J. R. R. Tolkien

• 1. Introduction

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  On the evening of his 21st birthday, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien sat down and wrote a letter to a young woman named Edith Mary Bratt. His guardian had forbidden him from even corresponding with her until that day. Tolkien told her he had never stopped loving her, and asked her to marry him. She wrote back that she was already engaged to someone else, a man named George Field. This is the man who would later be called the father of modern fantasy literature. He was born on the 3rd of January 1892 in Bloemfontein, and he died on the 2nd of September 1973. Between those dates he became an Oxford professor, a soldier on the Somme, a devout Catholic, and the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. But the man who invented Middle-earth was, first and always, a lover of words and the sounds they make. How does a philologist who struggled over the dictionary entry for walrus end up reshaping an entire genre? Why did he say his wife was the source of his greatest story? And what did the trenches of France leave inside him?

• 2. A Mother's Sacrifice

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  In 1900 Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church, and her Baptist family responded by cutting off all financial help to her. She had already been widowed. Her husband Arthur, an English bank manager, had died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could rejoin his family in England. In 1904, when Tolkien was 12, Mabel died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Rednal, a place she was renting. She was about 34. Insulin would not be discovered until 1921, two decades too late to save her. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote that his mother was "a martyr indeed", a woman who "killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith". Before she died, Mabel had assigned the guardianship of her two sons to her close friend, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, charged with raising them as good Catholics. Tolkien always called him "Father Francis", and in a 1965 letter described him as "an upper-class Welsh-Spaniard Tory" from whom he first learned charity and forgiveness. Mabel had also been her son's first teacher. She taught the boy botany, awakened his enjoyment of the look and feel of plants, and gave him the rudiments of Latin very early. That early grounding in Latin would echo through the languages he later built from nothing.

• 3. The Lure Of Invented Tongues

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  Around the 10th of June 1909, Tolkien composed a sixteen-page notebook he called "The Book of the Foxrook", which holds the earliest example of one of his invented alphabets. Short texts inside it were written in Esperanto, a language he had learned some time before 1909. This was not his first brush with constructed speech. As a young teenager he encountered Animalic, an invention of his cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon, and then helped build a more complex language called Nevbosh. His own first creation was named Naffarin. Language and grammar for Tolkien were a matter of aesthetics and euphony. His most developed inventions were Quenya and Sindarin, and the etymological link between them formed the core of much of his legendarium. Quenya was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations. He meant it as an "Elven-latin", phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek. He believed languages could not be separated from the myths attached to them. In 1930 he told a congress of Esperantists, "Your language construction will breed a mythology." By 1956 he had concluded that auxiliary languages like Volapuk, Esperanto, Ido, and Novial were "dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends". The popularity of his books even nudged mainstream dictionaries toward his idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish.

• 4. The Lonely Isle

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  On the 5th of June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. He had married Edith Bratt at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Warwick on the 22nd of March 1916, and now he was bound for the war. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he developed a code of dots so Edith could track his movements across a map of the Western Front. He arrived at the Somme in early July 1916, taking part in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient. The conditions were squalid. The Anglican chaplain, the Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by "hordes of lice" that treated the Medical Officer's ointment as "a kind of hors d'oeuvre". On the 27th of October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by those same lice. He was invalided back to England on the 8th of November 1916. The war took his closest friends. Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Bache Smith, fellow members of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society he had formed at school in 1911, were both killed during the battle. Gilson fell on the first day of the Somme. Smith died when a German artillery shell landed on a first-aid post. Tolkien's own battalion was almost completely wiped out after his return. He came away grateful for one thing, writing that the war taught him "a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties".

• 5. Luthien In The Glade

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  Edith Tolkien once danced for her husband in a clearing among flowering hemlock. The setting was the woods near Roos in Yorkshire, where in 1917 Tolkien briefly commanded an outpost of the Humber Garrison, and where Edith was able to live with him for a while. After her death in 1971, he recalled the moment. "In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing." That dance became the seed of the central story of his mythology. "I never called Edith Luthien," he wrote, "but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion." The connection was no private fancy. He had the name Luthien engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months after her, he was buried in the same grave, and the name Beren was added to his own. Beren and Luthien were the mortal man and the elf-maiden of his legendarium, and Tolkien set their love at the heart of everything he built. The story had begun even earlier than the glade at Roos. During his recovery from trench fever in a cottage at Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he started what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin, his attempt to make a mythology for England.

• 6. Hwaet In The Lecture Hall

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  Tolkien would enter the lecture room in silence, fix the audience with a look, and suddenly declaim the opening lines of Beowulf in Old English, starting with a great cry of "Hwaet!" His biographer Humphrey Carpenter recorded the performance. It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made students realise that Beowulf was not merely a set text but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry. One former student, the poet W. H. Auden, wrote to him years later thanking him for the "unforgettable experience" of hearing him recite it, adding, "The voice was the voice of Gandalf." In 1936 Tolkien delivered a lecture, later published as the essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", which the scholar Lewis E. Nicholson described as "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism". At the time, scholars deprecated the poem for dealing with childish battles against monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare. Tolkien argued the opposite, that the poet was addressing human destiny in general, and that the monsters were therefore essential. He called Beowulf one of his "most valued sources". He had finished a full translation of it in 1926 but never published it. His son Christopher edited it and brought it out in 2014, decades after his father's death.

• 7. An Accidental Bestseller

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  Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular. By sheer accident, a book called The Hobbit, which he had written years earlier for his own children, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin. She persuaded him to submit it. Published the following year, it drew adult readers as well as children, and the publishers asked for a sequel. That request set in motion The Lord of the Rings, a novel that grew far darker and more serious than the children's tale he first intended. He spent more than ten years writing the narrative and appendices, supported throughout by the Inklings and especially his closest friend C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia. The novel appeared in three volumes between 1954 and 1955, split that way partly because printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain. Its popularity has been measured again and again. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey by the BBC it was named the UK's best-loved novel. Australians voted it "My Favourite Book" in 2004. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers it was judged the favourite book of the millennium. About 250,000 Germans named it their favourite work of literature in a 2004 poll. Tolkien sold the film, stage, and merchandise rights of both books to United Artists in 1968, though the studio never made a film. The first screen adaptation came in 1978, an animated rotoscoping version directed by Ralph Bakshi covering only the first half of the story.

• 8. The Inheritance Of Christopher

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  Tolkien started the Quenta Silmarillion three times and never published it. He desperately hoped to release it alongside The Lord of the Rings, but both Allen & Unwin and Collins declined. The great mythology that lay behind everything else stayed unfinished at his death. The task of completing it fell to his son Christopher, whom he had appointed his literary executor. Working with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author himself, Christopher organised the material into a single coherent volume and published it as The Silmarillion in 1977. It won the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978. He did not stop there. In 1980 he published Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, and between 1983 and 1996 he brought out a twelve-volume series called The History of Middle-earth, full of unfinished, abandoned, and outright contradictory accounts. Later still came a string of standalone volumes assembled from his father's papers, including The Children of Hurin in 2007 and The Fall of Gondolin in 2018, a tale Tolkien himself called "the first real story" of Middle-earth. The raw materials are now split between two homes. Before his death Tolkien sold the manuscripts of his published works to Marquette University's library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. After he died, his estate gave the Silmarillion papers and his academic work to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. In 2009 a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing with Lewis but never completed, was discovered there among the rest.