J.R.R. Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (pronounced /dʒɒn ˈɹʷɒnld ˈɹʷuːəl ˈtʰɒlkiːn/) (Bloemfontein, now South Africa, January 3, 1892-Bournemouth, Dorset, September 2, 1973), often cited as J. R. R. Tolkien or JRRT, was a British writer, poet, philologist, linguist and university professor, best known for being the author of the classic heroic fantasy novels The Hobbit i>, The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair at Oxford University, teaching Anglo-Saxon, and from 1945 to 1959, he was Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton. He was close friends with fellow writer C.S. Lewis and both were members of an informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on March 28, 1972.
After his death, Tolkien's third son, Christopher, published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion and The Sons. of Hurin. These books, along with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of short stories, poems, fictional stories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world. called Arda, and more extensively over one of its continents, known as Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the word legendarium to most of these writings.
While writers such as William Morris, Robert E. Howard, and E. R. Eddison preceded Tolkien in the fantasy literary genre with such famous and influential works as Conan the Barbarian, the highly successful of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings when they were published in the United States led directly to the popular revival of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as "the father" of modern fantasy literature, or more specifically, high fantasy. Tolkien's works have inspired many other fantasy works and have had a lasting effect on popular culture. In 2008, The Times newspaper ranked him sixth in a list of "The 50 Greatest British Writers Since 1945".
Biography
Tolkien Family Origins
As far as we know, most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in the German state of Lower Saxony, although it had settled in England in the 18th century, and intensely adapted to their culture. The surname "Tolkien" is the anglicized form of the German "Tollkiehn", whose origin lies in tollkühn ('daredevil'). In contrast, the Suffield family, Tolkien's maternal ancestors, had strong roots in the city of Birmingham, where they traded at least since the early 19th century, after moving there from Evesham, Worcestershire..
Childhood
John Ronald Reuel was born in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Free State, on the evening of Sunday, January 3, 1892. His parents were Arthur Tolkien and Mabel Suffield, both from the United Kingdom. He received the same name as his paternal grandfather, John, because in his family it was customary to call the firstborn of his eldest son that way. His half-uncle John his, the eldest of John Benjamin Tolkien's sons, had only daughters, so Arthur decided to name his son after custom. Her middle name, Ronald, was given at Mabel's wish, as she believed the baby was going to be a girl and she planned to name her Rosalind, and she eventually chose Ronald as her replacement. Reuel, which comes from the ancient Hebrew and means 'close to God', was his father's middle name, Ronald would be the name his parents, relatives and his wife would use, despite not feeling totally identified with him; Those close to him called him John Ronald, "Tollers" or simply Tolkien.
The boy was baptized on 31 January in Bloemfontein Cathedral. Later, as Ronald was just walking, a tarantula bit him in his garden, an event some say has parallels in their stories, although Tolkien admitted to having no recollection of the accident and no fear of spiders as an adult. On 17 February 1894, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur, was born.
Although Arthur wanted to stay in Africa, the climate of the place affected Ronald's health, so in 1895, when he was three years old, he moved with his mother Mabel and his brother Hilary to England, where they it was to be an extended family visit, while her father remained in Orange, in charge of the sale of diamonds and other precious stones for the Bank of England. Arthur Tolkien's intention was to join his family in England, but he died on February 15, 1896 of rheumatic fever. His surprise death left the family with no income, so Mabel had to take their children to live with his own family in Birmingham.
That same year they moved again to Sarehole (now Hall Green), then a small town in Worcestershire, later absorbed by Birmingham. Ronald loved to explore the nearby Moseley Bog Forest and Sarehole Mill, as well as Clent and Lickey Hills, places that would later inspire passages in his works, along with other Worcestershire locations such as Bromsgrove and Alvechurch., Alcester (Warwickshire) and his aunt's farm, Bag End ("Bag End"), a name he would use in his stories.
Mabel took care of the education of her two children. Ronald was a very diligent student. His great interest in botany came from Mabel's teachings, which awakened in her son the pleasure of looking at and feeling plants. Ronald enjoyed drawing landscapes and trees, but his favorite lessons were those related to languages, since his mother began to teach him the basics of Latin at such an early age. In this way, he could already read at the age of four and write fluently soon after.
