J. R. R.

Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (/ˈruːl ˈtɒlkiːn/, [a]

3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an
English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and
The Lord of the Rings.

From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a
Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same
university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of
Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a
close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The
Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen
Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's
extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional
histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and,
within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the
larger part of these writings.

While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the tremendous
success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ignited a profound interest in the fantasy
genre and ultimately precipitated an avalanche of new fantasy books and authors. As a result,
he has been popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature and is widely
regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time.

Biography

Ancestry
Tolkien was English, and thought of himself as such.[3][T 1] His immediate paternal ancestors
were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and
Birmingham. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kreuzburg near
Königsberg, which had been founded during the medieval German eastward expansion,
where his earliest-known paternal ancestor, Michel Tolkien, was born around 1620.[4]
Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746)
was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg.[4] His son,
J. R. R. Tolkien
Christian Tolkien (1706–1791), moved from CBE FRSL

Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons

Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and
Johann (later known as John) Benjamin
Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in
the 1770s and became the ancestors of the
English family; the younger brother was J. R.
R. Tolkien's second great-grandfather.[4]

In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William

Gravell took over the Erdley Norton
manufacture in London, which from then on
sold clocks and watches under the name
Gravell & Tolkien. Daniel Gottlieb obtained Tolkien in the 1920s

British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin Born John Ronald Reuel
apparently never became a British citizen. Tolkien
3 January 1892
Other German relatives joined the two brothers
Bloemfontein,
in London. Several people with the surname Orange Free State
Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them (now South Africa)

members of the same family as J. R. R. Died 2 September 1973

Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of (aged 81)
them are descendants of people who were Bournemouth (then
in Hampshire),
evacuated from East Prussia in 1945, at the England
end of World War II.[5][4][6]
Occupation ·
Author academic
According to Ryszard Derdziński, the surname · ·
philologist poet

Tolkien is of Low Prussian origin and probably Citizenship British

means "son/descendant of Tolk".[5][4] Tolkien
Education King Edward's
mistakenly believed his surname derived from School, Birmingham
the German word tollkühn, meaning Exeter College,
"foolhardy",[7] and jokingly inserted himself as Oxford

a "cameo" into The Notion Club Papers under Genre Fantasy,

the literally translated name Rashbold. [8] high fantasy,
mythopoeia,
However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to
translation,
be a false etymology. Another suspected literary criticism
origin is the East Prussian village of Tołkiny.[9] Spouse Edith Bratt
​
While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of his family's ​(m. 1916; died 1971)​

German origin, his knowledge of the family's Children ·

John Michael ·
history was limited because he was "early Christopher ·
Priscilla
isolated from the family of his prematurely
deceased father".[5][4] Relatives Tolkien family

Signature
Childhood

Military career
Allegiance United Kingdom

Branch British Army

Years 1915–1920

Rank Lieutenant

Unit Lancashire Fusiliers

1892 Christmas card with a

Battles World War I

coloured photo of the Tolkien family

Battle of the
in Bloemfontein, sent to relatives in Somme
Birmingham, England Capture of
Schwaben
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3
Redoubt
January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange
Capture of
Free State (later annexed by the British
Leipzig Salient
Empire; now Free State Province in the Capture of
Republic of South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Regina Trench
Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank
manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield
(1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the
Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his
younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894.[10]

As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some believe
to have been later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event
as an adult. In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy, a young family servant took the baby
to his homestead, returning him the next morning.[11]

When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to
be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before
he could join them.[12] This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to
live with her parents in Kings Heath,[13] Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to
Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.[14]
He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills,
which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as
Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm Bag End, the
name of which he used in his fiction.[15]

Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a
keen pupil.[16] She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of
the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite
lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin
very early.[17]

Tolkien could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother
allowed him to read many books. He disliked Treasure Island and "The Pied Piper" and
thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was "amusing". He liked stories
about "Red Indians" (the term then used for Native Americans in adventure stories[18]) and
works of fantasy by George MacDonald.[19] In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang
were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later
writings.[20]

Birmingham Oratory, where Tolkien

was a parishioner and altar boy
(1902–1911)

Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement
protests by her Baptist family,[21] which stopped all financial assistance to her. In 1904, when
J. R. R. Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which
she was renting. She was then about 34 years of age, about as old as a person with diabetes
mellitus type 1 could survive without treatment—insulin would not be discovered until 1921,
two decades later. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote, "My own dear mother was a
martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he
did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to
ensure us keeping the faith."[21]

Before her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close
friend, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring
them up as good Catholics.[22] In a 1965 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled the
influence of the man whom he always called "Father Francis": "He was an upper-class
Welsh-Spaniard Tory, and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was—and he was
not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him; and in the light of it pierced even the
'liberal' darkness out of which I came, knowing more about 'Bloody Mary' than the Mother of
Jesus—who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the
Romanists."[T 2] After his mother's death, Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of
Birmingham and attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St Philip's School. In
1903, he won a Foundation Scholarship and returned to King Edward's.[23]

