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The Coming of Túrin into Brethil

2008-03-08T22:08:54Z

Findegil:

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Coming of Túrin into Brethil''' is the thirteenth chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
==Analysis==

The Battle of Unnumbered Tears

2007-07-31T07:01:42Z

Findegil:

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Battle of Unnumbered Tears''' is the second chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
[[Húrin]] and his brother [[Huor]] passed from [[Dor-lómin]] with a number of men from the [[House of Hador]] to [[Eithel Sirion]] upon the west of the barren plain, [[Anfauglith]]. Gathered there was the host of [[Fingon]], hidden from the eyes of [[Morgoth]]; and all were jubilant when they were joined by a force from hidden [[Gondolin]] led by [[Turgon]], Fingon’s brother.

The host of Fingon were to await a beacon signal from [[Maedhros]] before they joined the battle so that they might outflank the enemy forces, but Morgoth sent a force to come upon Fingon’s and keep the armies divided. The horde led by a [[Captain of Morgoth]] could only goad Fingon’s force into battle by killing the elf [[Gelmir]] who they had captured at the [[Dagor Bragollach]]. Gelmir’s brother, [[Gwindor]], was present with Fingon and was so enraged that he initiated the charge and Fingon's force entered the battle earlier than planned.

Such was the force of this initial attack that they reached the very doors of [[Angband]]; but Gwindor was captured. Fingon was then beaten back across the plain by the main host of Morgoth's forces that issued from many secret tunnels. So did the [[Nirnaeth Arnoediad]] begin.

To support his brother, Turgon brought his force into the fray, and Fingon, Húrin, Huor and Turgon met in the midst of the battle after long partings. But with the force of Maedhros routed, more [[Orcs]] led by [[Gothmog]] came upon the elves and men from the east, and they were outmatched.

Fingon fell to Gothmog, but Turgon, on the advice of Huor, retreated, guarded by the remnants of the House of Hador. There at the [[Fen of Serech]], Huor fell, but Húrin was captured alive at great loss to the enemy; and he was dragged to Angband.

==Analysis==
This chapter is very much a summary of the Nirnaeth Arnoediad; it is rich in its use of references to characters from the period and might be seen as being overwhelming to any audience who knows little of the [[First Age]]. [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher Tolkien’s]] '''''Introduction''''' at the beginning of the book does a valiant effort in supporting such a reader!

The chapter highlights those elements within which Húrin and his brother were present whilst giving a cursory sketch of the full battle itself. The events fulfill [[Morwen|Morwen's]] words of pessimism to Húrin in the earlier chapter, ''[[The Childhood of Túrin]]''.

It is seen from the narrative that Morgoth engineered a victory and yet throughout all there were goals he wished to attain, and these had been communicated to his Captains:

* Fingon should be brought to battle earlier than the elves planned.
* That Húrin should be captured alive.
* Turgon should be killed (or perhaps captured), as he seemed to Morgoth that he might be a ruin to his power.

Morgoth achieved the first two goals but failed the third.

The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin

2007-06-05T12:14:25Z

Findegil:

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin''' is the twelfth chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
In the depths of winter, [[Túrin]] came hooded and silent to the land of [[Dor-lómin]] to find his childhood stead empty and dark. Spent and weary, Túrin begged for shelter at the servant halls in the house of [[Brodda]], who was now the [[Easterlings|Easterling]] Lord of Dor-lómin.
Here Túrin met with [[Sador]], who was his childhood friend and mentor - he told of how [[Morwen]] and [[Nienor]] had left secretly over the passes of [[Ered Wethrin]] and so to [[Beleriand]]. To the Lady [[Aerin]], kinswoman of [[Húrin]], Sador directed Túrin – she was against her will the wife of Brodda; and Túrin came to both Brodda and Aerin in the great hall of the house.

There Túrin challenged Brodda and drew forth [[Anglachel]] putting its bitter edge it to the throat of the Easterling; he asked Aerin to tell all she knew of Morwen. She told of Brodda's dark oppression of Morwen and her house, so much so that she had fled five seasons ago, as the lands to the south were held open and free by the prowess of the [[Black Sword|Blacksword]]. And Túrin laughed as he held that very sword to Brodda's throat.

Then Brodda was killed as Túrin threw him and his neck was broken, and the thralls of the house arose and all the Easterlings were killed. After the rage, Aerin begged Túrin to leave in haste, for more of the [[Incomers]], that were Brodda’s kin, would soon come; but Aerin herself would not go forth with the rebels, for she remained in the hall and burned it as Túrin had departed.

The rebels made camp through the winter in a mountain refuge, and there Túrin left them for he would search for his mother and sister.

==Analysis==

The Fall of Nargothrond

2007-05-30T19:47:47Z

Findegil:

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Fall of Nargothrond''' is the eleventh chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
For five years a peace was realised about [[Nargothrond]]. It was then that two [[Elf|Elves]] came to King [[Orodreth]]: [[Gelmir]] and [[Arminas]] they were who had journeyed long from [[Círdan]] at the [[Mouths of Sirion]] who sent message from [[Ulmo]]; for the [[Lord of Waters]] had said peril draws near to Nargothrond. ''Shut your doors'' he had bidden and ''cast down [[Narog|Narog’s]] bridge''.

But Ordoreth turned to [[Túrin]] [[Mormegil]] for counsel, who in his pride would not heed the words sent from Círdan, who, Túrin said, hid from wars in the furthest place of [[Beleriand]], far from the shadow of [[Morgoth]].

Now autumn came, and indeed Morgoth unleashed a great horde long prepared and at its head was [[Glaurung]], [[Father of Dragons]]. In the northern vale of [[Sirion]] was [[Eithel Ivrin]] defiled and the [[Guarded Plain]], [[Talath Dirnen]] was burned. There came Túrin and Ordoreth, ahead a host of Nargothrond, but the multitude from [[Angband]] was greater and none but Túrin guarded by his dwarf-mask could withstand the dragon.

The soldiers of Nargothrond were withered and beaten; and Gwindor in death said, ''“Haste to Nargothrond and save [[Finduilas]]”''. But Túrin came too late, for Glaurung and a host of [[Orcs]] were before him, and the bridge over the Narog proved a ruin for they came upon the Doors in force and all the halls were taken and ruined.

In that sack, Túrin came to the wrecked [[Doors of Felagund]] and Glaurung awaited him, so that Túrin was bewitched by the dragon’s eye. There Túrin stood as stone as Finduilas amongst the thralls were led away to torment in Angband by a horde of Orcs. And Glaurung held [[Húrin|Húrin’s]] son to wound him with the cries of those innocents so they would trouble him thereafter.

With the passing of that dreadful company, Túrin was loosened; but once more Glaurung taunted him, and seemingly released him in pity. As he gave Túrin his freedom, he said to hasten to [[Dor-lómin]] to his mother and sister, and not tarry with the fate of Finduilas.

==Analysis==
It is now that Morgoth’s malevolent patience sews dividends; long planned for and thought through, a great host is unleashed. The forerunner of this army are the skirmishes of the previous years: the bands of [[Orcs]] who plundered, raided and sought out the lay of the land about [[Sirion]] and into [[Beleriand]]. So was the time made ripe with the exposure of Nargothrond.

It is now that Túrin is the very core of destruction for Orodreth’s kingdom. This comes to pass after the coming of the messengers of Ulmo. For as a result of Túrin's prowess, he has authority and respect; but the result of his pride and charisma is his pronouncement not to destroy the bridge he instigated at the Doors of Felagund. This seals the doom of the once-hidden kingdom and once more sews the seeds of his own regret.

To support in his scheme of destruction, Morgoth lets loose the mighty Glaurung; whose guidance is the very will of his master. It is Glaurung whose power holds Túrin whilst Finduilas and the others are driven forth; this, combined with the parting words to direct Túrin to Dor-lómin, seal Túrin’s lament.

For what might have happened if Túrin had slain Glaurung here (if he could)?

Or what if he broke the spell of the dragon and followed the trail of Finduilas?

Or would Nargothrond have fallen if the bridge had not been built or had been destroyed?

Does the cloak of doom that enrobes Túrin always bring with it destruction? So it would seem.

Túrin in Nargothrond

2007-05-30T19:25:20Z

Findegil:

{{coh-chapters}}
'''Túrin in Nargothrond''' is the tenth chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
[[Túrin]] was admitted to the halls of [[Nargothrond]] for he came with [[Gwindor]], who was once betrothed to [[Finduilas]], daughter of [[Orodreth]], King of Nargothrond. But none greatly recognised Gwindor, so much had his torment changed him, for he was bent with age and maimed. When Túrin was asked his name, [[Agarwaen]], son of [[Úmarth]] (that is Blood-stained son of Ill-fate) he called himself, for he wished to leave his darkness behind.

The sword [[Anglachel]] was forged anew so that its black edges burned with pale fire; and Túrin’s prowess with the blade gained him the respect of the [[Elves]], and after a time he became a counsel of Orodreth; and his advice was to fight Morgoth openly. This Gwindor ever gainsaid, marking that he knew the array of [[Morgoth]] - for he had seen that the power of [[Angband]] was greater than all the gatherings of Elves and [[Men]]. Secrecy and stealth should be their manner.

But Túrin advanced in influence and was soon chief counsellor to the King; and Orodreth then took Túrin’s guidance and the Elves no longer took secret ways in their skirmishes, but marched openly from Nargothrond; and a bridge was built at the [[Doors of Felagund]] so that they might make swift passage over [[Narog]] and hasten to war. For his valour, the elves girt Túrin in [[dwarf-mail]] and [[dwarf-mask]] so that his enemies flew from him – and they called him [[Mormegil]], the [[Black Sword]].

All the while, Gwindor’s honour fell, for he was weakened from Angband; and Finduilas looked now upon Túrin with admiration, and she found her heart moved when he was near. Seeing this, Gwindor’s friendship with Túrin was cooled and the elf cursed Morgoth, for the [[Great Enemy]] it seemed would follow his foes until the very bitter end; and he saw the ruin that came in Túrin’s train. And Gwindor went to Finduilas and said she must beware, for Agarwaen was in truth Túrin; truly was he the son of [[Húrin]], whose kin Morgoth cursed even now.

Finduilas came straight away to Túrin and asked him why he would hide his real name. In this, Túrin was angered, for he felt his fate was now betrayed; but Gwindor said, ''“The doom lies in yourself, not your name.”''

Yet in this time when the Black Sword held peace west of [[Sirion]], [[Morwen]] and [[Nienor|Niënor]] fled the tyranny of [[Dor-Lómin]] to come to [[Doriath]] in [[Melian|Melian’s]] ward. But there they found Túrin long gone.

==Analysis==
This chapter illustrates two elements of Túrin's character:

1. His ''charisma''

2. The ''Doom'' that enrobes him

'''Túrin's innate charisma'''

Túrin is a lord among men; he is the son of [[Húrin]] [[Thalion]] and the true ruler of Dor-lómin and the [[House of Hador]]. He is often compared to the Elves he has grown up with; called [[Adanedhel]] ("Man-Elf") in Nargothrond; and is said to be tall and strong in stature.
This innate power and strength combined with a potent lineage produced a naturally intense charisma that encircled Túrin and affected others in his company. It was this authority (combined with his prowess in battle) that supported his rise to chief counsellor of Orodreth.

'''The Doom laid upon him'''

During his time in Nargothrond, as it might be said in many periods of Túrin’s life, he seems beyond the grasp of Morgoth’s powers; and for a while might escape the shadowy fate laid upon him. Yet even in these periods of retreat and renaming, we find that aspects of Túrin’s character negatively affect his decisions:
* In particular his ''pride'' bordering on arrogance;
* His ''innocence'' of others and lack of empathy (he has a raw difficulty in seeing how others feel – he cannot see the origin of Gwindor’s coolness nor the attentions of Finduilas).
Both Gwindor and Finduilas might see these traits as a further concentrated outcome of Túrin’s feelings of superiority.

'''Both of these elements of Túrin’s character combine in Nargothrond.''' As a result he has authority and respect; but this is soon to be the key of doom to the Elven-kingdom.

Hobbiton

2007-05-30T18:01:42Z

Findegil: Fixed links

{{location
| image=[[Image:J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hill - Hobbiton-across-the-Water (Colored).jpg|250px]]
| name=Hobbiton
| othernames=
| etymology=[[Westron]] ''[[Hobbit]]'' + anglicized ''town'' (''ton'')
| type=City
| location=The [[Westfarthing]]
| inhabitants=[[Hobbits]]
| realms=The [[Shire]]
| description=A small town overlooked by [[The Hill]]
| events=[[Scouring of the Shire]]
| references=''[[The Hobbit]]''
|}}

'''Hobbiton''' was a large town in the central regions of the [[Shire]], within the borders of the [[Westfarthing]]. The town was overlooked by [[Hobbiton Hill]] (usually called simply '[[The Hill]]'), in which was [[Bag End]], the ancestral smial of the [[Baggins Family]] and the famous [[Frodo Baggins|Frodo]] and [[Bilbo Baggins]]. Hobbiton was located on the [[The Water|Water]], approximately a mile northwest of the neighboring village of [[Bywater]]. The [[Bywater Road]] passed through both villages and connected them to the [[Great East Road]] to the south.

The village of Hobbiton was on both sides of the Water. The dwellings were standard of [[Hobbits]], referred to as [[smials]] or [[Hobbit-holes]] but there were also buildings of wood, brick, or stone. One of the more prominent buildings in Hobbiton was [[Old Mill|Sandyman's Mill]] which stood on the north side of the Water, near the bridge. The [[Old Grange]] was on the west side of the lane which ran from the bridge to the Hill where [[Bag End]] stood. On the southern side of the Hill were three smaller Hobbit-holes along [[Bagshot Row]], on the south of the Water there were several other dwellings. The town also has their own Post Office.

After the [[War of the Ring]], Hobbiton was devasted by [[The Scouring of the Shire]]. [[Lotho Sackville-Baggins]] had named himself Chief and rough-looking [[Men]] had come to Hobbiton on Lotho's invitation. Frodo and his companions were stunned to see their homes, trees and hedges all torn up.

{{quote|It was one of the saddest hours in their lives. The great chimney rose up before them; and as they drew near the old village across the Water, through rows of new mean houses along each side of the road, they saw the new mill in all its frowning and dirty ugliness: a great brick building straddling the stream, which it fouled with a steaming and stinking overflow. All along the Bywater Road every tree had been felled.|[[The Return of the King]]. [[The Scouring of the Shire]]}}

After the Scouring of the Shire, Bag End was restored and new holes were dug along Bagshot Row. The new mill was removed. [[Sam Gamgee]] spread [[Galadriel|Galadriel's]] gift of earth from her orchard around the Shire, paying special attention to Hobbiton and Bywater. He planted the [[mallorn]] seed in the [[Party Field]] by the Hill where the [[The Party Tree|Party Tree]] had once stood. Soon Hobbiton was a peaceful and beautiful village once again.

[[Category:Shire]]
[[Category:Cities]]

Dwarf-masks

2007-05-30T14:39:05Z

Findegil:

[[Image:Ted_Nasmith_-_T%C3%BArin_Bears_Gwindor_to_Safety.jpg|left|thumb|Turin wearing a dwarf-mask]]
[[Image:Dwarfmask.jpg|thumb|right|Dwarf-mask of Belegost]]
The '''dwarf-masks''' were helmets of great crafting made in the [[First Age]] by the [[Dwarves]] of the [[Blue Mountains]]. These helmets had face plates which could be lowered over the face as a mask, and through this the fire of dragons might be withstood.

One such helm was the [[Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin]], crafted by the smith [[Telchar]] for the Dwarf King of [[Belegost]], [[Azaghâl]]. This he wore at the [[Battle of Unnumbered Tears]] where he fought [[Glaurung]], Father of Dragons.
[[Túrin]] [[Mormegil]] was gifted a dwarf-helm during his time in [[Nargothrond]]; and before this was the rightful heir to the Dragon Helm of Dor-lómin.

[[Category: Armor]]

Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien

2007-05-30T11:06:02Z

Findegil:

{{book|
title=Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien|
image=[[Image:Picturesjrrt.jpg|225px]]|
author=[[J.R.R. Tolkien]], [[Christopher Tolkien]]|
isbn=0395606489|
publisher=[[Houghton Mifflin]]|
date=1992|
format=Hardcover|
pages= 112|
amazon=http://www.amazon.com/Pictures-J-R-Tolkien/dp/0395606489|
amazonprice=$??
}}

'''Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien''' brings together a wide array of paintings, sketches and pictures by [[Tolkien]], confirming his considerable talent as an artist. This book provides a unique and fascinating insight into the visual conception of many of the places and characters familiar to readers of [[The Hobbit]], [[The Lord of the Rings]], [[The Silmarillion]] and [[The Children of Húrin]]. The text is by [[Christopher Tolkien]].

== Contents ==
1. [[Hobbiton]]-across-the-Water

2. The [[Trolls]]

3. Three Trolls turned to Stone

4. [[Rivendell]] Looking West

5. Rivendell Looking East

6. Rivendell

7. The Mountain-path

8. [[Misty Mountains]] Looking West

9. [[Bilbo]] woke with the early sun in his eyes

10. [[Beorn|Beorn's]] Hall

11. The Elvenking's Gate

12. The Elvenking's Gate

13. Bilbo comes to the Huts of the [[Raft-elves]]

14. Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves

15. [[Lake Town]]

16. The [[Front Gate]]

17. Conversation with [[Smaug]]

18. Smaug flies round the Mountain

19. Death of Smaug

20. The Hall at Bag End

21. [[Old Man Willow]]

22. [[Doors of Durin]]

23. [[Book of Mazarbul]]

24. [[Moria Gate]]

25. Forest of [[Lothlorien]] in Spring

26. [[Helm's Deep]] and [[Hornburg]]

27. [[Orthanc]] and [[Minas Tirith]]

28. [[Shelob|Shelob's]] Lair

29. [[Dunharrow]]

30. [[Orodruin]] and [[Barad-dûr]]

31. [[Taniquetil]]

32. [[Lake Mithrim]]

33. [[Nargothrond]]

34. Nargothrond

35. [[Gondolin]]

36. [[Tol Sirion]]

37. [[Mirkwood]] and [[Taur-nu-Fuin]]

38. [[Glaurung]] sets forth to seek [[Túrin]]

39. Polar bear

40-48. Various designs, sketches, floral and heraldic designs

[[Category:Books by J.R.R. Tolkien|Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien]]
[[Category:Books by Christopher Tolkien|Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien]]

J.R.R. Tolkien

2007-05-30T11:00:00Z

Findegil:

[[Image:Jrrt_1972_pipe.jpg|right|thumb|350px|J.R.R. Tolkien in 1972, in his study at Merton Street]]
''See also [[Simon Tolkien]], [[Christopher Tolkien]], [[Edith Tolkien]], [[Tolkien|etc.]]''

'''John Ronald Reuel Tolkien''' (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is an author best known for ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and its sequel trilogy ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. He worked as reader and professor in English language at the University of Leeds from 1920 to 1925; as professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford from 1925 to 1945; and of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. A strongly committed Catholic, Tolkien was a close friend of [[C.S. Lewis]], and a member of the [[Inklings]], a literary discussion group to which both Lewis and [[Owen Barfield]] belonged.

In addition to ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', Tolkien's published fiction includes ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' and other posthumous books about what he called a [[legendarium]], a fictional mythology of the remote past of Earth, called [[Arda]], and [[Middle-earth]] (from ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middangeard middangeard]'', the lands inhabitable by [[Men]]) in particular. Most of these posthumously published works were compiled from Tolkien's notes by his son [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher Reuel Tolkien]]. The enduring popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the "father of the modern high fantasy genre". Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children and not directly related to the legendarium.

== Biography ==
=== The Tolkien Family ===
Although records are unclear, many of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in Saxony (present-day Germany), but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English (not British)" (''Letters'', 165). The surname ''Tolkien'' is anglicised from ''Tollkiehn'' (i.e. German: ''tollkühn'', "foolhardy", the etymological English translation would be "dull-keen", a literal translation of "oxymoron"). The character of Professor Rashbold in ''[[The Notion Club Papers]]'' is a pun on the name.

'''See also:''' [[J.R.R. Tolkien's Family Tree]]

=== Childhood ===
Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State), South Africa, to [[Arthur Tolkien|Arthur Reuel Tolkien]] (1857 – 1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, ''née'' Suffield (1870 – 1904). Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on February 17, 1894.

While living in Africa he developed a severe fear of spiders after being bitten by a large tarantula out in their garden. When he was three, Tolkien 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 a severe brain haemorrhage before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Birmingham, England. 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 Hills and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his fiction.

