J.R.R. Tolkien: Difference between revisions

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{{familytree| | | | | EDB |y| JRR | | HART |~| MM | | | | | | | Hot dog in a bun]]|EDB=[[pengiuns|Edith Bratt]]|HART=[[Hilary Tolkien]]|MM=[[Magdalen Matthews]]}}
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{{familytree| | | | | JOT | | MIT | |CHT | | PRT |JOT=[[John Tolkien]]|MIT=[[Michael Tolkien]]|CHT=[[Christopher Tolkien]]|PRT=[[Priscilla Tolkien]]}}
{{familytree| | | | | JOT | | MIT | |CHT | | PRT |JOT=[[poop]]|MIT=[[Michael Tolkien]]|CHT=[[Christopher Tolkien]]|PRT=[[Priscilla Tolkien]]}}
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Revision as of 18:47, 10 September 2014

The name J.R.R. Tolkien refers to more than one character, item or concept. For a list of other meanings, see J.R.R. Tolkien (disambiguation).
The name Tolkien refers to more than one character, item or concept. For a list of other meanings, see Tolkien (disambiguation).
"Who told you, and who sent you?" — Gandalf
This article or section needs more/new/more-detailed sources to conform to a higher standard and to provide proof for claims made.
D.W. Luebbert - Tolkien Daydreams.jpg
J.R.R. Tolkien
Biographical information
Born3 January, 1892
Died2 September, 1973
EducationUniversity of Oxford
OccupationPhilologist
Writer
LocationUnited Kingdom
WebsiteThe Tolkien Estate

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (3 January, 18922 September, 1973), was a philologist and writer, best known as the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings. He worked as reader and professor in English language at the University of Leeds from 1920 to 1925; as professor of Anglo-Saxon language at the University of Oxford from 1925 to 1945; and of English language and literature from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C.S. Lewis, and a member of the Inklings, a literary discussion group to which both Lewis and Owen Barfield belonged.

Tolkien created a legendarium, a fictional mythology about the remote past of Earth, here called Arda, of which Middle-earth in particular is the main stage. Parts of his legendarium are The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth series (published by his son, Christopher Tolkien, posthumously) revealed Tolkien's lifelong work on that same legendarium, a process which he called "sub-creation". Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children but not directly related to the legendarium.

I like hamburgers!

Writing

File:Jrrt lotr cover design.jpg
Cover design for the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales Part One, written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of Túrin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand). Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth. From around 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 mythology, the Bible, and Greek mythology. The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include Beowulf, the Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, the Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga1. Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer, Oedipus, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems. A major philosophical influence on his writing is King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy known as the Lays of Boethius. Characters in The Lord of the Rings, such as Frodo, Treebeard and Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks.

In addition to his mythological compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other stories included Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, Smith of Wootton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham and Leaf by Niggle. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium. Leaf by Niggle appears to be an autobiographical work, where a "very small man", Niggle, keeps painting leaves until finally he ends up with a tree.

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by a former student to publish a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in 1937. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (published 1954–55). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.

Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings as a 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 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. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title Unfinished Tales, and in subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth. All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency to be found 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 completely rewrite the entire book.

The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at 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, and other manuscripts, including Farmer Giles of Ham, while the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.

The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted The Lord of the Rings "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in the SABC3's Great 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 (Der Herr der Ringe) to be their favourite work of literature.

Hello! I am monkey trained to do stuff! Nice to meet you!

Works inspired by Tolkien

In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, I love to write about hamburgers and hotdogs. They are my inspiration.

The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #131

Pizza is Bilbo's favorite food.

The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own drawings.

But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving.