Youth

King Edward's School in

Birmingham, where Tolkien was a
pupil (1900–1902, 1903–1911)[24]

While in his early teens, Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Animalic,
an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon. At that time, he was studying Latin
and Anglo-Saxon. Their interest in Animalic soon died away, but Mary and others, including
Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosh. The next
constructed language he came to work with, Naffarin, would be his own creation.[25][26]
Tolkien learned Esperanto some time before 1909. Around 10 June 1909 he composed "The
Book of the Foxrook", a sixteen-page notebook, where the "earliest example of one of his
invented alphabets" appears.[27] Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto.[28]

In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson,
Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called
the T.C.B.S. The initials stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, alluding to their fondness
for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library.[29][30]
After leaving school, the members stayed in touch and, in December 1914, they held a council
in London at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication
to writing poetry.[31]

In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollected vividly in a
1968 letter,[T 3] noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade
down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their
party of 12 hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and on to camp in the moraines beyond
Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the
eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn, "the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams". They went
across the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald and on across the Grosse Scheidegg to
Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass, through the upper Valais to Brig and on
to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.[32]

In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially
read classics but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in
1915 with first-class honours.[33] Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright, whose
Primer of the Gothic Language had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.[34]

Courtship and marriage

At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and
his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road,
Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, "Edith and Ronald took to frequenting
Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There
they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table
when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their
position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they
found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they
were in love."[35]
His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it "altogether unfortunate"[T 4] that his surrogate son
was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman; Tolkien wrote that the combined
tensions contributed to his having "muffed [his] exams".[T 4] Morgan prohibited him from
meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this
prohibition to the letter,[36] with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan
threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop.[37]

On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C.
H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to
marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the
brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only
because she felt "on the shelf" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She
explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.[38]

On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by
Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the
end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal. She wrote to Field and
returned her engagement ring. Field was "dreadfully upset at first", and the Field family was
"insulted and angry".[38] Upon learning of Edith's new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, "I
have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in
the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a
profession it would have been different."[39]

Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to
Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Jessop, "like many others of his age and class ... strongly
anti-Catholic", was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.[40]

Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and
married at St Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick, on 22 March 1916.[41] In his 1941
letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with
no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great
War.[T 4]
First World War

Tolkien in his military

uniform

In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he
elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael,
Tolkien recalled: "In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft
to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage."[T 4] Instead,
Tolkien, "endured the obloquy",[T 4] and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment
until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that
the hints were "becoming outspoken from relatives".[T 4] He was commissioned as a
temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on 15 July 1915.[42][43] He trained with
the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Rugeley Camp near to Rugeley, Staffordshire,
for 11 months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: "Gentlemen are rare among the
superiors, and even human beings rare indeed."[44] Following their wedding, Lieutenant and
Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp.[42] On 2 June 1916, Tolkien received a
telegram summoning him to Folkestone for posting to France. The Tolkiens spent the night
before his departure in a room at the Plough & Harrow Hotel in Edgbaston, Birmingham.[45]
He later wrote: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife
then ... it was like a death."[46]

France
On 5 June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. Like
other soldiers arriving for the first time, he was sent to the British Expeditionary Force's base
depot at Étaples. On 7 June, he was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer
to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade,
25th Division. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom. To pass
the time, he composed a poem titled The Lonely Isle, which was inspired by his feelings
during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he
developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements.[47] He left Étaples on 27
June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubempré, near Amiens.[48] He found himself
commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving
towns of Lancashire.[49] According to John Garth, he "felt an affinity for these working class
men", but military protocol prohibited friendships with "other ranks". Instead, he was required
to "take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters ... If
possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty."[50] Tolkien later lamented, "The
most improper job of any man ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and
least of all those who seek the opportunity."[50]

Battle of the Somme

The Schwaben Redoubt, painting

by William Orpen. Imperial War
Museum, London

Tolkien arrived at the Somme in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at
Bouzincourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwaben Redoubt and the Leipzig salient.
Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the
door might carry news of her husband's death. Edith could track her husband's movements
on a map of the Western Front. The Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the
Lancashire Fusiliers, recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by "hordes of
lice" which found the Medical Officer's ointment merely "a kind of hors d'oeuvre and the little
beggars went at their feast with renewed vigour."[51] On 27 October 1916, as his battalion
attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by lice. He was
invalided to England on 8 November 1916.[52]

