Blog: Remembering the Father of Fantasy – J.R.R. Tolkien’s Life and Legacy

J.R.R. Tolkien is easily one of the most well-known and influential authors the world over. His work sells millions of copies every year and he started one of the largest and most thorough fandoms you can find. His work has been translated into all sorts of mass media, from movies to video games, and even has been translated into several musicals. Though this is all well known, his life is not as well known, though it had an amazing effect on his tales. 

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, a part of the Orange Free State (a British province in South Africa) to Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mabel Suffield. His younger brother was Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born two years after Ronald. Though Tolkien thought of himself as English and technically was since he was born and raised in English territory, he was actually German on his father’s side. While he acknowledged that fact, he didn’t know much about his heritage because of his father’s untimely death, and so, didn’t speak much about it.  His ancestors had moved from Germany in the 1770s and started a watch company called Gravell & Tolkien. In the 1790’s, his great-uncle, Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747-1813), became an English citizen, though his great-grandfather, Johann (John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752-1819) did not, though his descendants eventually became citizens.  

In Bloemfontein, Ronald’s father worked as a bank manager making a good living to support his family. They had a good life there and Tolkien had several adventures in his three years living in Bloemfontein, the most well-known story being the spider incident. When he was three, he was bitten by a huge baboon spider, which fans of Tolkien’s work believe may have inspired many of the monstrous spiders in his books, though he later said that he had no memory of that event. However, the good times in South Africa would soon end. In 1896, while Tolkien’s family was in England on what was supposed to be a family reunion, his father died of rheumatic fever, and this was the first loss in the family that Ronald would face. 

 After her husband’s death, Mabel Tolkien took Ronald and Hilary to live in King’s Heath, Birmingham before eventually moving to Sarehole (a Worcestershire village) in 1896, a place that would have a great effect on Tolkien’s life and works. As a child, he would often visit his Aunt Jane’s farm, Bag End, and would explore Sarehole Mill, Mosely Bog, the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, and villages like Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Avenchurch. At home, he and his brother were homeschooled by their mother, who taught them many things, including botany (which would later inspire in Tolkien a love of plants) and the rudiments of Latin, instilling in him a love of languages. Tolkien became an avid reader, learning to read and write fluently at the early age of 4, his favorite books being the works of George MacDonald and Andrew Lang’s “Fairy Books.” Mabel was able to keep this lifestyle going with the support of her family until she officially became a Catholic, causing her to be cut off from financial aid and forced to rely on the church to help her. Unfortunately, even with the help of the church, more unfortunate events were to strike the Tolkien family. 

In 1904, when Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes in the house she was renting in Rednal, a small town on the edge of Birmingham. This forced him and Hilary to be placed in the guardianship of Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Brimingham Oratory. For the next few years, Ronald and Hilary jumped from home to home, living with aunts and in boarding homes, the most notable boarding house being Dutchess Road, Edgbaston, where he would meet his future wife, Edith Mary Bratt. According to Wikipedia, “9 years after her [Mabel’s] death, Tolkien wrote, “My own mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.” (Para 12, sent. 4) No longer able to be homeschooled, he attended King Edward’s School in Birmingham, (which he was able to partially pay for with a scholarship he won in 1903), and later attended St. Phillip’s School. 

 During his time at King Edward’s, Tolkien’s love for languages became more and more apparent, as he picked up studying French, German, Latin, Greek, and took an interest in Old English, Middle English, and Gothic, as well as Welsh and Finnish (two languages that would influence him greatly in the creation of his own languages). His love for reading also never died and in 1911 he met his best friends there, Geoffery Bache Smith, Rob Gilson, and Christopher Wiseman. Together, they formed a semi-secret society called the TCBS (Tea Club & Barrovian Society). The group was dedicated to changing the world through creating something of beauty, something that seemed to be a theme that would last for the rest of Tolkien’s life. 

In October of 1911, he began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. Initially, he majored in classical literature for two years but changed majors to study the English language, Germanic philology, and Old Norse, something he had had a passion for since his days at King Edward’s. Also in 1913, he published his first poem, called “From the many-willow’d margin of the immemorial Thames” in the Stapleton Magazine. When he graduated Exeter, he received a first-class degree in Anglo-Saxon, Germanic languages, and classical literature. 

