When you were younger, did you ever make up stories about the people and places around your home? Maybe there was an abandoned house that in your imagination became haunted by ghosts, or an old neighbor woman that you envisioned as a witch. This fantasizing isn’t very different from what many writers do when they transform their experiences into fiction. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his invention of Middle-earth, has done this to a greater degree than most. The Hobbit and, even more so, The Lord of the Rings were the fruits of a lifetime’s work, and Tolkien incorporated into them the landscape of his childhood, his interest in philology (the study of languages), his religious faith, his own vivid imagination, and his attitudes toward the world and the events happening around him.
The first three years of Tolkien’s life were spent in South Africa, where he had been born in 1892. His mother returned to England in 1895 with him and his younger brother. His father stayed in South Africa, planning to join the family later, but within a few months he contracted rheumatic fever and died.
The Tolkiens settled in the small English town of Sarehole, where the widow struggled to raise her children alone. As he grew, Tolkien showed an aptitude for language, and under his mother’s tutelage studied Latin and French. An avid reader, he especially loved fairy tales. His favorite was the story of Sigurd, the dragon slayer. It wasn’t the hero but the dragon Fafnir who intrigued him. The dragon represented a world that was exciting and dangerous, yet that was safely removed from his own life. Tolkien later recalled, “...the world that contained even the imagination of Fafnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever the cost or peril.” His fascination with dragons was later to appear in the character Smaug in The Hobbit.
Despite their poverty, it was a happy time for the boys, and in later years Tolkien recalled the countryside and its people with great fondness. In fact, the land and the people of Sarehole were to become part of his books, as the Shire and its whimsical inhabitants, the hobbits. You can see elements of his childhood home in hobbit country. The Sarehole mill became an important landmark near Bag End, Bilbo’s home, and the miller’s evil-looking son was transformed into Ted Sandyman, the unscrupulous hobbit who contributes to the polluting of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings. “The Shire,” Tolkien once said, “is very like the kind of world in which I first became aware of things.” At another time, he said, “I took the idea of the hobbits from the village people and the children.” Tolkien became absorbed in the study of language. After his teachers introduced him to Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, he began to read heroic tales such as Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Next he turned to Old Norse and the Norse sagas. On his own, he rummaged through the local bookstore for books on philology and archaic languages. Then he began to invent his own languages and alphabets. He developed complex histories for his languages, earlier words that evolved into later words, just as the Old English “stan” evolved into “stone” in modern English.
Not surprisingly, Tolkien went to Oxford University to study philology. One day he discovered a Finnish grammar book. While the words themselves enthralled him, Tolkien’s imagination was also fired by the tales written in this strange language. He delved into Finnish mythology and found himself wishing that there was such a body of work for England. It was perhaps at this point he first thought of writing a mythology himself.
Now Tolkien began work on a new language, based on Finnish- his “mad hobby,” as he called it. He felt that the language needed a history to support it: a language can’t exist without the people who speak it. Tolkien decided that this language was spoken by a race of elves who had already appeared in the poetry he was writing. This poetry was to form the basis of the vast mythology Tolkien wrote about a land called Middle-earth. just as his languages were based on actual languages, his mythology incorporated elements of the myths and legends that Tolkien admired.
Around this time, World War I began, and England declared war on Germany.
Tolkien entered the British army as an officer. Before going off to war, he married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Bratt. Like Tolkien, whose mother died when he was 12, Edith was an orphan. They had fallen in love when he was 16 and she was 19. Their guardians, however, had found out about the romance and had forbidden the lovers to meet until Tolkien turned 21, when he would legally be an adult. He incorporated this long separation into The Lord of the Rings, in the romance between Aragorn and Arwen.
Tolkien was sent to France, where he took part in the 1916 Battle of the Somme, a costly battle for the Allied forces. The slaughter there of thousands of young British soldiers left a lasting impression on Tolkien. In addition, the land had been desolated by trench warfare and the use of heavy artillery. His description of the desolation around Mordor has often been cited for its resemblance to the war-torn landscapes in Europe. Many of his colleagues who had been through the war saw its influence on Tolkien in scenes where he describes not only the horror of war, but also the sense of close comradeship and the quiet joys of little things. Those who survived the Battle of the Somme faced death from an unexpected quarter in the following months. Influenza and trench fever swept the ranks, affecting soldiers and officers alike. Tolkien contracted a particularly bad case of trench fever and was shipped back to England in late 1916. He spent his long recovery working on his mythology. The war ended in late 1918. Tolkien had survived, only to find that all but one of his close friends had died. To someone who valued friendship so highly, this was a great blow.
