J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien, later professor of English linguistics at the University of Oxford, had been working on his own mythology since his youth, which was based on specially constructed languages and was only published posthumously under the title The Silmarillion. Both The Lord of the Rings and the successful children's book The Hobbit (1937) are set in this world invented by Tolkien. Some of his contributions to linguistics and literature, such as the essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (1936), are also considered groundbreaking.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 as the son of English parents, the bank manager Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896) and his wife Mabel Suffield (1870–1904), in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State in South Africa, where his father was staying for professional reasons. Tolkien suspected the origin of his family on his father's side in Saxony and Lower Saxony. More recent research suggests that this part of the family comes from Kreuzburg near Königsberg in East Prussia. His ancestors moved from there to Gdansk in the 18th century. Tolkien's great-great-grandfather Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien then settled in London in the 1770s, presumably in connection with the blockade of Danzig after the First Partition of Poland, and was naturalized in 1794. Most of Tolkien's ancestors were craftsmen. In 1894, his brother Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien was born. Tolkien himself assumed that his surname was derived from the German word tollkühn. Polish Tolkien expert Ryszard Derdziński concluded in 2019 that the name Tolkien comes from Lower Prussia and means "descendant of Tolk". Another presumed origin is the East Prussian place name Tolkynen.

Tolkien's early childhood was largely quiet and uneventful, except for a tarantula bite, which is considered a possible trigger for the repeated appearance of poisonous giant spiders in his works. In 1895 he came to Birmingham, England, with his mother, who did not tolerate the African climate well, and his brother Hilary for a holiday. There, the following year, his mother received the news of the death of her husband, who had died of severe internal bleeding. The family then moved to Sarehole Mill, a suburb of Birmingham that had remained largely untouched by industrialisation at the time. Tolkien spent the next four years of his childhood in this rural idyll, which later became the model for the Shire, a part of his mythological world. It was here that he first became familiar with the dialect word gamgee for cotton, which later became the name of one of the hobbit protagonists in his magnum opus, The Lord of the Rings.

His mother, who converted to the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 against the will of her parents and parents-in-law, raised her children in her faith. This basic ideological influence ran through Tolkien's entire life and had far-reaching effects on his work.Since he was interested in languages at an early age, his mother taught him the basics of Latin, French and German. Through her, he was introduced to the stories of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, the Arthurian saga and the fairy tale books of Andrew Lang, in which he also heard for the first time about the Norse sagas of Siegfried and the dragon Fafnir.

Between 1900 and 1902, Tolkien and his mother moved several times within Birmingham, first to the Moseley district, then to King's Heath, where he first came across the Welsh language that touched him aesthetically through the unfamiliar names on the coal wagons passing behind the house, and finally to Edgbaston. Since all these places had an urban character, his childhood days, which were shaped by rural life, were over. In addition, there was an odyssey through various schools: initially accepted at King Edward's School, he transferred to St. Philips Grammar School in 1902 and then returned to King Edward's School in 1903 on a scholarship. There, in addition to the classical languages Latin and Greek, he also learned Middle English from a dedicated teacher.

On November 14, 1904, his mother died, completely unexpectedly for the twelve-year-old, after a six-day diabetic coma. This early death caused him to feel even more closely connected to the faith and the Catholic Church as an orphan. This event also strengthened his pessimistic attitude. He saw the world in the hands of evil, in the spirit of the Bible (1 Jn 5:19: "We know that we are of God, but the whole world is under the power of evil"). Only in the victories of good, he imagined, could the bad be temporarily pushed back. For him, man could only find salvation through faith in Jesus Christ and eternal life. This attitude became the fundamental tenor of his literary work.

The two brothers came into the care of Father Francis Morgan, a priest who was a friend of their mother's, who placed them first with their aunt Beatrice Bartlett and later with a landlady friend. There Tolkien met his future wife, Edith Bratt, three years his senior, in 1908. When his guardian learned of this, he forbade Tolkien to have any contact with Edith until he reached the age of majority at the age of twenty-one.