In that time when Tolkien was attending King Edward’s and, later, Exeter, love was in the air, and the object of his affection was one Edith Mary Bratt, a fellow orphan whom he had met at the age of 16 during his stay at Edgbaston. Edith was three years older than Ronald, but despite that age gap, they still found much to love about each other. Wikipedia quotes Humphery Carter (an English biographer) as saying, “[…] ‘Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, 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 they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided they were in love.’” (Para 18, Sent. 2-5). Their romance went on for a long time into Tolkien’s early college years until Father Morgan (who was still considered Tolkien’s legal guardian at this time) found out and forbade the romance on the basis of three things: Edith’s age, her Protestant faith, and Ronald’s performance in school (which had started to decline as he turned more of his attention towards Edith). He forced Tolkien to cut off all communication with Edith until he reached the age of twenty-one, when he would no longer be under Father Morgan’s guardianship and he agreed. Finally, when Tolkien’s twenty-first birthday rolled around, he sent a letter to Edith asking her to marry him, only to find out that she had already been engaged. However, after meeting with her in the countryside shortly after the letter had been sent, she returned her engagement ring to the other man and agreed to become Mrs. Tolkien. Their engagement lasted a year, with Edith reluctantly becoming a Catholic and finally marrying Ronald on March 22, 1914, at St. Mary Immaculate Catholic Church in Warwick. 

 Their lives remained peaceful until August of 1914, when Britain decided to join World War I. Unlike his contemporaries, Tolkien wasn’t thrilled at the prospect of war. He was a newlywed and wanted to continue his life at Oxford. His family was shocked at his reluctance to join the army and to instead join the University OTC and enter a program to get his degree. However, the war had a way of drawing people in, even when they tried to avoid it. According to Wikipedia, Tolkien said of that time in a 1941 letter to his second son, Michael: “[…]: ‘In those days, chaps joined up or they were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.’” (Para 24, set. 2-3). After he received his degree and could postpone enlistment no longer, on July 15, 1915, he became a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancaster Fusiliers and trained with the 13^th Battalion on Connock Chase, Rugeley Camp for 11 months, hoping in that time to end up in the same battalion as his friend, Geoffery Smith. Joining the army didn’t mean that everything had to change, however. He continued writing and wrote the poem “Goblin Feet,” which was published in Oxford poetry in 1915. He was allowed to live off base near the training camp with Edith until, on June 2, 1916, he received a telegram requiring him to go to Folkstone, England for posting to France. In the same 1941 letter to Michael recalling his time in WWI, Tolkien praised Edith for her “willingness to marry a man with no job, little money and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War.” They spent their last night together at the Plough & Harrow Hotel. When morning dawned on June 5, 1916 – the day he had to leave – he said, “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then…it was like death.” 

Tolkien was sent on an overnight journey to Calais, France, then sent to the British Expeditionary Forces base depot in Ѐtaples where he was assigned the position of signals officer to the 11^th Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers (74^th Brigade, 25^th Division) two days later. On June 27, 1916, he left Ѐtaples and join his battalion in Rubemprē to command enlisted men from mining, milling, and weaving towns from Lancashire, a job that he hated. Wikipedia says, “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.” (Para 25, Sent. 12-13) 

It was in July of 1917 that Tolkien arrived at one of the worst battles of WWI, the Battle of the Somme. In their biography of Tolkien’s life, the Tolkien Estate wrote, “He saw first-hand the horrors of trench warfare and the utter destruction of man, beast and landscape.” (Para. 5, Sent. 5) For the first week, he served in reserve, carrying supplies throughout the trenches. There, he met Geoffery Smith who survived when the 3^rd Stanford Pals were pushed back to Authville wood, which would unfortunately be the last time he ever saw him. Tolkien would later go on to anticipate assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and Leipzig Salient between terms at Bouzincourt. Tolkien’s battalion helped win the Battle of Thiepal Ridge and the Capture of Regina Trench. In his down time, he continued writing his stories (which would eventually collectively become known as The Three Great Tales of Middle Earth), and he kept in contact with Edith, devising a system of dots that she could understand so she could track his movements without having to worry about her husband’s letters being censored by the British Army. 