[[Image:Jrrt_1905.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Ronald and Hilary Tolkien in 1905]]

Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awoke in her son 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. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. He later attended St. Philip's School and Exeter College, Oxford.

His mother converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900, despite vehement protests by her Baptist family. She died of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage, Rednal, which they were then renting. For the rest of his life, Tolkien felt that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C.S. Lewis to Anglicanism.

During his subsequent orphanhood he was brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free public display from around 1908.

[[image:Jrrt_1911.jpg|left|thumb|150px|J.R.R. Tolkien in 1911]]

=== Youth ===
Tolkien met and fell in love with [[Edith Bratt|Edith Mary Bratt]], three years his senior, at the age of sixteen. Father Francis forbade him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter.

In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called "the [[T.C.B.S.]]", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness of drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illegally, 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 the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter (''Letters'', no. 306), 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 twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembers 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 on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.

[[image:Tolkien_1916.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from the middle years of WW1]]

On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. She replied saying that she was already engaged, but had done so because she had believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love, with Edith returning her ring and choosing to marry Tolkien instead. A condition of their engagement was that she was to convert to Catholicism for him. They were engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, on March 22, 1916.

With his childhood love of landscape, he visited Cornwall in 1914 and he was said to be deeply impressed by the singular Cornish coastline and sea. After graduating from the University of Oxford (Exeter College, Oxford) with a first-class degree in English language in 1915, Tolkien joined the British Army effort in [[World War I]] and served as a second lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme, until he came down with trench fever on October 27, and was moved back to England on November 8. Many of his fellow servicemen, as well as many of his closest friends, were killed in the war. During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called ''[[The Book of Lost Tales]]'', beginning with ''[[The Fall of Gondolin]]''. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, one day he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a thick grove of hemlock. This incident inspired the account of the meeting of [[Beren Erchamion|Beren]] and [[Lúthien]], and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.

=== Oxford ===
Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (among others, he initiated the entries "wasp" and "walrus"). In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there, but in 1925 he returned to Oxford as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College.

Tolkien and Edith had four children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917 - January 22, 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel (October 1920–1984), [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher John Reuel]] (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929). Tolkien assisted Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the unearthing of a Roman Asclepieion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928. During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and the first two volumes of ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "[[Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics]]" had a lasting influence on [[Beowulf]] research.

In 1945, he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien completed ''The Lord of the Rings'' in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent.
Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialisation, which he considered a devouring of the English countryside. For most of his adult life he eschewed automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude is perceptible from some parts of his work, such as the forced industrialisation of The Shire in ''The Lord of the Rings''.

[[Image:Jrrt_1972_tree.jpg|thumb|180px|The last known photograph of Tolkien, taken 9 October 1972, next to one of his favourite trees (a ''Pinus nigra'') in the Botanic Garden, Oxford]]

[[W.H. Auden]] was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with ''The Lord of the Rings'': Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter,
{{quote|I am [...] very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #327}}

=== Retirement and Old Age ===
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien increasingly turned into a figure of public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that Tolkien regretted he had not taken early retirement. While at first he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became more and more suspicious of emerging [[Tolkien fandom]], especially among the hippy movement in the USA. Already in 1944, he made a somewhat sarcastic comment about a fan letter by a twelve-year-old American reader ("It's nice to find that little American boys do really still say 'Gee Whiz'.", ''Letters'' no. 87). In a 1972 letter he deplores having become a cult-figure, but admits that
{{quote|even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu-Bu_and_Sheemish Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish]) cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #336}}.

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth at the south coast. Tolkien was awarded a CBE ("Commander of the British Empire") by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on March 28, 1972.

[[Image:Tolkiengrave.jpg|thumb|The grave of J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien]]
Edith Tolkien died on November 29, 1971, at the age of eighty-two, and Tolkien had the name Lúthien
engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on September 2, 1973, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name, so that the engraving now reads:
:''Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889 – 1971''
:''John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892 – 1973''

Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2675_Tolkien 2675 Tolkien]. Tolkien Way in Stoke-On-Trent is named after J.R.R.'s son Father John Francis Tolkien, who used to be the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains.

== Writing ==
[[Image:Jrrt_lotr_cover_design.jpg|thumb|350px|Cover design for the three volumes of ''The Lord of the Rings'' by J.R.R. Tolkien]]

Beginning with ''[[The Book of Lost Tales]]'', written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of [[Túrin]], were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in ''[[The Lays of Beleriand]]''). Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]''. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of ''The Fall of [[Númenor]]'', which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.

Tolkien was strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish mythology, the Bible, and Greek mythology. The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include ''Beowulf'', the ''[[Kalevala]]'', the ''[[Poetic Edda]]'', the ''[[Volsunga saga]]'' and the ''[[Hervarar saga]]''1. Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer, Oedipus, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems. A major philosophical influence on his writing is King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of ''Boethius''' ''Consolation of Philosophy'' known as the ''Lays of Boethius''. Characters in ''The Lord of the Rings'', such as Frodo, Treebeard and Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks.

In addition to his [[Mythopoeia|mythological compositions]], Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. 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]]''). Other stories included ''[[Mr. Bliss]]'', ''[[Roverandom]]'', ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' and ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]''. ''Roverandom'' and ''Smith of Wootton Major'', like ''The Hobbit'', borrowed ideas from his legendarium. ''Leaf by Niggle'' appears to be an autobiographical work, where a "very small man", Niggle, keeps painting leaves until finally he ends up with a tree.

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by a former student to publish a book he had written for his own children called ''The Hobbit'' in 1937. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel ''The Lord of the Rings'' (published 1954–55). 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.

Tolkien at first intended ''The Lord of the Rings'' as a children's tale like ''The Hobbit'', but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to ''The Hobbit'', it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in ''The Silmarillion'' and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of ''The Lord of the Rings''.

Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher, with some assistance from fantasy writer [[Guy Gavriel Kay]], organised some of this material into one volume, published as ''The Silmarillion'' in 1977. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title ''[[Unfinished Tales]]'', and in subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve volumes of ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]''.
All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency to be found between ''The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit'', the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing ''The Hobbit'' for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book.

The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of ''The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit'', and other manuscripts, including ''Farmer Giles of Ham'', while the Bodleian holds the ''Silmarillion'' papers and Tolkien's academic work.

''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 twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted ''The Lord of the Rings'' "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited just 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'' (''Der Herr der Ringe'') to be their favourite work of literature.

== Languages ==
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialised in Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Icelandic as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918. In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, 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 33, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture ''[[English and Welsh]]'', which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered west-midland Middle English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W.H. Auden in 1955 (''Letters'', no. 163), "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)".

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 the construction of artificial languages. The best developed of these are [[Quenya]] and [[Sindarin]], the etymological connection between which are at 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 "phonæsthetic" considerations. It was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish and Greek (''Letters'', no. 144). A notable addition came in late 1945 with [[Númenórean]], a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis myth, which by ''The Notion Club Papers'' ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language, and via the "[[Second Age]]" and the [[Eärendil the Mariner|Eärendil]] myth was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th-century "real primary world" with the mythical past of his Middle-earth.

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]]'', "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends" (''Letters'', no. 180).

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 today commonly accept Tolkien's revival of the spellings ''dwarves'' and ''elvish'' (instead of ''dwarfs'' and ''elfish''), which had not been in use since the mid-1800s and earlier. Other terms he has coined, like legendarium and [[eucatastrophe]], are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

== Works Inspired by Tolkien ==
In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which:
{{quote|The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #131}}

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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrethe_II_of_Denmark 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 to the style of his own drawings.

But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving.

In 1946, he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of the ''Hobbit'' as ''"too Disnified"'',
{{quote|Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #107}}

He was sceptical of the emerging [[Tolkien fandom|fandom]] in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of ''The Lord of the Rings'':
{{quote|Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #144}}

And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of ''The Lord of the Rings'' by Morton Grady Zimmerman:
{{quote|I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #207}}

He went on to criticise the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future productions, he forbade Disney should ever be involved:
{{quote|It might be advisable [...] to let the Americans do what seems good to them — as long as it was possible [...] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #13}}

United Artists never made a film, though at least [[John Boorman]] was planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to [[Tolkien Enterprises]], a [[Saul Zaentz]] company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of ''[[Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings|The Lord of the Rings]]'' appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by [[Ralph Bakshi]]). The screenplay was written by the fantasy writer [[Peter S. Beagle]]. This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half of the story that is ''The Lord of the Rings''. In 1977 an animated TV production of ''[[Rankin/Bass' The Hobbit|The Hobbit]]'' was made by [[Rankin/Bass]], and in 1980 they produced an animated film titled ''[[Rankin/Bass' The Return of the King|The Return of the King]]'', which covered some of the portion of ''The Lord of the Rings'' that Bakshi was unable to complete. In 2001-3 ''[[Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings|The Lord of the Rings]]'' was filmed in full and as a live-action film as a ''trilogy of films'' by [[Peter Jackson]].

== Bibliography ==
''See also [[Books|Books by J.R.R. Tolkien]]''
=== Fiction and Poetry ===
* 1936 ''Songs for the Philologists'', with [[E.V. Gordon]] et al.
* 1937 ''[[The Hobbit|The Hobbit or There and Back Again]]'', ISBN 0-618-00221-9 ([[Houghton Mifflin|HM]]).
* 1945 ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'' (short story)
* 1945 ''[[The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun]]'', published in ''Welsh Review''
* 1949 ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' (medieval fable)
* 1953 ''[[The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son]]'' published with the essay ''Ofermod''
* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''
** 1954 ''[[The Fellowship of the Ring]]'': being the first part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00222-7 (HM).
** 1954 ''[[The Two Towers]]'': being the second part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00223-5 (HM).
** 1955 ''[[The Return of the King]]'': being the third part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00224-3 (HM).
* 1962 ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]] and Other Verses from the Red Book''
* 1967 ''[[The Road Goes Ever On]]'', with [[Donald Swann]]
* 1964 ''[[Tree and Leaf]]'' (''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' and ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'' in book form)
* 1966 ''The Tolkien Reader'' (''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son'', ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'', ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]' and ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]]'')
* 1966 ''Tolkien on Tolkien'' (autobiographical)
* 1967 ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]''

=== Academic Works ===
* 1922 ''A Middle English Vocabulary''
* 1924 ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]'' (with [[E.V. Gordon]])
* 1925 ''Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography''
* 1925 ''[[The Devil's Coach Horses]]''
* 1929 ''[[Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad]]''
* 1932 ''The Name 'Nodens' '' (in: ''Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire''.)
* 1932/1935 ''[[Sigelwara Land]]'' parts I and II
* 1934 ''[[The Reeve's Prologue and Tale|The Reeve's Tale]]'' (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'')
* 1936 ''[[Beowulf: the monsters and the critics|Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics]]'' (lecture on [[Beowulf]] criticism)
* 1939 ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, given as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture)
* 1944 ''[[Sir Orfeo]]'' (an edition of the medieval poem)
* 1947 ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (essay, very central for understanding Tolkien's views on fastasy)
* 1953 ''Ofermod'', published with the poem ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son''
* 1953 ''Middle English "Losenger"''
* 1962 ''[[Ancrene Wisse]]: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle''
* 1963 ''English and Welsh''
* 1966 ''[[Jerusalem Bible]]'' (contributing translator and lexicographer)

=== Posthumous Publications ===
* 1975 Translations of ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]'', ''[[Pearl]]'' and ''[[Sir Orfeo]]''
* 1976 ''[[The Father Christmas Letters]]''
* 1977 ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' ISBN 0-618-12698-8 (HM).
* 1979 ''Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien''
* 1980 ''[[Unfinished Tales]] of Númenor and Middle-earth'' ISBN 0-618-15405-1 (HM).
* 1980 ''Poems and Stories'' (a compilation of ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]]'', ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son'', ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'', ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' and ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]'')
* 1981 ''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'' (eds. [[Christopher Tolkien]] and [[Humphrey Carpenter]])
* 1981 ''The Old English Exodus Text''
* 1982 ''[[Finn and Hengest]]: The Fragment and the Episode''
* 1982 ''[[Mr. Bliss]]''
* 1983 ''[[The Monsters and the Critics]]'' (an essay collection)
** ''[[Beowulf: the monsters and the critics|Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics]]'' (1936)
** ''[[On Translating Beowulf]]'' (1940)
** ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (1947)
** ''[[A Secret Vice]]'' (1930)
** ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]''
** ''[[English and Welsh]]'' (1955)
* 1983–1996 ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]'':<ol type="I"><li>''[[The Book of Lost Tales 1]]'' (1983)</li><li>''[[The Book of Lost Tales 2]]'' (1984)</li><li>''[[The Lays of Beleriand]]'' (1985)</li><li>''[[The Shaping of Middle-earth]]'' (1986)</li><li>''[[The Lost Road and Other Writings]]'' (1987)</li><li>''[[The Return of the Shadow]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 1) (1988)</li><li>''[[The Treason of Isengard]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 2) (1989)</li><li>''[[The War of the Ring]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 3) (1990)</li><li>''[[Sauron Defeated]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 4, including [[The Notion Club Papers]]) (1992)</li><li>''[[Morgoth's Ring]]'' (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)</li><li>''[[The War of the Jewels]]'' (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)</li><li>''[[The Peoples of Middle-earth]]'' (1996)</li></ol>
** ''Index'' (2002)
* 1995 ''[[J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator]]'' (a compilation of Tolkien's art)
* 1998 ''[[Roverandom]]''
* 2002 ''Beowulf and the Critics'' ed. Michael D.C. Drout ("Beowulf: the monsters and the critics" together with editions of two drafts of the longer essay from which it was condensed.
* 2007 ''[[The Children of Húrin]]'' ed. Christopher Tolkien

=== Audio Recordings ===
* 1967 ''Poems and Songs of Middle-Earth'', Caedmon TC 1231
* 1975 ''J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings his ''The Hobbit'' & ''The Lord of the Rings'', Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)

==Other names==
J, John, Ronald, Tollers, JRsquared, Ruginwaldus Dwalakôneis, Arcastar, "Eisphorides Acribus Polyglotteus, orator Graecorum", N.N, Fisiologvs, Kingston Bagpuize, Oxymore, Raegnold Hraedmoding

== References ==
* ''Biography'': Carpenter, Humphrey (1977). ''J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography'', New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-04-928037-6
* ''Letters'': Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher (eds.) (1981). ''The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien''. ISBN 0-618-05699-8
* ''HoME'': Tolkien, Christopher (ed.) (12 volumes, 1996-2002), ''The History of Middle-earth''

== Further Reading ==
A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:
* Anderson, Douglas A., Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger (eds.) (2004). ‘’Tolkien Studies’’, Vol 1
* Chance, Jane (ed.) (2003). ''Tolkien the Medievalist'', London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28944-0
* Chance, Jane (ed.) (2004). ''Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader'', Louisville: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-813-12301-1
* Flieger, Verlyn and Carl F. Hostetter (eds.) (2000). ''Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth'', Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30530-7. DDC 823.912. LC PR6039.
* O'Neill, Timothy R. (1979). ''The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth'', Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-28208-X
* Pearce, Joseph (1998). ''Tolkien: Man and Myth'', London: HarperCollinsPublishers. ISBN 000-274018-4
* Shippey, T. A. (2000). ''J.R.R. Tolkien — Author of the Century'', Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-12764-X, ISBN 0-618-25759-4 (pbk)
* Strachey, Barbara (1981). ''Journeys of Frodo: an Atlas of The Lord of the Rings'', London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-049-12016-6
* Tolkien, John & Priscilla (1992). ''The Tolkien Family Album'', London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-26-110239-7
* White, Michael (2003). ''Tolkien: A Biography'', New American Library. ISBN 0451212428
* ''The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends''. Humphrey Carpenter (1979), ISBN 0395276284
* ''The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends''. Colin Duriez and David Porter (2001), ISBN 1902694139
* ''Finding God in the Lord of the Rings'''. Kurt D. Bruner and Jim Ware (2003), ISBN 084238555X
* ''Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship''. Colin Duriez (2003), ISBN 1587680262

==Notes==
# As described by Christopher Tolkien in ''Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks Konung'' (Oxford University, Trinity College). B. Litt. thesis. 1953/4. [Year uncertain], ''The Battle of the Goths and the Huns'', in: Saga-Book (University College, London, for the Viking Society for Northern Research) 14, part 3 (1955-6). See [http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/bibl4.html publications by and about Christopher Tolkien]

[[Category:Tolkien Family]]

J.R.R. Tolkien

2007-05-30T10:58:04Z

Findegil:

[[Image:Jrrt_1972_pipe.jpg|right|thumb|350px|J.R.R. Tolkien in 1972, in his study at Merton Street]]
''See also [[Simon Tolkien]], [[Christopher Tolkien]], [[Edith Tolkien]], [[Tolkien|etc.]]''

'''John Ronald Reuel Tolkien''' (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is an author best known for ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and its sequel trilogy ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. He worked as reader and professor in English language at the University of Leeds from 1920 to 1925; as professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford from 1925 to 1945; and of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. A strongly committed Catholic, Tolkien was a close friend of [[C.S. Lewis]], and a member of the [[Inklings]], a literary discussion group to which both Lewis and [[Owen Barfield]] belonged.

In addition to ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', Tolkien's published fiction includes ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' and other posthumous books about what he called a [[legendarium]], a fictional mythology of the remote past of Earth, called [[Arda]], and [[Middle-earth]] (from ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middangeard middangeard]'', the lands inhabitable by [[Men]]) in particular. Most of these posthumously published works were compiled from Tolkien's notes by his son [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher Reuel Tolkien]]. The enduring popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the "father of the modern high fantasy genre". Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children and not directly related to the legendarium.

== Biography ==
=== The Tolkien Family ===
Although records are unclear, many of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in Saxony (present-day Germany), but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English (not British)" (''Letters'', 165). The surname ''Tolkien'' is anglicised from ''Tollkiehn'' (i.e. German: ''tollkühn'', "foolhardy", the etymological English translation would be "dull-keen", a literal translation of "oxymoron"). The character of Professor Rashbold in ''[[The Notion Club Papers]]'' is a pun on the name.

'''See also:''' [[J.R.R. Tolkien's Family Tree]]

=== Childhood ===
Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State), South Africa, to [[Arthur Tolkien|Arthur Reuel Tolkien]] (1857 – 1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, ''née'' Suffield (1870 – 1904). Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on February 17, 1894.

While living in Africa he developed a severe fear of spiders after being bitten by a large tarantula out in their garden. When he was three, Tolkien 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 a severe brain haemorrhage before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Birmingham, England. 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 Hills and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his fiction.

[[Image:Jrrt_1905.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Ronald and Hilary Tolkien in 1905]]

Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awoke in her son 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. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. He later attended St. Philip's School and Exeter College, Oxford.

His mother converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900, despite vehement protests by her Baptist family. She died of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage, Rednal, which they were then renting. For the rest of his life, Tolkien felt that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C.S. Lewis to Anglicanism.

During his subsequent orphanhood he was brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free public display from around 1908.

[[image:Jrrt_1911.jpg|left|thumb|150px|J.R.R. Tolkien in 1911]]

=== Youth ===
Tolkien met and fell in love with [[Edith Bratt|Edith Mary Bratt]], three years his senior, at the age of sixteen. Father Francis forbade him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter.

In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called "the [[T.C.B.S.]]", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness of drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illegally, 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 the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter (''Letters'', no. 306), 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 twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembers 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 on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.

[[image:Tolkien_1916.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from the middle years of WW1]]

On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. She replied saying that she was already engaged, but had done so because she had believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love, with Edith returning her ring and choosing to marry Tolkien instead. A condition of their engagement was that she was to convert to Catholicism for him. They were engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, on March 22, 1916.

With his childhood love of landscape, he visited Cornwall in 1914 and he was said to be deeply impressed by the singular Cornish coastline and sea. After graduating from the University of Oxford (Exeter College, Oxford) with a first-class degree in English language in 1915, Tolkien joined the British Army effort in [[World War I]] and served as a second lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme, until he came down with trench fever on October 27, and was moved back to England on November 8. Many of his fellow servicemen, as well as many of his closest friends, were killed in the war. During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called ''[[The Book of Lost Tales]]'', beginning with ''[[The Fall of Gondolin]]''. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, one day he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a thick grove of hemlock. This incident inspired the account of the meeting of [[Beren Erchamion|Beren]] and [[Lúthien]], and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.

=== Oxford ===
Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (among others, he initiated the entries "wasp" and "walrus"). In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there, but in 1925 he returned to Oxford as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College.

