Early Life
J. R. R. Tolkien (known as Ronald to close family and friends) was born on January 3rd, 1892 to an English family living in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The family had moved there for Arthur Reuel Tolkien’s work as a bank clerk, but returned to England only four years later, when Arthur passed away. This quotation from The Tolkien Society describes Ronald’s experience in South Africa.
His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England—or more particularly, the West Midlands. (Doughan, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch)
After Tolkien’s mother, Mabel Suffield, passed away due to diabetes in 1904 (a fatal illness at the time) the priest Father Francis Morgan took care of him and his brother Hilary financially, but left them to stay with their aunt for some time. They later moved into the house of Mrs. Faulkner, where Tolkien would meet his future wife, Edith Bratt.
While attending King Edward’s School, where he would soon make some of his closest lifelong friends, Tolkien had already become fluent in many languages, and started creating his own.
By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun. (Doughan, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch)
One language in particular that Tolkien found intriguing was Welsh. He read Welsh literature, studied the language and even took inspiration from it when creating Elvish languages for The Lord of The Rings.
He said: "He knew the Welsh language extremely well - both medieval and modern Welsh. "He read a lot of medieval Welsh literature, taught medieval Welsh when he was working at Leeds University and you can see the influence of the language and the literature in his creative writing and his scholarly work." He added: "Welsh is important as an influence particularly on one of the Elvish languages, Sindarin. It's not so much that he borrowed Welsh words, more the sounds.” (Study explores JRR Tolkien's Welsh influences)
Career and War Experiences
Tolkien’s passion for linguistics had a large impact on his career; he decided to study English language and literature at Oxford University, and later teach it to undergraduate students. Tolkien used his extensive knowledge of existing languages to create the fictional ones that would be included in his books. When the First World War started, while Tolkien was still in the process of obtaining his degree in English language and literature from Oxford University, he was able to delay his enlistment so he could complete his education in 1915. Later, he went to France and fought in the Battle of the Somme, before he fell victim to “trench fever”, a typhus-like illness four months later. Tolkien was sent back to England where he remained in the hospital for a month. After recovery, he put his degree to use and began working as a professor. “For most of his adult life, he taught English language and literature, specializing in Old and Middle English, at the Universities of Leeds (1920–25) and Oxford (1925–59).” (Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien)
Writing The Hobbit
When writing it, Tolkien hadn’t anticipated that one of his most popular and celebrated works, The Hobbit, which takes place in the fictional world of Middle Earth (as does the The Lord of The Rings series), would become the international bestseller we know it as today.
According to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what anarchic daemon, he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit“. In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. (Doughan, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch)
Tolkien originally wrote The Hobbit as a bedtime story for his four children around the year 1930, each night adding on more and more to the story, which wouldn’t be published until years later.
The result, 17 years later, was Tolkien’s masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, a modern version of the heroic epic. A few elements from The Hobbit were carried over, in particular a magic ring, now revealed to be the One Ring, which must be destroyed before it can be used by the terrible Dark Lord, Sauron, to rule the world. But The Lord of the Rings is also an extension of Tolkien’s Silmarillion tales, which gave the new book a “history” in which Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, and Men were already established. (Hammond, J.R.R. Tolkien)
In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien also included different languages spoken in Middle Earth, namely Quenya and Sindarin, which he developed into full languages, using his knowledge of linguistics and literature and his experience coming up with languages from scratch. Tolkien was an extremely talented writer who used his knowledge of languages to add to the fictional world he created and immerse readers more deeply into Middle Earth. His ability to not only master as many languages as he did (and at the age at which he learned them) but also to create his own just add to what makes his stories feel so real and what made him a very successful fantasy author.
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