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~ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
("Ronald" to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein,
South Africa. ~ When his
father, a bank clerk, died in 1896, he, his mother and younger
brother returned to West Midlands, England.
~ Tolkien lived on the genteel
side of poverty.
~ In 1904 his mother was
diagnosed with diabetes, incurable at that time. She died,
leaving the two boys orphaned.
~ Their caretakers became a
Father Francis, an aunt Beatrice Suffield and a
Mrs. Faulkner.
~ By this time Ronald was
already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered
Latin and Greek, and was becoming competent in Gothic and
Finnish.
~ Just for fun, he made up his
own languages.
~ Among the lodgers at Mrs.
Faulkner's boarding house was a young woman, Edith Bratt.
When Ronald was 16, and she 19, they fell in love.
~ Father Francis forbade Ronald
to see Edith for three years, until he was 21. Ronald stoically
obeyed.
~ He attended Exeter College,
Oxford, where he immersed himself in the classics, Old English,
the Germanic languages.
~ In 1913, he reunited with
Edith. They married in 1914.
~ One of the poems he
discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the
Crist of Cynewulf. He was amazed by the cryptic couplet:
Eαlα Earendel
engla beorhtast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended
(Hail Earendel brightest of angels,
over Middle Earth sent to
men.)
~ "Middangeard" was an ancient
expression for the everyday world between heaven and hell.
~ One day, while grading exams,
Tolkien discovered that a student had left blank a page in his
answer-book. On this page, moved by who knows what, he
wrote: In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. |
~ Tolkien decided he needed to
find out what a hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in and why
it lived in a hole.
~ From this investigation grew a tale he told to his children,
and even passed around. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it
came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, employee of a publishing
house
~ She asked Tolkien to finish
it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, then
chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his 10-year-old son, who loved it.
~ It was published as The
Hobbit in 1937, and became an immediate success.
~ Since then, it has
consistently remained
on children's recommended reading lists.
~ Unwin asked Tolkien to write
a sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien agreed to take up the
challenge, but this project soon developed into something much
larger, much deeper than
a children's story.
~ When The Lord of
the Rings was released, it received mixed reviews, ranging
from the ecstatic to the damning.
~ The BBC put on a condensed
radio adaptation in twelve episodes. Sales so exceeded the
break-even point that Tolkien regretted he hadn't taken early
retirement.
~ Despite all the fuss over
The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien did manage to write and
publish a number of other articles between 1925 and his death.
~ He even collaborated on the
translation of the Jerusalem Bible from the French. He did the
Book of Job.
~ After Tolkien's retirement in
1969, he and Edith moved to Bournemouth. Edith soon died, and he
returned to Oxford to rooms provided by Merton College.
~ Tolkien died two years later.
He was buried beside his wife in a single grave at the Catholic Wolvercote cemetery in Oxford. |