According to his children John and Priscilla Tolkien, "In later years, he would occasionally talk
of being at the front: of the horrors of the first German gas attack, of the utter exhaustion and
ominous quiet after a bombardment, of the whining scream of the shells, and the endless
marching, always on foot, through a devastated landscape, sometimes carrying the men's
equipment as well as his own to encourage them to keep going. ... Some remarkable relics
survive from that time: a trench map he drew himself; pencil-written orders to carry bombs to
the 'fighting line.' "[53]

Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob
Gilson of the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme
while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont Hamel. Fellow T.C.B.S. member Geoffrey
Smith was killed during the battle, when a German artillery shell landed on a first-aid post.
Tolkien's battalion was almost completely wiped out following his return to England.[54]

Men of the 1st Battalion, Lancashire

Fusiliers in a communication trench
near Beaumont Hamel, 1916. Photo
by Ernest Brooks

According to John Garth, Kitchener's Army, in which Tolkien served, at once marked existing
social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate
situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him "a deep sympathy and
feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties".[55]

Home front
A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals
and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service.[56][57][58] During his
recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called
The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Lost Tales represented Tolkien's
attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever
completing.[59] Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered
enough to do home service at various camps. It was at this time that Edith bore their first
child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien. In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son John as "
(conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-boat campaign)
round about the Battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does
now".[T 4] Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918.[60]
When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at
nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock.
After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered:[T 5]

I never called Edith Luthien—but she was the source of the story that in time
became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland
glade filled with hemlocks[61] at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in
command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live
with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes
brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has
gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.[T 5]

On 16 July 1919, Tolkien was taken off active service, at Fovant, on Salisbury Plain, with a
temporary disability pension.[62] On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the
army, retaining his rank of lieutenant.[63]

Academic and writing career

2 Darnley Road, the former home

of Tolkien in West Park, Leeds

20 Northmoor Road, one of

Tolkien's former homes in Oxford

After the end of World War I in 1918, Tolkien's first civilian job was at the Oxford English
Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin
beginning with the letter W.[64] In mid-1919, he began to tutor Oxford undergraduates
privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's College, given that the
women's colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a
married academic (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would
not have been.[65]

In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming
the youngest member of the academic staff there.[66] While at Leeds, he produced A Middle
English Vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with E. V.
Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades. He also translated Sir
Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, but the translations would not be published until 1975. In 1924,
he was promoted from a readership at Leeds to a professorship.[67]

In October 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-

Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.[68] During his time at Pembroke College,
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, while living at 20
Northmoor Road in North Oxford. In 1932, he published a philological essay on the name
"Nodens", following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney
Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.[69]

Beowulf
In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, which he finished in 1926, but did not
publish. It was later edited by his son Christopher and published in 2014.[70]

Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work,
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", which had a lasting influence on Beowulf
research.[71] Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article is "widely recognized as a turning point in
Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the
work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements.[72] At the time, the consensus of scholarship
deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal
warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general,
not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the
poem.[73] Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien
argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements.[74] In the essay, Tolkien revealed how
highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources"; this influence may
be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium.[75]
According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most
striking way, entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly
declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting "with a great cry of Hwæt!" It
was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it made the
students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text but "a powerful piece of dramatic
poetry".[76] Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the
"unforgettable experience" of hearing him recite Beowulf, and stating: "The voice was the
voice of Gandalf".[76]

Second World War

Merton College, where

Tolkien was Professor of
English Language and
Literature (1945–1959)

In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January
1939, he was asked to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office in the
event of national emergency. Beginning on 27 March, he took an instructional course at the
London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School. He was informed in October that his
services would not be required.[77][T 6][78]

In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English
Language and Literature,[79] in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served
as an external examiner for University College, Galway (now The University of Galway), for
many years.[80] In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of
Ireland (of which University College, Galway, was a constituent college).[81] Tolkien completed
The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.[82]
Family
The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January
2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John
Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien
(18 June 1929 – 28 February 2022).[83][84] Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent
them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.[85]

Retirement

Bust of Tolkien in the

chapel of Exeter College,
Oxford

During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily
increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated
him for the Nobel Prize in Literature.[86] The sales of his books were so profitable that he
regretted that he had not chosen early retirement.[17] In a 1972 letter, he deplored having
become a cult figure, but admitted that "even the nose of a very modest idol ... cannot remain
entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!"[T 7]

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public
directory,[T 8] and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside
resort patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author
gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow
Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had
been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place. The genuine and deep
affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health,
in details like wrapping presents, in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford so she
could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride in his becoming a famous author. They were
tied together, too, by love for their children and grandchildren.[87]

In his retirement Tolkien was a consultant and translator for The Jerusalem Bible, published in
1966. He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but, due to other commitments,
only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of
Jonah.[T 9]

