Jrr tolkien biography pdf

Continue Professor Ralph C. Wood's recent survey of British readers showed Tolkien's Lord of the Rings to be their overwhelming choice as the all-time favourite of the British book. This news has caused much clucking among intellectuals who know, of course, that this is far from the greatest work of English literature. However, even with the question of rank put aside, there is no doubt that Tolkien's epic enjoys more readers, both young and old, than any comparable set of books. Although it became something of a cult work in the 1960s, it continues to enjoy a large and varied following almost forty years later. It's a wonderful thing, especially in our film at the heart of the age - where, as Alistair Cook darkly observed, reading will soon become a quirky art like manual quilting. Some of my students have admitted that going through all 1,500 pages of Tolkien's epic is their greatest intellectual achievement; this is the first time they have ever gone beyond themselves long enough to master a larger world than their own small space. Others told me, even more tellingly, that reading Tolkien makes them feel clean in a way that nothing else does. While a stinging critique of our cultural decadence, it is also a tribute to something moral and religiously pure in Tolkien's work. In an attempt to understand the Tolkien phenomenon more fully, I suggest this distillation of Tolkien Humphrey Carpenter: Biography (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), as well as other readings I've made. 1. Youth (1892-1910) John Ronald Ruel Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa. Tolkien is actually a Dutch name, but the Tolkiens have long been Anglicized. Tolkien's father, like many other young Englishmen, migrated to a British colony in the hope of making his fortune. But Tolkien's mother was unhappy, living so far from home and in such harsh circumstances. She returned to England after the birth of her second son Hilary, when Ronald was just three years old. Their father contracted yellow fever and before Mabel Tolkien could return to Africa to care for him, he died. So she left a young widow, who was tasked with raising two young sons on her own. Ms Tolkien returned to her native Birmingham to take on the task, renting a cheap cottage on the edge of an ugly industrial town in a village called Sarehole Mill. The mill was no longer used to chop wheat (instead of crushing animal bones for fertilizer), but it became a mystical place for Tolkien's boys. They watched his work for hours as the water fell on the sluice and rushed under a large wheel, driving huge leather straps with pulleys and shafts. The boys also spent happy summer days picking flowers, playing in a sand pit, and invading the mushroom farmer, whom they called the Black Ogre. They soon picked up Warwickshire Warwickshire which included the word gamgee. A Birmingham doctor named Dr. Gamji invented a surgical bandage made of cotton wool, and this name became a household term in the region. (Much later in life, Tolkien and his family were vacationing on a beach in Cornwall when they met an old man who was known for replacing gossip, giving wise advice, and issuing ahead with chestnuts of wisdom. Mabel Suffield Tolkien was a wonderful woman. She was qualified in handwriting and languages with knowledge of Latin, Greek and French. She taught both disciplines to her sons so that young Ronald could read and write professionally before he was four years old. However, her own much in life proved extremely difficult. She did not receive much help from her family in raising these sons. Although once distinguished, Suffields went down in peace. Her father was, in fact, a salesman. They were also unitary, which were scandalized by Mabel's conversion to Catholicism in 1900. So are her husband's Baptist parents. With the exception of one uncle, Tolkien, who provided financial assistance, both families became extremely hostile to Mabel, ostracizing both her and her boys. Becoming a Catholic in England at the turn of the century was to commit a radical counter-cultural act. Although it was a high Anglican church, Mabel Tolkien is now dedicated to the Church of the Historic Enemy of England, the sacrament of Rome. Until recently, England was the most fiercely anti-Catholic country in Europe, thanks to an ancient feud with Catholic France and Spain, the vexing issue of Ireland, Guy Fawkes' plot to blow up Parliament, etc. even her family and country. In no case was it a step not calculated for its own benefit. She sought above all to give her sons a Catholic upbringing for great personal expense, and so she moved herself and her boys next door to the Birmingham Oratory, a large Catholic retreat house located in a suburb called Edgbaston. The oratorical art of St. Philip Nerie is a collection of secular priests living in the community, but without vows of poverty or obedience to any monastic authorities. Given the papal approval in 1575, speakers were introduced to England in 1848 by John Henry Newman after his famous conversion to Catholicism, perhaps after his visit to the oratory of San Girolamo in Rome. Speakers support a very Italian kind of Christianity - the desire to lead people to God through prayer, preaching and ordinances - and through the baroque beauty of their churches. oratorio (Handel is a famous practitioner) grew out of laudi spirituali sung in their religious exercises. Chesterton's friend Iler Bellock was also educated at the Birmingham Orator's Toilet. Tolkien's own faith would be shaped by the attempt of the speakers to navigate the middle path between denying the world asceticism of medieval monasticism and the condescending worldly attitude of much more modern Protestantism. Tolkien's daughter Priscilla assured me when I visited her home in Oxford in June 1988 that this strictly religious upbringing had turned her father into a very prickly kind of Catholic who wouldn't think