Tolkien would end up spending 4 months in the trenches before finally contracting the dreaded trench fever on October 27, 1916, an illness spread by the lice that were ubiquitous there. Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, a chaplain for the Lancaster Fusiliers recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by “hordes of lice.” Because of the severity of his illness, Tolkien was taken out of the trenches and spent the rest of WWI in hospitals and doing garrison duties since he was medically unfit for fighting. During this time, he started working on The Book of Lost Tales and was able to meet his first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien while in the hospital. Tolkien’s sickness kept occurring over 1917-1918, but he still worked at some home camps and was promoted to the temporary rank of Lieutenant on January 6, 1918, before being released from active service on July 16, 1919, at Fovant on Salisbury Plain with a temporary disability pension. 

However, not everybody was as lucky as Tolkien was to get out of the war. While Tolkien came out with relatively minimal injuries, many of his college and TCBS friends were killed. Amongst the dead were Rob Gilson and Geoffery Smith, who died of gas gangrene. The Tolkien Estate writes, “Shortly before he died Geoffrey Smith had exhorted Tolkien to pursue the ideals they shared, ‘may you say the things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.’” That left Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman as the only remaining members of the club, though Wiseman suffered the mental scars from his time in the Royal Navy, fighting in the Battle of Jutland on the HMS Superb. 

Though Tolkien had lost many of his closest friends to the war, life moved on and in 1919, he started a new chapter of his life that centered around his academic career. In mid-1919, he tutored undergraduates privately, including those at Lady Margaret Hall and St. Hugh’s College, something that was considered acceptable since he was married. After he was officially demobilized on November 3, 1920, he got a job working at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he primarily worked on the history/etymology of words with Germanic origin starting with the letter W and took up the post of reader of English languages. Two years later, he published A Middle English Vocabulary which was written for students using Kenneth Sisam’s Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose. In 1925, he published his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, co-written with E.V. Gordon, as well as Pearl and Sir Orfeo, which set the academic standard for several decades.  

Tolkien didn’t just stop at Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Since he was now working at Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, it was only natural that he should translate the epic Beowulf, which was finished in 1926, but was never published until 2014 by his son, Christopher Tolkien. However, though it wasn’t published, Tolkien spoke on Beowulf extensively, his most famous lecture on it being “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics.” According to Wikipedia, “Decades later, W.H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the ‘unforgettable experience’ of hearing him recite Beowulf, stating: ‘The voice was the voice of Gandalf.” (Para 34, Sent. 3)   

Tolkien would go on to teach at Oxford for 34 years before retiring in 1959 at the age of sixty, but that didn’t stop him from working on translations of old literature. After he retired, he published Acrene Wisse (a medieval prose) in 1962 and worked as a consultant and translator for The Jerusalem Bible. He also made many contributions to various magazines and books like Gryphon Magazine, Micrcosm, TLS, Yorkshire Poetry, Leads University Verse, etc.  

In the 1930’s during the years of WWII, Tolkien worked as a codebreaker and served in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in case there was a national emergency. He was released from service in October of 1939. 

One of the most notable things that would happen during and after Tolkien’s time at Oxford was the formation of the group called “The Inklings.” Originally, the club was a group of undergraduates who shared a love for writing that Tolkien was a part of. It was there that he met fellow professor and writer, C.S. Lewis, who would eventually become as well-known as Tolkien himself. They found that they shared a similar love for Northern myths and legends and soon became close friends. Eventually, the Inklings dispersed and what was left were Tolkien and Lewis’s friends (including philosopher and author, Owen Barfield, who would meet in pubs or college rooms to read their works-in-progress, drink, talk, and debate.) 