Final years

The grave of J. R. R. and Edith

Tolkien, Wolvercote Cemetery,
Oxford

Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where Merton
College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being
back in the city.[88]

Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year
Honours[89] and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March
1972.[T 10] In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of
Letters.[33][90]

He had the name Luthien [sic] engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery,
Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and
chest infection,[91] at the age of 81,[92] he was buried in the same grave, with "Beren" added
to his name. Tolkien's will was proven on 20 December 1973, with his estate valued at
£190,577 (equivalent to £2,454,000 in 2023).[93][94]
Views

The Corner of the Eagle and Child

Pub, Oxford, where the Inklings met
(1930–1950)

Religion
Tolkien's Catholicism was a significant factor in C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to
Christianity.[95] He once wrote to Rayner Unwin's daughter Camilla, who wished to know the
purpose of life, that it was "to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all
the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks."[96] He had a special
devotion to the blessed sacrament, writing to his son Michael that in "the Blessed Sacrament
... you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth,
and more than that".[T 4] He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion,
again writing to his son Michael that "the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is
Communion." He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of
place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament.[T 11] In the last years of his life,
Tolkien resisted certain liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, his
primary objection being the use of English for the liturgy.[97] Tolkien spoke Latin fluently, and
he felt that the English translations were clumsy.[98] In his old age he continued to make the
Mass responses in Latin.[88][99] Tolkien did not sign the Agatha Christie indult, however, and
he served as a lector at Corpus Christi, a parish church in Headington, in accordance with the
allowances of the Council.[100]

Race
Tolkien's Middle-earth fantasy writings have been said to embody outmoded attitudes to
race.[101] However, scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race
and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist both in peacetime and
during the two World Wars. With the late 19th-century background of eugenics and a fear of
moral decline, some critics believed that the mention of race mixing in The Lord of the Rings
embodied scientific racism.[102] Other commentators thought that Tolkien's description of the
orcs was modelled on wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese.[103] Critics have
noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography, with good in the West, evil in the
East.[104] Against this, Tolkien strongly opposed Nazi racial theories, as seen in a 1938 letter he
wrote to his publisher, while in the Second World War he vigorously opposed anti-German
propaganda.[105][106] His Middle-earth has been described as definitely polycultural and
polylingual, while scholars have noted that attacks on Tolkien based on The Lord of the Rings
often omit relevant evidence from the text.[107][108] A spokesman for HarperCollins, publisher
of the trilogy, said: "A number of academics have commented on Tolkien's work and this is
the first time anybody has ever seen these issues in it. Of course, if you look hard enough at
many great epics, you can extrapolate what you like, particularly if you have academic kudos
behind you."[109]

Nature
During most of his own life, conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien
himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in
which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling. In later years, a
number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his
writing of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and
untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized
world.[110][111][112]

Writing

Influences
Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion,
drew on a wide array of influences, including his philological interest in language,[113]
Christianity,[114][115] medievalism,[116] mythology, archaeology,[117] ancient and modern
literature, and personal experience. His philological work centred on the study of Old English
literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings.[118] He was
a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic,[119] Celtic,[120] Finnish,[121] and Greek[122][123]
language and mythology. Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and
topological antecedents for characters, places and events in Tolkien's writings. Some writers
were important to him, including the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris,[124] and he
undoubtedly made use of some real place-names, such as Bag End, the name of his aunt's
home.[125] He acknowledged, too, John Buchan and H. Rider Haggard, authors of modern
adventure stories that he enjoyed.[126][127][128] The effects of some specific experiences have
been identified. Tolkien's childhood in the English countryside, and its urbanization by the
growth of Birmingham, influenced his creation of the Shire,[129] while his personal experience
of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.[130]

Publications
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"
In addition to writing fiction, Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism. His seminal
1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon
epic Beowulf by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English
literature to this day.[131] Beowulf is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later
fiction, with major details of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings being adapted from
the poem.[132]

"On Fairy-Stories"
This essay discusses the fairy-story as a literary form. It was initially written as the 1939
Andrew Lang Lecture at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Tolkien focuses on Andrew
Lang's work as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales. He disagreed with Lang's broad
inclusion, in his Fairy Book collections, of traveller's tales, beast fables, and other types of
stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in
Faerie, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He viewed them as the
natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language.[133]

Children's books and other short works

In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to
entertain his children.[134] He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them,
building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas
Letters).[135] Other works included Mr. Bliss and Roverandom (for children), and Leaf by
Niggle (part of Tree and Leaf), The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smith of Wootton Major and
Farmer Giles of Ham. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed
ideas from his legendarium.[136]
The Hobbit
Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book called
The Hobbit, which he had written some years before for his own children, came in 1936 to the
attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin,
who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication.[92] When it was published a year later, the
book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the
publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel.[137]