Tolkien and Edith had four children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917 - January 22, 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel (October 1920–1984), [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher John Reuel]] (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929). Tolkien assisted Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the unearthing of a Roman Asclepieion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928. During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and the first two volumes of ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "[[Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics]]" had a lasting influence on [[Beowulf]] research.

In 1945, he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien completed ''The Lord of the Rings'' in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent.
Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialisation, which he considered a devouring of the English countryside. For most of his adult life he eschewed automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude is perceptible from some parts of his work, such as the forced industrialisation of The Shire in ''The Lord of the Rings''.

[[Image:Jrrt_1972_tree.jpg|thumb|180px|The last known photograph of Tolkien, taken 9 October 1972, next to one of his favourite trees (a ''Pinus nigra'') in the Botanic Garden, Oxford]]

[[W.H. Auden]] was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with ''The Lord of the Rings'': Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter,
{{quote|I am [...] very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #327}}

=== Retirement and Old Age ===
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien increasingly turned into a figure of public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that Tolkien regretted he had not taken early retirement. While at first he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became more and more suspicious of emerging [[Tolkien fandom]], especially among the hippy movement in the USA. Already in 1944, he made a somewhat sarcastic comment about a fan letter by a twelve-year-old American reader ("It's nice to find that little American boys do really still say 'Gee Whiz'.", ''Letters'' no. 87). In a 1972 letter he deplores having become a cult-figure, but admits that
{{quote|even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu-Bu_and_Sheemish Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish]) cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #336}}.

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth at the south coast. Tolkien was awarded a CBE ("Commander of the British Empire") by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on March 28, 1972.

[[Image:Tolkiengrave.jpg|thumb|The grave of J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien]]
Edith Tolkien died on November 29, 1971, at the age of eighty-two, and Tolkien had the name Lúthien
engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on September 2, 1973, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name, so that the engraving now reads:
:''Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889 – 1971''
:''John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892 – 1973''

Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2675_Tolkien 2675 Tolkien]. Tolkien Way in Stoke-On-Trent is named after J.R.R.'s son Father John Francis Tolkien, who used to be the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains.

== Writing ==
[[Image:Jrrt_lotr_cover_design.jpg|thumb|350px|Cover design for the three volumes of ''The Lord of the Rings'' by J.R.R. Tolkien]]

Beginning with ''[[The Book of Lost Tales]]'', written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of [[Túrin]], were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in ''[[The Lays of Beleriand]]''). Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]''. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of ''The Fall of [[Númenor]]'', which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.

Tolkien was strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish mythology, the Bible, and Greek mythology. The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include ''Beowulf'', the ''[[Kalevala]]'', the ''[[Poetic Edda]]'', the ''[[Volsunga saga]]'' and the ''[[Hervarar saga]]''1. Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer, Oedipus, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems. A major philosophical influence on his writing is King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of ''Boethius''' ''Consolation of Philosophy'' known as the ''Lays of Boethius''. Characters in ''The Lord of the Rings'', such as Frodo, Treebeard and Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks.

In addition to his [[Mythopoeia|mythological compositions]], Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. 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]]''). Other stories included ''[[Mr. Bliss]]'', ''[[Roverandom]]'', ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' and ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]''. ''Roverandom'' and ''Smith of Wootton Major'', like ''The Hobbit'', borrowed ideas from his legendarium. ''Leaf by Niggle'' appears to be an autobiographical work, where a "very small man", Niggle, keeps painting leaves until finally he ends up with a tree.

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by a former student to publish a book he had written for his own children called ''The Hobbit'' in 1937. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel ''The Lord of the Rings'' (published 1954–55). 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.

Tolkien at first intended ''The Lord of the Rings'' as a children's tale like ''The Hobbit'', but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to ''The Hobbit'', it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in ''The Silmarillion'' and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of ''The Lord of the Rings''.

Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher, with some assistance from fantasy writer [[Guy Gavriel Kay]], organised some of this material into one volume, published as ''The Silmarillion'' in 1977. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title ''[[Unfinished Tales]]'', and in subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve volumes of ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]''.
All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency to be found between ''The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit'', the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing ''The Hobbit'' for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book.

The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of ''The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit'', and other manuscripts, including ''Farmer Giles of Ham'', while the Bodleian holds the ''Silmarillion'' papers and Tolkien's academic work.

''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 twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted ''The Lord of the Rings'' "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited just 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'' (''Der Herr der Ringe'') to be their favourite work of literature.

== Languages ==
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialised in Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Icelandic as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918. In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, 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 33, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture ''[[English and Welsh]]'', which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered west-midland Middle English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W.H. Auden in 1955 (''Letters'', no. 163), "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)".

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 the construction of artificial languages. The best developed of these are [[Quenya]] and [[Sindarin]], the etymological connection between which are at 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 "phonæsthetic" considerations. It was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish and Greek (''Letters'', no. 144). A notable addition came in late 1945 with [[Númenórean]], a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis myth, which by ''The Notion Club Papers'' ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language, and via the "[[Second Age]]" and the [[Eärendil the Mariner|Eärendil]] myth was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th-century "real primary world" with the mythical past of his Middle-earth.

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]]'', "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends" (''Letters'', no. 180).

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 today commonly accept Tolkien's revival of the spellings ''dwarves'' and ''elvish'' (instead of ''dwarfs'' and ''elfish''), which had not been in use since the mid-1800s and earlier. Other terms he has coined, like legendarium and [[eucatastrophe]], are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

== Works Inspired by Tolkien ==
In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which:
{{quote|The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #131}}

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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrethe_II_of_Denmark 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 to the style of his own drawings.

But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving.

In 1946, he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of the ''Hobbit'' as ''"too Disnified"'',
{{quote|Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #107}}

He was sceptical of the emerging [[Tolkien fandom|fandom]] in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of ''The Lord of the Rings'':
{{quote|Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #144}}

And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of ''The Lord of the Rings'' by Morton Grady Zimmerman:
{{quote|I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #207}}

He went on to criticise the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future productions, he forbade Disney should ever be involved:
{{quote|It might be advisable [...] to let the Americans do what seems good to them — as long as it was possible [...] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #13}}

United Artists never made a film, though at least [[John Boorman]] was planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to [[Tolkien Enterprises]], a [[Saul Zaentz]] company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of ''[[Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings|The Lord of the Rings]]'' appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by [[Ralph Bakshi]]). The screenplay was written by the fantasy writer [[Peter S. Beagle]]. This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half of the story that is ''The Lord of the Rings''. In 1977 an animated TV production of ''[[Rankin/Bass' The Hobbit|The Hobbit]]'' was made by [[Rankin/Bass]], and in 1980 they produced an animated film titled ''[[Rankin/Bass' The Return of the King|The Return of the King]]'', which covered some of the portion of ''The Lord of the Rings'' that Bakshi was unable to complete. In 2001-3 ''[[Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings|The Lord of the Rings]]'' was filmed in full and as a live-action film as a ''trilogy of films'' by [[Peter Jackson]].

== Bibliography ==
''See also [[Books|Books by J.R.R. Tolkien]]''
=== Fiction and Poetry ===
* 1936 ''Songs for the Philologists'', with [[E.V. Gordon]] et al.
* 1937 ''[[The Hobbit|The Hobbit or There and Back Again]]'', ISBN 0-618-00221-9 ([[Houghton Mifflin|HM]]).
* 1945 ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'' (short story)
* 1945 ''[[The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun]]'', published in ''Welsh Review''
* 1949 ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' (medieval fable)
* 1953 ''[[The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son]]'' published with the essay ''Ofermod''
* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''
** 1954 ''[[The Fellowship of the Ring]]'': being the first part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00222-7 (HM).
** 1954 ''[[The Two Towers]]'': being the second part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00223-5 (HM).
** 1955 ''[[The Return of the King]]'': being the third part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00224-3 (HM).
* 1962 ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]] and Other Verses from the Red Book''
* 1967 ''[[The Road Goes Ever On]]'', with [[Donald Swann]]
* 1964 ''[[Tree and Leaf]]'' (''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' and ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'' in book form)
* 1966 ''The Tolkien Reader'' (''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son'', ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'', ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]' and ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]]'')
* 1966 ''Tolkien on Tolkien'' (autobiographical)
* 1967 ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]''

=== Academic Works ===
* 1922 ''A Middle English Vocabulary''
* 1924 ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]'' (with [[E.V. Gordon]])
* 1925 ''Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography''
* 1925 ''[[The Devil's Coach Horses]]''
* 1929 ''[[Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad]]''
* 1932 ''The Name 'Nodens' '' (in: ''Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire''.)
* 1932/1935 ''[[Sigelwara Land]]'' parts I and II
* 1934 ''[[The Reeve's Prologue and Tale|The Reeve's Tale]]'' (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'')
* 1936 ''[[Beowulf: the monsters and the critics|Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics]]'' (lecture on [[Beowulf]] criticism)
* 1939 ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, given as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture)
* 1944 ''[[Sir Orfeo]]'' (an edition of the medieval poem)
* 1947 ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (essay, very central for understanding Tolkien's views on fastasy)
* 1953 ''Ofermod'', published with the poem ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son''
* 1953 ''Middle English "Losenger"''
* 1962 ''[[Ancrene Wisse]]: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle''
* 1963 ''English and Welsh''
* 1966 ''[[Jerusalem Bible]]'' (contributing translator and lexicographer)

=== Posthumous Publications ===
* 1975 Translations of ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]'', ''[[Pearl]]'' and ''[[Sir Orfeo]]''
* 1976 ''[[The Father Christmas Letters]]''
* 1977 ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' ISBN 0-618-12698-8 (HM).
* 1979 ''Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien''
* 1980 ''[[Unfinished Tales]] of Númenor and Middle-earth'' ISBN 0-618-15405-1 (HM).
* 1980 ''Poems and Stories'' (a compilation of ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]]'', ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son'', ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'', ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' and ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]'')
* 1981 ''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'' (eds. [[Christopher Tolkien]] and [[Humphrey Carpenter]])
* 1981 ''The Old English Exodus Text''
* 1982 ''[[Finn and Hengest]]: The Fragment and the Episode''
* 1982 ''[[Mr. Bliss]]''
* 1983 ''[[The Monsters and the Critics]]'' (an essay collection)
** ''[[Beowulf: the monsters and the critics|Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics]]'' (1936)
** ''[[On Translating Beowulf]]'' (1940)
** ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (1947)
** ''[[A Secret Vice]]'' (1930)
** ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]''
** ''[[English and Welsh]]'' (1955)
* 1983–1996 ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]'':<ol type="I"><li>''[[The Book of Lost Tales 1]]'' (1983)</li><li>''[[The Book of Lost Tales 2]]'' (1984)</li><li>''[[The Lays of Beleriand]]'' (1985)</li><li>''[[The Shaping of Middle-earth]]'' (1986)</li><li>''[[The Lost Road and Other Writings]]'' (1987)</li><li>''[[The Return of the Shadow]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 1) (1988)</li><li>''[[The Treason of Isengard]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 2) (1989)</li><li>''[[The War of the Ring]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 3) (1990)</li><li>''[[Sauron Defeated]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 4, including [[The Notion Club Papers]]) (1992)</li><li>''[[Morgoth's Ring]]'' (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)</li><li>''[[The War of the Jewels]]'' (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)</li><li>''[[The Peoples of Middle-earth]]'' (1996)</li></ol>
** ''Index'' (2002)
* 1995 ''[[J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator]]'' (a compilation of Tolkien's art)
* 1998 ''[[Roverandom]]''
* 2002 ''Beowulf and the Critics'' ed. Michael D.C. Drout ("Beowulf: the monsters and the critics" together with editions of two drafts of the longer essay from which it was condensed.

=== Audio Recordings ===
* 1967 ''Poems and Songs of Middle-Earth'', Caedmon TC 1231
* 1975 ''J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings his ''The Hobbit'' & ''The Lord of the Rings'', Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)

==Other names==
J, John, Ronald, Tollers, JRsquared, Ruginwaldus Dwalakôneis, Arcastar, "Eisphorides Acribus Polyglotteus, orator Graecorum", N.N, Fisiologvs, Kingston Bagpuize, Oxymore, Raegnold Hraedmoding

== References ==
* ''Biography'': Carpenter, Humphrey (1977). ''J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography'', New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-04-928037-6
* ''Letters'': Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher (eds.) (1981). ''The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien''. ISBN 0-618-05699-8
* ''HoME'': Tolkien, Christopher (ed.) (12 volumes, 1996-2002), ''The History of Middle-earth''

== Further Reading ==
A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:
* Anderson, Douglas A., Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger (eds.) (2004). ‘’Tolkien Studies’’, Vol 1
* Chance, Jane (ed.) (2003). ''Tolkien the Medievalist'', London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28944-0
* Chance, Jane (ed.) (2004). ''Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader'', Louisville: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-813-12301-1
* Flieger, Verlyn and Carl F. Hostetter (eds.) (2000). ''Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth'', Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30530-7. DDC 823.912. LC PR6039.
* O'Neill, Timothy R. (1979). ''The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth'', Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-28208-X
* Pearce, Joseph (1998). ''Tolkien: Man and Myth'', London: HarperCollinsPublishers. ISBN 000-274018-4
* Shippey, T. A. (2000). ''J.R.R. Tolkien — Author of the Century'', Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-12764-X, ISBN 0-618-25759-4 (pbk)
* Strachey, Barbara (1981). ''Journeys of Frodo: an Atlas of The Lord of the Rings'', London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-049-12016-6
* Tolkien, John & Priscilla (1992). ''The Tolkien Family Album'', London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-26-110239-7
* White, Michael (2003). ''Tolkien: A Biography'', New American Library. ISBN 0451212428
* ''The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends''. Humphrey Carpenter (1979), ISBN 0395276284
* ''The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends''. Colin Duriez and David Porter (2001), ISBN 1902694139
* ''Finding God in the Lord of the Rings'''. Kurt D. Bruner and Jim Ware (2003), ISBN 084238555X
* ''Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship''. Colin Duriez (2003), ISBN 1587680262

==Notes==
# As described by Christopher Tolkien in ''Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks Konung'' (Oxford University, Trinity College). B. Litt. thesis. 1953/4. [Year uncertain], ''The Battle of the Goths and the Huns'', in: Saga-Book (University College, London, for the Viking Society for Northern Research) 14, part 3 (1955-6). See [http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/bibl4.html publications by and about Christopher Tolkien]

[[Category:Tolkien Family]]

Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien

2007-05-30T10:55:05Z

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{{book|
title=Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien|
image=[[Image:Picturesjrrt.jpg|225px]]|
author=[[J.R.R. Tolkien]], [[Christopher Tolkien]]|
isbn=0395606489|
publisher=[[Houghton Mifflin]]|
date=1992|
format=Hardcover|
pages= 112|
amazon=http://www.amazon.com/Pictures-J-R-Tolkien/dp/0395606489
}}

'''Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien''' brings together a wide array of paintings, sketches and pictures by [[Tolkien]], confirming his considerable talent as an artist. This book provides a unique and fascinating insight into the visual conception of many of the places and characters familiar to readers of [[The Hobbit]], [[The Lord of the Rings]], [[The Silmarillion]] and [[The Children of Húrin]]. The text is by [[Christopher Tolkien]].

== Contents ==
1. [[Hobbiton]]-across-the-Water

2. The [[Trolls]]

3. Three Trolls turned to Stone

4. [[Rivendell]] Looking West

5. Rivendell Looking East

6. Rivendell

7. The Mountain-path

8. [[Misty Mountains]] Looking West

9. [[Bilbo]] woke with the early sun in his eyes

10. [[Beorn|Beorn's]] Hall

11. The Elvenking's Gate

12. The Elvenking's Gate

13. Bilbo comes to the Huts of the [[Raft-elves]]

14. Bilbo comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves

15. [[Lake Town]]

16. The [[Front Gate]]

17. Conversation with [[Smaug]]

18. Smaug flies round the Mountain

19. Death of Smaug

20. The Hall at Bag End

21. [[Old Man Willow]]

22. [[Doors of Durin]]

23. [[Book of Mazarbul]]

24. [[Moria Gate]]

25. Forest of [[Lothlorien]] in Spring

26. [[Helm's Deep]] and [[Hornburg]]

27. [[Orthanc]] and [[Minas Tirith]]

28. [[Shelob|Shelob's]] Lair

29. [[Dunharrow]]

30. [[Orodruin]] and [[Barad-dûr]]

31. [[Taniquetil]]

32. [[Lake Mithrim]]

33. [[Nargothrond]]

34. Nargothrond

35. [[Gondolin]]

36. [[Tol Sirion]]

37. [[Mirkwood]] and [[Taur-nu-Fuin]]

38. [[Glaurung]] sets forth to seek [[Túrin]]

39. Polar bear

40-48. Various designs, sketches, floral and heraldic designs

[[Category:Books by J.R.R. Tolkien|Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien]]
[[Category:Books by Christopher Tolkien|Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien]]

Leeds

2007-05-30T10:29:28Z

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[[Image:Europe map.gif|thumb|Location of Leeds]]

'''Leeds''' is a moderately large city in Yorkshire, England. It has a population of 726,000 and is home to a vibrant university - [[Leeds University]]- where [[J.R.R. Tolkien]] was a professor between 1921 and 1925. [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher]], Tolkien's second son, was born here during this period.

===External Links===

[http://www.leeds.gov.uk/ Leeds City Council]

Tolkien Gateway:Welcome

2007-05-30T10:27:23Z

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Welcome to '''Tolkien Gateway'''! I, along with those who wish to help contribute, hope to create the largest encyclopedia based on [[J.R.R. Tolkien]]'s works on the net. You may be a bit confused, seeing as the site is a bit different than most sites. It allows anyone, anywhere, to update any page, instantly. We keep moderators online 24/7 to monitor for spam, but giving users the ability to update mistakes, and add to content, we find the site expands much more quickly and gives users the sense of contribution.
 
Feel free to use the search form on the left to search for anything related to [[J.R.R. Tolkien]], [[The Lord of the Rings]] and [[Middle-earth]]. The [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent Changes]] link on the left is also a good way to check out what is getting updated. The [[Special:Allpages|All Pages]] link will give you a good idea at how much content we really have on here. If you find a page not listed, make it! If you find some content you want to add to, add it, alter it, this is your site.

Incomers

2007-05-30T10:15:09Z

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[[Image:Easterling.jpg|thumb|Easterling as Portrayed in [[Peter Jackson's The Two Towers|Peter Jackson's The Two Towers]]]]
'''Incomers''' refers to the [[Easterlings|Easterling]] usurpers who ruled the land of [[Dor-lómin]] granted them by [[Morgoth]] after their treachery in the of [[Battle of Unnumbered Tears]]. It was a term used by the remnant of the [[House of Hador]] left as serfs and thralls under the tyranny of [[Brodda]] of the the House of [[Ulfang]].

Lady [[Aerin]] used this term in her meeting with [[Túrin]] [[Mormegil]] after his sack of the Hall of Brodda.

File:Easterling.jpg

2007-05-30T10:12:24Z

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Dwarf-masks

2007-05-30T10:05:54Z

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[[Image:Ted_Nasmith_-_T%C3%BArin_Bears_Gwindor_to_Safety.jpg|left|thumb|Turin wearing a dwarf-mask]]
[[Image:Dwarfmask.jpg|thumb|right|Dwarf-mask of Belegost]]
The '''dwarf-masks''' were helmets of great crafting made in the [[First Age]] by the [[Dwarves]] of the [[Blue Mountains]]. These helmets had face plates which could be lowered over the face as a mask, and through this the fire of dragons might be withstood.
One such helm was the [[Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin]], crafted by the smith [[Telchar]] for the Dwarf King of [[Belegost]], [[Azaghâl]]. This he wore at the [[Battle of Unnumbered Tears]] where he fought [[Glaurung]], Father of Dragons.
[[Túrin]] [[Mormegil]] was gifted a dwarf-helm during his time in [[Nargothrond]]; and before this was the rightful heir to the Dragon Helm of Dor-lómin.

Dwarf-mail

2007-05-30T09:48:34Z

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[[Image:dwarf-mail.jpg|thumb|right|Dwarf-mail rings]]
'''Dwarf-mail''' refers to the shirts of linked rings (or chain mail). It is classed as ''dwarf''-mail, as in the [[First Age]], the [[Dwarves]] of the [[Blue Mountains]] fashioned the finest steel that [[Middle-earth]] had ever seen. In [[Belegost]], the famous Dwarf-mail of linked rings was first made.

Many of these shirts of dwarf-mail came into the possession of the [[Elves]] of [[Beleriand]]. One such shirt and [[dwarf-mask]] was gifted to [[Túrin]] [[Mormegil]] during his time in [[Nargothrond]].

