J.R.R Tolkien

 

One of the most famous authors in our history, with a huge legacy in fantasy, is buried in Oxford with a fair amount of his family.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien who passed away on this day in 1973 is a well loved man for any fan of The Lord of the Rings or The Hobbit among others. An Englishman with a name of Polish/Prussian descent, he was born on the 3rd of January 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. This was due to his father, Arthur, relocating himself and his wife, Mabel, after he became head of the Bloemfontein office of the British Bank. Two years later, they had his younger brother Hilary and the family were set.

They returned to England when John was three, although his father stayed in Bloemfontein as it was only supposed to be an extended family visit and he would join them later on. However, he died of Rheumatic fever before he could join them, so Mabel and her two young sons stayed in England and moved in with her parents in Birmingham. The family were now without an income, but after moving in with his grandparents, they were soon able to find themselves a home in Sarehole where they moved in 1896. As a child he explored the area and this experience inspired scenes in his books as well as his Aunt Jane's farm, Bag End.

He and is brother were home-schooled by his mother, and something she passed on to her children was Botany which young John, known to his family as Ronald, very much enjoyed. He then dabbled in drawing and liked to draw trees and landscapes, but he enjoyed most of all learning languages and his mother had taught him Latin very early on in his schooling. He could read by the age of four and was a pretty intelligent child, his schooling continued at home and then at school even though his mother was cut off financially from the family for abandoning her Baptist faith and being received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900. Unfortunately, she died four years later from unmedicated diabetes, before she did so she assigned the guardianship of her sons to her fiend Father Francis Xavier Morgan, Tolkien was only 12 and his mum was 34. Father Francis was to raise the boys as Catholic and be a fair man to them.

It was while he was a teenager that Tolkien created his own language. He first dabbled with Animalic, a language constructed by his cousins, Mary and Marjorie Incledon, while also still studying established languages such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon. They grew bored of Animalic and went on to invent a more complex language between them called Nevbosh. This then mowed the path for his very own invented language Naffarin.

Languages wasn't the only thing that Tolkien was good at creating though. A tea lover, the young man created a societal club, which was fairly secret, with three of his friends. Established in 1911 at King Edward's School, the society included Tolkien, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman. The goal? To drink tea. They named themselves the T.C.B.S (Tea Club and Barrovian Society) and when they left school they stayed in touch and following a meeting in 1914 Tolkien left with a strong wish to write poetry.

He met Edith Mary Bratt, 19, when he was 16 years old after he and his brother moved into a boarding house where she lived. She shared his love of tea, and they spent their time touring the Birmingham teashops where they bonded over being orphans and keen interest in similar topics. Summer of 1909 hit and the two decided they were in love despite the age gap, a gap of which that Father Francis did not approve of. His guardian forbade contact with Edith until he turned 21, this included via written correspondence, and Tolkien obeyed for the most part, more so he continued his dalliance in secret until he was caught and then obeyed when the Father threatened to cut short his studies at university.

On the very day he turned 21, Tolkien wrote to Edith who had moved to Cheltenham to live with a family friend. He told her that he had loved her all this time and asked for her hand in marriage. She replied that she was engaged to another, George Field, and had done so as she had begun to doubt that Tolkien still loved her. However, his letter had changed everything. He arranged to meet her in Cheltenham and took the train to do just that five days after his birthday. They took a long walk, talked a while, and at the end she agreed to marry him. She sent a letter to George, returning her engagement ring and cutting off their promise to each other, both he and his family were upset and angry and even the family friend she was staying with disapproved of her choice. He kicked her out when she announced she was becoming a Catholic for him too. The couple were formally engaged in January of 1913 and married on the 22nd of March three years later.