At school, Tolkien not only became aware of philology, the science of the laws of language, through his school principal, but was also brought into contact with Old English by a teacher friend. It was at this time that he read for the first time a centrepiece of Old English literature, the poem Beowulf, and was immediately enthusiastic. In Middle English, he familiarized himself with the poems Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl from the manuscript collection Cotton Nero A.x. He later published important academic works on all three works. Finally, he also turned to Old Norse in order to be able to read the story about Siegfried and the dragon Fafnir, which had fascinated him so much as a child, in the original.

Spurred on by his newly acquired philological knowledge, Tolkien soon began to invent his own languages, which were based on his already well-developed knowledge of linguistic development principles. Early attempts were based on Spanish, but when he became aware of Gothic through a school friend, he not only began to fill in the gaps contained in this extinct language (and probably mainly due to the less extensive tradition), but also tried to return Gothic to a hypothetical original language.

This close preoccupation with languages soon became apparent at school, where Tolkien surprised his audience with fluent lectures in Greek, Gothic or Old English during debates (which were mostly held in Latin at the time).

In the summer of 1911, Tolkien and a few friends, including Christopher Wiseman, Robert Quilter Gilson and Geoffrey Bache Smith, formed the T.C.B.S. (Tea Club – Barrovian Society), an informal community of friends who met regularly, first in the school library and later in Barrow's stores, to discuss literature with each other. At this time, and possibly inspired by the T.C.B.S., Tolkien began writing poems in earnest, in which fairies dancing in the woodland appeared for the first time. A possible impetus for this could have come from the Catholic poet of mystical poems Francis Thompson, whose poetic work Tolkien demonstrably dealt with at this time. After a failed attempt in 1909, he was awarded a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, in December 1910. With the knowledge that his immediate future was thus secured, Tolkien went into the rest of his school years. Despite his later aversion to the theatre, Tolkien willingly took part in a performance of Aristophanes' play The Peace in the role of Hermes, and also returned to his old school in December 1911 for a performance of R. B. Sheridan's The Rivals by members of the T.C.B.S., in which he took on the role of Mrs. Malaprop.

In the time between finishing school and starting his studies in Oxford, Tolkien spent a hiking holiday in Switzerland with his brother and other friends. This journey laid the foundation for part of the novel The Hobbit (Bilbo's Crossing of the Misty Mountains). A postcard with the name Der Berggeist, on which an old man sitting under a pine tree on a rock is depicted (the picture comes from the mystical-esoterically oriented German painter Josef Madlener from Memmingen), became, according to his later statements, the inspiration for the figure of the magician Gandalf in his self-created world of Middle-earth.

In October 1911, Tolkien began his studies at Exeter College, Oxford, initially in Classics, the study of the classical languages Latin and Greek and their literature, but soon became bored. Only comparative linguistics could attract his interest. His professor in this subject pointed him to Welsh, to which Tolkien then enthusiastically turned.

After a two-week summer holiday in 1912, which he spent with King Edward's Horse, a cavalry regiment, mainly in the saddle, he returned to Oxford. Here he soon began to deal with Finnish. This influence was also evident in the fact that he abandoned his project of an artistic language based on Gothic and instead oriented himself towards his new favorite language. The result found its way into his mythological world "Middle-earth" years later as Quenya, the standard language of the Elves.

Tolkien spent Christmas 1912 with relatives, where, according to a widespread English Christmas custom, he staged a play he had written himself as director and leading actor – a remarkable fact in view of his later aversion to drama. On January 3, 1913, the day he came of age, he wrote to his childhood sweetheart Edith for the first time again, but had to learn that in the meantime she had become engaged to the brother of a school friend, George Field. Not inclined to give up his great love, Tolkien then visited her personally at her new place of residence, where he succeeded in changing her mind. A year later, after Edith's admission to the Catholic Church, the official engagement took place, and after another two years, on March 22, 1916, the wedding.