The Lord of the Rings

The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work: the
epic novel The Lord of the Rings (originally published in three volumes in 1954–1955). Tolkien
spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the
Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his
closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after
it.[138]

Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit,
but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing.[139] Though a direct sequel to The
Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense backstory of Beleriand that
Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication
in The Silmarillion and other volumes.[138] Tolkien strongly influenced the fantasy genre that
grew up after the book's success.[140]

The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever
since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both
sales and reader surveys.[141] In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord
of the Rings was found to be the UK's "Best-loved Novel".[142] Australians voted The Lord of
the Rings "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC.[143] In a
1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite
"book of the millennium".[144] In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd "greatest Briton" in a poll
conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted 35th in the SABC3's Great South Africans,
the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking
world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK's "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found
The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite work of literature.[145]
The Silmarillion
Tolkien wrote a brief "Sketch of the Mythology", which included the tales of Beren and Lúthien
and of Túrin; and that sketch eventually evolved into the Quenta Silmarillion, an epic history
that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien desperately hoped to publish it
along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) declined.
Moreover, printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain, requiring The Lord of the Rings to be
published in three volumes.[146] The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the
posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien.
From around 1936, Tolkien began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of
Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.[147]

Tolkien appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor, and he (with assistance from
Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of this
material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. It received the
Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978.[148]

Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-earth

In 1980, Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the
title Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In subsequent years (1983–1996), he
published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and
extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth. They
contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they
were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version
for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between The Lord of the Rings and
The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their
traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition,
that he would have preferred to rewrite the book completely because of the style of its
prose.[149]
Works compiled by Christopher Tolkien
Date Title Description
Tells the story of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor, children of Húrin
2007 The Children of Húrin
Thalion.[150]

Retells the legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs from Germanic mythology
The Legend of Sigurd
2009 as a narrative poem in alliterative verse, modelled after the Old Norse poetry of
and Gudrún
the Elder Edda.[151]

A narrative poem that Tolkien composed in the early 1930s, inspired by high
2013 The Fall of Arthur medieval Arthurian fiction but set in the Post-Roman Migration Period, showing
Arthur as a British warlord fighting the Saxon invasion.[152]

Beowulf: A
A prose translation of Beowulf that Tolkien made in the 1920s, with commentary
2014 Translation and
from Tolkien's lecture notes.[153][154]
Commentary

A retelling of a 19th-century Finnish poem that Tolkien wrote in 1915 while studying
2015 The Story of Kullervo
at Oxford.[155]

One of the oldest and most often revised in Tolkien's legendarium; a version
2017 Beren and Lúthien
appeared in The Silmarillion.[156]

Tells of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces; Tolkien called it "the
2018 The Fall of Gondolin
first real story" of Middle-earth.[157][158]

Manuscript locations
Before his death, Tolkien negotiated the sale of the manuscripts, drafts, proofs and other
materials related to his then-published works—including The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit
and Farmer Giles of Ham—to the Department of Special Collections and University Archives
at Marquette University's John P. Raynor, S.J., Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.[159] After his
death his estate donated the papers containing Tolkien's Silmarillion mythology and his
academic work to the Bodleian Library at Oxford University.[160] The Bodleian Library held an
exhibition of his work in 2018, including more than 60 items which had never been seen in
public before.[161]

In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Tolkien had begun co-writing
with C. S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.[162]
Languages and philology

Linguistic career
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of
language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated
with Old Norse as his special subject. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918
and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including
walrus, over which he struggled mightily.[163][164] In 1920, he became Reader in English
Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of
students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history
of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology,
introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925,
aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-
Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in
Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".[T 12] He had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of
Finnish.[165]

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955
lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he
entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native
language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.[166] He
considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and,
as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early
west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."[T 13]

Language construction
Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this
work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for
constructing languages. The most developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the
etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium.
Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in
particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elven-
latin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English,
and Greek.[T 14]
Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he
consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were
told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice,[167] "Your language construction will breed a
mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are
dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any
Esperanto legends".[T 15]

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 on mainstream dictionaries, which now commonly
accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish (alongside dwarfs and
dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier. (In fact,
according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been dwarrows or
dwerrows.) He coined the term eucatastrophe, used mainly in connection with his own
work.[168]