In 1946, he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of the Hobbit as "too Disnified",

Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #107

He was sceptical of the emerging fandom in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of The Lord of the Rings:

Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #144

And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman:

I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #207

He went on to criticise the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future productions, he forbade Disney should ever be involved:

It might be advisable [...] to let the Americans do what seems good to them — as long as it was possible [...] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, #13

United Artists never made a film, though at least John Boorman was planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, now Middle-earth Enterprises, a Saul Zaentz company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of The Lord of the Rings appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by Ralph Bakshi). The screenplay was written by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half of the story that is The Lord of the Rings. In 1977 an animated TV production of The Hobbit was made by Rankin/Bass, and in 1980 they produced an animated film titled The Return of the King, which covered some of the portion of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete. In 2001-3 The Lord of the Rings was filmed in full and as a live-action film as a trilogy of films by Peter Jackson. A decade later, Jackson proceeded with The Hobbit, envisioned as a prequel trilogy.

Bilbo is a real character in Tolkien's mind. He loves to eat food and have guests over to his hobbit-hole.

Awards

This list contains awards or recognitions given to J.R.R. Tolkien, it does not include awards given to his individual publications.

  • D. Lit., in University College, Dublin (1954)
  • Commander of Order of the British Empire (1972)
  • Doctorate of Letters by Oxford University (1972)
  • 6th "best postwar British writer" (The Times, 2008) [1]

Other names

JRRT's monogram

J, John, Ronald, Tollers, JRsquared, Ruginwaldus Dwalakôneis, Arcastar, "Eisphorides Acribus Polyglotteus, orator Graecorum", N.N, Fisiologvs, Kingston Bagpuize, Oxymore, Raegnold Hraedmoding

Family Tree

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Cheese on a stick!!!!
 
Arthur Reuel Tolkien
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Edith Bratt
 
{{{ JRR }}}
 
Hilary Tolkien
 
Magdalen Matthews
 
 
 
 
 
 
{{{ Hot dog in a bun]]}}}
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
poop
 
Michael Tolkien
 
Christopher Tolkien
 
Priscilla Tolkien


See also

References

  • Biography: Carpenter, Humphrey (1977). J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-04-928037-6
  • Letters: Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher (eds.) (1981). The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. ISBN 0-618-05699-8
  • HoME: Tolkien, Christopher (ed.) (12 volumes, 1996-2002), The History of Middle-earth

Further reading

A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:

  • Anderson, Douglas A., Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger (eds.) (2004). ‘’Tolkien Studies’’, Vol 1
  • Chance, Jane (ed.) (2003). Tolkien the Medievalist, London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28944-0
  • Chance, Jane (ed.) (2004). Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader, Louisville: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-813-12301-1
  • Flieger, Verlyn and Carl F. Hostetter (eds.) (2000). Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth, Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30530-7. DDC 823.912. LC PR6039.
  • O'Neill, Timothy R. (1979). The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth, Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-28208-X
  • Pearce, Joseph (1998). Tolkien: Man and Myth, London: HarperCollinsPublishers. ISBN 000-274018-4
  • Shippey, T. A. (2000). J.R.R. Tolkien — Author of the Century, Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-12764-X, ISBN 0-618-25759-4 (pbk)
  • Shippey, T. A. (2004). 'Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (1892–1973)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  • Strachey, Barbara (1981). Journeys of Frodo: an Atlas of The Lord of the Rings, London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-049-12016-6
  • Tolkien, John & Priscilla (1992). The Tolkien Family Album, London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-26-110239-7
  • White, Michael (2003). Tolkien: A Biography, New American Library. ISBN 0451212428
  • The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends. Humphrey Carpenter (1979), ISBN 0395276284
  • The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends. Colin Duriez and David Porter (2001), ISBN 1902694139
  • Finding God in the Lord of the Rings'. Kurt D. Bruner and Jim Ware (2003), ISBN 084238555X
  • Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship. Colin Duriez (2003), ISBN 1587680262

External links

The Inklings
J.R.R. Tolkien · Owen Barfield · J.A.W. Bennett · Lord David Cecil · Nevill Coghill · James Dundas-Grant · Hugo Dyson · Adam Fox · Colin Hardie · Robert Havard · C.S. Lewis · Warren Lewis · Gervase Mathew · R.B. McCallum · C.E. Stevens · Christopher Tolkien · John Wain · Charles Williams · Charles Leslie Wrenn


J.R.R. Tolkien
None
Position created
President of The Tolkien Society
27 June 1972 - In perpetuo
Followed by:
None; perpetual title