very highly of a Baptist like me! He was a believer before Vatican II, who despised folk liturgies (longing for the Latin masses) and who had no desire for ecumenical unity. Like Chesterton, Tolkien regarded the Protestant Reformation as a terrible mistake, and he regarded the great Anglican cathedrals as stolen Catholic property! Uncharacteristically harsh language, he called Anglicanism a pathetic and dark medley of half-remembered traditions and disfigured beliefs. Tolkien thus ridiculed his friend C.S. Lewis for being an unrepishable Ulster Protestant! (However, Ms. Tolkien also said that whenever her father explored his creative world, this short fused defensiveness about his faith fell away as he was free from the plumb inexhaustible depths of what Lewis called simply Christianity.) Tolkien remained a convinced rather than the standard issue of the cradle of the Catholic also because he considered his mother a martyr. Mabel Tolkien worked so hard to see that her boys were brought up in the Catholic faith that, weakened by her long labors, she died of diabetes in 1904, when Ronald was 12 years old. Her death made Tolkien a pessimist and a doom-monger. Doom is really a word that sounds like a terrible drumbeat all over the Lord of the Rings. It evokes a frightening sense of destiny and judgment. The death of Tolkien's mother filled him with a deep sense of impending loss, Carpenter said. It taught him that nothing is ever safe, that nothing will last, that no battle will be won forever. Tolkien was sometimes given bouts of depression, unable to attend confession and receive communion. However, he believed that the Crucifixion rightly stands at the center of Catholic worship as a sign of His Son's own sacrifice of God, as well as the doom that hangs over the whole being of life. That this death was weary so soon on his own mother led Tolkien to make this comment about her when he was 21: My dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not for everyone that God provides so simply a path to his great gifts as he did for Hilary and me, giving us a mother who committed suicide with difficulty and problems to provide us with faith (31). Mrs. Tolkien's death also meant that Tolkien and his brother were now orphans. However, she saw them they be placed in the custody of the oratory, where they were made by the wards of one of the priests, Father Francis X. Morgan. He was a kind and humorous man, a nice priest who had already become a central figure in the Tolkien family long before Mabel's death. He then described the practical details of the boys' housing, schooling and finances, and took them on holiday to the beach. Ronald and Hilary served, in turn, as altar boys when he said that early morning Mass, ate in a simple refectory oratorio, and became closely associated with the community of priests who performed the mission of the church. Despite this, Tolkien was severely pushed out of his Edenic innocence and joy into the fallen Adamic world of grief and grief. Tolkien and Lewis will later share this deep sense of maternal loss as one of the main commonalities. That did not mean, however, that Tolkien was a gloomy youth who walked with his mouth drawn down. On the contrary, he was as a child someone he remained as an adult: a cheerful man who loved good conversations, lively friendship and vigorous physical activity. He was a tough rugby player. Chief Tolkien's first joys were found in books, photographs and words. He became a gifted rice-picker who for the rest of his life kept colors and paints at hand at all times; he was particularly talented in landscapes and trees. Just as he regarded horses as the noblest of animal species, so does Tolkien think trees to be the most glorious plants - their slow growth and magnificent beauty gives them a kind of botanical divinity. He loved not only to draw trees, but also to be with them, to live in their presence and to receive their lives - to climb on them, leaning against them, sitting under them, even talking to them. To kill trees thoughtlessly - hack and strut growing green, as Gerard Manley Hopkins called it - was to commit a significant crime. Tolkien was concerned, so when someone knocked out an old willow overhanging pond Sarehole Mill and left the magazine to rot. Although Tolkien's imagination was highly visual, he would realize his images primarily in words, not in pictures. He was attracted to the sound of words no less than their meaning. Later he noticed that the basement door is a magnificent phrase, much more attractive than the word sky, and even prettier than the word beauty itself. Tolkien was also seen by a strange phonic order, which often had words. Starting one of her childhood stories with the phrase green great dragon, his mother told him that it would not do, that it should be a great green dragon. Tolkien spent his life trying to understand this syntax mystery. He was also moved by the wonder of Welsh words, which he saw printed on the sides of coal trucks, finding an almost mystical charm in an unpronounceable name like Penrhiwceiber. On the contrary, there was little attraction for him - not only because he often betokens empty complexity, but also because the grates in the ear with an irritating nasal. Instead, he was attracted to the beauty of Celtic and Germanic, finding in their sound and sense a completely new way to understand the world. Unsurprisingly, the young Tolkien did not enjoy the traditional children's books: Alice in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Piper and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. Like C.S. Lewis, he was moved by Candy George MacDonald's books. They were installed in remote kingdoms, where deformed and evil goblins were hidden under the mountains. Although he was attracted to Arthur's legends, the Tolkien boy found his main pleasure in the Red Book of Faye Andrew Lang. It contained the best story he had ever read, a story about