A popular topic for debate amongst the Inklings was that of fairy tales. While some people such as C.S. Lewis thought that they were quaint stories, Tolkien believed that they held a much deeper spiritual and moral value. J.R.R. Tolkien was quoted as saying of fairy tales, “The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the Universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairytale?” In 1939, he delivered a lecture at St. Andrew’s called “On Fairy-Stories”, which was a defense of the fantasy genre and would later be seen as his justification to for writing fantasy, leading to the part of his life that is the most recognizable to fans of his work: the creation of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. 

Many things inspired the creation of Tolkien’s secondary world, but the first thing that inspired him was his love for literature. As a child, he was a voracious reader, with some of his favorite books were the works of George MacDonald, a Scottish author and poet; and the “Fairy Books” by Andrew Lang. In his time at the TCBS, he started writing poetry, and formed a strong dedication to it, which would show in the early drafts of The Silmarillion. At Oxford, Beowulf would also affect his writing with its strong themes of heroism. 

Personal experience would also lend itself strongly to Tolkien’s creation of a secondary world. Growing up in Sarehole, England, he would often visit his Aunt Jane’s farm, which was called Bag End, a name he took when creating the home of Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit. Other villages and landmarks in and around Sarehole would inspire other places and scenes in his work. Many years later, Tolkien would go on a summer trip to Switzerland where he and twelve others went on a hike from the town of Interlaken to the village of Lauterbrunnen and the moraines beyond Mürren in the Bernese Highlands. That trip would be remembered vividly in a letter written in 1968 where Tolkien confirmed that it was the basis for Bilbo’s journey through the Misty Mountains to Erebor. Even WWI had an effect on his writing, inspiring the fire and brimstone land of Mordor, the stronghold of the Dark Lord, Sauron, the villain of The Lord of the Rings. 

However, the most beautiful story to be inspired by real life events was that of Beren and Luthien. Tolkien said of this experience in 1971 after Edith died, “‘I never called Edith Luthien – but she was the source of the story that became The Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and 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, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.”  

Language was also a huge factor in Tolkien’s creation of his legendarium as it was something he had loved and been exposed to from a very young age. The first invented language he ever came into contact with was Animalic, a language invented by his cousins. It clearly left a lasting impression as he would go on to create another language with them called Nevbosh and later independently created one called Naffarin. In 1909, he wrote “The Book of Foxrook” which is the earliest example of one of his invented alphabets. For the rest of his life, he would go on to create many different languages and dialects for the peoples that inhabited his books.  

Other influence in his books came from the things he studied and believed. Themes from Christianity, medievalism, mythology, archaeology, and ancient and modern literature can be found throughout his works and as seen in his languages, philology played a large role in his writing as well. The Lord of the Rings trilogy was especially influenced by European mythology, complete with maps and languages that Tolkien created. 

 Now that his influences have been established, it’s time to talk about his first book, The Silmarillion. While The Silmarillion wouldn’t be published until after his death by Christopher Tolkien amongst other works of his, it was a collection of the stories that he had been thinking up since his time in and recovering from WWI. The three he had started working on for The Silmarillion were The Fall of Gondolin, Beren and Luthien, and The Children of Hurin, and he would spend the majority of his life writing and rewriting different versions of these stories and others, hoping to finish them in his retirement. When The Lord of the Rings was being published, Tolkien offered the unfinished version of The Silmarillion to his publisher, but they rejected it due to paper shortages and thinking that no one would want to read it. Tolkien thus continued to work on his mythology, but never fully finished it as he had hoped to, thanks to the press from the success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings constantly interrupting him. 

Though The Silmarillion was technically the first thing he wrote, it was The Hobbit that was the first full story that Tolkien ever published. It was first created as Tolkien was grading papers at Pembrook College when he suddenly wrote on a blank piece of paper in a student’s exam book, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.” From there, he began to build the story, curious to figure out what this “Hobbit” was and why it lived in a hole in the ground. The story soon evolved into a children’s story for his four kids, John, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla, complete with over 100 illustrations. Eventually, he decided to publish the story and in 1937, it hit the shelves with Tolkien’s illustrations, maps, and dust jacket design, becoming an instant classic. 