Tolkien attended King Edward's School in Birmingham. While a student there he took part in George V's coronation parade, being staged just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace, he was later enrolled in St. Philip's School of Birmingham Oratory.
In 1900, Mabel and her two children converted to Catholicism despite strong opposition from her Baptist family, who consequently withdrew all financial support they had been giving since she became a widow. In 1904, when Ronald was twelve years old, she Mabel she died of complications from diabetes - a very dangerous disease before the advent of insulin - at Fern Cottage (Rednal), where she lived with her children in a rented house.. By remaining Catholic in the face of the withdrawal of family financial support, Ronald lived throughout his life convinced that his mother had been a true martyr for his faith, which made a deep impression on his parents. own Catholic beliefs.
During their orphanhood, Ronald and Hilary were raised by Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a Catholic priest at Birmingham Oratory in the Edgbaston area. Morgan, Andalusian although of a Welsh father, had supported Mabel Tolkien morally and financially after her conversion and had taught the young Ronald the basics of the Spanish language that he would later use in the creation of his "naffarin". The Oratory was almost in the shadow of the towers of Perrott's Folly and Edgbaston Waterworks, which would inspire images of the dark towers of Orthanc and Minas Morgul from The Lord of the Rings.
Another notable influence on him at this stage were the medieval romantic paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, many of whose works now belong to the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, which exhibited to the public from 1908.
Youth
In 1908, at the age of sixteen, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt at the orphanage, with whom he fell in love despite being three years younger. Ella Morgan's father forbade him to meet, talk about her, or even correspond with her until he was twenty-one, which the young man obeyed to the letter.
In 1911, while at King Edward College in Birmingham, Tolkien formed with three friends (Robert Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman) a semi-secret society known as the T.C., B.S., the Initials of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society ("Club de Té y Sociedad Barroviana"), alluding to his love of tea in Barrow's Stores, near the school, as well as in the library of the school itself (illegally). After leaving school, the members kept in touch. In fact, they held a "council" in London, at Wiseman's. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong impetus to write poetry.
Beyond the intimate unions of literature, study, and play, flowed a greater purpose. According to John Garth, writer, editor and researcher, awarded for his work Tolkien and the Great War. In The Rise of Middle-earth (Tolkien and the Great War), Smith "declared that through art, the four would have to leave the world better than they found it." In addition, Smith believed that he and his colleagues had a responsibility "to restore common sense, hygiene, and the love of real and true beauty to the breasts of all". Tolkien stated a view that "they had a world-shaking power". ”".
In the summer of 1911, Tolkien took a holiday in Switzerland, a trip he recalled still very vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's journey through the Misty Mountains (including the "slide down the slippery stones to the pine forest") is directly based on his adventures with his group of twelve hiking companions from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on their camping in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien recalled his deep sorrow at leaving the sights of the perpetual snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn, "the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams."
After much hurdles and impediments from Father Francis (who wanted Tolkien to focus on finishing his English studies at Oxford with honours), on the same evening of her twenty-first birthday Tolkien wrote a letter to Edith to declare his love and ask her if she wanted to marry him. She replied that she was already betrothed, as she believed that Tolkien had forgotten her. They met under a railway viaduct, where they renewed their love for her, whereupon Edith returned her engagement ring and decided to marry him. After becoming engaged in Birmingham in January 1913, Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence, and they were married on 22 March 1916 at Warwick.
Before his marriage, his travels took him to Cornwall where, owing to his childhood love of scenery, he was struck by the sight of the unique Cornish coastline and sea. He graduated in 1915 from Exeter College, where Joseph Wright, Professor of Historical Linguistics, had been a major influence on Tolkien's interest in different languages, with an honors degree in English Language, in the modality "English Linguistics and Literature to Chaucer».
