J. R. R. Tolkien

In this episode of the I Can't Sleep Podcast, fall asleep learning about J. R. R. Tolkien. He's a pretty interesting individual and has been very influential in the literary world. However, just reading the date range people lived is enough to put me out. I hope you enjoy this episode. Happy sleeping!

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast,

Where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice.

I'm your host Benjamin Boster.

Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled J.

R.

R.

Tolkien John Ronald Rule Tolkien January 3rd,

1892 to the 2nd of September,

1973 was an English writer and philologist.

He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

From 1925 to 1945 Tolkien was a Rawlinson and Bosworth professor of Anglo-Saxon and a fellow of Pembroke College,

Both at the University of Oxford.

He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and fellow of Merton College and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959.

Tolkien was a close friend of C.

S.

Lewis,

A co-member of the informal literary discussion group the Inklings.

He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on the 28th of March,

1972.

After Tolkien's death,

His son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts,

Including the Silmarillion.

These,

Together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings,

Form a connected body of tales,

Poems,

Fictional histories,

Invented languages,

And literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and,

Within it,

Middle-earth.

Between 1951 and 1955 Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.

While many other authors have published works of fantasy before Tolkien,

The great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre.

This has caused him to be popularly identified as the father of modern fantasy literature,

Or more precisely of high fantasy.

Tolkien's immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks,

Watches,

And pianos in London and Birmingham.

The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kurtzburg near Königsberg,

Which had been founded during the medieval German eastward expansion,

Where his earliest known paternal ancestor,

Michael Tolkien,

Was born around 1620.

Michael's son Christianus Tolkien,

1663 to 1746,

Was a wealthy miller in Kurtzburg.

His son Christian Tolkien,

1706 to 1791,

Moved from Kurtzburg to nearby Danzig,

And his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien,

1747 to 1813,

And Johann,

Later known as John Benjamin Tolkien,

1752 to 1819,

Emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family.

The younger brother was J.

R.

R.

Tolkien's second great-grandfather.

In 1792,

John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravel took over the Eardley Norton Manufacture in London,

Which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravel and Tolkien.

Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794,

But John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen.

Other German relatives also joined the two brothers in London.

Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling,

Some of them members of the same family as J.

R.

R.

Tolkien,

Live in northern Germany,

But most of them are descendants of people who evacuated East Prussia in 1945 at the end of World War II.

According to Ryszard Drzezinski,

The Tolkien name is of Low Prussian origin and probably means son-descendant of Tolk.

Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word Tolkien,

Meaning foolhardy,

And jokingly inserted himself as a cameo into the Notion Club papers under the literally translated name Rashbald.

However,

Drzezinski has demonstrated this to be a false etymology.

While Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin,

His knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father.

John Ronald Roald Tolkien was born on the 3rd of January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State,

Later annexed by the British Empire,

Now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa,

To Arthur Roald Tolkien 1857 to 1896,

An English bank manager,

And his wife Mabel,

Née Suffield,

1870 to 1904.

The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British Bank,

For which he worked.

Tolkien had one sibling,

His younger brother,

Hilary Arthur Roald Tolkien,

Who was born on the 17th of February 1894.

As a child,

Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden,

An event some believed to have been later echoed in his stories,

Although he admitted no actual memory of the event and no special hatred of spiders as an adult.

In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy,

A young family servant took the baby to his homestead,

Returning him to the next morning.

When he was three,

He went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit.

His father,

However,

Died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them.

This left the family without an income,

So Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in King's Hills,

Birmingham.

Soon after,

In 1896,

They moved to Sarehole,

Now in Hall Green,

Then at Worcestershire Village,

Later annexed to Birmingham.

He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog,

And the Clend,

Licky,

And Malvern Hills,

Which would later inspire scenes in his books,

Along with nearby towns and villages such as Brom's Grove,

Alchester,

And Alva Church,

And places such as his Aunt Jane's Farm,

Bag End,

The name of which he used in his fiction.

Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home.

Ronald,

As he was known in the family,

Was a keen pupil.

She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants.

Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees,

But his favorite lessons were those concerning languages,

And his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.

Tolkien could read by the age of four,

And could write fluently soon afterwards.

His mother allowed him to read many books.

He disliked Treasure Island and The Pied Piper,

And thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was amusing but disturbing.

He liked stories about Red Indians,

Native Americans,

And works of fantasy by George MacDonald.

In addition,

The fairy books of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him,

And their influence is apparent in some of his later writings.

Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family,

Which stopped all financial assistance to her.

In 1904,

When J.

R.

R.

Tolkien was twelve,

His mother died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Red Knoll,

Which she was renting.

