J.R.R. Tolkien
THE LORD OF THE RINGS: PREHISTORY
J.R.R.Tolkien, a reader in English 1920-24 and professor of the English Language 1924-25 of the University of Leeds, Yorkshire; Rawlisson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford 1925-45 and Merton Professor of the English Language and Literature 1945-59, was born on January 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to a bank clerk Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mable Suffield. After his father's death in 1896 John was brought back to England where he spent his early childhood in Worcestershire country. In 1899 Tolkien entered King Edward's School in Birmingham. There he discovered the beauty of ancient European languages, such as Old Welsh, English and Norse, Icelandic and Gothic. Taken with them Tolkien started inventing a language of his own, cross-breeding Old Norse and Finnish and the like. In 1910 Tolkien won a scholarship at Oxford and after a year he came into residence. There he took a deep interest in philology and soon was transferred from the classical department to a newly founded department of the English Language and Literature. He began composing verses, first trying to imitate Old English and then 'translating, form the 'Elvish' language which was already a possible tongue with cocnsistent roots, sound laws and inflections into which he poured all his imaginative and philological powers ; and strange as the exercise may seem, it was the source of that unparallelled richness and concreteness, which later distinguished him from all other philologists.'[12]
In August 1914 Tolkien joined the Lancashire riffle regiment, and in June 4, 1916 was sent to France where the great offensive on the Somme had started. Tolkien was lucky enough to survive.
After graduating from Oxford in 1915 he continued his philological research based upon his interest towards European languages. His first attempts to publish his 'Elvish' poetry failed but he did not abandon hope. On becoming Rawlisson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925, Tolkien wrote a book called The Book of Lost Tales which he intended to dedicate to England. In this book there were gathered his previous literary works, poems and stories about Valinor - an undying land beyond the Sundering Seas inhabited by Elves and omnipotent spirits of nature, the Valar. This work was rejected by publishers, but gave birth to the later Silmarillion -the book of creation and history of Middle-earth.
Tolkien still believed that his philological research was worth publishing so in 1937 he issued a book The Hobbit or There and Back Again which was in origin a fragment from his cycle adapted for juvenile tastes that included The Father Christmas Letters and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil.The book made him a world-known writer, though Tolkien himself seemed not to take his creation seriously and did not expect it to gain such a tremendous fame and acknowledgement.
The plot of the story was a simple one, and the professor spread the version that the idea for the story came up by accident. Once he took a pen and put down "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He lived peacefully, smoking his long pipe and drinking ale. There came Gandalf - a wizard with a grey beard and a heavy staff - and Bilbo's well-measured life scooted straightaway. The comfort-loving, unambitious hobbit had to take part in a perilous expedition accompanying thirteen dwarves in search of dragon-guarded treasures. Encounters with goblins, trolls elves and men, conversations with the dragon and rather an unwilling presence at the Battle of Five Armies were only a part of the adventures that befell Bilbo Baggins. One of them was a game of riddles with nasty Gollum when our hobbit found a ring that made its owner invisible. On coming back home he put it into his pocket and the ring was well-forgotten by the rest of the company.
Although with the publication of The Hobbit Tolkien gained fame as a storyteller, he still was not able to introduce his philological research and the tongues described in his History of Elvish Languages that had been written in the early 3O's. "Tolkien was persuaded to write the trilogy as a sequel to his smaller work, The Hobbit, which had been very little involved with his principal myths, just before World War II. The moral and emotional pressures of that war, cruelly renewing those of the first war in which his myths were first concieved, seem to have contributed to the imagination with which he transformed his old images in his new myth of the fatal ring of power." [15, Stephen Medcalf]
Plot is the revelation of the hidden means of a text, thus Tolkien began seeking a small hook that could have drawn out a new story. And there emerged the ring that Bilbo had found below the Misty Mountains. The ring turned out to be the main one of the nine. This lead Tolkien to provide a detailed history for his newly created world. Thus he began inventing an alphabeth, a calendar, chronology and genealogy for the fairy country. But the work was interrupted by World WarII, and The Lord of the Rings appeared only in 1954 and 1955 in three volumes called The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King. Tolkien spent 13 years in the writing of this complex work, into which he included not only words and names (as he did in The Hobbit) but phrases and even whole texts in Elvish, accompanying them with a detailed commentary and an appendix where all the peculiarities of the language were explained. Tolkien's professional background provided him with inspiration for many of his ideas. As a linguist he enjoyed inventing languages and the result of these exercises were songs, poems and a number of verses.
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