The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin

2007-05-30T09:33:27Z

Findegil: /* Synopsis */

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Return of Túrin to Dor-lómin''' is the twelfth chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
In the depths of winter, [[Túrin]] came hooded and silent to the land of [[Dor-lómin]] to find his childhood stead empty and dark. Spent and weary, Túrin begged for shelter at the servant halls in the house of [[Brodda]], who was now the [[Easterlings|Easterling]] Lord of Dor-lómin.
Here Túrin met with [[Sador]], who was his childhood friend and mentor, who told of how [[Morwen]] and [[Nienor]] had left secretly over the passes of [[Ered Wethrin]] and so to [[Beleriand]]. To the Lady [[Aerin]], kinswoman of [[Húrin]], Sador directed Túrin – she was against her will the wife of Brodda; and Túrin came to both Brodda and Aerin in the great hall of the house.

There Túrin challenged Brodda and he drew [[Anglachel]] and put it to the throat of the Easterling, and asked Aerin to tell all she knew of Morwen. She told of Brodda's oppression of Morwen and her house so that she had fled five seasons ago, as the lands to the south were held open by the prowess of the [[Black Sword|Blacksword]]. And Túrin laughed as he held that very sword.

Then Brodda was killed as Túrin threw him and his neck was broken, and the thralls of the house arose and all the Easterlings were killed. After the rage, Aerin begged Túrin to leave in haste, for more of the [[Incomers]], that were Brodda’s kin, would soon come; but she would not go forth with the rebels, for she remained in the hall and burned it as Túrin had departed.

The rebels made camp through the winter in a mountain refuge, and there Túrin left them for he would search for his mother and sister.

==Analysis==

Sarehole Mill

2007-05-29T21:23:01Z

Findegil:

[[Image:Sarehole_Mill.jpg|thumb|right|Sarehole Mill]]
'''Sarehole Mill''' is a fine example of one of more than fifty water mills that existed in Birmingham at one time.

===History of the Mill===
Sarehole Mill was built in 1765 on the site of an even older mill, Biddle's Mill, which dated back to 1540. Sarehole was used mostly to grind corn. Matthew Boulton's father rented the Mill and Sarehole farm in 1756. When his father died, Boulton used the Mill for making buttons and for metal rolling until he moved his operations to Handsworth in 1761. In the late 1890s Sarehole was the childhood haunt of [[Hobbit]] author [[J.R.R. Tolkien]], and famously used as inspiration for the mill at [[Hobbiton]] in [[The Lord of the Rings]].

The Mill is open to the public from April to October and to school parties throughout the year.

[[Image:J.R.R._Tolkien_-_The_Hill_-_Hobbiton-across-the-Water_%28Colored%29.jpg|thumb|right|Hobbiton by JRR Tolkien]]
===Tolkien and the Mill===
In 1896 [[J.R.R. Tolkien]] settled with his mother and brother at 5 Gracewell (now 264 Wake Green Road), a cottage in Sarehole village. It was only four miles from the centre of [[Birmingham]] but it was then still set within the north Worcestershire countryside. Coming from the hot dry landscape of South Africa, the green fields and woods made a vivid impression on Tolkien.

He said that Sarehole was the model for the [[Shire]], home of [[Bilbo]] in [[The Hobbit]]. When Tolkien visited Birmingham with his family in 1933 he lamented the changes in Sarehole, as Birmingham had continued to grow until Sarehole was but a suburb in the huge city. In 1933, much of the area was still farmland, but there were many more houses and gardens, and one old farmhouse had become a garage selling petrol.

The most exciting thing for a young boy to see in the village of Sarehole was certainly [[Sarehole Mill]], which Tolkien refers to as 'the great mill' in The Hobbit . It stands on the River Cole. Tolkien based the bad-tempered [[Ted Sandyman]] (the miller) in The Lord of the Rings on the miller there, who perhaps understandably shouted at him and his younger brother when they were playing in the mill yard.

[[Image:GeoAndrew.jpg|thumb|right|Sarehole Mill 1890]]
The millers, George Andrew senior and junior can be seen in the photo to the right taken in 1890.

===External Links===
[http://www.bplphoto.co.uk/TolkiensBirmingham/TolkienSarehole.htm Tolkien's Birmingham]

[http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/sarehole.bcc Sarehole Mill]

The Fall of Nargothrond

2007-05-29T21:18:36Z

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Túrin in Nargothrond

2007-05-29T20:18:44Z

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Sarehole

2007-05-20T07:09:52Z

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Moria

2007-05-13T09:26:23Z

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[[Image:J.R.R. Tolkien - Doors of Durin.jpg|thumb|right|Doors of Durin]]
'''Khazad-dûm''' was grandest and most famous of the mansions of the [[Dwarves]]. It lay in the central parts of the [[Misty Mountains]], tunnelled and carved through the living rock of the mountains themselves, so that a traveller could pass through it from the west of the range to the east. It was founded in very ancient days by [[Durin the Deathless]], who came upon a shimmering lake beneath the mountain [[Celebdil]], with a crown of stars reflected in its waters. He named that lake in the [[Dwarvish]] tongue, [[Kheled-zâram]], the [[Mirrormere]], and there he started the building of Khazad-dûm.

As the millennia passed, the descendants of Durin sat upon the throne of Khazad-dûm, and their cavernous city became famous throughout the world. It even has a passing mention in [[Quenta Silmarillion]], the tale of the [[Elf-lords]] and their wars far to the west, though to them it was no more than a distant rumour they heard from the [[Dwarves]] of the [[Blue Mountains]] on their borders. In the [[Second Age]], [[Noldor]] out of [[Lindon]] founded a country of their own by the western gates of Khazad-dûm. A rare friendship sprang up between the Dwarves and the Elves of this new land, [[Eregion]]. Eregion's ruler, [[Celebrimbor]], helped to construct the famous and magical gate that became known as the [[West-gate of Moria]], and indeed went so far as to present King [[Durin III]] with a [[Rings of Power|Ring of Power]]. The friendship of Khazad-dûm and Eregion came to a sudden end, though, in II 1697, when [[Sauron]] overran the country of the Elves, and the doors of Khazad-dûm were sealed against his forces.

Eventually, Sauron was driven back and Khazad-dûm continued to thrive. Much of its great wealth was based on the [[Mithril]] that was found in its mines, and as the centuries passed, the Dwarves mined deeper and deeper for the precious metal. In the year III 1980, they dug too deep, and unleashed a nameless terror from the depths beneath the city. The creature wreaked dreadful destruction, and in slaying the then King, [[Durin VI]], became known as [[Durin's Bane]]. In the following year, Durin's son, [[Náin I]], was also lost, and the Dwarves fled their ancient home. After millennia as one of the richest cities in [[Middle-earth]], Khazad-dûm stood dark and empty, but for the brooding menace the Dwarves had released. In that time it was given a new name, Moria, the [[Black Pit]].

The monster of Moria - a Balrog of [[Morgoth]], as was later known - lurked alone in Moria for nearly five hundred years. After that time, the old city of Khazad-dûm began to be peopled again, but not by Dwarves. Sauron directed his creatures there, and it began to fill with orcs and trolls. Though the orcs' numbers were greatly reduced in the [[Battle of Nanduhirion]], fought in the valley beneath Moria's [[East-gate]] in III 2799, the Balrog could not be bested, and Khazad-dûm remained a citadel of darkness.

There were two attempts by the Dwarves of Durin's line to reclaim their ancient home. The first of these was by Balin, who led a force of Dwarves there from [[Erebor]] in III 2989, but though he was successful at first, he was eventually defeated and slain. The story of the second attempt to recolonise the Dwarf-mansions is less clear, but it seems that after several centuries, [[Durin VII]] became [[King of Durin's Folk]], and led a further return to the citadel. It seems he was successful, so that long after the War of the Ring, the Dwarves of Durin's line reclaimed their inheritance, and the hammers rang again in their great halls beneath the Misty Mountains.

[[Image:Aleksandr Kortich - 03.jpg|thumb|right|The Company in Khazad-dûm]]
===The Layout of Khazad-dûm===
Khazad-dûm was a huge array of chambers, passages, mines, halls, stores and pits. In general, areas were either classed as ''mines'' or ''city''. The mines were working sections of Khazad-dûm whilst the city was the area of habitation.

'''The city areas''' of Khazad-dûm were clustered mainly to the east; these were the oldest parts of the kingdom and had good access to the East-gate. They were structured into seven Levels and seven Deeps. The Levels stretched above the gate whilst the Deeps were set deeper within the mountain below the level of the East-gate. It is possible that the First Level (on which the East-gate was set) and the First Deep were highly intertwined.

The eastern section of the city spaces had also been dolven in such a manner as to have light shafts to illuminate their chambers. One example of this is the [[Chamber of Mazarbul]] which was located on the eastern edge of the [[Seventh Level]].

'''The mine areas''' of Khazad-dûm were interlaced with the city spaces, but spread also westward toward the Western-gate. The mines ran deeper and further than any other tunnels within Khazad-dûm, and it is possible that more of the lower Deeps were given over to mining, although this is only conjecture.

The defined change between ''mines'' and ''city'' can be seen when the [[Fellowship]] pass through Moria - there is a marked difference between the early passages and chambers and those of the city structures illuminated by Gandalf.

[[Category:Cities]]
[[Category:Dwarven Kingdoms]]

The Party Tree

2007-05-13T09:07:47Z

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'''The Party Tree''' was the tree in the center of [[Party Field]] which was killed during [[The Scouring of the Shire]].

==Inspiration==
* Possibly a willow hanging over the mill-pool at Sarehole, Warwickshire, England

{{quote|‘They’ve cut it down!’ cried Sam. ‘They’ve cut down the Party Tree!’ He pointed to where the tree had stood under which Bilbo had made his Farewell Speech. '''It was lying lopped and dead in the field'''. As if this was the last straw Sam burst into tears.|[[The Lord of the Rings]], [[The Scouring of the Shire]]}}

{{quote|One incident in particular remained in his [Tolkien’s] memory: “There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool [at [[Sarehole]]] and I learned to climb it. It belonged to a butcher on the Stratford Road, I think. One day they cut it down. '''They didn’t do anything with it: the log just lay there. I never forgot that."'''|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

[[Category:Trees]]

J.R.R. Tolkien's inspirations

2007-05-13T09:07:11Z

Findegil: /* Bywater */

==='apes in the dark forests of the South'===
* Pet monkeys in South Africa?
{{quote|Against the Deeping Wall the hosts of Isengard roared like a sea. Orcs and hillmen swarmed about its feet from end to end. Ropes with grappling hooks were hurled over the parapet faster than men could cut them or fling them back. Hundreds of long ladders were lifted up. Many were cast down in ruin, but many more replaced them, and Orcs sprang up them like apes in the dark forests of the South.|[[Helm's Deep]], [[The Lord of the Rings]]}}
{{quote|One day a neighbour’s pet monkeys climbed over the wall and chewed up three of the baby’s [Tolkien’s] pinafores.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===Aragorn===
* Arthur of the Arthurian Legend
* Jesus Christ

===Archery===
{{quote|Red Indians were better: there were bows and arrows (I had and have a wholly unsatisfied desire to shoot well with a bow)...|[[On Fairy-stories]]}}
{{quote|But he [Tolkien] liked Red Indian stories and longed to shoot with a bow and arrow.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===Bag End===
* Tolkien's aunt Jane Neave's farm, called Bag End by the locals, in Dormston, Worcestershire -
{{quote|It [Bag End] was the local name for my aunt's [Jane Neave] farm in Worcestershire, which was at the end of a lane leading to it and no further ...|[[Nomenclature]]}}

===Baggins===
{{quote|Intended to recall bag — cf. Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug in The H. [Chapter 12] — and meant to be associated (by hobbits) with Bag End ...|[[Nomenclature]]}}

===Bandobras 'the Bullroarer' Took===
* George von Hohenzollern
{{quote|He [the Bullroarer] charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields, and knocked their king Golfimbul's head clean off with a wooden club.|[[An Unexpected Party]], [[The Hobbit]]}}
{{quote|She [Tolkien’s aunt Grace] alleged that the family name ['Tolkien'] had originally been ‘von Hohenzollern’, for they had emanated from the Hohenzollern district of the Holy Roman Empire. A certain George von Hohenzollern had, she said, fought on the side of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria at the Siege of Vienna in 1529. He had shown great daring in leading an unofficial raid against the Turks and capturing the Sultan’s standard. This (said Aunt Grace) was why he was given the nickname Tollkühn, ‘foolhardy’; and the name stuck.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===Battle Pit, the===
* The sandpit at Sarehole, Warwickshire, England
{{quote|The dead ruffians were laden on waggons and hauled off to an old sand-pit nearby and there buried: in the Battle Pit, as it was afterwards called.|[[The Scouring of the Shire]], [[The Lord of the Rings]]}}
{{quote|Not far from Sarehole Mill, a little way up the hill towards Moseley, was a deep tree-lined sandpit that became another favourite haunt for the boys [Ronald and Hilary].|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===Belladonna Took===
* Mabel Suffield, Tolkien’s mother

===Beren===
{{quote|Several of the tombs [at Wolvercote cemetery, Oxford, England] bear glazed photographs of the deceased, and the inscriptions are florid. In consequence a grey slab of Cornish granite rather to the left of the group stands out clearly, as does its slightly curious wording: Edith Mary Tolkien, Luthien, 1889-1971. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===Beren and Lúthien, meeting of===
* Edith Bratt sang and danced for Tolkien in a small wood in the village of Roos, Yorkshire
{{quote|Blue was her [Lúthien’s] raiment as the unclouded heaven, but her eyes were grey as the starlit evening; her mantle was sewn with golden flowers, but her hair was dark as the shadows of twilight.|[[The Silmarillion]]}}

{{quote|Keen, heart-piercing was her song as the song of the lark that rises from the gates of night and pours its voice among the dying stars, seeing the sun behind the walls of the world; and the song of Lúthien released the bonds of winter, and the frozen waters spoke, and flowers sprang from the cold earth where her feet had passed.|[[The Silmarillion]]}}

{{quote|But wandering in the summer in the woods of Neldoreth he [Beren] came upon Lúthien, daughter of Thingol and Melian, at a time of evening under moonrise, as she danced upon the unfading grass in the glades beside Esgalduin.|[[The Silmarillion]]}}

{{quote|It [the chief part of the Silmarillion] was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she [Edith Bratt] was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you [Christopher Tolkien] have seen them, and she could sing – and dance. For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.|[[Letter 340]], [[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]}}

{{quote|She [Edith Bratt] was remarkably pretty, small and slim, with grey eyes, firm clear features and short dark hair.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

{{quote|Near Roos they [Ronald and Edith] found a small wood with an undergrowth of hemlock, and there they wandered.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

{{quote|She sang and danced for him in the wood, and from this came the story that was to be the centre of The Silmarillion: the tale of the mortal man Beren who loves the immortal elven-maid Lúthien Tinúviel, whom he first sees dancing among hemlock in a wood.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===Bilbo===
* J.R.R. Tolkien

===Bilbo’s Birthday Party===
* Mosely college (in Warwickshire, England) being illuminated during Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 ? -

{{quote|There was a specially large pavilion, so big that the tree that grew in the field was right inside it, and stood proudly near one end, at the head of the chief table. Lanterns were hung on all its branches.|[[A Long-expected Party]], [[The Lord of the Rings]]}}

{{quote|Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated and the college on top of the hill in Moseley was illuminated with coloured lights.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===Bracegirdle===
* The name Bracegirdle of a character in the Horatio Hornblower novels by C.S. Forester
* See [[#Hornblower]]

===Bree===
* Brill in Oxfordshire, England ?
{{quote|...four miles along the Road you'll come upon a village, Bree under Bree-hill, with doors looking westward.|[[Fog on the Barrow-downs]], [[The Lord of the Rings]]}}
{{quote|Chetwood is a compound of Celtic and English, both elements meaning 'wood'; compare Brill, in Oxfordshire, derived from bree + hill.|Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings}}

* Birmingham ?
{{quote|...it was in the one thousand six hundred and first year of the Third Age that the Fallohide brothers, Marcho and Blanco, set out from Bree; and having obtained permission from the high king at Fornost, they crossed the brown river Baranduin with a great following of Hobbits. They passed over the Bridge of Stonebows, that had been built in the days of the power of the North Kingdom, and they took all the land beyond to dwell in, between the river and the Far Downs.|[[The Prologue]], [[The Lord of the Rings]]}}
{{quote|By the summer of 1896 Mabel Tolkien had found somewhere cheap enough for herself and the children [Ronald and Hilary] to live independently, and they moved out of Birmingham to the hamlet of Sarehole, a mile or so beyond the southern edge of the city.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

* London ?

===Bungo Baggins===
* Arthur Tolkien, Tolkien’s father

===Bywater===
* The pool at [[Sarehole]] Mill, Warwickshire, England –
{{quote|Over the road a meadow led to the River Cole, little more than a broad stream, and upon this stood Sarehole Mill...|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}
{{quote|...they [Ronald and Hilary] would scamper away from the yard, and run round to a place behind the mill [at Sarehole] where there was a silent pool with swans swimming on it. At the foot of the pool the dark waters suddenly plunged over the sluice to the great wheel below: a dangerous and exciting place.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}
{{quote|Soon it [Hobbiton] disappeared in the folds of the darkened land, and was followed by Bywater beside its grey pool.|[[Three is Company]], [[The Lord of the Rings]]}}
{{quote|Bywater. Village name: as being beside the wide pool occurring in the course of the Water, the main river of the Shire...|[[Guide to the Names in The Lord of the Rings]]}}

See also the [[#Gladden Fields]]

* Hall Green village near Sarehole, Warwickshire, England
{{quote|There were few houses at Sarehole beside the row of cottages where the Tolkiens lived, but Hall Green village was only a little distance away down a lane and across a ford.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}
{{quote|The conversation in The Green Dragon at Bywater, one evening in the spring of Frodo’s fiftieth year...|[[The Shadow of the Past]], [[The Lord of the Rings]]}}

:''Still adding entries, please don't add any new entries yet (feel free to edit the above though) Many thanks goes to [[User:Ardamir|Ardamir]] for letting us use his work.''

===pipe-smoking===
{{quote|I am in fact a Hobbit (in all but size). I like gardens, trees and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe...|[[Letter 213]]}}

{{quote|...he [Father Francis Xavier Morgan] used to sit on the ivy-covered verandah of the Oratory House [at Rednal] smoking a large cherrywood pipe; ‘the more remarkable’. Ronald recalled, ‘since he never smoked except there. Possibly my own later addiction to the Pipe derives from this.’|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===saplings===
{{quote|In the early morning and late afternoon the child [Tolkien] would be taken into the garden, where he could watch his father tending the vines or planting '''saplings''' in a piece of walled but unused ground.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

===walking===
* The focus on characters walking through Tolkien's works might possibly be due to Tolkien having to walk to his first school, King Edward’s School in Birmingham

{{quote|The school [King Edward’s School] was in the centre of Birmingham, four miles from Sarehole, and for the first few weeks '''Ronald had to walk much of the way''', for his mother could not afford the train fare and the trams did not run as far as his home. Clearly this could not continue, and regretfully Mabel decided that their days in the country would have to end.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

The Water

2007-05-13T09:06:37Z

Findegil:

'''The Water''' was a tributary of the River [[Brandywine]] that rose in the [[Westfarthing]] of the [[Shire]], and flowed eastward to meet the Brandywine just north of the [[Brandywine Bridge]]. [[Hobbiton]] and [[Bywater]] both stood on this river.

==Inspiration==
* Possibly The River Cole in Warwickshire, England.
{{quote|Over the road a meadow led to the River Cole, little more than a broad stream, and upon this stood [[Sarehole]] Mill...|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

[[Category:Rivers]]
[[Category:Shire]]

Swans

2007-05-13T09:06:17Z

Findegil:

'''Swans''' are waterfowl of either black or white color, though usually the latter. They were an important bird in the tales of the [[Elder Days]]. The [[Teleri]] seem to have especially revered swans, naming their city [[Alqualondë]] (the [[Swanhaven]]), and building their ships in swan-form. As well, the white swan's wing was the symbol for [[Tuor]] and his company ([[House of the Wing]]) in [[Gondolin]].

==Inspiration==
{{quote|...they [Ronald and Hilary] would scamper away from the yard, and run round to a place behind the mill [at [[Sarehole]]] where there was a silent pool with swans swimming on it.|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

[[Category:Birds]]

Ted Sandyman

2007-05-13T09:05:51Z

Findegil:

'''Ted Sandyman''' was the son of [[Sandyman]] the [[Hobbiton]] miller, who fell under the influence of [[Lotho Sackville-Baggins]] during the [[War of the Ring]] and became a collaborator with '[[Sharkey]]'s' regime.