She was then about thirty-four years of age,

About as old as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment.

Insulin would not be discovered until 1921,

Two decades later.

Nine years after her death,

Tolkien wrote,

Before her death,

Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close friend,

Fr.

Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory.

He was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics.

In a 1965 letter to his son Michael,

Tolkien recalled the influence of the man whom he always called Fr.

Francis.

He was an upper-class Welsh Spaniard Tory,

And seemed to some just a pottering old gossip.

He was,

And he was not.

I first learned charity and forgiveness from him,

And in the light of it pierced even the liberal darkness out of which I came,

Knowing more about Bloody Mary than the mother of Jesus,

Who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists.

After his mother's death,

Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham and attended King Edward's School,

Birmingham,

And later St.

Philip's School.

In 1903,

He won a foundation scholarship and returned to King Edward's.

While in his early teens,

Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language,

Animalic,

An invention of his cousins,

Mary and Marjorie Inkledon.

At the time,

He was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon.

Their interest in Animalic soon died away,

But Mary and others,

Including Tolkien himself,

Invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh.

The next constructed language he came to work with,

Nafarin,

Would be his own creation.

Tolkien learned Esperanto sometime before 1909.

Around June 10,

1909,

He composed The Book of the Foxrook,

A 16-page notebook where the earliest example of one of his invented alphabets appears.

Short texts in his notebook are written in Esperanto.

In 1911,

While they were at King Edward's School,

Tolkien and three friends,

Rob Gilson,

Geoffrey Bach-Smith,

And Christopher Wiseman,

Formed a semi-secret society they called the TCBS.

The initials stood for Tea Club and Barovian Society,

Alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in barrow stores near the school and secretly in the school library.

After leaving school,

The members stayed in touch,

And in December 1914 they held a council in London at Wiseman's home.

For Tolkien,

The result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.

In 1911,

Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland,

A trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter,

Noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains,

Including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods,

Is directly based on his adventures,

As their party of twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauderbrunnen and on to the camp in Moraines beyond Murren.

Fifty-seven years later,

Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn,

The silver-tined Selubdil of my dreams.

They went across the Klein-Scheidig to Grindenwald and on across the Gross-Scheidig of Marengen.

They continued across the Grimsel Pass through the Upper Wallis to Brig and on to the Aulich Glacier and Zermatt.

In October of the same year,

Tolkien began studying at Exeter College,

Oxford.

He initially read classics but changed his course in 1913 to English Language and Literature,

Graduating in 1915 with first-class honors.

Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright,

Whose primer of the Gothic language had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.

Courtship and Marriage At the age of sixteen,

Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt,

Who was three years his senior,

When he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road,

Edgbaston.

According to Humphrey Carpenter,

Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham tea shops,

Especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement.

There they would sit and throw sugar lumps into the hats of passers-by,

Moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty.

With two people of their personalities and in their position,

Romance was bound to flourish.

Both were orphans in need of affection,

And they found that they could give it to each other.

During the summer of 1909,

They decided that they were in love.

His guardian,

Father Morgan,

Considered it altogether unfortunate that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older Protestant woman.

Tolkien wrote that the combined tensions contributed to his having muffed his exams.

Morgan prohibited him from meeting,

Talking to,

Or even corresponding with Edith until he was twenty-one.

Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter,

With one notable early exception,

Over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.

On the evening of his twenty-first birthday,

Tolkien wrote to Edith,

Who was living with a family friend,

C.

H.

Jessop,

At Cheltenham.

He declared that he had never ceased to love her and asked her to marry him.

Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field,

The brother of one of her closest school friends.

But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt on the shelf and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her.

She explained that,

Because of Tolkien's letter,

Everything had changed.

On the 8th of January 1913,

Tolkien traveled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith.

The two took a walk into the countryside,

Sat under a railway viaduct,

And talked.

By the end of the day,

Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal.

She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring.

Field was dreadfully upset at first,

And the Field family was insulted and angry.

Upon learning of Edith's new plans,

Jessop wrote to her guardian,

I have nothing to say against Tolkien.

He is a cultured gentleman,

But his prospects are poor in the extreme,

And when he will be in position to marry,

I cannot imagine.

Had he adopted her profession,

It would have been different.

Following their engagement,

Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence.

Jessop,

Like many others of his age and class,

Strongly anti-Catholic,

Was infuriated,

And he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.

Edith Brad and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913 and married at St.

Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick on the 22nd of March 1916.

In his 1941 letter to Michael,

Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job,

Little money,

And no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.

First World War.

In August 1914,

Britain entered the First World War.

Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British army.

In the 1941 letter to his son Michael,

Tolkien recalled,

In those days chaps joined up or were scorned publicly.

It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.

Instead,

Tolkien endured the obloquy and entered a program by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree.

By the time he passed his finals in July 1915,

Tolkien recalled that the hints were becoming outspoken from relatives.

He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on the 15th of July 1915.

He trained with the 13th Reserve Battalion on Kennock Chase,

Rugeley Camp near to Rugeley Staffordshire,

For eleven months.

In a letter to Edith,

Tolkien complained,

Gentlemen are rare among the superiors,

And even human beings rare indeed.

Following their wedding,

Lieutenant and Mrs.

Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp.

On the 2nd of June 1916,

Tolkien received a telegram summoning him to Folkestone for posting to France.

Tolkien spent the night before his departure in a room at the Plough and Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston,

Birmingham.

He later wrote,

Junior officers were being killed off a dozen a minute.

Parting from my wife then,

It was like a death.

France.

The 5th of June 1916,

Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais.

Like other soldiers arriving for the first time,

He was sent to the British Expedientiary Forces based depot at Étaples.

On the 7th of June,

He was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer to the 11th Service Battalion,

Lancashire Fusiliers.

The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade,

25th Division.

While waiting to be summoned to his unit,

Tolkien sank into boredom.

To pass the time,

He composed a poem titled The Lonely Isle,

Which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais.

To evade the British Army's postal censorship,

He developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements.

He left Étaples on the 27th of June,

1916,

And joined his battalion at Roubaix-en-Prés near Abine.

He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly for the mining,

Milling,

And weaving towns of Lancashire.

According to John Garth,

He felt an affinity for these working-class men,

But military protocol prohibited friendships with other ranks.

Instead,

He was required to take charge of them,

Discipline them,

Train them,

And probably censor their letters.

If possible,

He was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty.

Tolkien later lamented,

The most improper job of any man is bossing other men.

Not one in a million is fit for it,

And least of all those who seek the opportunity.

Battle of the Somme Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July,

1916.

In between terms,

Behind the lines at Bousencourt,

He participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig Salient.

Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith,

Who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death.

Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front.

The Reverend Mervyn S.

Evers,

Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers,

Recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by hordes of lice,

Which found the medical officers' ointment merely a kind of hors d'oeuvre,

And the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigor.

On the 27th of October,

1916,

As his battalion attacked Regina Trench,

Tolkien contracted trench fever,

A disease carried by lice.

He was invalided to England on the 8th of November,

1916.

According to his children,

John and Priscilla Tolkien,

In later years he would occasionally talk of being at the front,

Of the horrors of the first German gas attack,

Of the utter exhaustion and ominous quiet after a bombardment,

Of the whining scream of the shells and the endless march,

Always on foot,

Through a devastated landscape,

Sometimes carrying the men's equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going.

Some remarkable relics survived from that time.

A trench map he drew himself,

Pencil-written orders to carry bombs to the fighting line.

Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war.

Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Barovian Society,

Who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel.

Fellow TCBS member Geoffrey Smith was killed during the battle when a German artillery shell landed on the first aid post.

Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.

According to John Garth,

Kitchener's army,

In which Tolkien served,

Had once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together.

Tolkien was grateful,

Writing that it had taught him a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy,

Especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.

A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties,

Being deemed medically unfit for general service.

During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood,

Staffordshire,

He began to work on what he called the Book of Lost Tales,

Beginning with The Fall of Gondolin.

Lost Tales represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England,

A project he would abandon without ever completing.

Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring,

But he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps.

It was at this time that Edith bore their first child,

John Francis Roald Tolkien.

In a 1941 letter,

Tolkien described his son John as conceived and carried during the starvation year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign round about the Battle of Cambry,

When the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now.

Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on the 6th of January 1918.

When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull,

He and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Ruse,

And Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock.

After his wife's death in 1971,

Tolkien remembered,

I never called Edith Luthien,

But she was a source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion.

It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Ruse in Yorkshire,

Where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917.

She was able to live with me for a while.

In those days her hair was raven,

Her skin clear,

Her eyes brighter than you have seen them,

And she could sing and dance.

But the story has gone crooked,

And I am left,

And I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.

On the 16th of July 1919,

Tolkien was taken off active service at Foven and Salisbury Plain with a temporary disability pension.

Academic and Writing Career On the 3rd of November 1920,

Tolkien was demobilized and left the army,

Retaining his rank of lieutenant.

His first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary,

Where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W.

In 1920,

He took up a post as Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds,

Becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there.

