Dec 25, 2009
J. R. R. Tolkien was born January 3, 1892 in South Africa, where his father was a banker. His father died in 1896 while Tolkien, his mother, and younger brother were visiting family in England. To economize, his mother moved the family to a village near Birmingham where she began Tolkien's education in French, German, and Latin, as well as botany and drawing. Here Tolkien fell in love with the English countryside. Mother and sons were received into the Catholic church in 1900. Tolkien was deeply religious; beneath the surface of the Lord of the Rings is a deep sense of God's providence. His mother died when Tolkien was eleven. They had moved back and forth from country to city, but her death meant a final move into the industrial city of Birmingham. There, at sixteen, he met his future wife, Edith Bratt. His guardian, worried by an infatuation in a teenager studying for an Oxford scholarship, insisted that he break off contact until he was twenty-one. A similar period of working and waiting is a defining circumstance in Aragorn's life, who must not hope to marry Arwen, daughter of Elrond, until he has restored his ancestors' kingdom.
Tolkien, from his first lessons in Latin, had shown a facility for languages and a deep curiosity about their inner working. As well as learning Latin and Greek at school, he taught himself Old English and Gothic. Tolkien soon went from inventing Gothic words to filling out the surviving vocabulary, then to inventing a language. This love of languages, together with a love of the countryside, was to be the genesis of Middle Earth and its history.
At Oxford, Tolkien specialized in Philology, the study of the development of languages over time. As his studies were drawing to a close World War I broke out. His experience of battle and the deaths of nearly all his closest friends stayed with him in his writing and his criticism of early texts. After the war, he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, then taught at the University of Leeds. In 1925 he was back in Oxford where he taught until retirement. Alongside his academic work, he continued to write the 'history' of Middle Earth, the world of his invented languages, discussing it with friends like C. S. Lewis. In 1936 he published The Hobbit, a story written for his children. An incident in The Hobbit, the finding of the Ring, becomes the point of departure for Lord of the Rings.
Lord of the Rings was written during the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War. Although he insisted the trilogy was not an allegory, he and it were not untouched by events of the time. The atomic bomb intensified his misgivings about modern technological progress and the corruption of power. His concept of the heroic, already affected by his experience in World War I, shifted further away from the traditional in the context of a world now capable of destroying itself. The publication of The Lord of the Rings in 1954—55 was greeted with bitter criticism from some members of the literary establishment, but sales were steady into the mid-sixties when the trilogy became a cult best seller. Tolkien, meanwhile, worked to prepare The Silmarillion, the pre-history of Middle Earth. He died in England on September 2, 1973, and the work was published posthumously in 1977.
Of his critical writing, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, On Fairy Stories, and the short study Ofermod, printed with the short play The Homecoming of Beortnoth Beorthelm's Son, all reflect the interaction of his scholarship and his creativity, as well as his profound concern with ethics.
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