J.R.R. Tolkien - John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontain, South Africa in 1892. His mother returned to England in 1895 but his father died in South Africa. The young Tolkien and his brother Hilary were raised by their mother for 9 more years before she, too, died. They were then fostered by Father Francis Morgan of the Roman Catholic Church. As a result of his upbringing, J.R.R. Tolkien remained a devout Roman Catholic all his life.
Always interested in languages, John Ronald Tolkien learned to read, write, and speak both Greek and Latin while living with Father Morgan. At the time, English schools still required students to learn Latin. When he was a teenager, Tolkien discovered a grammar book for the Gothic language, and he immediately fell in love with ancient Germanic languages. Moving on from Gothic through the years, especially when he studied at Oxford University, Tolkien became a specialist in Old English (Anglo-Saxon), Icelandic, Norse, and related languages. He eventually learned a little bit (or quite a bit) about many other languages, including Hebrew, Irish, Finnish, Welsh, Babylonian, Dutch, Spanish, French, and others.
Tolkien's gift for linguistics led him down the career path of philology, which in those days was treated with a bit of contempt by the more highly valued literary professionals at major English universities like Oxford. Tolkien nonetheless became instrumental in raising the perceived value of Old English literature and philological studies overall, particularly with his revolutionary lecture, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", which today is cited by many "Beowulf" scholars as their primary inspiration for wanting to study the poem.
However, J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for having written the popular fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The first book originated as an amusing story he composed for his children. Writing down the adventure, Tolkien eventually allowed a family friend to borrow the manuscript. The friend in turn showed it to a publisher, George Allen & Unwin, who offered to publish the book if Tolkien would finish it. The Hobbit was published in 1937 in the United Kingdom and in 1938 in America. It was an immediate success and the publisher urged Tolkien to write a sequel.
At first claiming to have nothing more to say about Hobbits, Tolkien nonetheless set about composing a new adventure which required about 11 years to complete. The new book became not so much another story about Hobbits as about the ending of the days of "magic" and the fairy folk in an imaginary past time. Hobbits were central to the tale, but they were only one element in a complex legend that inspired generations of critics, authors, and readers to devote countless hours to analyzing Tolkien's work.
The Lord of the Rings, when finally published in 1954 and 1955, was a moderate success for ten years. Tolkien had throughout this period published other books (including Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham), but he most wanted to publish a book he called The Silmarillion. Originally set in its own mythology, The Silmarillion became a part of the Middle-earth mythology that Tolkien created for The Lord of the Rings. He spent most of his remaining years, until he died in 1973, struggling to compose a Silmarillion narrative that would be compatible with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
It fell to Tolkien's son Christopher to bring a Silmarillion to publication in 1977. In the following years, Christopher undertook the remarkable task of documenting the various mythologies his father had devised from 1916 -- when he began writing a mythology for England while recoverng from Trench Fever in an army hospital -- up through the late 1960s, when Tolkien began restructuring the Middle-earth mythology to make it more "scientific", or more scientifically valid.
Perhaps the final piece of J.R.R. Tolkien's incomplete legendarium of various attempts to portray a definitive imaginary mythology will be published in 2007: The Children of Hurin. This book, edited by Christopher Tolkien, is expected to tell in full the intriguing story of Hurin and his children, Turin, Lalaith, and Niniel -- a tale that has only been told in various fragmentary or summarized parts in The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales of Numenor and Middle-earth, and The War of the Jewels.
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