While at Leeds,

He produced a Middle English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E.

V.

Gordon.

Both became academic standard works for several decades.

He translated Sir Gawain,

Pearl,

And Sir Orfeo.

In 1925,

He returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon,

With a fellowship at Pembroke College.

In mid-1919,

He began to tutor undergraduates privately,

Most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St.

Hugh's College,

Given that the women's college were in great need of good teachers in their early years,

And Tolkien,

As a married professor then still not common,

Was considered suitable,

As a bachelor don would not have been.

During his time at Pembroke College,

Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings,

While living at 20 Northmore Road in North Oxford.

He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name Nodens,

Following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepian at Lydney Park,

Gloucestershire in 1928,

Beowulf.

In the 1920s,

Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf,

Which he finished in 1926,

But did not publish.

It was finally edited by his son and published in 2014,

More than 40 years after Tolkien's death,

And almost 90 years after its completion.

Ten years after finishing his translation,

Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work Beowulf,

The Monsters and the Critics,

Which had a lasting influence on Beowulf research.

Lewis E.

Nicholson said that the article is widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism,

Noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work,

As opposed to its purely linguistic elements.

At the time,

The consensus of scholarship deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare.

Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general,

Not as limited by particular tribal politics,

And therefore the monsters were essential to the poem.

Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles,

As at Finsburg,

Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements.

In the essay,

Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf.

Beowulf is among my most valued sources.

This influence may be seen throughout this Middle-earth legendarium.

According to Humphrey Carpenter,

Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most striking way,

Entering the room silently,

Fixing the audience with a look,

And suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem,

Starting with a great cry of weight.

It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall,

And it made the students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text,

But a powerful piece of dramatic poetry.

Decades later,

W.

H.

Auden wrote to his former professor,

Thanking him for the unforgettable experience of hearing him recite Beowulf,

And stating,

The voice was the voice of Gandalf.

Second World War In the run-up to the Second World War,

Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker.

In January 1939,

He was asked to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the event of national emergency.

Beginning on the 27th of March,

He took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cipher School.

He was informed in October that his services would not be required.

In 1945,

Tolkien moved to Merton College,

Oxford,

Becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature,

In which post he remained until his retirement in 1959.

He served as an external examiner for University College Galway,

Now NUI Galway for many years.

In 1954,

Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland,

Of which University College Galway was a constituent college.

Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948,

Close to a decade after the first sketches.

Family The Tolkiens had four children,

John Francis Roll Tolkien,

17 November 1917 to 22 January 2003,

Michael Hilary Roll Tolkien,

22 October 1920 to 27 February 1984,

Christopher John Roll Tolkien,

21 November 1924 to 16 January 2020,

And Priscilla Mary Ann Roll Tolkien,

18 June 1929 to 28 February 2022.

Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.

Retirement During his life and retirement,

From 1959 up to his death in 1973,

Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame.

In 1961,

His friend C.

S.

Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement.

In a 1972 letter he deplored having become a cold figure,

But admitted that even the nose of a very modest idol cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense.

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory,

And eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth,

Which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper-middle class.

Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society,

But Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow inklings.

Edith,

However,

Was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess,

Which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place.

The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health,

In details like wrapping presents,

In the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she could retire to Bournemouth,

And in her pride in his becoming a famous author.

They were tied together,

Too,

By love for their children and grandchildren.

In his retirement,

Tolkien was a consultant and translator for the Jerusalem Bible,

Published in 1966.

He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate,

But due to other commitments only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors in a translation of the Book of Jonah.

Final Years Edith died on the 29th of November 1971,

At the age of 82.

Ronald returned to Oxford,

Where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street.

He missed Edith,

But enjoyed being back in the city.

Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours,

And received the insignia of the Order of Buckingham Palace on the 28th of March 1972.

In the same year,

Oxford University gave him an honorary doctorate of letters.

He had the name Lucian engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery,

Oxford.

When Tolkien died 21 months later,

On the 2nd of September 1973,

From a bleeding ulcer and chest infection at the age of 81,

He was buried in the same grave with Baron added to his name.

Tolkien's will was proven on 20th of December 1973,

With his estate valued at £190,

577,

Equivalent to £2,

452,

000 in 2021.

Views Religion Tolkien's Catholicism was a significant factor in C.

S.

Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity,

Although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England.

He once wrote to Rayner Unwin's daughter Camilla,

Who wished to know the purpose of life,

That it was to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have,

And to be moved by it to praise and thanks.

He had a special devotion to the Blessed Sacrament,

Writing to his son Michael that in the Blessed Sacrament you will find romance,

Glory,

Honour,

Fidelity,

And the true way of all your loves upon earth,

And more than that.

