![]() ![]() When World War I broke out, he enlisted as a second lieutenant in a signaling corps, marrying Edith in 1916 before he left for France and the Battle of the Somme. Father Francis forbade Tolkien to see or write to her until his twenty-first birthday, at which time they became engaged.Īt Oxford, Tolkien studied comparative philology and ancient literature and went on inventing languages. ![]() This club helped him find a voice for his life work.Īt the age of sixteen, Tolkien fell in love with nineteen-year-old Edith Bratt, another orphan in his boarding house. The group dreamed of contributing something new to the world. Tolkien even then was writing verse and inventing his first languages. At King Edward's, Tolkien formed his first club, the TCBS (Tea Club and Barovian Society) with four close friends who all shared an interest in ancient languages and medieval studies. Though the orphans boarded with an aunt, Father Francis became their only real family. Mabel Tolkien died in 1904 of diabetes when Ronald was twelve. Because Ronald needed a more intellectual training, his mother enrolled him again at King Edward's on scholarship. After two years, both boys were enrolled in a Catholic school, and the local priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, became the boys's guardian. ![]() His strong Catholic faith came from her.Īt the age of seven, he entered King Edward's School in Birmingham, and the family moved there. This choice cut her off from their financial and emotional support, but Tolkien was proud of his mother's religious strength all his life. Meanwhile, she became a Catholic, to her family's dismay. He also loved fairy tales, adventure stories, and drawing. His mother was his first teacher, and from her, Ronald learned a love of languages and botany. This was his ideal English countryside before industrialization, a hobbit landscape of villages and carts, an old brick mill, and lots of trees. She found a cottage in the country for the boys in Sarehole, Warwickshire, and the setting's effect on Ronald was deep. Mabel Tolkien was suddenly a widow in Birmingham, England, with two small children and very little income. In 1895, their mother took the children to England for a holiday, and while they were gone, their father died of rheumatic fever in South Africa. His younger brother, Hilary, was born in 1894. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, of English parents, Mabel Suffield and Arthur Tolkien. Tolkien demonstrates that mythic stories speak to the human spirit in every age. The amount of Middle-Earth history and chronicles published since theĪuthor's death is fourfold in volume to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings put together. His son, Christopher, carried on, editing and publishing Tolkien's unfinished manuscripts. Not only has the fantasy industry grown up around the book, but also a demand for more details about his imaginary world, Middle-Earth. He hoped to sketch out a giant mythology that others could appreciate and add to, and they have. He would be even more over-whelmed at the games, toys, and films spawned by the novel, but he would understand the urge to proliferate what he had done. Tolkien knew there was a hunger for heroic myth in the modern world, but he was surprised by his vast success. In the fifty years following its publication, commentators learned to take an objective look at it. From the first, the book evoked strong, subjective reactions. It is a story about how goodness prevails, even in times of confusion and war, when people of integrity hold together. His mythic quest novel, pitting a small hobbit as a hero against the Lord of Evil, holds a unique place in twentieth-century fiction: it is popular culture and enduring literature at the same time. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and a scholar of such texts as Beowulf. ![]() The Lord of the Rings, by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, first published in three parts during 19, is sometimes thought of as the first adult fantasy novel, although as a form it has affinity with the old heroic romances that inspired its author. ![]()
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