Tolkien - life, myths, books, legends

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892 to 1973) was a professor and English writer best known for his fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion. He taught at Oxford university.  

He was actually born in South Africa and when a very small child was bitten by a very large Baboon spider in his garden. (Perhaps giving him the idea of that seen with Frodo and the spider!)

Baboon spider

At the age of three, he was on a visit to the UK with his mother when his father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever. This loss left the family without an income and so they moved to Birmingham in the UK where they would be close to his mother's parents. He had an aunt Jane who owned a farm called Bag End. (Could this be the inspiration for Bilbo's home?)

Bag End

The more one reads of his childhood and life the more it becomes clear how much he used all his experiences, including the spider, in his literary works.

His mother, Maple Tolkien, home tutored her 2 children and found that the young Tolkien showed a propensity for languages, such as Latin, at a very early age.  Unfortunately, Mabel died of diabetes when Tolkien was only 12. It would be another two decades before insulin, a treatment for diabetes, would be discovered. In Edgbaston, Tolkien lived close to Perrot’s Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks.  

Perrot's Folly

Towers must have had a big impression as they two seemed to crop up in his tales in slightly different forms.

Tolkien was also very interested in the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones. 

In his early teens, Tolkien invented, with his cousin, a complex language called Nevbash. The second constructed language he created was completely his own, Naffarin.  As well as making up new languages he took time to learn Esperanto. After university, he went with a party of 12 friends to Switzerland and hiked from Interlaken to Murren. 

He spoke of this grand adventure with much joy and the scenery would have been startlingly similar to that which would be experienced by Bilbo passing through the Misty mountains.  

Tolkien was in the British Army during World War I and served as a second lieutenant responsible for commanding enlisted men from the industrial heartland of Lancaster. As he later lamented,

"The most improper job of any man is bossing other men. Not one in 1 million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity”.

He was at the battle of the Somme in July 1916 and came down with trench fever from the ever-present lice in the trenches. Token’s battalion was almost completely wiped out in the brutal battles while he recovered in a hospital in England.  (Lice caused 15% of all sicknesses in the British army at that time). Many of his closest school friends died on those bloody muddy fields. In fact, he said by 1918 all but one of his closest friends were dead.

Token translated Beowulf in the 1920s and gave an acclaimed lecture entitled ‘Beowulf: The monsters and the critics’.  Tolkien insisted that this poem was not just

‘a mine of historical data into which some fantastical monsters have inconveniently strayed but a work of art in which the monsters are foils for an entire cultural attitude to life, death and courage’.

The ancient story begins and ends with a funeral and is an epic old English poem of 3182 lines. It is probably the oldest surviving poem in old English and one of its most important. A manuscript found of Beowulf has been dated between 975 to 1025 A.D. and is found in the Nowell Codex in the British library.  The oral tradition that this manuscript recorded dated from much earlier, and it is believed to have been composed between 700 and 750 A.D.  The poem mixes fiction with 5th- and 6th-century history.  The tale of monsters and battles has an epic timeless quality and would have been recited in huge halls for centuries.  Beowulf mentions characters like Ohthere (530 Ad) and his son (575 AD) and their graves have subsequently been discovered in Upplands, Sweden.

The mount at Lejre on the left has been excavated showing epic finds but the other mound on the right has not yet been examined. Who knows what more finds lie beneath?

In Denmark excavations at Lejre have revealed that a hall was built there in the mid-six century, exactly the time period of Beowulf (Beowulf mentions kings of the Skjöldung dynasty) and where Scandinavian tradition said it was. It is now thought that much of Beowulf is from real historical characters from six century Scandinavia. John Niles, a former university professor and an expert on the Lejre site, said that researchers in the area have found now evidence of a series of great halls dating between 550 and 1000 A.D.

Beowulf is written in a language that sounds very much like Tolkien’s Elvish tongue.  Tolkien would enter his lecture room, at Pembroke College in Oxford reciting Beowulf loudly in its original tongue with dramatic power and effectiveness. W H Auden once wrote to tell him “what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite Beowulf. The voice was the voice of Gandalf.”

Pembroke Hall, Oxford

Tolkien spoke many languages including Latin, French, German, Middle English, old English, Finish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh and mediaeval Welsh.  No wonder when it came to making up new cultures and languages and traditions he found himself peculiarly equipped for this fictional landscape.  

Years later during the Third Reich, a German publisher wrote demanding to know if Tolkien was of Aryan extraction, in other words, non-Jewish in order to permit publication of his book in Germany.   Tolkien wrote a cold response correcting their misunderstanding of what Aryan actually meant.  Who better to clarify their erroneous perspectives than this gifted and creative professor.

“Thank you for your letter. I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” 

For a long period, after writing some of his earlier books, he got tired of writing about Hobbits.  He felt had covered everything in The Silmarillion in enough detail, which had not met with public acclaim.  His publisher pushed for something more like the Hobbit again but Tolkien had lost interest in the topic.  Then decades later his son was sent to the front lines in the second world war and Tolkien began sending instalments to him, set in Middle Earth.  Tales of courage, heroism and danger, fear and suffering with long hard journeys that ended up in his famous book, The Lord of The Rings.  I like that Tolkien became more not less forgiving of others in his old age as this quote of his indicates.

“For myself, I find I become less cynical rather than more--remembering my own sins and follies; and realise that men's hearts are not often as bad as their acts, and very seldom as bad as their words.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

In creating new races, legends, languages and history he never forgot to embed messages in his stories that are epic, timeless and touch the spirit.

All that is gold does not glitter,

Not all those who wander are lost;

The old that is strong does not wither,

Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

A light from the shadows shall spring;

Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

The crownless again shall be king.

"Song of Aragorn" from The Lord of the Rings by Tolkien