Sigurd, the warrior who killed Fafnir's dragon. It was also a story set in the distant and nameless North - a region at once the richest and most beautiful it has ever encountered, but also the most dangerous. Again with Lewis, the ferocious and dark beauty of The North, the harsh and cruel world of Scandinavian myth and saga, will always be more appealing to Tolkien than the sunny mythologies of the Mediterranean world. This is in line with their own early, bitter experience. When he was later to take up the study of Anglo-Saxon (and become the main authority on Beowulf), Tolkien was struck, as was divine revelation, when he first encountered these lines in an old English poem called Crist by Cynewulf: Eala Earendel enorthast Ofer middangeard monnum sent. (Hello, arendel, bright angels / above the middle ground sent.) Tolkien admitted that he felt kinda excitement, as if something had stirred me up, half waking up from sleep. Behind these words was something very distant, strange and beautiful, if I could understand it, far beyond the ancient English language. Tolkien interpreted Erendel as referring to John the Baptist, the forerunner of Christ, but he also believed that it was the Anglo-Saxon name of Venus, the star that preset the dawn. He figures in the rings of the epic as a shiny gem set on the hunt of the Vingilot ship as he floats across the night sky. As a child, Tolkien invented languages. He and his young friends started with Animalic, a language based in English, somewhat like a Latin pig. The boy nightingale woodpecker forty meant You. He soon came up with Naffarin, who had his own system of sounds and grammar, thus serving as a precursor to the various Elvis languages that Tolkien later developed. Unsurprisingly, such a linguistic genius flourished at King Edward's school, where he was sent after the oratory school could no longer challenge him. Greek and Latin were the basis of the curriculum Edward. Tolkien could read and speak Latin in Latin by the time he graduated from this public school, and once during the debate, he spoke exclusively Greek. Later in life he will break free in Gothic or Anglo-Saxon. At the end of his final year at King Edward's, he and his classmates performed a Greek play in the original language, and they sang the national anthem (God, the king's thus) also in Greek! Before working at Oxford in 1911 at an exhibition at Exeter College, Tolkien took a summer walking tour of Switzerland. There he climbed the great cliffs and crevices of the Alps. Their vast steep and deep provided a wonderful exterior and physical correlate with its own inner and spiritual landscape. There he also found a postcard depicting the mountain spirit of a German artist named Makenerer. He will keep it all his life because it was the origin of one of his most important characters, Master Gandalf. Carpenter describes it: It shows an old man sitting on a rock under a pine tree. He has a white beard and wears a wide-brimmed round hat and a long cape. He speaks to a white fave who sniffs his upturned hands, and he has a humorous but compassionate expression; there is a glimpse of rocky mountains in the distance. Although young Tolkien was obsessed with languages and mythologies, he was not just a bookworm. He fell in love with a fellow student named Edith Bratt when he was 16 and she was 19. It began as a simple novel performed in tearooms, in late-night conversations as they leaned out of the window of their boarding house, and in what they called three big kisses. (Tolkien will later seek to preserve this clean and innocent world of non-genital courtship by showing the magnificent erotic power of handclasp.) Gradually, their love grew into something serious. Father Morgan won't have any of this, despising what Hopkins calls Innocent Mind and Mayday's Girl and Boy. The priest knew that he had been entrusted with the shepherd of genius, and he did not want him to be lost in the youth love. He ordered Tolkien to move out of the boarding house where Bratt lived and break the case altogether. When Ronald and Edith began handing over the recordings to couriers and meeting in secret, Morgan ordered that they not see each other again under any circumstances, and that they did not communicate by mail or by message for another three years. By the time Ronald had reached his majority, Edith would have been pretty ripe 24, and of course that would be the end of it. Most of us will think it's Morgan's incredibly insensitive father who laid down such strict rules, even if we're probably going to treat young Tolkien as utterly spineless for obeying them. The priest knew that young Ronald was an intellectual prodigy, destined for greatness, and that he should not from such extraordinary achievements to the charms of charms Beautiful girl. Father Morgan may also have fed the private hope that this deeply religious boy himself would seek holy orders. Tolkien, for his part, was not a typically rebellious young man, attacking all restrictions. He held to the old-fashioned view that authority existed to be obeyed. Nor was there a small consideration that Father Morgan also served as his surrogate parent, kindly if harshly the man he loved and revered because he was his faithful guardian. So for the next three years, Ronald and Edith had no connections. Second. Early masculinity (1911-1930) Tolkien flourished in Oxford. There he learned the glory of good talk, strong ale, men's company and freshly tucked pipes. He was by no means a book. Like other oxonians, he took their curious slang and indulged in what would become a lifelong love of rather boorish practical jokes. Having already mastered Greek and Latin in public school, he missed them at Oxford, preferring his independent works in German. It came, as we saw, to have an almost mystical relation to words. He considered formulating breath as our greatest gift, one thing animals lack: speech. According to Tolkien, no word is ever arbitrary or