Ancestry Tolkien was English, and thought of himself as such. 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. According to Ryszard Derdziński, the surname Tolkien is of
Low Prussian origin and probably means "son/descendant of Tolk". and jokingly inserted himself as a "cameo" into
The Notion Club Papers under the literally translated name Rashbold. However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to be a
false etymology. Another suspected origin is the East Prussian village of
Tołkiny. While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father". 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. 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. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in
Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to
Sarehole (now in
Hall Green), then a
Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. 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. Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. 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. 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) and works of fantasy by
George MacDonald. In addition, the "Fairy Books" of
Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings. , 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, 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." 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 . 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." 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.
Youth 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. 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. Short texts in this notebook are written in Esperanto. 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. 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. In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollected vividly in a 1968 letter, 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. 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. Among his tutors at Oxford was
Joseph Wright, whose
Primer of the Gothic Language had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy.
Courtship and marriage in 1906 at age 17. She married Tolkien in 1916. 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." His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it "altogether unfortunate" 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". with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop. On the evening of his 21st birthday Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with a family friend named C. H. Jessop in
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. 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." 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. 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. In a 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. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on
Cannock Chase, Rugeley Camp near to
Rugeley, Staffordshire, for eleven months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained: "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed." Following their wedding Lieutenant and Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp. He later wrote: "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then ... it was like a death."
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. He left Étaples on 27 June 1916 and joined his battalion at
Rubempré, near
Amiens. He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving towns of Lancashire. 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." 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." 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. 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'. 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. , 1916 According to 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".
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. 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. 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". 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: On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant.
Academic and writing career , one of Tolkien's former homes in
Oxford After the end of the war 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. 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. 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. 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 were not published until 1975. In 1924 he was promoted from a readership at Leeds to a
professorship. In October 1925 he returned to Oxford as
Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at
Pembroke College. 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.
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. 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. 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. 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. Where
Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at
Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. 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. According to Tolkien's biographer
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". 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". In 1945 Tolkien moved to
Merton College, Oxford, becoming the
Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, 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. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the
National University of Ireland (of which University College, Galway, was a constituent college). Tolkien completed
The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.
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). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated
letters from Father Christmas when they were young.
Retirement 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. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory; 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. 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.
Final years ,
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. Tolkien was made a
Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the
1972 New Year Honours and received the insignia of the Order at
Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary
Doctorate of Letters. He had the name
Luthien 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, at the age of 81, 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 £ in ). == Views ==