Meanwhile, his academic path was not straightforward either. Due to his neglect of the actual subject matter in favor of his numerous language interests, he completed an intermediate exam after two years of study, disappointingly only with a "second" (comparable to the German grade "Good"). At the suggestion of his college, where his interest in Germanic languages had been noticed, he then moved to the "Institute for English Language and Literature". There he read the Anglo-Saxon work Christ (early 9th century), a collection of religious poetry, as part of the demanding Old English literary canon. Two lines of this poem had a lasting influence on him: Middangeard or Middle-earth here refers to the world of humans. Tolkien believed that the name Earendel, traditionally translated as "ray of light", refers to the morning star, Venus, which announces the end of the night and the dawn of day with its rising. He himself later described the effect of these lines on himself as follows: This point in time can be cautiously considered the birth of his mythology, because just one year later he wrote the poem The Voyage of Earendel the Evening Star, which begins with the lines quoted above and forms the germ of his Middle-earth mythology.

His further studies passed quietly; he continued to meet with his friends from the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (T.C.B.S.), who supported him in his poetic endeavors. An anecdote from this time sheds significant light on Tolkien's way of working, which was still characteristic of Tolkien later on: When asked by his friend G. B. Smith about the background of his Earendel poem, Tolkien answers: "I don't know. I'll try to find out." (German: "I don't know. I'll try to figure it out.") This view of writing, not as a new creation, but as a journey of discovery, remained decisive for him throughout his life. In the year after the outbreak of the First World War, in the second week of June 1915, he completed his studies – this time with distinction (First Class Honours).

Tolkien was called up as a telecommunications officer in the 11th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers Regiment and from the summer of 1916 took part in the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest battle of the First World War, through active front-line service. The direct experience of the atrocities of trench warfare affected him deeply and made the intrusion of evil into a peaceful world a fundamental theme of his life and literature. On 27 October 1916 he showed symptoms of typhus, which was transmitted by lice and rampant in the trenches, and on 8 November he was shipped to England for treatment.

During his convalescent leave, first in Birmingham and then in Great Haywood, he learned of the death of his T.C.B.S. comrade G. B. Smith, after he had learned of the loss of his school friend Rob Gilson while still in France. Smith's last letter concludes with the moving lines: "May God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot."  that I have been trying to say, long after I will no longer be there to say them myself, this should be my fate." For Tolkien, they became a legacy. He began with a project that has no great precedents in literary history, the creation of a complete cycle of legends that begins with a creation of the world. With the writing of The Book of Lost Tales, which was only published posthumously by his son Christopher, larger parts of his mythology, which was later elaborated in The Silmarillion, existed for the first time.

It was here that he first consistently used his invented languages, especially Quenya, which is based on Finnish, and Sindarin, which goes back to Welsh. He now used both as the language of the Elves in Middle-earth.

Meanwhile, his health was fluctuating, and the danger of being sent back to the front hovered over him constantly. Temporarily transferred to Yorkshire, he soon fell ill again and was transferred to the Harrogate Sanatorium. Recovered and sent to a telecommunications school in the northeast, he fell ill again after graduation and was this time sent to the officers' hospital in Kingston upon Hull.

During this time, on November 16, 1917, Edith gave birth to their first son, who was baptized John Francis Reuel in honor of Father Francis. He was followed on 22 October 1920 by Michael Hilary Reuel, on 21 November 1924 by Christopher John Reuel and finally on 22 December 1929 by his daughter Priscilla Anne Reuel. The time after the birth of the first son was marked by happy moments: During shore excursions into the surrounding forests, Edith sang and danced for him - this ultimately resulted in the story of the great love between the mortal hero Beren and the beautiful but immortal elf Lúthien, who can be considered a focal point of the Silmarillion.