just random. As he will show in the Brotherhood of The Ring, even seemingly meaningless childish rhymes like Hey, diddle diddle may have originally served drinking songs. Words come in being because they show, in irreplaceable and uns duplicated ways, the nature of things. Like Adam in Eden, by naming the animals god brings before him, words give life to the established order. The tree is not really a tree until someone calls it. A star is not just a ball of matter moving in a mathematical course; It is also a created miracle, which the word star unequivocally shows. Things, therefore, call their names from us, beckon us to give them their true existence with words. It is an ontological view of language: it arises from the very nature of things and thus is an internal, not outer cosmos. Here Tolkien is directly opposed to the standard post-modernist view that words are traits that show nothing but their differences from other insignia, and thus their origin in the human desire to bring order to chaos. Hence Ferdinand Sossure's widely circulated statement: Language is a system of arbitrary signs... There is no reason to prefer Soeur sister, Ochs boeuf etc... Since the sign was arbitrary, it did not follow any law other than the law of tradition, and since it was based on tradition, it was arbitrary. For Tolkien, on the other hand, language is our fundamental path in real. Also, as a Christian, Tolkien that our logos (words) are rooted in logos (Word), which became flesh in Jesus Christ. Mythologies are the highest examples of this ontological nature of speech. They're Them characters and events and images - the fundamental order of things, the order that we are called not to invent so much as to learn. Tolkien, therefore, believed that he had not invented his magnificent mythology so much as he discovered it. One day, when asked what a particular passage meant, he replied: I don't know; I'll try to find out. I always had a sense, he said, to write down what was already out there. Tales sprang up in his head, he admitted, as these things, and as they came, separately, so too the links grew (92). Tolkien began to view Gandalf and his other central characters not as fictional, but as historical figures! This concept may seem to us a bit of a crack if we see that a complex understanding of language lies behind it. Tolkien despised the idea popularized by The German anthropologist Max Muller that mythologies are diseases of languages. Mueller, unlike the theologian Rudolf Bultman, wanted to go beyond fuzzy and primitive myths to more precise abstractions of modern science. M ller would thus read the myth of Thorr, the Scandinavian god of thunder, as a prescientific attempt to explain the phenomenon that we now know to result from a simple collision of hot and cold air. Tolkien argued that Mueller got things exactly backwards: modern languages of sick mythologies. In the ancient world, people do not seek to abstract from natural events from their human and divine (or demonic) context: they have seen that all four spheres are intertwined into a complex multi-layered whole. In his essay The Feri Stories, Tolkien argues that the word Torre was probably related to the fact that the ancient minks experienced three things at once: human rage in the form of a roaring testy, a howl farmer; the hoarse noise of lightning and thunder; and divine anger, before which we are all judged and found willing. Owen Barfield, one true philosopher among the Inklings, made a similar point about Latin spiritus and Greek pneumatic. Unlike our one-dimensional spirit of words, these words mean wind-breathing-spirit at the same time. For the ancient Greeks and Romans to utter such words was to experience the reality of natural power, plus an invisible sign of human life, as well as the proximity and power of divine reality. It is this original metaphorical and mythological richness we have largely lost in most modern languages. Their scientific abstractions are decaying myths and metaphors. (George Orwell argued that the terrible political price of such selfless locations is that almost any evil can be refuted on their behalf.) Tolkien's high respect for ancient languages also appreciates ancient poetry. Like Chesterton and Lewis, he remained almost entirely opaque for the free verse of experimental contemporary poetry, even with his fellow Christian T.S. Eliot. He Anglo-Saxon and medium average poems like Beowulf, Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the latter of which he translated into the much-admired modern English version. Among the later bards, he was drawn to the 19th century Catholic poet Francis Thompson, and he particularly admired (like C.S. Lewis) the work of William Morris. Like Tolkien himself, Morris sought to retell the ancient English and Icelandic sagas. Thus, Tolkien's own poetry indulges in poetic inversions and archaisms, in drum rhythms and regular rhymes that sound too much like jingling to us. The poet John Heath-Stubbs calls it verse, not poetry: Erendel jumped out of the ocean cup in the gloom of the rim of the middle world; From the Door of the Night, like a ray of light leaping over the twilight edge, and launching its crust like a silver spark from the golden sand Down the sun-drenched breath of the fiery Death Day He sped out of Westerland. Tolkien, during his time at Oxford, was supported not only by the power of words. He was also buoyed by three friendships he made at King Edward School and that continued as the group withdrew in their Cambridge and Oxford studies. Tolkien and his friends discovered the miracle of sharing books and ideas, love and dreams as they met for a daily conversation at a local Birmingham tea club called Burrows. Thus they gave a comically latinate name - Barrovian Tea Club Society -- which they shortened to TCBS. These four young men were united not only in their thorough knowledge of Greek and Latin literature, but also in their common