He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of the Holy Communion,

Again writing to his son Michael that the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is communion.

He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament.

In the last years of his life,

Tolkien resisted the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council,

Especially the use of English for the liturgy.

He continued to make the responses in Latin loudly,

Ignoring the rest of the congregation.

Race Tolkien's fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying a racist attitude.

Scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters,

And that he was anti-racist in peacetime and during the World Wars.

With the late 19th century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline,

Some critics saw the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings as embodying scientific racism.

Other commentators saw in Tolkien's orcs a reflection of wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese.

Critics have noted,

Too,

That the work embodies a moral geography,

With good in the West,

Evil in the East.

Against this,

Scholars have noted that Tolkien was outraged in peacetime by Nazi racial theory,

While during the Second World War he was equally disgusted by anti-German racial propaganda.

Other scholars have stated that Tolkien's Middle-earth is definitely polycultural and polylingual,

And that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings often omit evidence from the text.

Nature During most of his own life,

Conservationism was not yet on the political agenda,

And Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views,

Except in some private letters,

In which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree felling.

In later years,

A number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of The Lord of the Rings,

Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature,

And in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world.

Writing Influences Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth,

Especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion,

Drew on a wide array of influences,

Including his philological interest in language,

Christianity,

Medievalism,

Mythology,

Archaeology,

Ancient and modern literature,

And personal experience.

His philological work centered on the study of Old English literature,

Especially Beowulf,

And he acknowledged its importance to his writings.

He was a gifted linguist,

Influenced by Germanic,

Celtic,

Finnish,

And Greek language and mythology.

Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and topological antecedents for characters,

Places,

And events in Tolkien's writings.

Some writers were important to him,

Including the arts and crafts polymath William Morris,

And he undoubtedly made use of some real place names,

Such as Bag End,

The name of his aunt's home.

He acknowledged to John Buchan and H.

Rider Haggard,

Authors of modern and adventure stories,

That he enjoyed.

The effects of some specific experiences have been identified.

Tolkien's childhood in the English countryside,

And its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham,

Influenced his creation of the Shire,

While his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.

Publications Beowulf,

The Monsters,

And the Critics In addition to writing fiction,

Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism.

His seminal 1936 lecture,

Later published as an article,

Revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by literary critics.

The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English literature to this day.

Beowulf is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction,

With major details of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings adapted from the poem.

On Fairy Stories This essay discusses the fairy story as a literary form.

It was initially written as a 1939 Andrew Lange lecture at the University of St.

Andrews,

Scotland.

Tolkien focuses on Andrew Lange's work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales.

He disagreed with Lange's broad inclusion in his fairy book collections of traveller's tales,

Beast fables,

And other types of stories.

Tolkien held a narrower perspective,

Viewing fairy stories as those that took place in fairy,

An enchanted realm,

With or without fairies as characters.

He viewed them as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language.

Children's Books and Other Short Works In addition to his mythopoeic 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 works include Mr.

Bliss and Reverandum for Children,

And Leaf by Niggle,

Part of Tree and Leaf.

The Adventures of Tom Bombadil,

Smith of Wooten Major,

And Farmer Giles of Ham.

Reverandum and Smith of Wooten Major,

Like The Hobbit,

Borrowed ideas from his legendarium.

The Hobbit Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular,

But by sheer accident a book called The Hobbit,

Which he had written some years before his own children,

Came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall,

An employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin,

Who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication.

When it was published a year later,

The book attracted adult readers as well as children,

And it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel.

The Lord of the Rings The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work,

The epic novel The Lord of the Rings,

Originally published in three volumes in 1954-1955.

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.

Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of 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 backstory of Bilyarion that Tolkien had constructed in previous years,

And which eventually saw posthumous publications in the Silmarillion and other volumes.

Tolkien strongly influenced the fantasy genre that grew up after the book's success.

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 20th 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 UK's best-loved novel.

Australians voted The Lord of the Rings my favorite 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 favorite book of the millennium.

In 2002,

Tolkien was voted the 92nd greatest Briton in a poll conducted by the BBC,

And in 2004 he was voted 35th in the SABC3's The Great South Africans,

The only person to appear in both lists.

His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking world.

In a 2004 poll inspired by UK's Big Read survey,

About 250,

000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings to be their favorite work of literature.

Reviews

There were a lot of dates! Great seeing you back on Insight! 🤗🤗 (Although I had gone out and listened to the podcast as I missed your bedtime stories!) This helped lull me to sleep, thank you! 💖