Artwork

Tolkien learnt to paint and draw as a child and continued to do so all his adult life. From early
in his writing career, the development of his stories was accompanied by drawings and
paintings, especially of landscapes, and by maps of the lands in which the tales were set. He
produced pictures to accompany the stories told to his own children, including those later
published in Mr Bliss and Roverandom, and sent them elaborately illustrated letters purporting
to come from Father Christmas. Although he regarded himself as an amateur, the publisher
used the author's own cover art, his maps, and full-page illustrations for the early editions of
The Hobbit. He prepared maps and illustrations for The Lord of the Rings, but the first edition
contained only the maps, his calligraphy for the inscription on the One Ring, and his ink
drawing of the Doors of Durin. Much of his artwork was collected and published in 1995 as a
book: J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator. The book discusses Tolkien's paintings, drawings,
and sketches, and reproduces approximately 200 examples of his work.[169] Catherine
McIlwaine curated a major exhibition of Tolkien's artwork at the Bodleian Library, Tolkien:
Maker of Middle-earth, accompanied by a book of the same name that analyses Tolkien's
achievement and illustrates the full range of the types of artwork that he created.[170]
Legacy

Influence
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success
of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence and the shaping
of the modern fantasy genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father"
of modern fantasy literature[171][172]—or, more precisely, of high fantasy,[173] as in the work of
authors such as Ursula Le Guin and her Earthsea series.[174] In 2008, The Times ranked him
sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".[175] His influence has extended to
music, including the Danish group the Tolkien Ensemble's setting of all the poetry in The Lord
of the Rings to their vocal music;[176] and to a broad range of games set in Middle-earth.[177]
Among literary allusions to Tolkien, he appears as the elderly "Professor J. B. Timbermill" in all
five novels in J. I. M. Stewart's series A Staircase in Surrey.[178][179] The scholar Tom Shippey
describes Tolkien as the "author of the [20th] century",[180] and states that "I do not think any
modern writer of epic fantasy has managed to escape the mark of Tolkien, no matter how
hard many of them have tried".[181] John Clute, writing in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy,
similarly credits Tolkien with being "the twentieth-century's single most important author of
fantasy".[182] His work has had a massive impact on western pop culture, and remains
extremely influential.[183]

Adaptations
In a 1951 letter to publisher Milton Waldman (1895–1976), Tolkien wrote about his intentions
to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which "[t]he cycles should be linked
to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music
and drama".[T 16] The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's
legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The
Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the
music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The
Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity
they bore in style to his own drawings.[184] Tolkien was not implacably opposed to the idea of
a dramatic adaptation, however, and sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The
Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968. United Artists never made a film,
although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976, the
rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first
film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was released in 1978 as an animated rotoscoping film
directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It covered only
the first half of the story of The Lord of the Rings.[185]

In 1977, an animated musical television film of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in
1980, they produced the animated musical television film The Return of the King, which
covered some of the portions of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete.
From 2001 to 2003, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action
films that were filmed in New Zealand and directed by Peter Jackson. The series was
successful, performing extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars.[186] From
2012 to 2014, Warner Bros. and New Line Cinema released The Hobbit, a series of three films
based on The Hobbit, with Peter Jackson serving as executive producer, director, and co-
writer.[187] The first instalment, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, was released in
December 2012;[188] the second, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, in December
2013;[189] and the last instalment, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, in December
2014.[190] In 2017, Amazon acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings, for a
series of new stories set before The Fellowship of the Ring.[191][192]

Possible sainthood
On 2 September 2017, the Oxford Oratory, Tolkien's parish church during his time in Oxford,
offered its first Mass for the intention of Tolkien's cause for beatification to be opened.[193][194]
A prayer was written for his cause.[193]

Memorials

Tolkien and the characters and places from his works have become eponyms of many real-
world objects. These include geographical features on Titan (Saturn's largest moon),[195]
street names such as There and Back Again Lane, inspired by The Hobbit,[196] mountains
such as Mount Shadowfax, Mount Gandalf, and Mount Aragorn in Canada,[197][198] companies
such as Palantir Technologies,[199] and species including the wasp Shireplitis tolkieni,[200] 37
new species of Elachista moths,[200][201] and many fossils.[202][203][204]

Since 2003, The Tolkien Society has organized Tolkien Reading Day, which takes place on 25
March in schools around the world.[205] In 2013, Pembroke College, Oxford University,
established an annual lecture on fantasy literature in Tolkien's honour.[206] In 2012, Tolkien
was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new
version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admired.[207][208]
A 2019 biographical film, Tolkien, focused on Tolkien's early life and war experiences.[209] The
Tolkien family and estate stated that they did not "approve of, authorise or participate in the
making of" the film.[210]

Sarehole Mill's blue plaque

Several blue plaques in England commemorate places associated with Tolkien, including for
his childhood, his workplaces, and places he visited.[45][211][212]

Address Commemoration Date unveiled Issued by

Sarehole Mill, Hall Green, "Inspired" 1896–1900 (i.e. Birmingham Civic Society and
15 August 2002
Birmingham lived nearby) The Tolkien Society[213]