conviction that they were destined to light up a new spiritual light for England. They shared C. S. Lewis's thesis that philia is the only love that does not diminish when it is divided. As one admitted, they felt four times their intellectual size when they met. More perhaps even than his Oxford tutors, these three friends helped shape Tolkien's sense of how to have a unique talent and vocation. It was a blow almost for bearing when two of these three friends were killed in animal horror (as Tolkien called it) of World War I. After graduating from Oxford in 1915, Tolkien himself went to the French front, almost immediately, to take part in the Battle of the Somma. He was spared near certain death only because he contracted trench fever and was sent back to England. Like Carl Barth, Virginia Woolf, and many others, Tolkien felt that a radical restructuring of human life occurred in this prematurely named Great War. Here humanity has taken a decisive step to the abyss. This was the beginning of what Pope John Paul II called the century and culture of death. As George Will observed, more people have been killed in this century than in all previous centuries combined. For the first time in the Western war, the civilian population was not spared, as was laid waste in the new practice of all-out war. Unlike Lewis, Tolkien was constantly affected by his military experience. If the death of his mother taught Tolkien that there was something terribly wrong with the world as a whole, then this war brought him a special wretchedness of modern life, with its ever-threatening means for absolutely destructive purposes. The Lord of the Rings has war and a weapon of total compulsion as its central theme, unlike anything comparable in Lewis's books. Yet, even among the bloated corpses with their horribly looking eyes, Tolkien found strange hope. Although he despised commanders who took on a superb air of power, he deeply admired the rank-and-file and THE NOs who played their part without fuss or fury. Frodo Baggins and Sam Gamji are really Hobbit versions of these common soldiers who slogged forward with no hope of glory or even victory. Tolkien also felt a special calling to realize the slain dreams and hopes of two of his TCBS comrades who were killed. One of them, G.B. Smith, wrote shortly before his death this remarkable confession of Tolkien: My main consolation is that if I scuppered today... there will still be a member of the great TCBS to voice what I dreamed of and what we all agreed on. For the death of one of its members cannot put an end to the immortal four! .... God bless you, my dear John Ronald, and let you say what I have tried to say long after I am not there to tell them if such will mine much. A few months before Tolkien crossed the channel for war, he revived his old love for Edith Bratt. He feared that she might have married at the same time, but she had no other love than John Ronald, and they thus resumed their old relationship where he left off. In an era when the only approved way to outsite romantic love lay in marriage, they were married shortly before Tolkien was sent. On their honeymoon, he began working on a new mythology that was rolling in the back of his mind. It was like the Silmaryls, the three great jewels of the elves, who were stolen from the blessed kingdom of Valinor by the evil being Morgoth, and followed by wars in which the elves try to restore them. This will require the whole mythological system to explain all this; hence his lifelong project called Silmarillion. Edith did not study at Oxford or Cambridge (which of course women still couldn't do) after graduating from public school. Instead, she worked as a secretary, unable to earn a living like the gifted pianist she was. But she turned out to be an excellent nurse, who returned to the health of her war-torn husband. He will never forget their early happiness, especially their long walks in the hemlock wood as he recovered from a trench fever. Her were crows, he wrote, her skin is clean, her eyes are light, and she can sing - and dance (97). Tolkien later insisted that the name of the name be written on Edith's tombstone. She was an elf-girl who sacrificed her immortality to marry mortal Beren, just as Edith Bratt gave up her own ambition to marry Tolkien. After his death in 1973, his children engraved Beren's name on his own marker. Edith Bratt Tolkien sacrificed many, in fact, to become Tolkien's wife. He called her small, and sometimes treated her like a child. For example, he simply insisted that she become a Catholic before their marriage, never explaining how she might come to share her deep intellectual reverence for the Roman Church. She has grown to resent having to make recognition before visiting the masses, regarding these as external duties more than internal needs. Later, when Tolkien became a professor at Oxford, she felt terribly inadequate, often even silent, among other professorial wives with much greater education and cultural achievements than hers. She became known as a wife who did not call and who was thus expelled from the house, which was hosted by other Oxford wives. Worst of all was Edith's dissatisfaction with Tolkien's need for male intellectual companions, especially C.S. Lewis and other Inklings. She saw that he really came to life only among such friends. Although Edith gave birth to three sons and a daughter, and although they raised them among a happy family life, she and Tolkien lived in almost different areas, occupying different bedrooms and keeping their watch. Tolkien had Johnson's fear of sleep, and he often toiled very late, partly because he couldn't work at his desk without a break until Edith went to bed. Nevertheless, Tolkien felt such a huge debt for the sacrifices that Edith made on his behalf that when he retired from Oxford, he insisted that they live in a rather nondescript seaside resort near Bournemouth. He knew she would be happy there, though it