J.R.R. Tolkien
(1892-1973)
Who Was J.R.R. Tolkien?
J.R.R. Tolkien was an English fantasy author and academic. Tolkien settled in England as a child, going on to study at Exeter College. While teaching at Oxford University, he published the popular fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The works have had a devoted international fan base and been adapted into award-winning blockbuster films.
Early Life and Family
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892, to Arthur Tolkien and Mabel Suffield Tolkien. After Arthur died from complications of rheumatic fever, Mabel settled with four-year-old Tolkien and his younger brother, Hilary, in the country hamlet of Sarehole, in Birmingham, England.
Mabel died in 1904, and the Tolkien brothers were sent to live with a relative and in boarding homes, with a Catholic priest assuming guardianship in Birmingham. Tolkien went on to get his first-class degree at Exeter College, specializing in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic languages and classic literature.
World War I
Tolkien enlisted as a lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and served in World War I, making sure to continue writing as well. He fought in the Battle of the Somme, in which there were severe casualties, and was eventually released from duty due to illness. In the midst of his military service, he married Edith Bratt in 1916.
Continuing his linguistic studies, Tolkien joined the faculty of the University of Leeds in 1920 and a few years later became a professor at Oxford University. While there he started a writing group called The Inklings, which counted among its members C.S. Lewis and Owen Barfield. It was also at Oxford, while grading a paper, that he spontaneously wrote a short line about "a hobbit."
Books: 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings'
The award-winning fantasy novel The Hobbit — about the small, furry-footed Bilbo Baggins and his adventures — was published in 1937, and was regarded as a children’s book, though Tolkien would state the book wasn’t originally intended for children. He also created more than 100 drawings to support the narrative.
Over the years, while working on scholarly publications, Tolkien developed the work that would come to be regarded as his masterpiece — The Lord of the Rings series, partially inspired by ancient European myths, with its own sets of maps, lore and languages.
Tolkien released part one of the series, The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954; The Two Towers and The Return of the King followed in 1955, finishing up the trilogy. The books gave readers a rich literary trove populated by elves, goblins, talking trees and all manner of fantastic creatures, including characters like the wizard Gandalf and the dwarf Gimli.
While Rings had its share of critics, many reviewers and waves upon waves of general readers took to Tolkien’s world, causing the books to become global bestsellers, with fans forming Tolkien clubs and learning his fictional languages.
Tolkien retired from professorial duties in 1959, going on to publish an essay and poetry collection, Tree and Leaf , and the fantasy tale Smith of Wootton Major . His wife Edith died in 1971, and Tolkien died on September 2, 1973, at the age of 81. He was survived by four children.
Legacy and New Adaptations
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series are grouped among the most popular books in the world, having sold tens of millions of copies. The Rings trilogy was also adapted by director Peter Jackson into a highly popular, award-winning trio of films starring Ian McKellen , Elijah Wood, Cate Blanchett and Viggo Mortensen , among others. Jackson also directed a three-part Hobbit movie adaptation starring Martin Freeman, which was released from 2012 to 2014.
Tolkien's son Christopher has edited several works that weren't completed at the time of his father's death, including The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin , which were published posthumously. The Art of the Hobbit was published in 2012, celebrating the novel's 75th anniversary by presenting Tolkien's original illustrations.
Underscoring the enduring popularity of Tolkien's famed fantasy world, in November 2017, online retail and entertainment behemoth Amazon announced that it had acquired the TV rights for the book series. In its statement, the company revealed plans to "explore new storylines preceding Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, " with the potential for a spinoff series, thereby exciting fans with the promise of a prequel to the familiar deeds of Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf and the rest.
The author's life was the subject of the 2019 feature Tolkien , a biopic starring Nicholas Hoult and steeped with references to The Lord of the Rings .
QUICK FACTS
- Name: John Ronald Ruel Tolkien
- Birth Year: 1892
- Birth date: January 3, 1892
- Birth City: Bloemfontein
- Birth Country: South Africa
- Gender: Male
- Best Known For: J.R.R. Tolkien is an internationally renowned fantasy writer. He is best known for authoring 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy.
- Writing and Publishing
- Fiction and Poetry
- Astrological Sign: Capricorn
- Exeter College
- King Edward's School
- Death Year: 1973
- Death date: September 2, 1973
- Death City: Bournemouth, Dorset
- Death Country: England
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CITATION INFORMATION
- Article Title: J.R.R. Tolkien Biography
- Author: Biography.com Editors
- Website Name: The Biography.com website
- Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/jrr-tolkien
- Access Date:
- Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
- Last Updated: September 11, 2019
- Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
- If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it's my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.
- Children aren't a class. They are merely human beings at different stages of maturity. All of them have a human intelligence which even at its lowest is a pretty wonderful thing, and the entire world in front of them.
- The hobbits are just what I should like to have been but never was—an entirely unmilitary people who always came up to scratch in a clinch.