Of course WWI nearly scuppered that. There was outrage directed that Tolkien when he did not volunteer to fight for his country right off the bat. A man with no job, barely any money, and a fair amount of doubt on who he would end up, people just kept mounting pressure on the poor lad and it seemed like they wanted him to die for a noble cause or else would amount to nothing. He endured the distain directed at him and entered a program that delayed enlistment until he could complete his degree. When he did exactly that in July of 1915 he was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant for the Lancashire Fusiliers. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase and remained on call until just after his wedding when he was summoned to our neck of the woods- Folkestone, in order to be sent to France.  

He boarded troop transport on the 5th of June 1916 headed for Calais. Two days later he was assigned as a signals officer to the 11th Battalion and while awaiting orders composed a poem called The Lonely Isle. He then decided to create a code so his wife could track him while bypassing the postal censorship that the army had enforced. He arrived at the Somme in July 1916 and partook in combat which was a major stressor for Edith but she didn't have to worry for long. Tolkien was sent back to England in early November as he contracted Trench Fever which was carried by lice.

Tolkien got lucky. Nearly his entire battalion was wiped out after he returned to England, plus two members of the T.C.B.S were killed, Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith which would have hurt greatly. But his service wasn't over yet, despite being weak Tolkien spent what was left of the war juggling hospital and garrison duties. He was unfit for general service, but he still had to do his bit. In the meantime he began working on The Book of Lost Tales and then while still in service Edith gave birth to their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien.

When the war was over England went back to as much normality as it could muster, this meant that ex-servicemen had to get civilian jobs. Tolkien's was at the Oxford English Dictionary where he worked on words of Germanic origin starting with W. A year later he went on to tutor Oxford undergraduates privately, many of them women as he was a suitable candidate being married. A year after that he became a reader for English language at the University of Leeds, while here he produced a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight alongside E.V Gordon. He then went on to translate Sir Gawain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo, but these weren't published until 1975, two years after his death. While doing the circuit of civi jobs and life returning to normal, the Tolkiens' also welcomed their second child, Michael, in 1920.

Their third son, Christopher, was born in November of 1924 and then in October of 1925, Tolkien returned to Oxford with a fellowship at Pembroke College. It was here that he wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of LOTR. During this time he also translated Beowulf which he finished in 1926 but never published, instead his son Christopher published this on his behalf in 2014. Despite not publishing the translation, he lectured on the work a decade after he'd finished it which heavily impacted Beowulf research. He argued that the monsters were essential to the poem and regarded the work highly to the point its influences can be seen within Tolkien's own.

The Tolkiens' had their fourth and final child, a girl, Priscilla, in 1929. WWII quickly rolled around and Tolkien was again expected to serve, however this time it was in a completely different capacity. He was asked to serve in the cryptographic department of the Foreign Office due to his skills with codes, he brushed up via the Government Code and Cypher School but was informed in October that he was no longer needed. In 1945 he instead moved to Merton College in Oxford and became a Professor of English Language and Literature. He remained here until he retired in 1959 all the while working on LOTR which he fully completed in 1948.

Tolkien enjoyed retirement, especially as his fame had begun to rise, to the point that he wished he had done it sooner. His friend, C.S Lewis, he of Narnia fame, even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. His books soared and while he didn't so much enjoy being the object of fame, he enjoyed the things that came with it. It caused him to move the family to Bournemouth, which was mainly with his wife in mind due to how popular the destination was for their new class, and remove his phone number from the public directory as the public hounded him.

Edith Tolkien died on the 29th of November 1971 at 82. It was only then he returned to Oxford, but he technically took her with him. He buried her at Wolvercote Cemetery in Oxford and then died himself from a chest infection and bleeding ulcer a little less than two years later. He was buried with his beloved wife.

Following his death, his son Christopher compiled many of his unfinished works and published them. As a well loved author he also received many memorials including blue plaques around England. But we're not here to talk about his work or else we'd be here forever, it went on to spawn several adaptions and is a well loved fandom and we're known to enjoy the odd movie marathon ourselves! This man who many thought wasn't good enough for Edith Bratt went on to be so much more than anyone could have imagined, admittedly later in his life, but just goes to show you can't judge a book by its cover!