==Inspiration==
It is possible [[J.R.R. Tolkien]] was inspired by the miller’s son at [[Sarehole]] mill, Warwickshire, England.

{{quote| There were two millers [at Sarehole Mill], father and son. The old man had a black beard, but '''it was the son who frightened the boys with his white dusty clothes and sharp-eyed face. Ronald named him ‘the White Ogre’.''' When he yelled at them to clear off they would scamper away from the yard...|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

{{quote|I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.|[[The Lord of the Rings]], Foreword}}

[[Category:Hobbits]]

Old Mill

2007-05-13T09:04:12Z

Findegil:

The '''Old Mill''' was the mill that stood on the north banks of [[The Water]] in [[Hobbiton]], run by [[Ted Sandyman]], but bought and demolished by [[Lotho Sackville-Baggins]].

The Old Mill is thought to be inspired by [[Sarehole|Sarehole Mill]] from [[Tolkien|Tolkien's]] childhood.

[[Category:Structures]]

J.R.R. Tolkien

2007-05-13T09:02:46Z

Findegil:

[[Image:Jrrt_1972_pipe.jpg|right|thumb|350px|J.R.R. Tolkien in 1972, in his study at Merton Street]]
''See also [[Simon Tolkien]], [[Christopher Tolkien]], [[Edith Tolkien]], [[Tolkien|etc.]]''

'''John Ronald Reuel Tolkien''' (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is an author best known for ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and its sequel trilogy ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. He worked as reader and professor in English language at the University of Leeds from 1920 to 1925; as professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford from 1925 to 1945; and of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. A strongly committed Catholic, Tolkien was a close friend of [[C.S. Lewis]], and a member of the [[Inklings]], a literary discussion group to which both Lewis and [[Owen Barfield]] belonged.

In addition to ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', Tolkien's published fiction includes ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' and other posthumous books about what he called a [[legendarium]], a fictional mythology of the remote past of Earth, called [[Arda]], and [[Middle-earth]] (from ''[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middangeard middangeard]'', the lands inhabitable by [[Men]]) in particular. Most of these posthumously published works were compiled from Tolkien's notes by his son [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher Reuel Tolkien]]. The enduring popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the "father of the modern high fantasy genre". Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children and not directly related to the legendarium.

== Biography ==
=== The Tolkien Family ===
Although records are unclear, many of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in Saxony (present-day Germany), but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English (not British)" (''Letters'', 165). The surname ''Tolkien'' is anglicised from ''Tollkiehn'' (i.e. German: ''tollkühn'', "foolhardy", the etymological English translation would be "dull-keen", a literal translation of "oxymoron"). The character of Professor Rashbold in ''[[The Notion Club Papers]]'' is a pun on the name.

'''See also:''' [[J.R.R. Tolkien's Family Tree]]

=== Childhood ===
Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State), South Africa, to [[Arthur Tolkien|Arthur Reuel Tolkien]] (1857 – 1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, ''née'' Suffield (1870 – 1904). Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on February 17, 1894.

While living in Africa he developed a severe fear of spiders after being bitten by a large tarantula out in their garden. When he was three, Tolkien 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 a severe brain haemorrhage before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Birmingham, England. 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 Hills and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his fiction.

[[Image:Jrrt_1905.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Ronald and Hilary Tolkien in 1905]]

Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awoke in her son 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. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. He later attended St. Philip's School and Exeter College, Oxford.

His mother converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900, despite vehement protests by her Baptist family. She died of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage, Rednal, which they were then renting. For the rest of his life, Tolkien felt that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C.S. Lewis to Anglicanism.

During his subsequent orphanhood he was brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free public display from around 1908.

[[image:Jrrt_1911.jpg|left|thumb|150px|J.R.R. Tolkien in 1911]]

=== Youth ===
Tolkien met and fell in love with [[Edith Bratt|Edith Mary Bratt]], three years his senior, at the age of sixteen. Father Francis forbade him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter.

In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called "the [[T.C.B.S.]]", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness of drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illegally, 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 the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter (''Letters'', no. 306), 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 twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembers 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 on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.

[[image:Tolkien_1916.jpg|right|thumb|150px|Tolkien in 1916, wearing his British Army uniform in a photograph from the middle years of WW1]]

On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. She replied saying that she was already engaged, but had done so because she had believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love, with Edith returning her ring and choosing to marry Tolkien instead. A condition of their engagement was that she was to convert to Catholicism for him. They were engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, on March 22, 1916.

With his childhood love of landscape, he visited Cornwall in 1914 and he was said to be deeply impressed by the singular Cornish coastline and sea. After graduating from the University of Oxford (Exeter College, Oxford) with a first-class degree in English language in 1915, Tolkien joined the British Army effort in [[World War I]] and served as a second lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme, until he came down with trench fever on October 27, and was moved back to England on November 8. Many of his fellow servicemen, as well as many of his closest friends, were killed in the war. During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called ''[[The Book of Lost Tales]]'', beginning with ''[[The Fall of Gondolin]]''. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, one day he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a thick grove of hemlock. This incident inspired the account of the meeting of [[Beren Erchamion|Beren]] and [[Lúthien]], and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.

=== Oxford ===
Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (among others, he initiated the entries "wasp" and "walrus"). In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there, but in 1925 he returned to Oxford as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College.

Tolkien and Edith had four children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917 - January 22, 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel (October 1920–1984), [[Christopher Tolkien|Christopher John Reuel]] (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929). Tolkien assisted Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the unearthing of a Roman Asclepieion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928. During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote ''[[The Hobbit]]'' and the first two volumes of ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''. Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "[[Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics]]" had a lasting influence on [[Beowulf]] research.

In 1945, he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien completed ''The Lord of the Rings'' in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent.
Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialisation, which he considered a devouring of the English countryside. For most of his adult life he eschewed automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude is perceptible from some parts of his work, such as the forced industrialisation of The Shire in ''The Lord of the Rings''.

[[Image:Jrrt_1972_tree.jpg|thumb|180px|The last known photograph of Tolkien, taken 9 October 1972, next to one of his favourite trees (a ''Pinus nigra'') in the Botanic Garden, Oxford]]

[[W.H. Auden]] was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with ''The Lord of the Rings'': Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter,
{{quote|I am [...] very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #327}}

=== Retirement and Old Age ===
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien increasingly turned into a figure of public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that Tolkien regretted he had not taken early retirement. While at first he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became more and more suspicious of emerging [[Tolkien fandom]], especially among the hippy movement in the USA. Already in 1944, he made a somewhat sarcastic comment about a fan letter by a twelve-year-old American reader ("It's nice to find that little American boys do really still say 'Gee Whiz'.", ''Letters'' no. 87). In a 1972 letter he deplores having become a cult-figure, but admits that
{{quote|even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chu-Bu_and_Sheemish Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish]) cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #336}}.

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth at the south coast. Tolkien was awarded a CBE ("Commander of the British Empire") by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on March 28, 1972.

[[Image:Tolkiengrave.jpg|thumb|The grave of J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien]]
Edith Tolkien died on November 29, 1971, at the age of eighty-two, and Tolkien had the name Lúthien
engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on September 2, 1973, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name, so that the engraving now reads:
:''Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889 – 1971''
:''John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892 – 1973''

Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2675_Tolkien 2675 Tolkien]. Tolkien Way in Stoke-On-Trent is named after J.R.R.'s son Father John Francis Tolkien, who used to be the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains.

== Writing ==
[[Image:Jrrt_lotr_cover_design.jpg|thumb|350px|Cover design for the three volumes of ''The Lord of the Rings'' by J.R.R. Tolkien]]

Beginning with ''[[The Book of Lost Tales]]'', written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of [[Túrin]], were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in ''[[The Lays of Beleriand]]''). Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]''. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of ''The Fall of [[Númenor]]'', which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.

Tolkien was strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish mythology, the Bible, and Greek mythology. The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include ''Beowulf'', the ''[[Kalevala]]'', the ''[[Poetic Edda]]'', the ''[[Volsunga saga]]'' and the ''[[Hervarar saga]]''1. Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer, Oedipus, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems. A major philosophical influence on his writing is King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of ''Boethius''' ''Consolation of Philosophy'' known as the ''Lays of Boethius''. Characters in ''The Lord of the Rings'', such as Frodo, Treebeard and Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks.

In addition to his [[Mythopoeia|mythological compositions]], Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. 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]]''). Other stories included ''[[Mr. Bliss]]'', ''[[Roverandom]]'', ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' and ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]''. ''Roverandom'' and ''Smith of Wootton Major'', like ''The Hobbit'', borrowed ideas from his legendarium. ''Leaf by Niggle'' appears to be an autobiographical work, where a "very small man", Niggle, keeps painting leaves until finally he ends up with a tree.

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by a former student to publish a book he had written for his own children called ''The Hobbit'' in 1937. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.

Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel ''The Lord of the Rings'' (published 1954–55). 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.

Tolkien at first intended ''The Lord of the Rings'' as a children's tale like ''The Hobbit'', but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to ''The Hobbit'', it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in ''The Silmarillion'' and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of ''The Lord of the Rings''.

Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher, with some assistance from fantasy writer [[Guy Gavriel Kay]], organised some of this material into one volume, published as ''The Silmarillion'' in 1977. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title ''[[Unfinished Tales]]'', and in subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve volumes of ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]''.
All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency to be found between ''The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit'', the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing ''The Hobbit'' for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book.

The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of ''The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit'', and other manuscripts, including ''Farmer Giles of Ham'', while the Bodleian holds the ''Silmarillion'' papers and Tolkien's academic work.

''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 twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted ''The Lord of the Rings'' "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited just 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'' (''Der Herr der Ringe'') to be their favourite work of literature.

== Languages ==
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialised in Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Icelandic as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918. In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, 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 33, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture ''[[English and Welsh]]'', which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered west-midland Middle English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W.H. Auden in 1955 (''Letters'', no. 163), "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)".

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 the construction of artificial languages. The best developed of these are [[Quenya]] and [[Sindarin]], the etymological connection between which are at 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 "phonæsthetic" considerations. It was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish and Greek (''Letters'', no. 144). A notable addition came in late 1945 with [[Númenórean]], a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis myth, which by ''The Notion Club Papers'' ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language, and via the "[[Second Age]]" and the [[Eärendil the Mariner|Eärendil]] myth was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th-century "real primary world" with the mythical past of his Middle-earth.

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]]'', "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends" (''Letters'', no. 180).

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 today commonly accept Tolkien's revival of the spellings ''dwarves'' and ''elvish'' (instead of ''dwarfs'' and ''elfish''), which had not been in use since the mid-1800s and earlier. Other terms he has coined, like legendarium and [[eucatastrophe]], are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

== Works Inspired by Tolkien ==
In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which:
{{quote|The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #131}}

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 [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margrethe_II_of_Denmark 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 to the style of his own drawings.

But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving.

In 1946, he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of the ''Hobbit'' as ''"too Disnified"'',
{{quote|Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #107}}

He was sceptical of the emerging [[Tolkien fandom|fandom]] in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of ''The Lord of the Rings'':
{{quote|Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #144}}

And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of ''The Lord of the Rings'' by Morton Grady Zimmerman:
{{quote|I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #207}}

He went on to criticise the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future productions, he forbade Disney should ever be involved:
{{quote|It might be advisable [...] to let the Americans do what seems good to them — as long as it was possible [...] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).|''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'', #13}}

United Artists never made a film, though at least [[John Boorman]] was planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to [[Tolkien Enterprises]], a [[Saul Zaentz]] company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of ''[[Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings|The Lord of the Rings]]'' appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by [[Ralph Bakshi]]). The screenplay was written by the fantasy writer [[Peter S. Beagle]]. This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half of the story that is ''The Lord of the Rings''. In 1977 an animated TV production of ''[[Rankin/Bass' The Hobbit|The Hobbit]]'' was made by [[Rankin/Bass]], and in 1980 they produced an animated film titled ''[[Rankin/Bass' The Return of the King|The Return of the King]]'', which covered some of the portion of ''The Lord of the Rings'' that Bakshi was unable to complete. In 2001-3 ''[[Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings|The Lord of the Rings]]'' was filmed in full and as a live-action film as a ''trilogy of films'' by [[Peter Jackson]].

== Bibliography ==
''See also [[Books|Books by J.R.R. Tolkien]]''
=== Fiction and Poetry ===
* 1936 ''Songs for the Philologists'', with [[E.V. Gordon]] et al.
* 1937 ''[[The Hobbit|The Hobbit or There and Back Again]]'', ISBN 0-618-00221-9 ([[Houghton Mifflin|HM]]).
* 1945 ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'' (short story)
* 1945 ''[[The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun]]'', published in ''Welsh Review''
* 1949 ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' (medieval fable)
* 1953 ''[[The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son]]'' published with the essay ''Ofermod''
* ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''
** 1954 ''[[The Fellowship of the Ring]]'': being the first part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00222-7 (HM).
** 1954 ''[[The Two Towers]]'': being the second part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00223-5 (HM).
** 1955 ''[[The Return of the King]]'': being the third part of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ISBN 0-618-00224-3 (HM).
* 1962 ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]] and Other Verses from the Red Book''
* 1967 ''[[The Road Goes Ever On]]'', with [[Donald Swann]]
* 1964 ''[[Tree and Leaf]]'' (''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' and ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'' in book form)
* 1966 ''The Tolkien Reader'' (''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son'', ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'', ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]' and ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]]'')
* 1966 ''Tolkien on Tolkien'' (autobiographical)
* 1967 ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]''

=== Academic Works ===
* 1922 ''A Middle English Vocabulary''
* 1924 ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]'' (with [[E.V. Gordon]])
* 1925 ''Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography''
* 1925 ''[[The Devil's Coach Horses]]''
* 1929 ''[[Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad]]''
* 1932 ''The Name 'Nodens' '' (in: ''Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire''.)
* 1932/1935 ''[[Sigelwara Land]]'' parts I and II
* 1934 ''[[The Reeve's Prologue and Tale|The Reeve's Tale]]'' (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's ''The Canterbury Tales'')
* 1936 ''[[Beowulf: the monsters and the critics|Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics]]'' (lecture on [[Beowulf]] criticism)
* 1939 ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, given as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture)
* 1944 ''[[Sir Orfeo]]'' (an edition of the medieval poem)
* 1947 ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (essay, very central for understanding Tolkien's views on fastasy)
* 1953 ''Ofermod'', published with the poem ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son''
* 1953 ''Middle English "Losenger"''
* 1962 ''[[Ancrene Wisse]]: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle''
* 1963 ''English and Welsh''
* 1966 ''[[Jerusalem Bible]]'' (contributing translator and lexicographer)

=== Posthumous Publications ===
* 1975 Translations of ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]'', ''[[Pearl]]'' and ''[[Sir Orfeo]]''
* 1976 ''[[The Father Christmas Letters]]''
* 1977 ''[[The Silmarillion]]'' ISBN 0-618-12698-8 (HM).
* 1979 ''Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien''
* 1980 ''[[Unfinished Tales]] of Númenor and Middle-earth'' ISBN 0-618-15405-1 (HM).
* 1980 ''Poems and Stories'' (a compilation of ''[[The Adventures of Tom Bombadil]]'', ''The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son'', ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'', ''[[Leaf by Niggle]]'', ''[[Farmer Giles of Ham]]'' and ''[[Smith of Wootton Major]]'')
* 1981 ''[[The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien]]'' (eds. [[Christopher Tolkien]] and [[Humphrey Carpenter]])
* 1981 ''The Old English Exodus Text''
* 1982 ''[[Finn and Hengest]]: The Fragment and the Episode''
* 1982 ''[[Mr. Bliss]]''
* 1983 ''[[The Monsters and the Critics]]'' (an essay collection)
** ''[[Beowulf: the monsters and the critics|Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics]]'' (1936)
** ''[[On Translating Beowulf]]'' (1940)
** ''[[On Fairy-Stories]]'' (1947)
** ''[[A Secret Vice]]'' (1930)
** ''[[Sir Gawain and the Green Knight]]''
** ''[[English and Welsh]]'' (1955)
* 1983–1996 ''[[The History of Middle-earth]]'':<ol type="I"><li>''[[The Book of Lost Tales 1]]'' (1983)</li><li>''[[The Book of Lost Tales 2]]'' (1984)</li><li>''[[The Lays of Beleriand]]'' (1985)</li><li>''[[The Shaping of Middle-earth]]'' (1986)</li><li>''[[The Lost Road and Other Writings]]'' (1987)</li><li>''[[The Return of the Shadow]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 1) (1988)</li><li>''[[The Treason of Isengard]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 2) (1989)</li><li>''[[The War of the Ring]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 3) (1990)</li><li>''[[Sauron Defeated]]'' (The History of ''The Lord of the Rings'' vol. 4, including [[The Notion Club Papers]]) (1992)</li><li>''[[Morgoth's Ring]]'' (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)</li><li>''[[The War of the Jewels]]'' (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)</li><li>''[[The Peoples of Middle-earth]]'' (1996)</li></ol>
** ''Index'' (2002)
* 1995 ''[[J.R.R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator]]'' (a compilation of Tolkien's art)
* 1998 ''[[Roverandom]]''
* 2002 ''Beowulf and the Critics'' ed. Michael D.C. Drout ("Beowulf: the monsters and the critics" together with editions of two drafts of the longer essay from which it was condensed.

=== Audio Recordings ===
* 1967 ''Poems and Songs of Middle-Earth'', Caedmon TC 1231
* 1975 ''J.R.R. Tolkien Reads and Sings his ''The Hobbit'' & ''The Lord of the Rings'', Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)

==Other names==
J, John, Ronald, Tollers, JRsquared, Ruginwaldus Dwalakôneis, Arcastar, "Eisphorides Acribus Polyglotteus, orator Graecorum", N.N, Fisiologvs, Kingston Bagpuize, Oxymore, Raegnold Hraedmoding

== References ==
* ''Biography'': Carpenter, Humphrey (1977). ''J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography'', New York: Ballantine Books. ISBN 0-04-928037-6
* ''Letters'': Carpenter, Humphrey and Tolkien, Christopher (eds.) (1981). ''The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien''. ISBN 0-618-05699-8
* ''HoME'': Tolkien, Christopher (ed.) (12 volumes, 1996-2002), ''The History of Middle-earth''

== Further Reading ==
A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:
* Anderson, Douglas A., Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger (eds.) (2004). ‘’Tolkien Studies’’, Vol 1
* Chance, Jane (ed.) (2003). ''Tolkien the Medievalist'', London, New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-28944-0
* Chance, Jane (ed.) (2004). ''Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a Reader'', Louisville: University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 0-813-12301-1
* Flieger, Verlyn and Carl F. Hostetter (eds.) (2000). ''Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle Earth'', Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-30530-7. DDC 823.912. LC PR6039.
* O'Neill, Timothy R. (1979). ''The Individuated Hobbit: Jung, Tolkien and the Archetypes of Middle-earth'', Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-395-28208-X
* Pearce, Joseph (1998). ''Tolkien: Man and Myth'', London: HarperCollinsPublishers. ISBN 000-274018-4
* Shippey, T. A. (2000). ''J.R.R. Tolkien — Author of the Century'', Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. ISBN 0-618-12764-X, ISBN 0-618-25759-4 (pbk)
* Strachey, Barbara (1981). ''Journeys of Frodo: an Atlas of The Lord of the Rings'', London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. ISBN 0-049-12016-6
* Tolkien, John & Priscilla (1992). ''The Tolkien Family Album'', London: HarperCollins. ISBN 0-26-110239-7
* White, Michael (2003). ''Tolkien: A Biography'', New American Library. ISBN 0451212428
* ''The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends''. Humphrey Carpenter (1979), ISBN 0395276284
* ''The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends''. Colin Duriez and David Porter (2001), ISBN 1902694139
* ''Finding God in the Lord of the Rings'''. Kurt D. Bruner and Jim Ware (2003), ISBN 084238555X
* ''Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship''. Colin Duriez (2003), ISBN 1587680262

==Notes==
# As described by Christopher Tolkien in ''Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks Konung'' (Oxford University, Trinity College). B. Litt. thesis. 1953/4. [Year uncertain], ''The Battle of the Goths and the Huns'', in: Saga-Book (University College, London, for the Viking Society for Northern Research) 14, part 3 (1955-6). See [http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/bibl4.html publications by and about Christopher Tolkien]

[[Category:Tolkien Family]]

Rivendell

2007-05-13T09:01:47Z

Findegil:

[[Image:J.R.R. Tolkien - Rivendell.jpg|thumb|300px|''Rivendell'' by [[J.R.R. Tolkien]]]]
'''Rivendell''' is an [[Elves|Elven]] outpost in [[Middle-earth]]. It is also referred to as "The Last Homely House East of the Sea", a reference to [[Valinor]], which is west of the sea. It is established by [[Elrond]] in the [[Second Age]] of Middle-earth (four or five thousand years before the events of ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]''). Besides Elrond himself, notable Elves who lived there include [[Arwen]] and [[Glorfindel of Rivendell|Glorfindel]].