Shortly after The Hobbit was published and became a massive success, Stanley Unwin (Tolkien’s publisher from Allen & Unwin) asked for another book about Hobbits. Tolkien, not exactly having anything else on Hobbits at the time, sent in the unfinished manuscripts for The Silmarillion, but they were quickly rejected, forcing him to begin the herculean task of writing The Lord of the Rings. The three-volume series was finished in 1948, twelve years after it was begun at Pembrook College. Tolkien described it as being a “monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children.” Unlike The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings wasn’t a children’s book, but rather was a work of epic fantasy for adults that served as a sequel to both The Hobbit and The Silmarillion, filled with history and lore. Tolkien would often stop writing for months just to fix historical or linguistic problems within his book to make sure that it was absolutely perfect and consistent with the stories he had already written. However, even after all that work, Tolkien would have to wait for three more years before he ever saw the story be published. Ultimately, he had to write a letter to Allen & Unwin to finally get the ball rolling on its publication, basically telling them that something was better than nothing. They had asked for more Hobbits, and he had given them more Hobbits. Thus, Allen & Unwin agreed to publish his “monster,” despite the threat of financial loss due to how large and different it was to its predecessor. Finally, in 1954, the first book of the series The Fellowship of the Ring came out, and in 1955, the last two books, The Two Towers and The Return of the King, became available to the public, completely surpassing Tolkien and the publisher’s expectations with how many copies were sold. 

However, despite the number copies being sold completely surpassing expectations, The Lord of the Rings didn’t become super popular until a copyright dispute between Ace books and Ballantine books that took place in the 1960’s. At the time, Allen & Unwin was pushing for The Lord of the Rings to be released in a paperback format, something that Tolkien was opposed to due to his dislike for paperback. However, Ace books thought that if Tolkien wasn’t going to officially release a paperback edition of his books, they would and make a lot of money while doing so. Thus, they exploited a legal loophole and published an unauthorized paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings. In response, Ballantine books – a paperback distributing company in the U.S. who was given the rights to publish paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings in response to Ace books’ unauthorized publications – launched a copyright dispute with Ace, bringing more attention to the books than ever before. Ultimately, Tolkien and Ballantine books won, and the series reached a new audience as it was embraced by 60’s counterculture movement in America. 

The success of The Lord of the Rings brought Tolkien a lot of unwanted attention. Not only was he uncomfortable with all the press he was getting, but he also had to take his phone number out of the public directory to keep fans from constantly calling him. Eventually, the attention became so bad that he ended up having to move from his home to the seaside town of Bournemouth to get away from the fans. It was there that he and Edith would spend their last years together. 

Edith would die in 1971 at the age of 82, leaving Tolkien to live the last two years of his life alone. In 1972, Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters and the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, made him the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year’s Honors for his contributions to the arts and bestowed upon him the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace. A year later, on September 2, 1973, Tolkien died of a stomach ulcer and a chest infection. His body was lain to rest with Edith’s, and on their shared headstone are carved the names “Beren” and “Luthien” after the main characters of the story he had created based on his love for his wife. 

Today, Tolkien’s legacy lives on in the minds of every person who has read his work or has read something close to it. He is now considered the father of the high fantasy genre, as he had brought it to light and made it popular through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. His works have sold over 100 million copies and have been translated into over 25 languages. The success of The Lord of the Rings has caused people to form loyal fan clubs that learn his languages and everything they can about his secondary world out of love for the books. People loved and still enjoy the story for its secondary world and themes of loss, friendship, and self-sacrifice, leaving a lasting legacy that has transcended even the rapidly changing world of today.  

Until next time,

M.J.

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https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/jrr-tolkien. Biography.com. Updated: 9/11/19 Copyright: 2024. Accessed: 2/13/24. J.R.R. Tolkien

https://www.tolkienestate.com/ The Tolkien Estate. Copyright: Tolkien Estate Limited 2022. Updated: Unknown. Accessed 2/13/24.

https://tolkienlibrary.com/abouttolkien.php Tolkienlibrary.com. Copyright: Unknown. Updated: Unknown. Accessed: 2/13/24. Tolkien Bibliography.

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