1 Duchess Place,
Lived near here 1902–1910 Unknown Birmingham Civic Society[214]
Ladywood, Birmingham

4 Highfield Road, Birmingham Civic Society and

Lived here 1910–1911 Unknown
Edgbaston, Birmingham The Tolkien Society[215]

Plough and Harrow, Hagley

Stayed here June 1916 June 1997 The Tolkien Society[216]
Road, Birmingham

2 Darnley Road, West Park, First academic appointment, The Tolkien Society and Leeds
1 October 2012
Leeds Leeds Civic Trust[217]

20 Northmoor Road, North Oxfordshire Blue Plaques

Lived here 1930–1947 3 December 2002
Oxford Board[218]

Hotel Miramar, East

Stayed here regularly from 10 June 1992 by
Overcliff Drive, Borough of Bournemouth[219]
the 1950s until 1972 Priscilla Tolkien
Bournemouth

St Mary Immaculate, 45
Married here 22 March 1916 6 July 2018 Warwick Town Council[220]
West Street, Warwick

The Royal Mint produced a commemorative £2 coin in 2023 to mark the 50th anniversary of
Tolkien's death.[221]
Notes

a. Tolkien pronounced his surname /ˈtɒlkiːn/.[1] In General American, the surname is

ⓘ [2]
commonly pronounced /ˈtoʊlkiːn/ .

References

Primary
1. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #190 to Rayner Unwin, 3 July 1956: "After all the book is
English, and by an Englishman"

2. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #267 to Michael Tolkien, 9–10 January 1965.

3. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #306 to Michael Tolkien, 1967 or 1968

4. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #43 to Michael Tolkien, 6–8 March 1941

5. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #340 to Christopher Tolkien, 11 July 1972.

6. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #35 to C. A. Furth, Allen & Unwin, 2 February 1939 (see
also editorial note).

7. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #336 to Sir Patrick Browne, 23 May 1972

8. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #332 to Michael Tolkien, 24 January 1972

9. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #294 to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer, 8 February 1967

10. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #334 to Rayner Unwin, 30 March 1972 (editorial note).

11. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #250 to Michael Tolkien, 1 November 1963

12. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #7, to the Electors of the Rawlinson and Bosworth
Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford, 27 June 1925

13. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #163 to W. H. Auden, 7 June 1955.

14. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #144 to Naomi Mitchison, 25 April 1954.

15. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #180 to 'Mr Thompson' (draft), 14 January 1956.

16. Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #131 to Milton Walden, late 1951

Secondary
1. Tolkien, Christopher, ed. (1988). The Return of the Shadow: The History of The Lord of
 , p , ( ) y
the Rings, Part One. The History of Middle-earth. Vol. 6. ISBN 0-04-440162-0.

2. Wells, John C. (2008). Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.). Longman. ISBN 978-
1-4058-8118-0.

3. Brennan, David (21 September 2018). "The Hobbit: How Tolkien Sunk a German Anti-
Semitic Inquiry Into His Race" (https://www.newsweek.com/hobbit-how-tolkien-sunk-g
erman-anti-semitic-inquiry-his-race-1132744) . Newsweek. Archived (https://web.arch
ive.org/web/20240426091705/https://www.newsweek.com/hobbit-how-tolkien-sunk-g
erman-anti-semitic-inquiry-his-race-1132744) from the original on 26 April 2024.
Retrieved 9 July 2023. "My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth
century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am
an English subject – which should be sufficient."

4. Derdziński, Ryszard (2017). "On J. R. R. Tolkien's Roots" (https://web.archive.org/web/20

190110183343/http://www.elendilion.pl/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/TolkienAncestry.pd
f) (PDF). Archived from the original (http://www.elendilion.pl/wp-content/uploads/201
8/03/TolkienAncestry.pdf) (PDF) on 10 January 2019.

5. Derdziński, Ryszard. "Z Prus do Anglii. Saga rodziny J. R. R. Tolkiena (XIV–XIX wiek)" (htt
ps://web.archive.org/web/20190110133737/https://depot.ceon.pl/bitstream/handle/1234
56789/15041/Z%20Prus%20do%20Anglii.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) (PDF).
Archived from the original (https://depot.ceon.pl/bitstream/handle/123456789/15041/Z%
20Prus%20do%20Anglii.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y) (PDF) on 10 January 2019.

6. "Absolute Verteilung des Namens 'Tolkien' " (https://web.archive.org/web/201305102023

25/http://www.verwandt.de/karten/absolut/tolkien.html) . verwandt.de (in German).
MyHeritage UK. Archived from the original (http://www.verwandt.de/karten/absolut/tolki
en.html) on 10 May 2013. Retrieved 9 January 2012.