meant almost complete isolation from his scientific friends. She remained for him an orphan girl who saved an orphan boy from great loneliness and sadness. Hence Tolkien's poignant recollection of her: Forever (especially alone) we still met in a forest clearing and many times went hand in hand, escaping from the shadow of imminent death before our last show (98). III. Mature years (1931-73) After the end of the war and Tolkien settled into marriage, he soon began to climb the academic ladder - first as a researcher of the Oxford English Dictionary (a centuries-old compilation of the history of each English word), then as a teacher of English at the University of Leeds, and finally as Professor of English and Literature at Merton College, Oxford. The last appointment occurred when Tolkien was only 32 years old, and he spent 35 years. C. S. Lewis, by contrast, never got a professorial job at Oxford, remaining a tutor until, near the end of his life, Cambridge finally made it his Tolkien was a good, but not a great teacher. He was given a fuzzy articulation that made his lectures difficult to understand. Nor was he able to explain himself in clear terms that it was difficult to reduce his mass education in proportions that his disciples could understand. But he was fascinated by Anglo-Saxon and gifted at bringing his subject alive. His Recitations of Beowulf were so marked that W. H. Oden described them as being spoken in Gandalf's voice. Another listener stated that Tolkien could turn the lecture hall into a middle room, where he was a bard while we were feasting, listening to the guests (133). Tolkien remained constitutionally immune to critical theory, believing that literary interpretation could never be turned into science and thus became part of the curriculum. He believed that literature interprets itself more as God reveals itself - in pure secrecy and power. Like Charles Williams, whom he otherwise thought was not one but a few free screws, Tolkien viewed great literary texts as events that would take place largely through reading them aloud. Linguistic and historical research is the only true help for understanding literary texts, Tolkien believes, revealing their original surroundings, and also showing how the author used words, even as a language also made his own constructive use of the author. Tolkien's life was as rich intellectually as it was practically. There was nothing gothic about it. Tolkien lived in a succession of Oxford neighborhoods, occupying houses that had untidy paintings on the wall and electrified coals in the hearth. W. H. Oden was shocked by the heavyness of the furniture. Tolkien attended the morning Mass at the nondescript Catholic Church, and he spent most of his time supplementing his income by doing the mind-blowing work of an external examiner on English essays written at other British universities. Nevertheless, Tolkien believed that inner satisfaction among external simplicity is the eternal call of Christians living in a fallen world to be satisfied with the environment in which we are, no matter what clothes are decent, whatever food is eaten. So he lamented the capture and get the mentality of modern life. He was very distressed by the destruction of his childhood pursuing suburban development, and he so lamented the spread of the highway that he did not own or drive a car after the Second War. As a fierce opponent of all things hurried and space cuts, he scrawled those words through the tax return: Not a penny for Concorde. Although Lewis and Tolkien were united in their disdain for chronological snobbery, which suggests that all modern things transcend ancient things, they were divided on other issues. Lewis never shared Tolkien's Gallophobia, for example. This led to hatred not only of French cooking, but also of hatred Norman conquest! He felt that 1066 meant the end of a thriving Anglo-Saxon culture and its replacement by French and Italian influences, which were almost entirely imidacent to English literature. Lewis, by contrast, was a great master of English Renaissance literature in all its Latina glory. Tolkien also disliked Lewis Narnia's books, perhaps because he rushed them so quickly without developing careful mythology as the basis. The lion, the witch, and tolkien's closet gave this mocking subtitle: The Nymphs and Their Ways, or The Love of Faun's Life. Tolkien was no less critical of Lewis's popular forays into theology, thinking he was completely unqualified to make statements on complex issues in which he had not been deeply studied. When Simple Christianity and Screwtape Letters became bestsellers, Tolkien called Lewis the theologian of everyone. Tolkien also found Charles Williams's work completely alien in his platonizing supernatural, and he lamented his pernicious influence on Lewis, especially in this hidden force. But it was Joy Davidman's dominant presence in Lewis's later life that most deeply angered Tolkien. She was not only an American, but also a divorcee, which Lewis, not before the first meeting with her in 1954, insisted on becoming a central member of the Inklings circle. Tolkien was unaccustomed to treating women as his intellectual equal. When Joy Lewis died in 1961, Tolkien did not attend the funeral or call Lewis afterwards. Yet Lewis never seemed offended by this violation in their friendship. Although he despised Tolkien's poetry privately, he gave generous public praise to the Lord of the Rings, and he wrote a touching obituary that the Times later published after Tolkien's death. Nevertheless, Tolkien never forgot his great debt to Lewis. When Jack died in 1963, the Tollers wrote this touching confession to their daughter Priscilla: Until now I felt the normal feelings of a man my age - like an old tree that loses all its leaves one by one: it feels like an axe blow near the roots. Although Tolkien refused to contribute to the posthumous volume of the essay in honor of Lewis, he spent many hours