After graduation, Tolkien joined the British Army then fighting in World War I. He enlisted in the rank of second lieutenant, specializing in signals (transmissions), in the 11th Service Battalion, Lancashire Rifles, which was sent to France in 1916 with the British Expeditionary Force. Tolkien served as a communications officer at the Battle of the Somme until he fell ill with trench fever on October 27, for which he was transferred to England on November 8.
While convalescing in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, he began work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales with "The Fall of Gondolin". Between 1917 and 1918, he suffered relapses of his illness, although he had recovered sufficiently to do maintenance work at various camps, after which he was promoted to the rank of lieutenant. When he was posted to Kingston upon Hull, he went walking with his wife one day through the woods of nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a thick grove of hemlocks, surrounded by white flowers. This scene inspired the passage of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as "his Lúthien". Tolkien and Edith had four children: the priest John Francis Reuel (1917-2003), the schoolteacher Michael Hilary Reuel (1920-1984), the writer Christopher John Reuel (1924-2020) and the social worker Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929-2022).
Maturity
Tolkien's first civilian job after the war was as an editorial assistant lexicographer for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked for two years mainly on the history and etymology of words in Germanic origin beginning with the letter W, tracing its origin to High German, Middle German, and even Old Norse., reforming with his teaching the teaching of this discipline. In Leeds he met E. V. Gordon, with whom he published what is considered the best edition to date of the anonymous Alliterative Revival work, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, written in Middle English in the late XIV century.
In 1924 his third son was born, Christopher, who would be in charge (with the collaboration of his wife Bailey Tolkien) of posthumously publishing all the manuscripts that his father had left scattered around the study in his house on Northmoor Road. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. It was during his stay at Pembroke that Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings .
Although Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become so popular, in 1937 C. S. Lewis persuaded him to publish The Hobbit, originally written for his children. it attracted adult readers, and became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, so Tolkien was asked to write a sequel to the work. In 1929 his daughter Priscilla was born.
In 1928 Tolkien assisted Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the excavation of a Roman asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Regarding academic publications, his 1936 lecture entitled "Beowulf: the monsters and the critics" had a decisive influence on studies of the Beowulf myth.
At Oxford, Tolkien became friends with the professor and writer C. S. Lewis, (future author of The Chronicles of Narnia), with whom he initially disagreed because of his religious convictions (Lewis was an agnostic, and later became a Protestant), but who ended up being one of its main proofreaders, along with the other members of the literary club they formed, the Inklings. Its members met on Fridays before lunch at the Eagle and Child pub, and on Thursday nights in Lewis's rooms at Magdalen College to recite the works that each one composed, as well as romances and excerpts from the great epic works of Northern Europe.
Since his teens, Tolkien had begun writing a series of myths and legends about Middle-earth. He was missing in his country a mythology of the character of the Greek, for example, and he proposed to invent "a mythology for England", which would later give rise to The Silmarillion, originally called The book of lost tales. These stories are supposedly inspired by a story published in 1927 by Edward Wyke-Smith entitled The Wonderful Land of the Snergs (also the Finnish Kalevala, the Scandinavian sagas and, in general, a bit of all European mythology of whatever origin).[citation needed]
Old Age
In 1957, Tolkien traveled to the United States to receive honorary degrees from major universities, including Marquette (where the original manuscripts of his works are preserved today) and Harvard. The trip had to be cancelled, as Edith fell ill. Tolkien retired two years after his tenure at Oxford. In 1961, C. S. Lewis proposed him as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the jury rejected the proposal for his "poor prose". In 1965, the first edition of The Lord of the Rings was published. > in the United States. In 1968 the Tolkien family moved to Poole, near Bournemouth.
At this time he was made an honorary doctorate by various universities, a vice-president of the Philological Society, and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1969. In his honour, the North American Mythopoeic Society and the British Tolkien Society were founded, as well as dozens of similar societies in various countries.
Death
Edith died on November 29, 1971, at the age of 81. Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he died 21 months later, on September 2, 1973, aged 81, and was buried in the same grave as his wife. This tomb, located in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, bears the names "Beren" and "Lúthien" for Ronald and Edith, respectively, taken from the legend included in The Silmarillion about the love between these two beings of different natures (the elven maiden Lúthien and the mortal Beren) and of the theft of one of the Silmarils.
