Tolkien was born on Jan. To escape the heat and dust of southern Africa and to better guard the delicate health of Ronald as he was called , Tolkien's mother moved back to England with him and his younger brother when they were very young boys.
Within a year of this move their father, Arthur Tolkien, died in Bloemfontein, and a few years later the boys' mother died as well. The boys lodged at several homes from until , when Ronald entered Exeter College, Oxford. Tolkien received his B. During the interim he married his longtime sweetheart, Edith Bratt, and served for a short time on the Western Front with the Lancashire Fusiliers.
While in England recovering from "trench fever" in , Tolkien began writing "The Book of Lost Tales, " which eventually became The Silmarillion and laid the groundwork for his stories about Middle-earth. After the Armistice he returned to Oxford, where he joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary and began work as a free-lance tutor.
Gordon on an acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was completed and published in Some years later, Tolkien completed a second translation of this poem, which was published posthumously. They shared an intense enthusiasm for the myths, sagas, and languages of northern Europe; and to better enhance those interests, both attended meetings of "The Coalbiters, " an Oxford club, founded by Tolkien, at which Icelandic sagas were read aloud. During the rest of his years at Oxford—twenty as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, fourteen as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature—Tolkien published several esteemed short studies and translations.
As a writer of imaginative literature, though, Tolkien is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, tales which were formed during his years attending meetings of "The Inklings, " an informal gathering of like-minded friends and fellow dons, initiated after the demise of The Coalbiters. The Inklings, which was formed during the late s and lasted until the late s, was a weekly meeting held in Lewis's sitting-room at Magdalen, at which works-in-progress were read aloud and discussed and critiqued by the attendees, all interspersed with free-flowing conversation about literature and other topics.
The nucleus of the group was Tolkien, Lewis, and Lewis's friend, novelist Charles Williams; other participants, who attended irregularly, included Lewis's brother Warren, Nevill Coghill, H.
Dyson, Owen Barfield, and others. The common thread which bound them was that they were all adherents of Christianity and all had a love of story. Having heard Tolkien's first hobbit story read aloud at a meeting of the Inklings, Lewis urged Tolkien to publish The Hobbit, which appeared in A major portion of The Fellowship of the Ring was also read to The Inklings before the group disbanded in the late 's. Tolkien retired from his professorship in Tolkien then became a professor in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he collaborated with E.
Gordon on the famous edition of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. Tolkien remained at Leeds until , when he took a position teaching Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. Tolkien at Oxford Tolkien spent the rest of his career at Oxford, retiring in Although he produced little by today's "publish or perish" standards, his scholarly writings were of the highest caliber. One of his most influential works is his lecture "Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics.
Another prominent member was C. Lewis, who became one of tolkien's closest friends. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, and Lewis, an agnostic at the time, frequently debated religion and the role of mythology. Unlike Lewis, who tended to dismiss myths and fairy tales, Tolkien firmly believed that they have moral and spiritual value. Said Tolkien, "The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the Universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?
This grew into a story he told his children, and in a version of it came to the attention of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin now part of HarperCollins , who published it as The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, in It become an instant and enduring classic. Lord of the Rings Stanley Unwin, the publisher, was stunned by The Hobbit's success and asked for a sequel, which blossomed into a multivolume epic. While The Hobbit hinted at the history of Middle-earth that Tolkien had created in his "Lost Tales" which he was now calling "The Silmarillion" , the sequel drew heavily upon it.
So determined was Tolkien to get every detail right that it took him more than a decade to complete the book "Lord of the Rings. While the book was eagerly received by the reading public, critical reviews were everything but neutral. Some critics, such as Philip Toynbee, deplored its fantasy setting, archaic language, and utter earnestness. Others, notably W. Auden and C. Lewis, lauded it for its straightforward narrative, imagination, and tolkien's palpable love of language.
The Lord of the Rings did not reach the height of its popularity until it finally appeared in paperback. Tolkien disliked paperbacks and hadn't authorized a paperback edition. In , however, Ace Books exploited a legal loophole and published an unauthorized paperback version of The Lord of the Rings.
Within months Ballantine published an official version with a rather cross note about respecting an author's wishes. The lower cost of paperbacks and the publicity generated by the copyright dispute boosted sales of the books considerably, especially in America where it was quickly embraced by the 60s counterculture. He soon found a position as Reader of English language at the University of Leeds in , and in , the university appointed him Professor. In , he returned to Oxford University as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the remarkably young age of Tolkien was an excellent teacher, and his dramatic lectures on Beowulf were legendary.
Tolkien and his wife, Edith, had four children: sons John, Michael, and Christopher and daughter Priscilla, born between and The family lived quietly in Oxford while Tolkien pursued his academic studies and personal writing. John eventually entered the priesthood. Christopher, who followed in his father's footsteps as a university lecturer, also oversees Tolkien's literary estate and has edited many volumes of his father's notes. Tolkien also enjoyed an active social life with his colleagues at the university.
He became a founding member of the all-male club known as the Inklings, who met frequently to talk, drink beer at the local taverns, and discuss writing.
Members included many authors, most famously C. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. For many years, they convened at least once a week to read both their favorite literature and their own works in progress. From an early age, Tolkien pursued an active life of the imagination.
In childhood, he and his brother Hilary would play at vanquishing evil dragons, and Tolkien added to his early mastery of Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Finnish, a talent for inventing languages of his own. As a young man, he tried his hand at poetry, going so far as to publish a few pieces, but by the time he returned from the War, he had begun an ambitious collection of loosely connected stories, poems, and songs that told the history and legends of the elves, eventually known as The Silmarillion.
After his children were born, he began enthusiastically telling them stories, many of which he wrote down.
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