reflecting on Lewis's latest book, Letters to Malcolm, mostly in prayer. On the deepest issues, they were very deeply agreed upon. They both believed that the Middle Ages were a much more humane and civilized time than our own, and that its class hierarchy was not evil. Tolkien argued in good medieval fashion that everyone should belong to a particular manor house, whether high or low. Knowing your station in life frees one from false ambitions. Tolkien himself was liberated from all social and intellectual vanity. As a monarchist he voted outright tory and yet he got on well with college servants at Oxford - unlike some of his supposed political allies - always looking for a better salary for them. However, he opposed as an attempt to mechanize and formalize equality. He feared that modern egalitarianism did not lead to universalization of humility, but to materialistic slavery. While there was a lot of Tolkien's historical nostalgia for the old feudal and hierarchical society, he also believed that respect for his superiors was spiritually invigorating: Touching a cap to Squire might be damn bad for Squire, but it's damn good for you. This love of ancient patriarchal cultures led Tolkien to share Lewis's passion for Norse mythology and Icelandic sagas, as well as early English literature. This inspired them to create their own similar literature. So they wittily called themselves and their friends inklings, gathering weekly in each other's student rooms, or at the Whitehorse pub (later it was the Eagle and the Child they nicknamed Bird and Baby) to drink beer and read and criticize each other's work. Their main hint concerned the continued authenticity and vitality of the Christian gospel in the secular era. Indeed, it was under the influence of Tolkien that Lewis returned to the church as a professed Christian. Largely because of his own reading and thinking, Lewis abandoned his previous scepticism and believed, albeit reluctantly, in God. However, as a theist, Lewis could only believe in Jesus of Nazareth as a noble ethical example to which we must follow: not as an embodied, crucified and resurrected Christ, the Son of God himself. These are the last concepts, but myths. Like all other myths, biblical stories are beautiful deceptions, mere desire-fulfillment, beautiful lies - even if they lie breathed through silver. In a late-night conversation in the spring of 1929, as they walked up and down in the deer park of Magdalen College, Tolkien explained to Lewis that myths are not dreams that single men project onto an empty universe to cheer themselves up. The great mythical repetitions of dying and rising gods, heroes fighting the forces of evil despite their own defeat, are signs of something transcendentally significant. Our universal myth-making impulse is an anthropological testament to what we create because we were created. Thus, we are once again in action the most fundamental order of the cosmos, distinguishing the basic models of all things: life through death. However, erroneous pagan myths can sometimes point to the Truth. Tolkien gave his argument a thorough exposition in his Andrew Lang Lecture 1937, About Fairies History. There he claimed that mythical tales grope for hope which, in the history of Abraham and Isaac and James and Jesus Christ, finally enters space and time to become a historical reality, God's own myth-fact. Even the most unrealistic quality of fairy tales - their happy ending - points to this truth. They not a universal failure and but in eucatastrage, good disaster. This calamity recognizes the reality of death and destruction, but it shows the finality of Joy --Joy beyond the walls of the world, as acute as grief (86). Tolkien called these fairy-tale endings a distant gleam or echo of the gospel in the real world. The Gospel is the ultimate fairy tale story because it contains the greatest and most conceivable eucatastrof - the birth and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. There is no other tale ever told that people would rather find it was true, and none that so many skeptical men have accepted as true to the merits.... Rejecting it leads either to sadness or anger (88-89). Lewis was so convinced of this argument, as Tolkien laid it out in 1929, that it led to his own conversion to the Christian faith. Although Tolkien spent his life inventing complex mythology to embody this carefully thought-out theology, he never considered himself a man disassembled. He firmly believed in his own abilities as a scientist and author, but did not consider his talents particularly important for the well-being of society as a whole. On the contrary, he felt like another ordinary weak man, a weak member of the human race. This refusal to take himself too seriously gave Tolkien a huge comic sense, with a special sympathy for costume parties and practical jokes. Once at the carnival, he pretended to be a polar bear, and another time dressed as an Anglo-Saxon warrior, chasing on the way an astonished neighbor with an axe. He also competed in swimming competitions, wearing a Panamanian hat and smoking a pipe. Later in life he will be singling out unsuspecting shopkeepers by showing off his extra set of false teeth among the handful of changes he has made to them. And he endlessly treated his children to stories about characters whose names were taken from ridiculous road signs and notifications: BILL STICKERS WILL BE'THEURAED provided the name of an irrepressible villain, and MAJOR ROAD AHEAD revealed his righteous pursuer. He also wrote beautifully illustrated Christmas letters, which were left in the chimney or brought by the postman, and which allegedly told of recent events at the North Pole. One of the stories he wrote for his children grew into a book long, and it was published in 1937 as the Hobbit. It became an unexpected bestseller, and publishers demanded more fiction from Tolkien. Eagerly he gave them his huge and still evolving manuscript