Thought
Religiosity
Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and thus felt himself to be the instrument of C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity. However, he was disappointed when it became Anglican (a Church Tolkien considered a distortion of Catholicism based on the 'true' and 'enduring hatred' of it) instead of Catholic.
Tolkien educated his children intensively in his religion. In a letter dated January 8, 1944, and addressed to his son Christopher with the intention of encouraging him, he urges him, after explaining a little bit of Catholic doctrine, to resort to praise: "I use them a lot (in Latin): the Gloria Patri; the Gloria in excelsis; the Laudate Dominum; the Laudate pueri Dominum, one of the Sunday psalms, and the Magnificat” and the letter goes on to point out various other religious ways to seek tranquility and inspiration.
In his later years, Tolkien was deeply disappointed by the reforms and changes brought about after the Second Vatican Council, as his grandson Simon Tolkien recalls:
I remember vividly when I went to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a Roman Catholic devotee and was soon after the Church changed the liturgy of Latin to English. My grandfather obviously did not agree with that and gave all his answers in a very loud Latin voice while the rest of the congregation responded in English. The experience was frightening to me, but my grandfather gave it the same. I just had to do what I thought was right.
It is a common comment, that there are parallels between the Middle-earth saga and certain events in Tolkien's life. It is often argued that The Lord of the Rings represents England during and immediately after World War II. Tolkien ardently repudiated this view in the preface to the second edition of his novel, declaring that he preferred applicability to allegory. Fairy tales are valid because they are consistent with themselves and with some truths about reality. He concluded that Christianity itself follows this pattern of internal consistency and external truth. His belief in the fundamental truths of Christianity and its place in mythology leads commentators to find Christian themes in The Lord of the Rings , despite its notable lack of overtly religious references, ceremonies religious or appeals to God. Tolkien vehemently objected to C. S. Lewis's use of religious references in his stories, which were often overtly allegorical, however Tolkien wrote that the Mount Doom scene exemplifies lines from the Our Father. However, it cannot be ignored that in his reply letter (Letters no. 142), Tolkien acknowledged that: "The Lord of the Rings is, of course, a fundamentally religious and Catholic work." His love of myths and devout faith were united in his belief that mythology "is the divine echo of Truth". He expressed this view in his poem "Mitopoeia", and his idea that myths contain certain "fundamental truths" became a central theme of the Inklings as a whole.
Political Thought
Tolkien's political ideas were guided by his strict Catholicism, so his views were predominantly conservative, in the sense of favoring established conventions and orthodoxies over innovation and modernization.[citation required]
Anti-communism
Tolkien supported the Nationalist side (led by Francisco Franco) during the Spanish Civil War, after learning that "red" militiamen were destroying churches and killing priests and nuns in the Republican zone. After meeting him in 1944, Tolkien expressed his admiration for the Catholic South African poet Roy Campbell, whom he considered a defender of the Catholic faith for his actions with the Francoist side.
Tolkien despised Joseph Stalin. During World War II, he referred to him as "that bloodthirsty old murderer". However, in 1961 Tolkien strongly criticized a Swedish commentator who had branded The Lord of the Rings a anti-communist parable and identified Sauron with Stalin, to which Tolkien expressed that the situation in the novel had already been conceived long before the Russian Revolution.
Opposition to Nazism
Following the prevailing opinion in Great Britain at the time, he agreed with the policy of appeasement advocated by the Chamberlain government. However, Tolkien consistently condemned the Nazi Party's racial doctrine and anti-Semitism as "utterly pernicious and unscientific". When, in February 1938, his publishers in Germany asked for confirmation as to whether he was of Aryan descent, he submitted two drafts. responses different from their English publishers. In the one that is preserved (that is, the one that was not sent to Germany), after ridiculing the mythification of the Aryan (Hindu or Persian) origin of the Germanic peoples, he replied:
[...] if I must understand that they want to find out if I am Jewish originI can only answer that I'm sorry to say No. I have ancestors who belong to that gifted town. [...] I have become accustomed to consider my German surname with pride, and I continued to consider it this way throughout the period of the unfortunate last war, during which I served in the English army. However, I cannot fail to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this species have to become the rule on issues related to literature, then it is not far from the moment when having a German surname ceases to be a source of pride.