After further transfers in the spring of 1918, to Penkridge in Staffordshire and back to Hull, Tolkien fell ill again and had to be admitted to the officers' hospital again. This time he used the time to teach himself some Russian in addition to working on his mythology. After his release in October, it was finally clear that the end of the war was imminent. In search of work, he then turned to one of his former Oxford lecturers, William A. Craigie, who got him a job at the New English Dictionary, so that Tolkien could move to Oxford with his wife and child in November 1918.

Even though his satire Farmer Giles of Ham contains some ironic allusions to his time at the New English Dictionary, it was a happy time overall. Permanently united with Edith for the first time and living in his own house, he also found his work intellectually stimulating. Later, he said of the two years he was involved in the production of the dictionary that he had never learned more at any time in his life. However, the tasks set for him did not fill the day, so that he still found time to teach students as a private teacher – an activity that turned out to be lucrative enough to be able to end his work on the New English Dictionary in 1920. But even if the financial situation was acceptable, Tolkien had not given up his desire to pursue an academic career. Surprisingly, in the summer of 1920, an opportunity arose: in Leeds, the position of a "reader" at the Institute for the English Language had become vacant. Although he was initially skeptical about his chances, he got the job. However, this also meant a further separation from Edith, who remained behind in Oxford with her two sons until she was able to join them in 1921.

He was initially entrusted by his superior with the organization of the study plan for Old and Middle English. In 1922, the Canadian Eric Valentine Gordon came to Leeds as a lecturer. With him, Tolkien worked on a new edition of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was soon regarded as an outstanding contribution to Middle English philology after its publication in 1925. The two colleagues also became closer in their private lives and, together with students, formed the Viking Club, in which, in addition to the plentiful enjoyment of beer, the focus was on Old Norse drinking songs and sometimes quite coarse songs in Old English – a circumstance that probably contributed significantly to Tolkien's popularity among his students. After four years in Leeds, in 1924, Tolkien was finally appointed professor of English.

Poems from this period contain the first references to creatures that later found their place in his Middle-earth mythology: The poem Glib, for example, describes a slimy creature with faintly glowing eyes that lives deep in a cave, reminiscent of the figure of Gollum. His "serious" mythology, which was published in the Book of Lost Stories in the early 1980s, was meanwhile almost complete. He selected two of the legends, the story of Túrin Turambar and the story of Lúthien and Beren, in order to translate them into a more detailed poem form.

In 1925, the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, suddenly became vacant. Tolkien applied and was awarded the post, probably due to the reputation of his Sir Gawain edition, among other things. In 1926, Tolkien founded the Kolbitar (Icelandic for "coal biter") among his colleagues, an informal group that met regularly to read the Icelandic sagas in the original Old Norse language. From 1927 onwards, this group also included Clive Staples Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia), a colleague of Tolkien's from 1926, who soon became his closest friend. Lewis also supported him in a curriculum reform that placed greater emphasis on the combination of linguistics and literary studies, which was initiated by Tolkien and adopted by the faculty in 1931. However, it was not these professional achievements on which Tolkien's later fame was based. His two main works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, both have their roots in the family circle at home, in the role of father, which Tolkien fulfilled in an exemplary manner towards his children.

In the early 1920s and 1930s, Tolkien began to regularly tell his children imaginative stories, but most of them were set outside the mythical world on which he was already seriously working at the time. Among other things, the story Roverandom, which goes back to the disappearance of a toy dog of his second son Michael, dates from this time. While there are only one or two cryptic references to the larger mythology in this tale, which at the time were only understandable to him himself, the story The Hobbit, which began in 1930, refers several times to events from his serious mythology, such as in the references to the elven city of Gondolin, which at this time is already part of his world of legends, which is later set in the First Age of Middle-earth,  and the form of the necromancer. Through the mediation of a former student, Allen & Unwin became aware of his story, which was published in 1937 after a positive review by the publisher's son, Rayner Unwin. At the urgent request of the publisher, Tolkien began work on a follow-up story, which was initially designed as a children's book, like The Hobbit. Towards the end of the 1930s, and after inspiration from C. S. Lewis, who was now associated with him in the literary circle of the Inklings – a group that included Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson and Adam Fox in addition to Lewis and Tolkien – he gave the much-acclaimed lecture On Fairy-Stories, in which he described the principles of the later emerging fantasy genre and vigorously defended it against accusations of escapism.