7. "Ash nazg gimbatul" (http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45548112.html) . Der

Spiegel (in German). No. 35/1969. 25 August 1969. Archived (https://web.archive.org/we
b/20110427035821/http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-45548112.html) from the
original on 27 April 2011. "Professor Tolkien, der seinen Namen vom deutschen Wort
'tollkühn' ableitet,... ."

8. Geier, Fabian (2009). J. R. R. Tolkien (in German). Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag. p. 9.

ISBN 978-3-499-50664-2.

9. Cawthorne, Nigel (2012). A Brief Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien: A Comprehensive Introduction

to the Author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. London: Robinson. ISBN 978-1-
78033-860-6.
10. Carpenter 1977, p. 14

11. Carpenter 1977, p. 13. Both the spider incident and the visit to the homestead are
covered here.

12. Carpenter 1977, p. 24

13. Carpenter 1977, Ch I, "Bloemfontein". At 9 Ashfield Road, King's Heath.

14. Carpenter 1977, p. 27

15. Carpenter 1977, p. 113

16. Carpenter 1977, p. 29

17. Doughan, David (2002). "JRR Tolkien Biography" (http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/b

iography.html) . Life of Tolkien. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2006030305075
1/http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html) from the original on 3 March
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18. Butts, Dennis (2004). "Shaping boyhood: British Empire builders and adventurers" (http
s://books.google.com/books?id=t1RsBgAAQBAJ&pg=PA340) . In Hunt, Peter (ed.).
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of course, adults were already reading tales of adventure involving Red Indians"

19. Carpenter 1977, p. 22

20. Carpenter 1977, p. 30

21. Carpenter 1977, p. 31

22. Carpenter 1977, p. 39

23. Carpenter 1977, pp. 25–38

24. Carpenter 1977, pp. 24–51

25. "Tolkien's Not-So-Secret Vice" (http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/vice.htm) . Archived (https://we

b.archive.org/web/20121122010424/http://folk.uib.no/hnohf/vice.htm) from the original
on 22 November 2012.

26. "Tolkien's Languages" (https://web.archive.org/web/20131224110153/http://lordfingulfin.

webs.com/earlierlanguages.htm) . Archived from the original (http://lordfingulfin.webs.c
om/earlierlanguages.htm) on 24 December 2013.
27. Bramlett, Perry C. (2002). I Am in Fact a Hobbit: An Introduction to the Life and Works of
J. R. R. Tolkien (https://books.google.com/books?id=8ef3-s6fixIC&pg=PAPA136) .
Mercer University Press. p. 136. ISBN 978-0-86554-894-7. Archived (https://web.archiv
e.org/web/20170215191402/https://books.google.com/books?id=8ef3-s6fixIC&pg=PA13
6) from the original on 15 February 2017. See also: Book of the Foxrook (https://tolkieng
ateway.net/wiki/Book_of_the_Foxrook) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/201702
02055817/http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Book_of_the_Foxrook) 2 February 2017 at the
Wayback Machine.

28. Smith, Arden R. (2006). "Esperanto" (https://books.google.com/books?id=B0loOBA3ejIC

&pg=PAPA172) . In Drout, Michael D. C. (ed.). The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia:
Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Routledge. p. 172, and Book of the Foxrook (http://
parmadili.skf.org.pl/elendili/esperanto.jpg) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/2017
0202162102/http://parmadili.skf.org.pl/elendili/esperanto.jpg) 2 February 2017 at the
Wayback Machine; transcription on Tolkien i Esperanto (http://www.elendilion.pl/2007/0
6/18/tolkien-i-esperanto/) Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20161019054129/htt
p://www.elendilion.pl/2007/06/18/tolkien-i-esperanto/) 19 October 2016 at the
Wayback Machine; the text begins with "PRIVATA KODO SKAŬTA" (Private Scout Code).

29. Carpenter 1977, pp. 53–54

30. Tolkien and the Great War, p. 6.

31. Carpenter 1977, p. 82

32. "1911 – J. R. R. Tolkien besichtigt das Oberwallis" (https://www.valais-wallis-digital.ch/d

e/a/#!/explore/cards/173) . Valais Wallis Digital (in German). Archived (https://web.archi
ve.org/web/20160305092953/https://www.valais-wallis-digital.ch/de/a/#!/explore/card
s/173) from the original on 5 March 2016, citing Carpenter & Tolkien 1981, Letters #306
to Michael Tolkien, autumn 1968.

33. Hammond, Wayne G.; Scull, Christina (26 February 2004). The Lord of the Rings JRR
Tolkien Author and Illustrator. Royal Mail Group plc (commemorative postage stamp
pack).

34. Carpenter 1977, pp. 45, 63–64

35. Carpenter 1977, p. 40