In 1967 he protested against a description of Middle-earth as "Nordic", a term he disliked because of its association with the similarly named racial theory. Tolkien held nothing but contempt for Hitler, accusing him: "Ruin, ruin, it perverts, misapplies and makes forever curseable that noble Nordic spirit, supreme contribution to Europe, which I have always loved and tried to present in its true light". Later he would speak of Hitler as one of the "military idiots", "a rascal vulgar and ignorant, as well as having other faults (or the source of them)". On the other side, his own, he also disliked the demagogic and Manichaean anti-German propaganda used during World War II to bolster the British war effort.
Amazingly, in 1943 he wrote:
My political opinions are more and more inclined towards anarchism (concerned philosophically, which means the abolition of control, not barbarous men armed with bombs) or to the “unconstitutional” monarchy. It would arrest anyone who used the word State (in any other sense than the starvation of England and its inhabitants, something that lacks power, rights or mind) [... ]
These words have led him to be described as a "monarchic anarchist".
Accusations of racism
The issue of racism in Tolkien's work has been the subject of some scholarly debate. Christine Chism classifies the allegations into three distinct categories: intentional racism, an unconscious Eurocentric bias, and an evolution of latent racism in his early days. works, to a conscious repudiation of the racist tendencies in his later works. John Yatt has written: "The 'whites' are good, the 'darks' are bad, the orcs are the worst of all". Critics like Tom Shippey or Michael D. C. Drout disagree with such a sweeping generalization from Tolkien's "white" and "dark" men into "good" and "bad." Tolkien's work has also been defended in this regard by outspoken racists such as the British National Party.
His stance on racial politics in Germany has been discussed above; about the living conditions of people of color in South Africa, before apartheid , he wrote to his son Christopher:
As for what you say or suggest of the "local" conditions, I knew them. I don't think they've changed a lot (not even worse). I heard them from my mother; and I have still taken a special interest from that part of the world since. The treatment of color almost always horrifies the one coming out of Britain, and not just in South Africa. Sadly, it is not many who have long preserved that generous feeling.
Pacifism
Tolkien lost most of his friends in the trenches during World War I, making him unfailingly anti-war in general. Near the end of the Second, he declared that the Allies were no better than the Nazis and that they behaved like orcs in their calls for the complete destruction of Germany. In some fragments of the Letters to his son Christopher, he reveals the bitterness and human uselessness caused by the war, and compares real events with those of his books: «... we are trying to conquer Sauron with the Ring. And (apparently) we will succeed. But the price is, as you know, breeding new Saurons and slowly turning men and elves into orcs." Appalled by the atomic bombings on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he referred to the Manhattan Project scientists as "lunatic physicists" and " builders of Babel". He also wrote: "[...] I know nothing about British or American imperialism in the Far East that does not fill me with pain and disgust [...]".
Conservationism and environmentalism
Tolkien, a great lover and defender of trees and forests, showed great respect for nature in his writings. He also expressed his rejection of the side effects of industrialization, which he considered devouring the English rural landscape. This conservationist attitude can be perceived in his work, the most palpable case being his portrayal of the "forced industrialization" of the Shire at the end of The Return of the King .
For most of his life he was hostile even to automobiles, preferring to ride his bicycle. He caricatured this aspect of his personality in Mr. Bliss, a children's story lavishly illustrated by himself and edited posthumously by Baillie Tolkien.
Literary work
Poems
The first poem Tolkien managed to get published was The Battle of the East Field in 1911, when he was nineteen years old.
Tolkien had long been interested in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, and had read various works in Old English, including the anonymous poem Christ I; two lines of it particularly impressed him:
Eala Earendel agla beorhtast.
Ofer middangeard monnum sendedHail, Earendel, the brightest of angels.
Sent to men on the middle ground— "Christ I", anonymous (verses 104-105).