During World War II, work on his follow-up project to The Hobbit, now called The Lord of the Rings, dragged on. This work was interrupted again and again by other tasks.

In 1945, still in Oxford, he moved to the professorship of English Studies. It was not until 1954 that The Lord of the Rings was published. The delay had to do with Tolkien's perfectionism on the one hand, but also with Tolkien's desire for a change of publisher, which was motivated by the supposed rejection of his serious mythical work The Silmarillion. When his old publisher, Allen & Unwin, refused an ultimatum to publish his complete mythology (The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion) without the opportunity to view the manuscript, Tolkien pitched his work to Collins Publishing.

After initial enthusiasm, however, they insisted on far-reaching cuts, which Tolkien was not willing to make, so that he remorsefully turned to his old publisher. Rayner Unwin, who had examined The Hobbit as a child, had meanwhile risen to the position of junior publisher and accepted the book without further corrections. Due to the exorbitant paper prices in England as a result of the war, the work was published in three volumes (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King), so that each individual volume could be offered at affordable prices. Hence the erroneously used categorization of the complete works as a trilogy, which Tolkien rejected throughout his life. Originally, he had divided the work into six books. In 1964, American publisher Donald A. Wollheim of Ace Books asked for permission to publish The Lord of the Rings in paperback in the United States. Tolkien declined on the grounds that he did not want an edition of his work in such a degenerate form. This rejection angered Wollheim – pioneer of the paperback in the USA – so much that he looked for a loophole in the copyrights to it. In fact, paperback rights for the United States were not clearly regulated. Wollheim concluded from this that the rights of the states were free, and with what was later called pirated printing, he laid the foundation for the book's immense success in the United States. The resulting lawsuit was later decided against Ace Books.

Wollheim's unauthorized copy of The Lord of the Rings sparked a cult movement among students, which quickly made Tolkien a celebrity. However, through close ties to his ever-increasing number of fans, who exerted considerable pressure on the publisher of the pirate edition in his favour, Tolkien managed to discontinue the pirate edition, contrary to the unfavourable legal situation for him, so that soon only the version authorised by him was available on the US market.

Tolkien spent the rest of his life working on The Silmarillion, which he did not complete until the end of his life and which was only published by his son Christopher Tolkien after his death.

For a few years, he and his wife Edith moved to the English seaside resort of Bournemouth. Edith died there in 1971, whereupon Tolkien moved back to Oxford. In 1972 he was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Thus, he had the right to add the corresponding abbreviation to his name (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE). However, he was not a knight and did not have a title of nobility. For the English-language edition of the Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966, the most important international Protestant-Catholic Bible edition of the present day, he had translated the Book of Jonah.

Tolkien also worked on a sequel to The New Shadow. It was supposed to tell the story of how, more than 100 years after the War of the Ring, a secret society is trying to reform society in favor of so-called orc cults. However, this narrative is interrupted on the grounds that such coup attempts were doomed to failure after Sauron's fall. The novel fragment, which reflects the widespread fears of youth religions in the early 1970s, was published posthumously in 1996 under the title The New Shadow. On September 2, 1973, Tolkien died at the age of 81 after a short illness in a private hospital in Bournemouth, where he had returned for a short vacation. His eldest son, John Francis Reuel (1917–2003), who had been ordained a Catholic priest on February 10, 1946, said mass at his father's funeral.

The tomb of J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife is located in the Catholic part of Wolvercote Cemetery on Jordan Hill in Oxford; on the gravestones are the names Beren and Lúthien in addition to their names – signs of a love that outlasts death.