of Silmarillion. They were puzzled and bought off by the phone history of this massive mythological chronicle. They demanded more hobbits! Tolkien came across the idea of introducing a new hobbit, Bilbo's son, as the center of history, and giving bilbo's ring found moral rather than magical meaning. In this way, he will be able to link the bourgeois complacency) Baggins to the vast spiritual landscape of Silmarillion. While Bilbo accidentally wandered into this world, his son Frodo (first called Bingo) will be drawn into him, both ethically and religiously. Slowly the connection between the two kingdoms dawned on Tolkien, and he hastily recorded it: Make the return of the ring a motif.... Ring: (he added later), where does his origin come from? Necromancer? Not very dangerous when used for good purposes. But he's going to hit his fine. You must either lose it or yourself (186). The idea was one thing, its implementation is quite another. It was not until 1954, sixteen years later, that the first two volumes of the Rings were published. The Second World War broke out at the same time, and (as C.S. Lewis observed) real events began, horribly to fit the pattern (Tolkien) invented (190). But there were other, less significant reasons for the delay. In addition to the burden of his academic work, Tolkien's own perfectionism and procrastination were major obstacles - not to mention his penchant for chasing linguistic hares. At the end of Book III, he became dead and did not touch the manuscript for six months. At the initiative of Lewis, Tolkien resumed work on it in 1944, reading it aloud to the Inklings at their weekly meeting of pubs. But he went callous again in 1945, didn't finish the storyline until 1947, and completed the final changes and applications only in 1949 - entering successive projects with two fingers, the machine balanced on his attic bed, since there was no room on his desk. So he spent twelve of his best years writing The Lord of the Rings, finishing it as he approached his 60th birthday. But then there was a long bargaining over the actual print, the publisher insisting on three volumes rather than one, and refusing to include Silmarillion along with them. Even then, Tolkien was not completely satisfied. He preferred War of the Ring as the title of the last volume, fearing that The Return of the King gave the plot. The reviews were mixed. W. H. Oden and C.S. Lewis praised the books extravagantly, while Edwin Muir and Edmund Wilson cursed them as a simple juvenilia. There may have been a bit of professional jealousy in Muir's disdain, as Tolkien was uncharacteristically spiteful towards Muir when he ran for election as an Oxford poetry professor. Wilson complained that the characters are not men, but just boys who know nothing about women and who, thus, simply masquerade as heroes. Readers ignored the critics. To the hundreds of thousands they bought and read books, turning an elderly, obscure and financially constrained Oxford professor into a rich man and world celebrity. Fan letters and gifts came pouring in Americans rang in the middle of the night, oblivious to the time difference of six to eight hours. began to arrive without a destination and photos through the windows of Tolkien's house. Tolkien's cult soon emerged, and there were rumors among Californian hippies that he had composed The Rings while smoking marijuana and things even more powerful. Graffiti was scrawled in odd places: Frodo Lives and J. R. R. Tolkien Hobbit-formation. Requirements for film versions and translations came from near and far. Yet Tolkien never lost his sense of irony about it all. Being a cult figure in your life, he wrote, is not unpleasant at all. However, I don't believe it tends to puff one up; in my case, at any rate, it makes me feel very small and inadequate. But even the nose of a very humble idol can not remain completely unsalted from the sweet smell of incense (232). Tolkien was unselfish with his newly-approved wealth, giving much of his (anonymously) to his parish church in the Oxford suburb of Hedington, though he resented much of the tax-free. He also generously provided for his children without even writing down his own postage stamps and razor blades. Tolkien, who was from Oxford, moved to an obscure seaside resort near Bournemouth, where only his friends and associates could find him. After Mabel Tolkien's death in 1971, he was often a lonely, though still active, man. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1972 for his work in philology, not fantasy. He continued in desultory fashion to revise Silmarillion until finally he saw that his son Christopher - who became an expert in his father's fiction - would have to complete it for publication. Christopher Tolkien actually spend the next 25 years living away from the public eye in France while editing and publishing his father's other works in nine volumes of fat, until his own death in the late 1990s. Tolkien himself died on September 2, 1973 at the age of 81. He was buried next to his wife in a simple grave located in the Catholic part of Oxford Public Cemetery called Wolvercote, among Polish immigrants. Dr. Ralph Wood, Professor of English at Baylor University, is an expert at Tolkien and has studied Christian literary classics and inklings (a close group of Oxford literary masters, including C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Tolkien). He taught for 26 years at Wake Forest University, where he won awards for outstanding teaching. His publications include A Journey down the same road: The Lord of the Rings as a Do-Christian Classic, Christian Century 110, 6 (February 24, 1993): 208-11. 208-11. jrr tolkien biography book. jrr tolkien biography movie. jrr tolkien biography pdf. jrr tolkien biography short. jrr tolkien biography facts. jrr tolkien biography wikipedia. jrr tolkien biography video. best jrr tolkien biography

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