In 1914, inspired by these lines, he wrote the poem The Voyage of Eärendel, the Evening Star, which recounted the journey through the sky of the sailor Eärendel, later to become Eärendil. This poem it would be essential in the development of his future legendarium.
Tolkien went on to write numerous poems, some of them related to his legendarium and which would later be included by his son Christopher in the volumes of The History of Middle-earth. In 1917, while hospitalized with an illness contracted during World War I, he began work on other poems that would become the basis for the main stories in The Silmarillion: The Tale of Tinúviel, Turambar and the Foalókê, and The Fall of Gondolin; over the years, these poems became prose texts that evolved into the stories of Beren and Lúthien, The Children of Húrin and The Fall of Gondolin, respectively.
In 1953, he successfully published the poem The Return of Beorhtnoth, Son of Beorhthelm, although it had already been finished since 1945. Written in alliterative verse, it is a continuation of the unfinished Anglo-Saxon poem The Battle of Maldon.
In 1961, an aunt asked him to write a book dedicated to Tom Bombadil, a character who appears in The Lord of the Rings. Although only the first two poems are dedicated to the character, Tolkien titled the collection The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Poems from The Red Book, and included other poems dating from the 1920s.
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and other Red Book poems can be found summarized (along with poems) in Tales from the Perilous Realm, which contains many short works of the fantastic genre.
Roverandom
J. R. R. Tolkien has always used to narrate stories to his own children, for the most diverse reasons. Thus, he conceived the story of Roverandom in 1925, as a story for his sons John (eight years old) and Michael (five) during a vacation. Michael had been very fond of one of his toys that summer: a miniature, lead dog painted black and white. Unfortunately, one day while walking on the beach with his father, he left it on the ground to play and lost it. Although Tolkien and his two eldest children spent hours looking for it, it was not possible to recover it, so the author imagined the story we know today as Roverandom to comfort little Michael.
This is a children's story that tells the story of a puppy named Rover who bites a witch, for which he punishes him by turning him into a toy. A boy buys that toy, but loses it on the beach. So, the sorcerer of the sand makes him live adventures from the Moon to the bottom of the sea.
This short story was not published until 1998, posthumously.
Legendarium
These are the books of the "Legendarium" arranged chronologically:
- The Silmarillion, spans from the creation of Arda to the beginning of the Third Age of the Sun of the Middle Earth.
- The story of Beren and Lúthien, developed in the First Age of the Sun of the Middle Earth.
- The children of Húrindeveloped in the First Age of the Sun of the Middle Earth.
- Unfinished stories of Numenor and the Middle Earthwith stories about the three ages of the Middle Earth.
- The Fall of Gondolin, developed in the First Age of the Sun in the Land of Beleriand
- Tal-Elmar, the beginning of a story that contemplates the Nouvians from the point of view of the Wild Men. It happens in the Second Age of the Sun. (Inconclusive)
- The hobbitdeveloped in the Third Age of the Sun of the Middle Earth.
- The Lord of the Ringsdeveloped in the Third Age of the Sun of the Middle Earth and completed at the beginning of the Fourth Age of the Sun.
- The adventures of Tom Bombadil and other poems of The Red Book.
- Bilbo's last songjust before we sail to the impureable lands, leaving the Middle Earth forever.
- The History of the Middle Earth, which is a series of 12 books that gather and analyze material related to the fantastic world created by J. R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien
- The new shadow, developed in the Fourth Age of the Sun during the government of Eldarion (unfinished)
- The History of the Middle Earth, is a series of 13 books that collect and analyze material related to the fantastic world created by J. R. Tolkien, compiled and edited by his son, Christopher Tolkien.
- The volumes are as follows:
- The Book of Lost Tales 1 (HTM I, 1983)
- The Book of Lost Tales 2 (HTM II, 1984)
- The bullets of Beleriand (HTM III, 1985)
- Formation of the Middle Earth (HTM IV, 1986)
- The lost way and other writings (HTM V, 1987)
- The Return of the Shadow (HSDLA I, 1988)
- The betrayal of Isengard (HSDLA II, 1989)
- The Ring War (HSDLA III, 1990)
- The End of the Third Age or Sauron defeated (HSDLA IV, 1992)
- The Fall of Numenor (HTM VI, 1992)
- The ring of Morgoth (HTM VII, 1993)
- The War of the Jewels (HTM VIII, 1994)
- The peoples of the Middle Earth (HTM IX, 1996)
In 2002, the volume called The History of Middle-earth Index was published, which has not been translated into Spanish and consists of a complete index of each of the thirteen volumes that comprise the collection.