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J. R. R. Tolkien Biography
Born: January 3, 1892 Bloemfontein, South Africa Died: September 2, 1973 Bournemouth, England English writer, essayist, poet, and editor
J. R. R. Tolkien gained a reputation during the 1960s and 1970s as a cult figure (a person with a devoted following amongst a small group of people) among youths discouraged by war and the technological age from his work The Hobbit and the trilogy that followed, The Lord of the Rings.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, the son of English-born parents in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State of South Africa, where his father worked as a bank manager. To escape the heat and dust of southern Africa and to better guard the delicate health of Ronald (as he was called), Tolkien's mother moved back to a small English village with him and his younger brother when they were very young boys. Tolkien would later use this village as a model for one of the locales in his novels. Within a year of this move their father, Arthur Tolkien, died in Bloemfontein, and a few years later the boys' mother died as well.
The Tolkien boys lodged at several homes from 1905 until 1911, when Ronald entered Exeter College, Oxford. Tolkien received a bachelor's degree from Oxford in 1915 and a master's degree in 1919. During this time he married his longtime sweetheart, Edith Bratt, and served for a short time on the Western Front with the Lancashire Fusiliers (a regiment in the British army that used an older-style musket) during World War I (1914–18), when Germany led forces against much of Europe and America).
Begins writing
In 1917, Tolkien was in England recovering from "trench fever," a widespread disease transmitted through fleas and other bugs in battlefield trenches. While bedridden Tolkien began writing "The Book of Lost Tales," which eventually became The Silmarillion (1977) and laid the groundwork for his stories about Middle Earth, the fictional world where Tolkien's work takes place.
After the war Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary and began work as a freelance tutor. In 1920 he was appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University. The following year, having returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien became friends with the novelist C. S. Lewis (1898–1963). They shared an intense enthusiasm for the myths, sagas, and languages of northern Europe, and to better enhance those interests, both attended meetings of the "Coalbiters," an Oxford club, founded by Tolkien, at which Icelandic sagas were read aloud.
During the rest of Tolkien's years at Oxford—twenty as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, fourteen as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature—Tolkien published several well-received short studies and translations. Notable among these are his essays "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" (1936), "Chaucer as a Philologist [a person who studies language as it relates to culture]: The Reeve's Tale" (1934), and "On Fairy-Stories"(1947); his scholarly edition of Ancrene Wisse (1962); and his translations of three medieval poems: "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," "Pearl," and "Sir Orfeo" (1975).
Tolkien retired from his professorship in 1959. While the unauthorized publication of an American edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1965 angered him, it also made him a widely admired cult figure in the United States, especially among high school and college students. Uncomfortable with this status, he and his wife lived quietly in Bournemouth for several years, until Edith's death in 1971. In the remaining two years of his life, Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he was made an honorary fellow of Merton College and awarded a doctorate of letters. He was at the height of his fame as a scholarly and imaginative writer when he died in 1973, though critical study of his fiction continues and has increased in the years since.
The world of Middle Earth
Tolkien, a devoted Roman Catholic throughout his life, began creating his own languages and mythologies at an early age and later wrote Christian-inspired stories and poems to provide them with a narrative framework. Based on bedtime stories Tolkien had created for his children, The Hobbit concerns the efforts of a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, to recover a treasure stolen by a dragon. During the course of his mission, Baggins discovers a magical ring which, among other powers, can render its bearer invisible. The ability to disappear helps Bilbo fulfill his quest; however, the ring's less obvious powers prompt the evil Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, to seek it. The hobbits' attempt to destroy the ring, thereby denying Sauron unlimited power, is the focal point of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which consists of the novels The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955). In these books Tolkien rejects such traditional heroic qualities as strength and size, stressing instead the capacity of even the humblest creatures to win against evil.
Throughout Tolkien's career he composed histories, genealogies (family histories), maps, glossaries, poems, and songs to supplement his vision of Middle Earth. Among the many works published during his lifetime were a volume of poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), and a fantasy novel, Smith of Wootton Major (1967). Though many of his stories about Middle Earth remained incomplete at the time of Tolkien's death, his son, Christopher, rescued the manuscripts from his father's collections, edited them, and published them. One of these works, The Silmarillion, takes place before the time of The Hobbit and tells the tale of the first age of Holy Ones (earliest spirits) and their offspring.
Nonetheless, Tolkien implies, to take The Lord of the Rings too seriously might be a mistake. He once stated that fairy stories in itself should be taken as a truth, not always symbolic of something else. He went on to say, "but first of all [the story] must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded literary belief. To succeed in that was my primary object."
Nearly thirty years after his death, the popularity of Tolkien's work has hardly slowed. In 2001 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was released as a major motion picture. The magic of Tolkien's world won over both the critics and public alike as the movie was nominated in thirteen categories, including Best Picture, at the Academy Awards; it won four awards. Two more films are scheduled for release by the end of 2003.
For More Information
Bloom, Harold, ed. J. R. R. Tolkien. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2000.
Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: Allen & Unwin, 1977. Reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Grotta, Daniel. J. R. R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth. Philadelphia: Running Press Book Publishers, 2002.
Neimark, Anne E. Myth Maker: J. R. R. Tolkien. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
Pearce, Joseph. Tolkien: Man and Myth. San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1998.
Shippey, T. A. J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001.
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