jackson decided to adapt The Hobbit for the big screen as well. He ultimately split the rich story into three films, the first of which debuted nearly ten years after the first trilogy concluded. An Unexpected Journey came to theaters in December 2012, followed by The Desolation of Smaug in 2013 and The Battle of Five Armies in 2014. The first film encountered mixed critical reviews, especially in comparison to its predecessors, and Tolkien fans found that the final two installments tended to stray further and further from the book. Regardless, these films were considered commercial successes as well.

In 2017, Christopher Tolkien published Beren and Lúthien, which he had compiled and edited from his father's work. The story follows the romance between the titular characters, a human and an elf, respectively, who are mentioned in The Lord of the Rings. It is based on Tolkien's own relationship with his wife, Edith, and was published one hundred years after Tolkien, having recently returned from war, watched Edith dance for him in a glade in East Yorkshire—the moment that, according to a letter Tolkien later wrote to Christopher, first inspired the romance between Beren and Lúthien.

Significance

The success that Tolkien finally achieved as a fantasy writer in the late 1950s meant that a lifetime of financial worries and measured scorn from many of his academic colleagues were alleviated. Tolkien became famous. Among medievalists, his editing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and his essays on Beowulf continue to be instructive and persuasive in the middle of radical changes in the fashions of literary and medieval studies. However, his wider celebrity derives from his fantasy fiction.

In his heroic mythopoetic fiction, Tolkien has recreated something of the spirit of the best of medieval literature: a captivating release of the imagination tethered by details of the simple familiarities of essential living and interspersed with suggestions that heroism can make fleeting but radiant differences in a hostile world. For readers of all ages and tastes, Tolkien has been of enormous influence in demonstrating one of the traditional goals of the arts: to delight and instruct. As a solid medievalist, he managed to convey the ethos and spirit of medieval culture, to honor it for its charms and powers, and to present, in compelling narratives, the permanent attractions of heroism, duty, and loyal love in the inevitable human confrontations with fear, temptation, loss, and mortality.

Amidst inevitable criticism of length and loyalty to the books, especially in the case of The Hobbit, the two film trilogies were undeniably successful commercially and cemented a place for Tolkien's work within a genre of films dominated by classics such as the Star Wars franchise. Meanwhile, the members of the Tolkien estate have remained bitter about the lack of control that the original contract allowed them in terms of the film versions, with Christopher ultimately denouncing Jackson's efforts and the overall commercialization of the philosophical works. Not long after the release of The Battle of Five Armies, rumors began surfacing that Jackson wished to pursue other Tolkien works, but the author did not sell any other rights, and his estate has legally refused any such efforts.

Bibliography

Bromwich, Jonah Engel. "A New Tolkien Book Was Inspired by the Author's Own Romance." The New York Times, 1 June 2017, www.nytimes.com/2017/06/01/arts/tolkien-book-new.html. Accessed 10 July 2017.

Brown, Devin. Tolkien: How an Obscure Oxford Professor Wrote The Hobbit and Became the Most Beloved Author of the Century. Abingdon Press, 2014.

Carpenter, Humphrey. Tolkien: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1977.

Crabbe, Katharyn W. J. R. R. Tolkien. Rev. and expanded ed., Continuum, 1988.

Duriez, Colin. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. HiddenSpring, 2003.

Flowers, Michael. "A Hemlock by Any Other Name . . ." The Tolkien Society, 9 June 2014, www.tolkiensociety.org/blog/2014/06/a-hemlock-by-any-other-name/. Accessed 24 July 2017.

Johnson, Judith A. J. R. R. Tolkien: Six Decades of Criticism. Greenwood Press, 1986.

Kreeft, Peter. The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview behind The Lord of the Rings.Ignatius Press, 2005.

Lobdell, Jared. The Rise of Tolkienian Fantasy. Open Court, 2005.

McMillan, Graeme. "The Hobbit Earns More in Worldwide Box Office Than Fellowship or Two Towers." Wired, 29 Jan. 2013, www.wired.com/2013/01/the-hobbit-box-office/. Accessed 10 July 2017.

Purtill, Richard L. J. R. R. Tolkien: Myth, Morality, and Religion. 1984. Ignatius Press, 2003.

Rogers, Deborah Webster, and Ivor Rogers. J. R. R. Tolkien. Twayne Publishers, 1980.

Salu, Mary, and Robert T. Farrell, editors. J. R. R. Tolkien, Scholar and Storyteller: Essays in Memoriam. Cornell UP, 1979.

White, Michael. Tolkien: A Biography. Little, Brown, 2001.