The Silmarillion
Tolkien wrote a brief outline of his mythology of which the tales of Beren and Lúthien and Turin were a part, and that outline evolved into the Quenta Silmarillion, an epic tale that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien hoped to publish it under the cover of the success of The Lord of the Rings , but the publishers (both Allen & amp; Unwin and Collins) were not convinced by him; since, in addition, printing costs were very high in the post-war period. The story of this continuous rewriting is told in the posthumous series of The History of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher. From about 1936 Tolkien began to extend his framework to encompass the narrative of the fall of Númenor ( Akallabêth ), inspired by the legend of Atlantis. It was not until 1977, posthumously, that the writings that make up The Silmarillion saw the light, compiled and edited by Christopher Tolkien. To the aforementioned stories (Quenta Silmarillion and Akallabêth), other shorter ones, from the first and last times of Middle-earth, were added for publication: Ainulindalë , Valaquenta and Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age.
The Hobbit
Tolkien wrote the stories of his legendarium for his own delight, that of his family, and that of his literary circle, with no intention of reaching the general public with them. However, by chance, another book he had written in 1932 for his own children and which he had titled The Hobbit passed from hand to hand without intervention of the author until it reached Susan Dagnall, an employee of London publisher George Allen & Unwin She This she showed the book to the president of the company, Stanley Unwin, who gave it to his youngest son, Rayner, to read; They liked the story so much that they decided to publish it.
This book narrates the adventures of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins who, along with the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves, will be involved in a journey to recover the kingdom of Erebor, wrested from the dwarves by the dragon Smaug.
Although a children's story, the book also attracted the attention of adult readers and became popular enough that Stanley Unwin asked Tolkien to work on a sequel, later known as The Lord of the Rings.
The Lord of the Rings
Although not inspired to deal with the subject, Stanley Unwin's request for a sequel to The Hobbit prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work, The Lord of the Rings, an epic fantasy novel subdivided into three volumes and published between 1954 and 1955. Tolkien spent more than ten years creating the novel's story and appendices, during which time he received constant support of the Inklings, in particular of his closest friend, C. S. Lewis, to whom he lent or read his drafts for his judgment. Both the events of The Hobbit and those of The Lord of the Rings are framed in the context of The Silmarillion, but at a much later time.
Tolkien's original intention when he began writing The Lord of the Rings was for it to be a children's story in the style of The Hobbit, but he soon remembered the ring found by Bilbo Baggins and decided to center the story around him and his future, becoming a darker and more serious writing; therefore, despite being a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it was aimed at a more mature audience. On the other hand, Tolkien took more advantage in this novel of the immense history of Beleriand, which he had been building in previous years and which was finally published posthumously in The Silmarillion and other volumes.
The Lord of the Rings became wildly popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the century XX judging by its sales and reader surveys, such as that carried out by UK bookstores Waterstone's and television network Channel 4, which chose The Lord of the Rings as the best book of the century.
Kullervo's Story
This is a prose version of the Kullervo cycle of the Finnish epic poem Kalevala. Written by Tolkien when he was a student at Exeter College, Oxford, from 1914 to 1915, it was an unsettled time for the author, and this is the feeling reflected in the story's dark subject matter.
His career as a linguist
Tolkien learned Latin, French, and German from his mother and, while at school, learned Middle English, Old English, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norwegian, Spanish, Welsh, and Medieval Welsh. He was also familiar with Esperanto, Danish, Dutch, Lombard, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Swedish, and old forms of modern German and Slovak, which reveals his deep linguistic knowledge of all Germanic languages.
