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.