Biography – The Tolkien Society. Who was Tolkien? Photo by Pamela Chandler. Diana Willson. Used with permission. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1. English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo- Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1. The Lord of the Rings (1. Middle English name of Middle- earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide. In the 1. 96. 0s he was taken up by many members of the nascent “counter- culture” largely because of his concern with environmental issues. In 1. 99. 7 he came top of three British polls, organised respectively by Channel 4 / Waterstone’s, the Folio Society, and SFX, the UK’s leading science fiction media magazine, amongst discerning readers asked to vote for the greatest book of the 2. Visit Amazon.com's J. R. R. Tolkien Page and shop for all J. R. R. Tolkien books and other J. R. R. Tolkien related products (DVD, CDs, Apparel). Check out pictures. Croatian WWW Site Dedicated to the World of J.R.R. Tolkien. Date: Tuesday, April 17th, 2007. The Children of Húrin The first complete book by J.R.R. Tolkien in. JRR Tolkien changed all that. “Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics” (1936), a paper he delivered to the British Academy shortly before the. Cover of the 1937 first edition, from a drawing by Tolkien. Author: J. R. R. Tolkien: Illustrator: J. R. R. Tolkien: Cover artist: J. R. R. Tolkien. The Tolkien name was derived from German. Tolkien (who was fascinated with languages said the surname came from the German word tollkühn, meaning 'foolhardy'. 1 Biography. 1.1 Family origins; 1.2 Childhood; 1.3 Youth; 1.4 Courtship and marriage; 1.5 First World War. 1.5.1 France; 1.5.2 Battle of the Somme; 1.5.3 Home front. Please note also that his name is spelt Tolkien (there is no “Tolkein”). Childhood and Youth. The name “Tolkien” (pron.: Tol- keen; equal stress on both syllables) is believed to be of German origin; Toll- kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever – hence the pseudonym “Oxymore” which he occasionally used. His father’s side of the family appears to have migrated from Saxony in the 1. Anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial. So John Ronald (“Ronald” to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S. A., on 3 January 1. His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 1. February 1. 89. 6 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England – or more particularly, the West Midlands. The West Midlands in Tolkien’s childhood were a complex mixture of the grimly industrial Birmingham conurbation, and the quintessentially rural stereotype of England, Worcestershire and surrounding areas: Severn country, the land of the composers Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gurney, and more distantly the poet A. E. Housman (it is also just across the border from Wales). Tolkien’s life was split between these two: the then very rural hamlet of Sarehole, with its mill, just south of Birmingham; and darkly urban Birmingham itself, where he was eventually sent to King Edward’s School. By then the family had moved to King’s Heath, where the house backed onto a railway line – young Ronald’s developing linguistic imagination was engaged by the sight of coal trucks going to and from South Wales bearing destinations like” Nantyglo”,” Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd”. Then they moved to the somewhat more pleasant Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. However, in the meantime, something of profound significance had occurred, which estranged Mabel and her children from both sides of the family: in 1. May, she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. From then on, both Ronald and Hilary were brought up in the faith of Pio Nono, and remained devout Catholics throughout their lives. The parish priest who visited the family regularly was the half- Spanish half- Welsh Father Francis Morgan. Tolkien family life was generally lived on the genteel side of poverty. However, the situation worsened in 1. Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, usually fatal in those pre- insulin days. She died on 1. 4 November of that year leaving the two orphaned boys effectively destitute. At this point Father Francis took over, and made sure of the boys’ material as well as spiritual welfare, although in the short term they were boarded with an unsympathetic aunt- by- marriage, Beatrice Suffield, and then with a Mrs Faulkner. By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. 16 February 1974: The Tolkien Society, at Christopher Tolkien’s suggestion, acclaims J.R.R. Tolkien as Honorary President in perpetuo. 26 November 1974. JRR Tolkien biography. Books reviewed; Bibliography; John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 at Bloemfontein, capital of the Orange Free State in South. Tolkien: A Biography. Humphrey Carpenter. Allen and Unwin, London, 1977. Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun. He had also made a number of close friends at King Edward’s; in his later years at school they met regularly after hours as the “T. C. B. S.” (Tea Club, Barrovian Society, named after their meeting place at the Barrow Stores) and they continued to correspond closely and exchange and criticise each other’s literary work until 1. However, another complication had arisen. Amongst the lodgers at Mrs Faulkner’s boarding house was a young woman called Edith Bratt. When Ronald was 1. Eventually Father Francis took a hand, and forbade Ronald to see or even correspond with Edith for three years, until he was 2. Ronald stoically obeyed this injunction to the letter. He went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1. Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1. Edith. He then obtained a disappointing second class degree in Honour Moderations, the “midway” stage of a 4- year Oxford “Greats” (i. Classics) course, although with an “alpha plus” in philology. As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature. One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf – he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet: Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast. Ofer middangeard monnum sended. Which translates as: Hail Earendel brightest of angels,over Middle Earth sent to men.(“Middangeard” was an ancient expression for the everyday world between Heaven above and Hell below.)This inspired some of his very early and inchoate attempts at realising a world of ancient beauty in his versifying. In the summer of 1. Mexican boys in Dinard, France, a job which ended in tragedy. Though no fault of Ronald’s, it did nothing to counter his apparent predisposition against France and things French. Meanwhile the relationship with Edith was going more smoothly. She converted to Catholicism and moved to Warwick, which with its spectacular castle and beautiful surrounding countryside made a great impression on Ronald. However, as the pair were becoming ever closer, the nations were striving ever more furiously together, and war eventually broke out in August 1. War, Lost Tales and Academia. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Tolkien did not rush to join up immediately on the outbreak of war, but returned to Oxford, where he worked hard and finally achieved a first- class degree in June 1. At this time he was also working on various poetic attempts, and on his invented languages, especially one that he came to call Qenya [sic], which was heavily influenced by Finnish – but he still felt the lack of a connecting thread to bring his vivid but disparate imaginings together. Tolkien finally enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers whilst working on ideas of Earendel [sic] the Mariner, who became a star, and his journeyings. For many months Tolkien was kept in boring suspense in England, mainly in Staffordshire. Finally it appeared that he must soon embark for France, and he and Edith married in Warwick on 2. March 1. 91. 6. Eventually he was indeed sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus- like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in hospital in Birmingham. By Christmas he had recovered sufficiently to stay with Edith at Great Haywood in Staffordshire. During these last few months, all but one of his close friends of the “T. C. B. S.” had been killed in action. Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape, “… in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell- tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire” [Letters 6. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the “Gnomes”, (i. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien. Throughout 1. 91. It was when he was stationed in the Hull area that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him. This was the inspiration for the tale of Beren and Lúthien, a recurrent theme in his “Legendarium”. He came to think of Edith as “Lúthien” and himself as “Beren”. Their first son, John Francis Reuel (later Father John Tolkien) had already been born on 1. November 1. 91. 7. When the Armistice was signed on 1. November 1. 91. 8, Tolkien had already been putting out feelers to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilised he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the “Oxford English Dictionary”), then in preparation. While doing the serious philological work involved in this, he also gave one of his Lost Tales its first public airing – he read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club, where it was well received by an audience which included Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future “Inklings”. However, Tolkien did not stay in this job for long. In the summer of 1.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2016
Categories |