Constructed languages
Her passion for languages began at the age of eight or nine, when she would delight in the sounds of Latin pronounced by her mother or amused herself with her cousin Mary by inventing their own languages, such as "animalic" or " nevbosh' ('new nonsense'). Somewhat later he created the "naffarin" (based on the Spanish that he learned with the help of Father Morgan). Later he discovered Gothic, Welsh and Finnish, the basis of his great creations: Sindarin, the language of the Sindar and, above all, Quenya, the language of the Noldor; encouraged by his professors Kenneth Sisam, a high school professor of Comparative Literature and with whom he would compete for the chair of Anglo-Saxon at Merton College at the University of Oxford, and Robert Gilson, who discovered in him a great philologist.
Her academic career and literary production are inseparable from her love of language and philology. He majored in the philology of Greek during college and in 1915 he graduated with Old Norse as a special subject. From 1919 to 1920, after being discharged from the army at the end of World War I, Tolkien worked as assistant editor-in-chief of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, writing drafts for three additions which first appeared in the edition published in October 1921. In 1920, he went to the University of Leeds as Professor of English, where he claimed credit for increasing the number of students in linguistics from five to twenty. He taught courses on Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory philology to Germanic languages, Gothic, Old Norse, and Medieval Welsh. When Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship in 1925, at the age of thirty-three, he boasted that his German students at Leeds had formed a 'Viking Club'.
Privately, Tolkien was drawn to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and entertained notions of an inherited taste for language, where he labeled "native tongue" as opposed to "mother tongue" in his lecture " English and Welsh', which is crucial to understanding his concept of race and language. He considered West Midlands Middle English his "native tongue" and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am West Midlands by blood (and took their Middle English as a known language as soon as I laid my hands on it). eyes on them).
Parallel to his professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing it to the extent that his academic output remained rather meager, was his affection for the construction of artificial languages. The most developed were Quenya and Sindarin. Language and grammar for Tolkien were a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was shaped by 'phono-aesthetic' considerations; it was intended as "elf-Latin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish and Greek. A notable addition came in late 1954 with Númenorian Adunaic, a language of "a slightly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's myth of Atlantis which, through "The Notion Club Papers", is directly linked to his ideas on the heritability of language, and through the Second Age of the Sun the myth of Eärendil was established in the legendarium, thus providing a link to the "real and primordial world" of Tolkien's XX century with the mythological past of Middle Earth.
Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them and consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists heard this from him, in his lecture "A Secret Vice", "The Construction of their language will engender a mythology", but in 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, etc., are dead, more than other unused ancestral languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legend".
The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even in major dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's reinstatement of the words dwarves (dwarfs) and elvish (elven) (as opposed to dwarfs and elfish), which had not been in use since roughly the middle of the 19th century. Other terms he has coined, such as legendarium and eucatastrophe are mostly used in connection with his work.
Film adaptations of his work
Several of Tolkien's works have been adapted for film, beginning with the Rankin/Bass animated adaptation of the novel The Hobbit in 1977. The following year Ralph Bakshi directed The Lord of the Rings, an incomplete adaptation also for the animated cinema of the novel in three volumes. The Rankin/Bass team also created, in 1980, an animated television special titled The Return of the King, which included a very brief recap of the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Rings, which was presented as a sequel to the 1977 film.
More than twenty years later, New Line Cinema and New Zealand director Peter Jackson created the most successful adaptation of The Lord of the Rings, in a trilogy of films starring by Elijah Wood, Viggo Mortensen, Sean Astin, Christopher Lee, Andy Serkis, Liv Tyler, Orlando Bloom and Ian McKellen, released in the years 2001: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, 2002 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers and 2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Subsequently, the same New Line Cinema and Peter Jackson (although for a time the direction of the Mexican Guillermo del Toro was considered) also addressed the adaptation of The Hobbit in a trilogy of films with Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins, Richard Armitage as Thorin, Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Orlando Bloom again as the wood elf Legolas, Christopher Lee, who reprized Saruman, Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug as well as Andy Serkis reinterpreting Gollum. Released in 2012: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, 2013 The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and 2014 The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies.
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