Tolkien once said that at the heart of his books is the realization of the inevitability of death. At the age of 24, he had already faced not only the widespread death of the war, but also the personal losses of his parents and friends.
Tolkien slowly returned to academic life. He moved through a series of university positions, culminating in his election to a professorship at Oxford. He published several scholarly works that won respect in his field, including a landmark lecture on Beowulf, the famous Old English epic poem.
But he began to feel increasingly alienated from the world about him. Postwar England was rapidly changing with the growth of technology and industry. The way of life he loved so much and had risked his life to defend in war was disappearing. He watched sadly as trees were cut down and countryside was taken over by city, all in the name of progress.
Tolkien’s answer was to turn to the myths and heroic legends of the past. He also continued to work on his own mythology. By this time, he had developed several new languages and a complex history and mythology, for the races who spoke them. This hobby, as Tolkien modestly called it, was his consuming passion, but he never expected it to arouse much interest in others. He wrote several poems and stories that were published in a university weekly, but there was nothing yet to catch the popular imagination.
That was to change with his invention of hobbits- short, jolly folk with hairy feet and a love of tobacco pipes. One day while sitting at his desk and grading papers, Tolkien came upon a blank page. He wrote on it, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Almost ten years after he had written that first line, Tolkien completed The Hobbit, the story of a timid hobbit named Bilbo Baggins, who sets out on an adventure with a troop of dwarves and a wizard. Tolkien incorporated into his book elements from his mythology, including the dwarves and elves. His childhood memories and the inventive imagination that so delighted his own children gave the book its droll humor and its main character, Bilbo. In the hobbit, Tolkien had found a character his readers could identify with and follow into the heroic world of myth and legends.
The Hobbit was published in 1937 as a children’s book. It was met with great enthusiasm and received several awards, including the prestigious New York Herald Tribune prize as the year’s best children’s book. At the request of his publishers, Tolkien set out to write a sequel to The Hobbit. The publishers had wanted another children’s book, but it soon became apparent that the new book was taking on a more profound meaning and would far surpass The Hobbit in depth as well as length. When Tolkien at last submitted his new novel, The Lord of the Rings, his publisher thought that it was a work of genius but that it would probably be a commercial flop. However, when the first book of the trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in 1954, it had respectable sales that quickly increased to a phenomenal rate. The other books of the trilogy, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, were published sooner than planned because of the popular demand.
The critics offered a range of comment on Tolkien. Some gave him great reviews, and he was awarded a prize for the best fantasy novel of 1956. Others sharpened their pencils and attacked the trilogy mercilessly. They said it was badly written, and dismissed it as escapist fantasy. According to these critics, Tolkien’s popularity would quickly fade. But such negative prophecies proved wrong. Tolkien’s books soon developed a wide following, especially on college campuses in the United States. In the 1960s, Tolkien’s message of love and peace and respect for nature appealed to students looking for new meaning in their lives.
Clubs were formed and fan magazines were published for the sole purpose of discussing his books.
Tolkien, meanwhile, had retired from teaching in 1958. He published several more small works of fiction. But most of his effort went into his mythology, which he still had hopes of publishing. The task was a huge one. Tolkien had an assortment of manuscripts to work with, some dating back to his college days.
Through the years, he had written conflicting versions of some stories from his mythology and had left others unfinished. The inconsistencies had to be ironed out and the gaps filled in. Facts also had to be corrected where they disagreed with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. This work remained unfinished at his death in 1973.
The job of finishing the book was taken on by his son Christopher, who edited the manuscripts and compiled a coherent history of Middle-earth, from its creation through to the events recounted in The Lord of the Rings. In 1977 this history was published as The Silmarillion. If you read it, you will find the book very different from Tolkien’s novels. It contains a great deal of legends and tales, some more fully outlined than others, but none with the plot and character development typical of a story. (In this way, The Silmarillion is even more like the ancient epics than Tolkien’s other books.) If you want to know more about Middle-earth, however, the book contains a wealth of information about the land and races created by Tolkien’s fertile imagination.