During the [[War of the Elves and Sauron]] in the [[Second Age]], Rivendell was under siege by the forces of [[Sauron]].

In ''[[The Hobbit]]'', [[Bilbo Baggins]] stopped off at Rivendell with the Dwarves on the way to the [[Lonely Mountain]] and also on the way back to the [[Shire]] with [[Gandalf]].

In ''[[The Lord of the Rings]]'', [[Frodo Baggins]] and his [[Hobbit]] companions journey to Rivendell, where they meet with Bilbo, who had retired there after his 111th birthday, spending his time on his memoir, ''[[The Hobbit|There and Back Again]]''. Several other Elves, [[Dwarves]] and [[Men]] also arrive at Rivendell on separate errands; at the Council of Elrond they learn that all of their errands are related to the fate of the [[One Ring]], and they must decide what to do about it. In the end it is the Hobbits who influence the decision.

Rivendell is located at the edge of a narrow gorge of the [[Bruinen|Bruinen River]] (one of the main approaches to Rivendell comes from a nearby ford of Bruinen), but well hidden in the moorlands and foothills of the [[Hithaeglir]] or the [[Misty Mountains]].

The [[Sindarin]] translation of Rivendell is '''''Imladris''''', meaning "Deep Valley of the Cleft".

==Inspiration==
* Possibly ‘the Dell’ at [[Sarehole]], Warwickshire, England

{{quote|But in order to get to the place where we [Ronald and Hilary] used to blackberry (called '''the Dell''') we had to go through the white one’s [the Sarehole miller’s son’s] land...|[[J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography]]}}

[[Category:Eriador]]
[[Category:Cities]]
[[Category:Realms]]
[[Category:Elven Kingdoms]]

Sandyman

2007-05-13T09:01:19Z

Findegil:

'''Sandyman''' was the owner of the [[Old Mill]] in [[Hobbiton]] at the time of [[Bilbo's Birthday Party]], whose first name - if he had one - is never revealed by [[Tolkien]]. He was an opinionated fellow, ready to pass on tall tales, who was unpopular with [[Sam]]'s father [[Hamfast Gamgee|Hamfast]]. His fate is slightly ambiguous, but it seems that he died sometime in the years before the [[War of the Ring]], with his Mill being inherited by his son [[Ted Sandyman|Ted]], who sold it to [[Lotho Sackville-Baggins]] during his takeover of the [[Shire]].

==Inspiration==
* Possibly the miller at [[Sarehole]] Mill, Warwickshire, England

{{quote|You shouldn’t listen to all you hear, Sandyman,’ said the Gaffer, who '''did not much like the miller.'''|[[The Lord of the Rings]], [[A Long-expected Party]]}}

{{quote|I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, '''the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.'''|[[The Lord of the Rings]], Foreword}}

[[Category:Hobbits]]

Sarehole

2007-05-13T08:58:09Z

Findegil:

[[Image:Sarehole_Mill.jpg|thumb|right|Sarehole Mill]]
'''Sarehole Mill''' is a fine example of one of more than fifty water mills that existed in Birmingham at one time.

===History of the Mill===
Sarehole Mill was built in 1765 on the site of an even older mill, Biddle's Mill, which dated back to 1540. Sarehole was used mostly to grind corn. Matthew Boulton's father rented the Mill and Sarehole farm in 1756. When his father died, Boulton used the Mill for making buttons and for metal rolling until he moved his operations to Handsworth in 1761. In the late 1890s Sarehole was the childhood haunt of [[Hobbit]] author [[J.R.R. Tolkien]], and famously used as inspiration for the mill at [[Hobbiton]] in [[The Lord of the Rings]].

The Mill is open to the public from April to October and to school parties throughout the year.

[[Image:J.R.R._Tolkien_-_The_Hill_-_Hobbiton-across-the-Water_%28Colored%29.jpg|thumb|right|Hobbiton by JRR Tolkien]]
===Tolkien and the Mill===
In 1896 [[J.R.R. Tolkien]] settled with his mother and brother at 5 Gracewell (now 264 Wake Green Road), a cottage in Sarehole village. It was only four miles from the centre of [[Birmingham]] but it was then still set within the north Worcestershire countryside. Coming from the hot dry landscape of South Africa, the green fields and woods made a vivid impression on Tolkien.

He said that Sarehole was the model for the [[Shire]], home of [[Bilbo]] in [[The Hobbit]]. When Tolkien visited Birmingham with his family in 1933 he lamented the changes in Sarehole, as Birmingham had continued to grow until Sarehole was but a suburb in the huge city. In 1933, much of the area was still farmland, but there were many more houses and gardens, and one old farmhouse had become a garage selling petrol.

The most exciting thing for a young boy to see in the village of Sarehole was certainly Sarehole Mill, which Tolkien refers to as 'the great mill' in The Hobbit . It stands on the River Cole. Tolkien based the bad-tempered [[Ted Sandyman]] (the miller) in The Lord of the Rings on the miller there, who perhaps understandably shouted at him and his younger brother when they were playing in the mill yard.

[[Image:GeoAndrew.jpg|thumb|right|Sarehole Mill 1890]]
The millers, George Andrew senior and junior can be seen in the photo to the right taken in 1890.

===External Links===
[http://www.bplphoto.co.uk/TolkiensBirmingham/TolkienSarehole.htm Tolkien's Birmingham]

[http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/sarehole.bcc Sarehole Mill]

File:GeoAndrew.jpg

2007-05-13T08:56:18Z

Findegil:

J.R.R. Tolkien's inspirations/notes

2007-05-13T08:42:54Z

Findegil:

*Hornblower, bracegirdle – from the Hornblower books ?
*Radcliffe camera
*Ilmen – from ilma, or Ilmarinen in Kalevala?
*Tom bombadil – from Väinämöinen? Check http://www.minastirith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=17;t=000024;p=5#000107
*Meneltarma, fuin (the mountain in Dorthonion) – koli, sinai, olympus ?
*Manwë – ukko, zeus, thor?
*Talking (sentient) animals – talking animals in Kalevala ?
*Maglor, daeron – väinämöinen (mighty singer) ?
*Singing contest of sauron and felagund – singing contest between väinämöinen and joukahainen ?
*Art of singing – art of singing in Kalevala
*Hísilómë (the name) – Hiisi in kalevala?
*Bard's black arrow – joukahainen's special bow and arrows
*riding on eagle - väinämöinen riding on eagle to Pohja?
*Tolkien's favorite fantasy/sci-fi authors were:
**E.R. Eddison
**John Christopher
**Isaac Asimov
**Mary Renault
*it is said that they [Lossoth] can run on the ice with bones on their feet, and have carts without wheels. – skis and sleds in Kalevala?
*Woods of hísilómë – Hiisi's dark forest ?
*Galadriel – mielikki in kalevala ?
*Treebeard – tapio in kalevala ?
*Ents – talking trees in kalevala?
**Now she asks the trees the question,
**And the forest gives this answer:
**"We have care enough already,
**Cannot think about thy matters;
**Cruel fates have we to battle,
**Pitiful our own misfortunes!
**We are felled and chopped in pieces,
**Cut in blocks for hero-fancy,
**We are burned to death as fuel,
**No one cares how much we suffer."
*Galadriel - the fairy godmother figure in "The Princess and the Goblin": http://www.electricpenguin.com/blatherings/lotr/archives/00000022.html
*http://www.mythfolklore.net/andrewlang/images/red.jpg
*chapter in red fairy book: “soria moria castle”
*maia (the name) – The Strange Adventures of Little Maia in The Olive Fairy Book
*journey into mordor – The Golden Key of George MacDonald, two children search for the mysterious "land from where the shadows fall."
*Hobbits – lilliputs in early versions of The Hobbit, snergs in the marvellous land of snergs (AH p. 6-7), AH p. 9
*Goblins – gibbelins in Lord Dunsany
*Balin (name) – HotH1 p. 24
*fimbulfambi (name) - HotH1 p. 24
*The shire - Or, if I had pretended that 'the Shire' was some fictitious Loamshire of actual England. Yet actually in an imaginary country and period, as this one, coherently made, the nomenclature is a more important element than in an 'historical' novel. But, of course, if we drop the 'fiction' of long ago, 'The Shire' is based on rural England and not any other country in the world – least perhaps of any in Europe on Holland, which is topographically wholly dissimilar. (In fact so different is it, that in spite of the affinity of its language, and in many respects of its idiom, which should ease some part of the translator's labour, its toponymy is specially unsuitable for the purpose.) The toponymy of The Shire, to take the first list, is a 'parody' of that of rural England, in much the same sense as are its inhabitants: they go together and are meant to. After all the book is English, and by an Englishman, and presumably even those who wish its narrative and dialogue turned into an idiom that they understand, will not ask of a translator that he should deliberately attempt to destroy the local colour.
*Middle-earth – middangeard
*Mirkwood – myrkwood in the Prose Edda
*Gandalf (the name) – in heimskringla
*Elvenhome – alfheim in heimskringla
*Red Book of Westmarch - Red Book of Hergest in the Mabinogion, Everyman edition by Lady Charlotte Guest (http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/mab/index.htm)
*Ea - in the The Seven Evil Spirits
*Erech – in The Seven Tablets of Creation
*Swans – in kalevala?
*Kalevala (http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/kalec10.txt):
**Puhuri, the north-wind, the father of Pakkanen (frost) is sometimes personified as a gigantic eagle.
*Eagles – eagles in kalevala?
*Black stream in The hobbit – black Tuoni river in kalevala?
*Vala – from finnish valo?
*Ilúvatar – from finnish
*whole shire was invited – in kalevala:
**Thereupon the trusted maiden
**Spread the wedding-invitations
**To the people of Pohyola,
**To the tribes of Kalevala;
**Asked the friendless, asked the homeless
**Asked the laborers and shepherds,
**Asked the fishermen and hunters,
**Asked the deaf, the dumb, the crippled,
**Asked the young, and asked the aged,
**Asked the rich, and asked the needy;
**Did not give an invitation
**To the reckless Lemminkainen,
**Island-dweller of the ocean.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farthing
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_%28division%29
*farthings on iceland
*three farthing stone - Even more exciting, we found the Four Shire Stone (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v111/Lizallinos/Knitted%20Hobbits/Moreton%20in%20the%20Marsh/fourshirestone.jpg), Tolkien's inspiration for his own Three Farthing Stone! It was so easy to imagine him stopping there on his way to visit his brother in Evesham, having a little rest and thinking to himself, "I must put something of the sort in my book.."! The Four Shire Stone marks the spot where four Shires came together in Tolkien's day.
*http://www.rootsweb.com/~engcots/4ShireStonePhotos.html
*four farthings - warwickshire, worcestershire, oxfordshire, gloucestershire ?
*Treriksröset in sweden?
*Bree – moreton-in-marsh?
*shire – english shire
*ingvë – yngve, frej in prose edda?
*Ingvi (?) – ynglings in prose edda
*Brand – in prose edda
*Golden hair – thor's and sif's hair in prose edda
*Hobbits' interest in genealogy – icelanders'
*http://www.wagner-dc.org/haymes04_lec.html
*gondor – venice: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/1858273.stm
*gimli – gimle (the sky) in prose edda
*eldar (the name) – from norse (?) eld, eldar
*island ferry: in prose edda:
**She took from the north, out of Jötunheim, four oxen which were the soils of a certain giant and, herself, and set them before the plow. And the plow cut so wide and so deep that it loosened up the land; and the oxen drew the land out into the sea and to the westward, and stopped in a certain sound. There Gefjun set the land, and gave it a name, calling it Selund. And from that time on, the spot whence the land had been torn up is water: it is now called the Lögr in Sweden; and bays lie in that lake even as the headlands in Selund. Thus says Bragi, the ancient skald:
**Gefjun drew from Gylfi | gladly the wave-trove's free-hold,
**Till from the running beasts | sweat reeked, to Denmark's increase;
**The oxen bore, moreover, | eight eyes, gleaming brow-lights,
**O'er the field's wide: booty, | and four heads in their plowing
*http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9282
*http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=11556
*http://www.sffworld.com/forums/showthread.php?t=8522&page=1&pp=15
*http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.books.tolkien/msg/3fad9c3c879f5a2c?output=gplain
*http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.tolkien/msg/bdb4b12467dc0ad1?output=gplain
*golfimbul – golf and fimbultul
*middle-earth – midgard
*And Hárr answered: "She is ring-shaped without, and round about her without lieth the deep sea; and along the strand of that sea they gave lands to the races of giants for habitation. But on the inner earth they made a citadel round about the world against the hostility of the giants, and for their citadel they raised up the brows of Ymir the giant, and called that place Midgard.
*Aulë at the prayer of Yavanna wrought two mighty lamps for the lighting of the Middle-earth which he had built amid the encircling seas.
*Middle-earth (the name) – “midgard”
*Valimar - Asgard in Prose Edda
*Telperion and Laurelin – Ash and Embla in Prose Edda
*Their halls are above the everlasting snow, upon Oiolossë, the uttermost tower of Taniquetil, tallest of all the mountains upon Earth. When Manwë there ascends his throne and looks forth, if Varda is beside him, he sees further than all other eyes, through mist, and through darkness, and over the leagues of the sea. – “There is one abode called Hlidskjálf, and when Allfather sat in the high-seat there, he looked out over the whole world and saw every man's acts, and knew all things which he saw.” in Prose Edda
*Greatest in strength and deeds of prowess is Tulkas, who is surnamed Astaldo, the Valiant. He came last to Arda, to aid the Valar in the first battles with Melkor. He delights in wrestling and in contests of strength; and he rides no steed, for he can outrun all things that go on feet, and he is tireless. His hair and beard are golden, and his flesh ruddy; his weapons are his hands. He has little heed for either the past or the future, and is of no avail as a counsellor, but is a hardy friend. – “The Earth was his daughter and his wife; on her he begot the first son, which is Ása-Thor: strength and prowess attend him, wherewith he overcometh all living things.” in Prose Edda
*In seven hours the glory of each tree waxed to full and waned again to naught; and each awoke once more to life an hour before the other ceased to shine. Thus in Valinor twice every day there came a gentle hour of softer light when both trees were faint and their gold and silver beams were mingled. Telperion was the elder of the trees and came first to full stature and to bloom; and that first hour in which he shone, the white glimmer of a silver dawn, the Valar reckoned not into the tale of hours, but named it the Opening Hour, and counted from it the ages of their reign in Valinor. Therefore at the sixth hour of the First Day, and of all the joyful days thereafter, until the Darkening of Valinor, Telperion ceased his time of flower; and at the twelfth hour Laurelin her blossoming. And each day of the Valar in Aman contained twelve hours, and ended with the second mingling of the lights, in which Laurelin was waning but Telperion was waxing. – “Nörfi or Narfi is the name of a giant that dwelt in Jötunheim: he had a daughter called Night; she was swarthy and dark, as befitted her race. She was given to the man named Naglfari; their son was Audr. Afterward she was wedded to him that was called Annarr; Jörd[1] was their daughter. Last of all Dayspring had her, and he was of the race of the Æsir; their son was Day: he was radiant and fair after his father. Then Allfather took Night, and Day her son, and gave to them two horses and two chariots, and sent them up into the heavens, to ride round about the earth every two half-days. Night rides before with the horse named Frosty-Mane, and on each morning he bedews the earth with the foam from his bit. The horse that Day has is called Sheen-Mane, and he illumines all the air and the earth from his mane." in Prose Edda
*Moon and sun – “A certain man was named Mundilfari, who had two children; they were so fair and comely that he called his son Moon, and his daughter Sun, and wedded her to the man called Glenr. But the gods were incensed at that insolence, and took the brother and sister, and set them up in the heavens; they caused Sun to drive those horses that drew the chariot of the sun, which the gods had fashioned, for the world's illumination, from that glowing stuff which flew out of Múspellheim. Those horses are called thus: Early-Wake and All-Strong; and under the shoulders of the horses the gods set two wind-bags to cool them, but in some records that is called 'iron-coolness.' Moon steers the course of the moon, and determines its waxing and waning.”
*But Tilion was wayward and uncertain in speed, and held not to his appointed path; and he sought to come near to Arien, being drawn by her splendour, though the flame of Anar scorched him, and the island of the Moon was darkened. – “It is no marvel that she hastens furiously: close cometh he that seeks her, and she has no escape save to run away." Then said Gangleri: "Who is he that causes her this disquiet?" Hárr replied: "It is two wolves; and he that runs after her is called Skoll; she fears him, and he shall take her. But he that leaps before her is called Hati Hródvitnisson. He is eager to seize the moon; and so it must be." in Prose Edda
*Draugluin, carcharoth – “The saying runs thus: from this race shall come one that shall be mightiest of all, he that is named Moon-Hound; he shall be filled with the flesh of all those men that die, and he shall swallow the moon, and sprinkle with blood the heavens and all the lair; thereof-shall the sun lose her shining, and the winds in that day shall be unquiet and roar on every side.” in Prose Edda
*Straight road - Bifröst in Prose Edda
*Dwarves – dwarves in Prose Edda:
**Next after this, the gods enthroned themselves in their seats and held judgment, and called to mind whence the dwarves had quickened in the mould and underneath in the earth, even as do maggots in flesh. The dwarves had first received shape and life in the flesh of Ymir, and were then maggots; but by decree of the gods had become conscious with the intelligence of men, and had human shape. And nevertheless they dwell in the earth and in stones.
*Durin (the name) – durin in Vóluspá
*Dwalin (the name) – dwalin in Vóluspá
*nain (the name) – nain in Vóluspá
*dain (the name) – dain in Vóluspá
*bifur (the name) – bifur in Vóluspá
*bafur (the name) – bafur in Vóluspá
*bombur (the name) – bombur in Vóluspá
*nori (the name) – nori in Vóluspá
*ori (the name) – ori in Vóluspá
*oin(the name) – oin in Vóluspá
*thorin (the name) – thorin in Vóluspá
*fili (the name) – fili in Vóluspá
*fundin (the name) – fundin in Vóluspá
*thrór (the name) – thrór in Vóluspá
*gloin (the name) – gloin in Vóluspá
*dori (the name) – dori in Vóluspá
*oakenshield (the name) – eikinskjalde in Vóluspá
*máhanaxar - Then said Gangleri: "Where is the chief abode or holy place of the gods?" Hárr answered: 'That is at the Ash of Yggdrasill; there the gods must give judgment everyday."
**“The third root of the Ash stands in heaven; and under that root is the well which is very holy, that is called the Well of Urdr; there the gods hold their tribunal.” in Prose Edda
*mîm (the name) – mîmir in Prose or Poetic Edda
*tulkas: “He delights in wrestling and in contests of strength; and he rides no steed, for he can outrun all things that go on feet, and he is tireless.” – Thor in Prose Edda: “Thor walks to the judgment, and wades those rivers which are called thus”
*elvenhome – alfheimr in Prose Edda
*Vanyar (light elves) – light-elves in Prose Edda ?
*Noldor (deep elves) – dark-elves in Prose Edda ?
*Elves of the light - light-elves in Prose Edda ?
*Dark elves - dark-elves In Prose Edda ?
**“That which is called Álfheimr[1] is one, where dwell the peoples called Light-Elves; but the Dark-Elves dwell down in the earth, and they are unlike in appearance, but by far more unlike in nature. The Light-Elves are fairer to look upon than the sun, but the Dark-Elves are blacker than pitch.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Eagle_and_Child
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hobbit
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_of_the_Rings
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=002123
*http://www.bplphoto.co.uk/TolkiensBirmingham/
*We followed a section of the Pilgrims' Way, leading to Canterbury. 'The Bull' is a common name for old pubs. It refers not to the animal but to the Papal Bull the innkeeper had purchased to permit him to traffic with pilgrims. The area is also where Tolkien came from, and the gnarled treeroots twisting out into sunken lanes certainly suggest a possible genesis for the ents.
*http://www.tolkiensociety.org/media/Who_is_who.html
*Goldilocks and the Three Bears
*Sam gardener – tolkien’s love of plants (and perhaps gardening)
*Tirith – terrace?
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hacker_%28folklore%29
*minas tirith and ithil – tale of two cities?
*Westfold – vestfold in norge
*http://www.users.muohio.edu/shermalw/honors_2001_fall/honors_papers_2000/COMPTON_TOLKEIN.HTML
*http://faculty.jbu.edu/jhimes/Silmarillion-Kalevala.html
*grima in foster brothers' tale
*Frodo – frode?
*Melkor – loke, the devil, lucifer, satan
*Variags – variags (varangians)
*Ainur (valair) - Asar
*Gandalf – odin
*Manwë – odin
*Ilúvatar - odin
*Mahal – taj mahal?
*Balrogs – fallen angels with cut wings in Bible
*Tulkas – lithuanian tulkas
*Tulkas – thor
*Orome - thor
*Grond, the Hammer of the Underworld – mjöllne
*Gandalf, resurrection – balder
*Gondorians – Egyptians
*Berúthiel – skadi
*The eye – odin's one eye ?
*Osse, uinen – njord
*Aldarion, erendis – njord, skadi ?
*Cats – tolkiens dislike of cats
*Yavanna – freja, frej
*Rúmil, daeron – brage ?
*Angainor – gleipne, drone, löding ?
*Este – eir
*Corsairs – mediterranean corsairs
*Vala – vala (völva)
*http://scv.bu.edu/~aarondf/Rivimages/realriv.html
*gondors roads – roman roads
*green dragon – pub in oxford
*http://forums.theonering.com/viewtopic.php?p=3301734&sid=10faf5ebdebf575e0a7f6ced9ffe0660#3301734
*valarin – protogermanic?
*Belfalas – Belfast?
*Huorns – brothers grimm?
*Boromirs funeral – scylds funeral
*Ents – McDonald’s ”phantastes”
*Entmoot – meetings at eagle and child ?
*I must bid you lay aside your weapons – Beowulf
*Tuna – town?
*Bingo – stuffed koala bears, the ‘bingos’
*The darkness of the present days has had some effect on it [LR]. Though it is not an 'allegory'.
*http://www.herenistarion.org/cgi-bin/bb/YaBB.cgi?board=Literary_Inspiration;action=display;num=1093379016
*http://www.herenistarion.org/cgi-bin/bb/YaBB.cgi?board=Literary_Inspiration;action=display;num=1088739671
*http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/wiki.cgi?Mythology/%c9arendel
*easterlings – Asians?
*http://www.herenistarion.org/cgi-bin/bb/YaBB.cgi?board=History;action=display;num=1088711162
*lembas – eucharist ?
*galadriel – virgin mary
*Aragorn/Frodo – Jesus Christ
*http://www.herenistarion.org/parmanole/PNbiblical.html
*http://www.herenistarion.org/parmanole/PNTracingEpic.html
*http://www.herenistarion.org/beyondtheshire/BTS9.html
*Hobbit (the name) – page 1-2 of RC
*Red book (the name) – page 2 of RC
*Device of the found manuscript – page 2 of RC
*Hobbits – RC pg. 3, 5, 8
*Tolkien carefully chose the date when the Fellowship began their journey to destroy the One Ring: the 25th of December, the same day that the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus Christ.
*The name Gollum comes from the terrible, swallowing-sound the poor creature makes. His original hobbit-name, Sméagol, is old-english for "caveman" or "cave-digger."
*Sméagol's best friend is named Déagol, the old-english name for "secret." It's a very suitable name, as his murder is Gollum's secret.
*The inspiration for the character Tom Bombadil was a puppet which was stuck in the toilet. The puppet belonged to one of Tolkien's sons, and after Tolkien had "saved" it, he wrote a poem dedicated to Tom. In the poem the character meets Goldberry, a waternymph. (A pretty bad joke, thinking about what the poor puppet experienced.)
*Legolas is the only one in the Fellowship who prefers the bow and arrow as a weapon. This has its origins in ancient myths about elves who shot arrows down from Heaven. The myths came from tales about ancient gods who threw bolts of lightning.
*Just as Tolkien carefully chose the date when the Fellowship set out from Rivendell, he was just as careful with choosing the date when the One Ring was destroyed: March 25th, the day Jesus Christ died and defeated Satan.
*Hobbits – pygmies
*Bullroarer (the name) – nomenclature
*Use of Beowulf in "The King of the Golden Hall"
*Tolkien in the Land of Arthur: the Old Forest Episode
*http://www.travellady.com/Issues/Issue64/64E-hobbits.htm
*http://pourtolkien.free.fr/jardillierArthur.html
*Tolkien himself talks about Elrond as an allegory of lore, Lembas as an allegory or the eucharist, Galadriel as being connected with the Virgin Mary, the Eregion elves representing science and machinery; Saruman representing industrialisation; Tom Bombadil as the spirit of the vanishing Oxfordshire countryside; etc etc etc.
*Possible sources of tolkien’s bullroarer, mythprint 37
*Isumbras (the name ?) – RC pg. 6
*Shire (the name) – RC pg. 7
*Elder days (name) – RC pg. 9
*Middle-earth – RC pg. 9-10
*Bilbo (name) – RC pg. 10, AH p. 33-34
*Frodo (name) – RC pg. 10
*Old world – RC pg. 10
*Greenwood (name) – RC pg. 11
*Misty mountains (name) – RC pg. 11-12
*Misty mountains – RC pg. 12
*Mirkwood (name) – RC pg. 12-13
*Harfoots (name) – RC pg. 13
*Stoors (name) – RC pg. 13
*Fallohides (name) – RC pg. 14
*Hobbits: emigration into eriador – RC pg 14
*Weathertop (name) – RC pg 14
*Wilderland (name) – RC pg. 14
*Loudwater – RC pg. 14-15
*Took – RC pg. 15
*Master of brandy hall – RC pg. 15
*As for the Bounty of 1420... it always reminded me of the giddiness in West following the two World Wars: baby-booms and economic growths following long years under a Shadow.
*The Shire] is in fact more or less a Warwickshire village of about the period of the Diamond Jubilee ... Letters, 230 (#178)
*But, of course, if we drop the 'fiction' of long ago, 'The Shire' is
based on rural England and not any other country in the world...
[Later in the same letter he implied that the Shire was "an imag-
inary mirror" of England.] Letters, 250 (#190)
* There is no special reference to England in the 'Shire' -- except
of course that as an Englishman brought up in an 'almost rural'
village of Warwickshire on the edge of the prosperous bourgeoisie of
Birmingham (about the time of the Diamond Jubilee!) I take my models
like anyone else -- from such 'life' as I know.
Letters, 235 (#181)
*Shire – RC pg. 23
*But none were more dangerous than the Great Willow: his heart was rotten, but his strength was green; and he was cunning, and a master of winds – wind in the willows
*But I suppose that the Quendi are in fact in these histories very little akin to the Elves and Fairies of Europe; and if I were pressed to rationalize, I should say that they represent really Men with greatly enhanced aesthetic and creative faculties, greater beauty and longer life, and nobility – the Elder Children, doomed to fade before the Followers (Men), and to live ultimately only by the thin line of their blood that was mingled with that of Men, among whom it was the only real claim to 'nobility'.
*Orcs (the word is as far as I am concerned actually derived from Old English orc 'demon', but only because of its phonetic suitability) are nowhere clearly stated to be of any particular origin. But since they are servants of the Dark Power, and later of Sauron, neither of whom could, or would, produce living things, they must be 'corruptions'. They are not based on direct experience of mine; but owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition (goblin is used as a translation in The Hobbit, where orc only occurs once, I think), especially as it appears in George MacDonald, except for the soft feet which I never believed in.
*Westernesse – Rc pg. 16
*Bree, chetwood – RC pg.16
*Gondor – RC pg. 17-18
*Belfalas – RC pg. 18
*Lune – pg. 19
*Marcho, blanco – RC pg. 19
*Thain – RC pg. 21
*Sullong – RC pg. 23
*Orcs –RC pg. 24-26
*Michel delving (name) – RC pg. 26
*Mathom (name) – RC pg. 26
*Hobbits – RC pg. 27
*Smial – RC pg. 27
*White downs – RC pg. 28
*March (name) – RC pg. 28
*“one could see the Sea from the top of that tower” – RC pg. 28-29
*”thatched with dry grass or straw, or roofed with turves” – RC pg. 29
*Brandybuck (name) – RC pg. 29
*Oldbuck (name) – RC pg. 29
*Herblore – RC pg. 30
*Tobold (name) – tobacco
*Hornblower – RC pg. 31, 760
*Isengrim – RC pg. 31
*Prancing pony (name) – RC pg. 31
*Prancing pony - http://www.thepublican.com/story.asp?sectioncode=7&storycode=53323
*Farthing – RC pg. 32
*Boffin (name) – RC pg. 33
*Norbury (name) – RC pg. 33
*Shire-moot – RC pg. 34
*Shirriff (name) – RC pg. 35
*§51 Barnabas is [added: not] an exception. Barnabas Butterbur was a Man of Bree, not a hobbit. I gave him this name for various reasons. First of all a personal one. On an old grey stone in a quiet churchyard in southern England I once saw in large letters the name Barnabas Butter. That was long ago and before I had seen the Red Book, but the name came back to me when the character of the stout innkeeper of Bree was presented to me in Frodo's record. The more so because his name, in agreement with the generally botanical type of name favoured in Bree, was actually Butterburr, or in the C.S. Zilbarāpha [> Zilbirāpha]. Barnabas has unfortunately only a very slight phonetic similarity to the real first-name of the innkeeper: Barabatta (or Batti). This was the nickname of the landlord of 'The Pony' which he had borne so long that if he ever had another given-name it had been forgotten: it means 'quick-talker or babbler'. Still, in converting Batti Zilbarāpha [> Zilbirāpha] into Barney Butterbur I do not think I have been unjust.
*Gondor – Gondwanaland?
*Númenor – iceland?
*“only a feather in their caps” – RC pg. 35
*Bounders – RC pg. 35-36
*Gandalf (name) – RC pg. 36
*Thorin (name) – RC pg. 36
*Gollum – RC pg. 37, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein ?
*The One Ring – RC pg. 38
*Samwise – RC pg. 39
*The original red book has not been preserved – RC pg. 41
*Meriadoc, peregrin, pippin (names) – RC pg. 42
*Númenor (name) – RC pg. 42
*Sauron (name) – RC pg. 43
*Este – rest?
*A long expected party – RC pg. 52
*Baggins, bag end – RC pg. 51 http://forums.theonering.com/viewtopic.php?p=577381, AH p. 30-31
*bag end, bag end (name) - AH p. 29
*Eleventy-first – RC pg. 52
*The Hill – RC pg. 52
*Sackville – RC pg. 53
*Sackville-baggins – RC p. 762
*Tweens – RC pg. 54
*Gerontius, old took – RC pg. 54, AH p. 34
*Hamfast – RC pg. 55
*Gamgee – RC pg. 55
*Ivy bush – RC pg. 56
*Holman – RC pg. 56
*Bagshot row – RC pg. 56
*Noakes – RC pg. 57
*Buckland – RC pg. 57-58
*Hobbit speech – RC 58-59
*Gorbadoc – RC pg. 59
*Miller – RC pg. 60
*Warren – RC pg. 60
*Gandalf – RC pg. 61-62, AH p. 36-39
*Shire – RC pg. 64
*Gandalf’s fireworks – RC pg. 65 ?
*Took, grubb, chubb, burrows, bolger, Bracegirdle, brockhouse, goodbody, hornblower, proudfoot – RC pg. 66
*bolger (name) - HotH1 p. xiv ?
*Crackers – RC pg. 68
*Springle-ring – RC pg. 68
*Misty mountains – RC pg. 70
*The road goes ever on – RC pg. 71
*Green dragon – RC pg. 44
*Saruman (name) – RC pg. 81
*Sauron’s practice of giving rings – RC pg. 84
*One ring – RC pg. 85
*Smeagol, deagol – RC pg. 86
*One ring – RC pg.88-89
*One ring – The Magic Ring http://www.valancourtbooks.com/themagicring.html
*Black country – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Country
*Bounders – rc pg. 753-754
*Buckland – rc pg. 754
*Bracegirdle – rc pg. 754
*brandybuck – rc pg. 754
*chubb – rc pg. 755
*corsairs – rc pg. 755
*cotton – rc pg. 755
*witchking – Pakkanen (?) in kalevala
*http://www.jitterbug.com/origins/lotr.html
*abandoned homestead – lemminkäinen returns to his house burned down in kalevala (rune 29)
*tuor as a slave – kullervo as a slave
*entwives –
**Summer-daughter, magic maiden,
**Southern mother of the woodlands,
**Pine-tree daughter, Kateyatar,
**Pihlayatar, of the aspen,
**Alder-maiden, Tapio's daughter,
**Daughter of the glen, Millikki,
**And the mountain-maid, Tellervo,
**Of my herds be ye protectors,
** In kalevala
*Goldberry –
** Rise thou virgin of the valley,
**From the springs arise in beauty,
**Rise thou maiden of the fountain,
**Beautiful, arise in ether,
** In kalevala
*Treebeard –
**Knippana [Kuippana], O King of forests,
**Thou the gray-beard of the woodlands,
**Watch thy dogs in fen and fallow,
** In kalevala
*Maggot’s dogs –
** Only laid aside some cabbage,
**For the herdsman, Kullerwoinen;
**Set apart some wasted fragments,
**Leavings of the dogs at dinner,
**
** Silloin Ilmarin emäntä, paimenen pajattaessa,
**Kullervoisen kukkuessa, jo oli vuollut voivatinsa,
**itse rieskansa reväisnyt, kakkaransa kaivaellut;
**keittänyt vetisen vellin, kylmän kaalin Kullervolle,
**jos' oli rakki rasvan syönyt, '''Musti''' murkinan pitänyt,
**'''Merkki''' syönyt mielin määrin, '''Halli''' haukannut halunsa.
** In kalevala
*Lúthien singing back beren from mandos – Orpheus, Eurydice, hades
*Last year a Birmingham nature reserve that is thought to have inspired parts of Tolkien's novels was renamed The Shire Country Park, after the place where hobbits dwell in Middle Earth.
It includes Moseley Bog, which dates back to the Bronze Age, and is thought to have inspired the "Old Forest" in the books.
[[Sarehole|Sarehole Mill]], near the family home and now a museum, is viewed as being the "great mill" of The Shire.
The 96ft (29m) high Perrot's Folly and the nearby Waterworks Tower, in Edgbaston, are also seen by many as the real-life counterparts of the Two Towers of Gondor.
*Entwives – Eurydice ?
*Ents marching on isengard – birnam wood to dunsinane hill
*Incest of túrin and nienor – incest of kullervo and kalervo’s daughter in kalevala
*Nienor and lalaith – the two sisters of kullervo in kalevala
*Death of lalaith – death of most of kullervo’s kin in kalevala
*going out he lifted up his hand towards the North, crying: "Marrer of Middle-earth, would that I might see thee face to face, and mar thee as my lord Fingolfin did!" -
**These the words of Kullerwoinen:
**Wait, yea wait, thou Untamoinen,
**Thou destroyer of my people;
**When I meet thee in the combat,
**I will slay thee and thy kindred,
**I will burn thy homes to ashes!"
*Suicide of nienor – suicide of kullervo’s sister in kalevala
*Gurthang – kullervo’s sword in kalevala
*Suicide of túrin – suicide of kullervo in kalevala
*"Hail Gurthang, iron of death, thou alone now remainest! But what lord or loy-alty dost thou know, save the hand that wieldeth thee? From no blood wilt thou shrink! Wilt thou take Túrin Turambar? Wilt thou slay me swiftly?" - corresponding words in W.F. Kirby's Kalevala translation
*http://web.archive.org/web/20060108125654/http://www.scandga.org/Insights/2001-02+Winter/Tolkien.htm
*hegel and tolkien - http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=49&TopicID=194948&PagePosition=1&PagePostPosition=1
*nazgul - it remains remarkable that nasc is the word for 'ring' in Gaelic [Irish; in Scottish usually written nasg]... I have no liking at all for *Gaelic from Old Irish downwards, as a language, but it is of course of great historical and philological interest, and I have at times studied it [With alas! very little success] ?
*voyages of eärendil – homer’s odyssey
*annatar – finnish antaa, anna
*valinor - Valhall
*arveduis ship - lemminkäinens ship
*gold and silver - gold and silver in kalevala
*gold, silver, sun, moon - rune 49 in kalevala
*narsil/andúril - the sword that is forged by ilmarinen for väinämöinen & rune 45, 46 in kalevala
*the moon, the sun, stars - väinämöinen's sword
*nimrodel, goldberry, ulmo - rune 40 in kalevala
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=5;t=000109;p=1#000013
*his boots were yellow - kullervo's blue socks
*entwife - tapio's wife ?
*ulmo - ahto in kalevala
*gandalf opening the gate of moria - väinämöinen opening the gate of pohja mountain in kalevala rune 42
*arkenstone - sampo in kalevala ?
*one ring, rings of power, galadriel's dust - sampo in rune 42, 43 in kalevala
*uinen - vellamo in kalevala
*silmaril - sampo in rune 39 in kalevala
*fimbrethil - birch in rune 44 in kalevala ?
*dark plague - 8 sons of louhis daughter bringing plague to väinö in rune 45 in kalevala
*carcharoth - bear coming to kalevala in rune 46 in kalevala
*silmaril in carcharoth - fish swallowing fish swallowing fish swallowing spark from ukko's sword in rune 47 in kalevala
*gandalf (or frodo) leaving ME - väinämöinen sailing away in rune 50 in kalevala
*straight road - väinämöinen sailing away in rune 50 in kalevala
*gandalf - väinämöinen in kalevala
*mandos - tuoni in kalevala
*lúthien bringing back beren from mandos(?) - lemminkäinen's mother bringing back lemminkäinen from tuoni in kalevala
*elf-friend - RC p. 756
*fair folk - RC p. 757
*feanor - ilmarinen in kalevala
*feanor creating the silmarils and/or sauron creating the one ring - ilmarinen creating sampo in kalevala
*The effect of the Sampo is like that of the One Ring, which causes moral corruption and fierce war.
*http://tolkiensarda.se/new/nummer/magsidor/art28_3.php
*http://www.theonering.net/features/notes/note8.html
*noldor – r from Swedish?
*Timpinen – finnish
*http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=42452&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0&MENU_ID=13150
*http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/GenerateContent?CONTENT_ITEM_ID=2668&CONTENT_ITEM_TYPE=0&MENU_ID=1765
*”he was interested in roots and beginnings” – scholarship p. 30
Herb-master – scholarship p. 29
*Bilbo – scholarship p. 42, gorbo in the marvellous land of snergs (AH p. 6-7), AH p. 34
*belladonna - AH p. 34
*belladonna (name) - AH p. 34
*Bilbo mature – scholarship p. 42
*Lotr taking a more adult tone – scholarship p. 42
*Adventurous hobbits – scholarship p. 42
*Frodo’s uncertainty – scholarship p. 42-43
*Autumn 1418 – scholarship p. 43
*Frodo – scholarship p. 43
*Woses – rc p. 764-765
*Halls of Mandos in Valinor - Catholic doctrine of Purgatory)
*Buckland – buckland in oxfordshire
*http://www.adrian.smith.clara.net/brill.html
*bree - http://www.squarewheels.org.uk/bike/routeCamOx/Brill-wiggly.jpg
*The industrialization of the Shire was based on Tolkien's witnessing of the extension of the Industrial Revolution to rural Warwickshire during his youth, and especially the deleterious consequences thereof. The rebellion of the hobbits and the restoration of the pre-industrial Shire may be interpreted as a prescription of voluntary simplicity as a remedy to the problems of modern society.
*The 4 hobbits – scholarship p. 43
*Frodo-sam – scholarship p. 43-44
*Laugh on the edge of mordor – scholarship p. 44
*Frodo – scholarship p. 44
*Frodo and sam in mordor – scholarship p. 44
*Burden of the ring – scholarship p. 44
*Eye of sauron – scholarship p. 45
*Surprise, concealment – scholarship p. 45
*Witchking – scholarship p. 45
*Nazgûl – scholarship p. 45
*Nazgûl, flying – scholarship p. 45-46
*Black breath, vapour – scholarship p. 46
*Barrow-downs – scholarship p. 46-47
*http://www.sf-fandom.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=197465
*laurelin, (mallorn) – laburnum “golden rain”
*telperion, white tree – silver cherry
*ilmarin – ilmarinen in Kalevala
*After the destruction of Númenor, the Undying Lands were removed from Arda so that Men could not reach them and only the Elves could go there by the Straight Road and in ships capable of passing out of the Spheres of the earth. By special permission of the Valar, the Hobbits Frodo Baggins, Bilbo Baggins, and Samwise Gamgee were also permitted to go to Valinor, as well as Gimli the Dwarf. -
It has been suggested that the concept was based on Hy Brasil, a mythical land that can reputedly be seen off the coast of Ireland for one day in every seven years.
*http://www.minastirith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=000735;p=1#000018
*http://www.virtualbrum.co.uk/tolkien.htm
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000264
*http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_midlands/4766929.stm
*http://www.minastirith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=4;t=000250
*http://www.thetolkienforum.com/showthread.php?t=18227&highlight=%22white+tree%22
*http://sf-fandom.com/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=19638&highlight=white+tree
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=49&TopicID=202121&PagePosition=1&PagePostPosition=1
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=46&TopicID=201375&PagePosition=1&PagePostPosition=1
*pub in oxford: the elm tree
*corpses of the dead marshes – scholarship p. 47
*lights of the dead marshes – scholarship p. 48
*orthanc - AOTC p. 88
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=000546;p=1
*http://www.minastirith.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=2;t=000742;p=1#000006
*A possible real-life inspiration for Tolkien were the Barrow Downs of Warwickshire, near the village of Long Compton.
*the Great Barrows, and the green mounds, and the stone-rings upon the hills and in the hollows of the hills - This description recalls the prehistoric burial mounds and stone circles in England and elsewhere in Europe.
*Lúthien obtains a brief respite in which they both return to Middle-earth 'alive' – though not mingling with other people : a kind of Orpheus-legend in reverse, but one of Pity not of Inexorability.
*Even in the house the heat could be intense, and he had to be clothed entirely in white. 'Baby does look such a fairy when he's very much dressed-up in white frills and white shoes,' Mabel wrote to her husband's mother. 'When he's very much undressed I think he looks more of an elf still.'
*Frodo (and Bilbo?) as orphan – Tolkien himself orphan
*Lórien (in valinor) – breidablick ?
*Witch-king, morgoth – vindlone in edda ?
*Moria – biblical ?
*But I have the autumn wanderlust upon me, and would fain be off with a knapsack on my back and no particular destination, other than a series of quiet inns.
*http://www.houseofnames.com/xq/asp.fc/qx/boffin-family-crest.htm
*'Much Hemlock' echoes the name Much Wenlock in Shropshire (Much
'Great', as Michel [Delving)
*As for the 'land of Morīah' (note stress): that has no connexion (even 'externally') whatsoever. Internally there is no conceivable connexion between the mining of Dwarves, and the story of Abraham. I utterly repudiate any such significances and symbolisms. My mind does not work that way; and (in my view) you are led astray by a purely fortuitous similarity, more obvious in spelling than speech, which cannot be justified from the real intended significance of my story.
*Standelf means 'stone-quarry' (Old English stan-(ge)delf, surviving
in the place-name Stonydelph in Warwickshire).
*Standelf combines Old English stem 'stone, stones' and delf 'digging, mine, quarry, ditch', thus stan-gedelf 'quarry'; compare 'Stonydelph' in Warwickshire.
*Needlehole is also the name of a village in Gloucestershire. Its elements needle + hole are simple, but 'hole' again suggests the Hobbit tendency to dig.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chivery
*angainor - Spake again the magic eagle:
**Why this ringing of thine anvil,
**Why this knocking of thy hammer,
**Tell me what thy hands are forging?"
**This the answer of the blacksmith:
**"'Tis a collar I am forging
**For the neck of wicked Louhi,
**Toothless witch of Sariola,
**Stealer of the silver sunshine,
**Stealer of the golden moonlight;
**With this collar I shall bind her
**To the iron-rock of Ehstland!"
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=21&TopicID=204718&PagePosition=2&PagePostPosition=1
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=21&TopicID=204739&PagePosition=2&PagePostPosition=1
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mont_Saint_Michel
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Michael%27s_Mount
*http://skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=164632
*The men of the Vales of Anduin loosed arrows with “great bows of yew,” according the Lord of the Eagles in The Hobbit. The description is reminiscent of late medieval Welsh longbows.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huns
*huns’ horses: sacred for the hunt?
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woodwose
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rohirrim
*Minyatur – miniature?
*Avari – avars
*The antipathy between the Rohirrim and the Dunlendings resembles the historical tension between the Anglo-Saxon settlers of Britain and the native Celts.
*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susa
*Meduseld means "mead hall" from the Old English medu meaning "mead" - a honeyed wine - and sæld meaning "hall." A mead hall was the hall of a chief in Anglo-Saxon times where banquets were held. Heorot, the mead hall of Hrothgar in Beowulf, is an example.
*Beorn is an Old English word meaning "man, warrior." It originally meant "bear" and was derived from the word béo meaning "bee" in reference to a bear's love of honey.
*The name Beorn is also related to the the Old Norse word bjorn meaning "bear." Bjorn - or Bjarni - was a man in the Norse legend "The Saga of Hrolf Kraki" who was cursed to become a bear by day and man by night. Bjorn's son Bothvarr Bjarki was able to send a bear-form into battle. Bjarki means "little bear."
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=002291;p=1
*http://www.tolkiensociety.com/t_wend/2002_report.html
*The dwarves of course are quite obviously - wouldn't you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.
*Now Dwarves have their own secret language, but like Jews and Gypsis [sic] use the language of the country.
*I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue.....
*Ayesha, haggard: http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=46&TopicID=158743&PagePostPosition=1
*The detail of Beren losing his hand to Carcharoth was possibly modelled after the Germanic legend of the god Tyr, who lost his hand to the wolf Fenris.
*The Prose Edda
*The Poetic Edda
*Nazgûl – wendigo ?
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=3;t=000270
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=21&TopicID=205489&PagePosition=1&PagePostPosition=1
*http://www.godchecker.com/pantheon/finnish-mythology.php?deity=TAPIO
*Tolkien most likely based lembas on bread known as hard tack that was used during long sea voyages and military campaigns as a primary foodstuff. This very un-magical bread was little more than flour and water which had been baked hard and would keep for months as long as it was kept dry. However, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa wrote in his book Libri tres de occulta philosophia (Book 3, Chapter 13) of a herb from Scythia that allowed people to go for twelve days afterward without any need for food or water. It is also possible that Tolkien based lembas on this description in Agrippa's writings.
*'Its actual origin as an "invention"', however, as Tolkien writes in a manuscript quoted in Parma Eldalamberon 12 (1998), p. xi, 'goes back to at least 1915, its real source being Gothic *midu (=Gmc. [Germanic] medu) ["mead"] + wopeis ["sweet"], then supposed to have been developed so: miduwopi > miduwodi > mifuwofi > miruvore'.
*In the book lembas has two functions. It is a 'machine' or device for making credible the long marches with little provision, in a world in which as I have said 'miles are miles'. But that is relatively unimportant. It also has a much larger significance, of what one might hesitatingly call a 'religious' kind. This becomes later apparent, especially in the chapter 'Mount Doom' (III 213 and subsequently). I cannot find that Z has made any particular use of lembas even as a device; and the whole of 'Mount Doom' has disappeared in the distorted confusion that Z has made of the ending. As far as I can see lembas might as well disappear altogether.
*Another saw in waybread (lembas)= viaticum and the reference to its feeding the will (vol. III, p. 213) and being more potent when fasting, a derivation from the Eucharist. (That is: far greater things may colour the mind in dealing with the lesser things of a fairy-story.)
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=001188
*Harad is also a town in Saudi Arabia.
*Eluréd and elurín, and elros and Elrond being borne away – chronology p. 2
*Sea – chronology p. 2, 4
*http://www.minastirith.com/ubb/ultimatebb.php?ubb=get_topic;f=1;t=002327;p=1
*? - Hilary sometimes meets him with a lamp
*Gondor – chronology p. 6
*"Puss-cat Mew" also features a "glove of invisibility" which I thought a remarkable parallel to Tolkien's Ring, although not as sinister.
*Puss cat mew
*You can still see the little postern gate in the college wall on Magdalen bridge where Lewis let Tolkien out at around 2 am. He and Dyson went on walking and talking for another two hours! And be sure, when you enter the quad from the porter's lodge, to look backwards and upwards. There are mediaeval gargoyles on the wall there. One is _definitely_ Gollum!
*And the accomodation he enjoyed in one of the Alpine huts - just a bed on the floor, with a cover - sounds to me very much like that which Tom offered the hobbits in his penthouse [a penthouse being, in this case, a room built onto the side of the house].
*? – the ingoldsby legends
*? – j.m. barrie’s peter pan
*? – Thucydides
*? – the birds of Aristophanes
*? – whitby ruined abbey
*? – the lost explorers: a tale of the trackless desert
*? – scouting for buller
*? – john Ruskin
*? – shakespeare’s Richard II
*? – sheridan’s the rivals
*? – “out of doors literature”, mountaineering, al fresco in poetry, walking tours…
*Koh-i-noor diamond in a jelly ?
*? - Final tragedy of sigurd and brynhild in völsunga saga
*? – Richard Jefferies
*? – woolly-haired prognathous Papuan parent
*Francis bacon wrote shakespeare’s works?
*? – king Edward II’s procession
*? - Aristophanes’ play The Peace in which Ronald takes the part of Hermes
*Some had long stabbing thorns, some hooked barbs that rent like knives. – wait-a-bit ?
*? – wake-robin
*? – wake-wort
*“wildered and waworn in wanhope bound them” – William morris, The Wood Beyond the World
*hobbit – hobbledehoy, rabbit, Babbitt, ring of words pg. 54, HotH1 p. xiii
*arkenstone – ring of words pg. 54
*númenor – numinous, ring of words pg. 55
*gil-galad – gilgamesh and galahad, ring of words pg. 55
*name-choosing – ring of words pg. 55
*nazgûl - http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/display_topic_threads.asp?ForumID=49&TopicID=210754&PagePosition=1&PagePostPosition=1
*Eärendil – ring of words p. 56
*wingilot– ring of words p. 56
*niggle – tolkien, ring of words p. 57
*bounder – ring of words p. 57
*lockhole - ring of words p. 57
*waybread - ring of words p. 57
*cracks of doom - ring of words p. 57
*weapontake - ring of words p. 59
*arkenstone - ring of words p. 59
*ent - ring of words p. 59
*dernhelm - ring of words p. 59
*mathom - ring of words p. 59
*smial - ring of words p. 59
*emnet - ring of words p. 59
*months of the shire calendar - ring of words p. 59
*elfsheen - ring of words p. 59
*dwimmerlaik - ring of words p. 59
*easterling - ring of words p. 59
*elven - ring of words p. 59
*mannish - ring of words p. 59
*sigaldry - ring of words p. 59
*westernesse - ring of words p. 59
*daymeal - ring of words p. 59
*elvenhome - ring of words p. 59
*oakenshield - ring of words p. 59
*over-heaven - ring of words p. 59
*warg - ring of words p. 59
*farthing - ring of words p. 60
*flet - ring of words p. 60
*halfling - ring of words p. 60
*walter scott
*hiawatha ?
*Reliques of ancient english poetry
*lord macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, ring of words p. 66
*works of George Dasent; Popular Tales from the Norse, Njal's Saga
*moria – ring of words p. 66
*edward bulwer-lytton, ring of words p. 66
*charles kingsley, ring of words p. 66
*charles kingsley's Hereward to wake, ring of words p. 66
*horse-boy, ring of words p. 66
*ruffling, ring of words p. 66
*william morris, ring of words p. 69-72
*meduseld – hall of the wolfings, ring of words p. 73-74
*hans christian andersen, ring of words p. 76
*backarappers - ring of words p. 78
*bob-owlers - ring of words p. 78
*gaffers - ring of words p. 78
*gammers - ring of words p. 78
*mithered - ring of words p. 78
*ninnyhammer - ring of words p. 78
*taters - ring of words p. 78
*varmint - ring of words p. 78
*go for - ring of words p. 78
*hay - ring of words p. 78
*marish - ring of words p. 78
*north-away - ring of words p. 78
*by - ring of words p. 78
*gladden - ring of words p. 78
*nasturtian - ring of words p. 78
*oliphaunt - ring of words p. 78
*shirriff - ring of words p. 78
*leg it - ring of words p. 78
*peaching - ring of words p. 79
*staggerment - ring of words p. 79
*bogosity - ring of words p. 79
*thinnuous - ring of words p. 79
*rhymeroyals - ring of words p. 79
*pennywhistles - ring of words p. 79
*tintrumpets - ring of words p. 79
*creamhorns - ring of words p. 79
*confusticate - ring of words p. 79
*bebother - ring of words p. 79
*flabbergastation - ring of words p. 79
*grabsome - ring of words p. 79
*vanishment - ring of words p. 79
*night-speech - ring of words p. 80
*riding-pony - ring of words p. 80
*spell-enslaved - ring of words p. 80
*war-beacon - ring of words p. 80
*beggar-beard - ring of words p. 80
*oathkeeper - ring of words p. 80
*windwrithen - ring of words p. 80
*herb-master - ring of words p. 80
*dragon-guarded - ring of words p. 80
*elf-friend - ring of words p. 80
*mountain-roots - ring of words p. 80
*forest-gloom - ring of words p. 80
*forest-silence - ring of words p. 80
*sea-sighing - ring of words p. 80
*curious-minded - ring of words p. 80
*quiet-footed - ring of words p. 80
*spell-enslaved - ring of words p. 80
*march-ward- ring of words p. 81
*elvenhome- ring of words p. 81
*lore-master- ring of words p. 81
*E.R.. eddison: the worm ouroboros, ring of words p. 82
*owen barfield
*amidmost - ring of words p. 89
*midmost - ring of words p. 89
*arkenstone - ring of words p. 89
*eorclanstanas - ring of words p. 90
*unlight - ring of words p. 225
*malefit - ring of words p. 226
*attercop - ring of words p. 91
*spiders in TH - ring of words p. 91
*Cob - ring of words p. 92
*Lob - ring of words p. 92
*shelob - ring of words p. 92
*vista – spanish?
*backarapper - ring of words p. 92
*bane - ring of words p. 93
*kôr – haggard's 'She', Tolkien and the Great War
*The name Luthany, of a country, occurs five times in Francis
Thompson's poem The Mistress of Vision. As noted previously
(I. 29) my father acquired the Collected Poems of Francis Thompson
in 1913 -- 14; and in that copy he made a marginal note against one of
the verses that contains the name Luthany -- though the note is not
concerned with the name. But whence Thompson derived Luthany
I have no idea. He himself described the poem as'afantasy'(Everard
Meynell, The Life ofFrancis Thompson, 1913, p. 237).
This provides no more than the origin of the name as a series of sounds
*Rohan and Moria mentioned in my father's letter of 1967on this subject (The
Letters of j R. R. Tolkien, pp. 383 -- 4)
*a subtle literary reference to King Lear that connects triangularly the Lord of the Nazgûl, Denethor, and Shakespeare’s mad King. , also haggard's eric brighteyes
*Mr. Howard Green, Tolkien’s imaginary Snorri-cum-Lönnrot, is a type familiar in nineteenth-century adventure ﬁction, the remote but realistic pseudo-editor who provides the occasion for the story and interjects explanatory notes and comments. H. Rider Haggard was fond of the device, employing it in She and King Solomon’s Mines, and Tolkien has followed in his footsteps.
*but he found that he had put it back in his pocket - John D. Rateliff notes in 'She and Tolkien', Mythlore 8, no. 2, whole no. 28 (Summer 1981) a similarity between this incident in The Lord of the Rings and a passage in She and Allan by H. Rider Haggard, whose She Tolkien knew and admired:
There is also an echo of the One Ring . . . when Allan Quatermain is given a magic amulet which he is warned to keep safe. He wears it on a chain around his neck and keeps it hidden under his shirt [as Frodo does after leaving Rivendell], only bringing out on rare occasions or at great need. Soon after he receives it, a magician tells him he will not be able to throw it away even if he wanted to and challenges him to try:
I did try, but something seemed to prevent me from accomplishing my purpose of giving the carving back to Zikali as I wished to do. First my pipe got in the way of my hand, then the elephant hairs caught in the collar of my coat; then a pang of rheumatism to which I was accustomed from an old injury, developed of a sudden in my left arm, and lastly I grew tired of bothering about the thing, [p. 7, Haggard quotation from Chapter 1]
*Several commentators, most notably John D. Rateliff in 'She and Tolkien', Mythlore 8, no. 2, whole no. 28 (Summer 1981), have pointed out possible influences on Galadriel by aspects of Ayesha in works by H. Rider Haggard: She (1887), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), She and Allan (1921), and Wisdom's Daughter (1923). Rateliff writes:
The most obvious parallel is She herself - Ayesha, Wisdom's daughter, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. An exceedingly beautiful woman, so beautiful that all who see her remember the sight ever after, She rules a small, isolated, ancient kingdom, the borders of which no one is allowed to pass. Strangers are admitted only if she has sent word beforehand to admit them, and even then they must make part of the journey blindfolded. Beautiful and terrible, worshipful but fearsome, she is not only wise and beautiful but also immortal.... Like She, Galadriel is immortal, wise, queenly, and beautiful beyond belief. There are important differences between Ayesha and Galadriel, but the similarities are striking, [p. 6]
Steve Linley in 'Tolkien and Haggard: Some Thoughts on Galadriel', Anor 23 (1991) comments that both Galadriel and Ayesha 'have a powerful gaze, the effect of which on the recipient being the feeling of being laid bare or psychologically "denuded"', and 'both live amidst a culture of preservation; Ayesha, however, preserves only herself, for selfish reasons.... She treats all other human beings as a lesser species. . . . Ayesha actively seeks power and world domination', whereas Galadriel rejects the power the Ring would have given her. However, Linley points out that had Galadriel accepted the Ring 'the reader familiar with She might recognise that Galadriel would come to resemble Ayesha more closely in respect of her less appealing characteristics' (pp. 12, 13, 14).
In 1966 Tolkien told Henry Resnik: 'I suppose as a boy She interested me as much as anything' (An Interview with Tolkien', Niekas 18 (Spring 1967). P- 40).
In 'She and Tolkien', Mythlore 8, no. 2, whole no. 28 (Summer 1981), John D. Rateliff further notes that in Rider Haggard's She, Chapter 13, 'we are told of "a vessel like a font cut in carved stone ... full of pure water" (described in She and Allan [Chapter 22] as "a marble tripod on which stood a basin half full of water"). Both Galadriel and Ayesha use this "mirror" to show the heroes visions of distant places and use it themselves to see what is happening in the outer world' (p. 7). But there are differences in what the mirror shows. Ayesha says:
That water is my glass; in it I see what passes if I care to summon up the pictures which is not often. Therein I can show thee what thou wilt of the past, if be anything that has to do with this country and with what I have known, or anything that thou, the gazer hast known. Think of a face if thou wilt, and it shall be reflected from thy mind upon the water. I know not all the secret yet - I can read nothing in the future. [She, Chapter 13]
*She lifted up her hand and from the Ring that she wore there issued a great light that illumined her alone and left all else dark. She stood before Frodo seeming now tall beyond measurement, and beautiful beyond enduring, terrible and worshipful. Then she let her hand fall, and the light faded ... and lo! she was shrunken: a slender elf-woman, clad in simple white - John D. Rateliff in 'She and Tolkien', Mythlore 8, no. 2, whole no. 28 (Summer 1981), cites the following from H. Rider Haggard's Ayesha: The Return of She, Chapter 19, as a possibly unconscious influence on this scene:
She began slowly to stroke her abundant hair, then her breast and body. Wherever her fingers passed the mystic light was born, until ... she shimmered from head to foot like the water of the phosphorescent sea, a being glorious yet fearful to behold. Then she waved her hand, and save for the gentle radiance on her brow, became as she had been. [p. 6]
*the tides of fate are flowing - An echo, perhaps, of 'There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune' (Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act IV, Scene 3).
*the air itself seemed black and heavy to breathe. When lights appeared Sam rubbed his eyes.... He first saw ... a wisp of pale sheen ... some like misty flames - In H. Rider Haggard's She the protagonists also pass through unpleasant marshes:
Never did I see a more dreary and depressing scene. Miles on miles of quagmire, varied only by bright green strips of comparatively solid ground, and by deep sullen pools fringed with tall rushes. . .. Undoubtedly, however, the worst feature of the swamp was the awful smell of rotting vegetation that hung about it, which at times was positively overpowering, and the malarious exhalations that accompanied it, which we were of course obliged to breathe.
This marsh is by no means dead: it contains many birds and reptiles, including poisonous snakes, and clouds of mosquitoes. At night one of the heroes sees 'impish marsh-born balls of fire, rolled this way and that' (Chapter 10; compare will-o'-the wisp, note for p. 314).
*it shrank, and the shrivelled face became rags of skin upon a hideous skull. - Readers, including John D. Ratehff and Jared Lobdell, have noted a similarity between Tolkien's description of the death of Saruman and the sudden ageing and death of Ayesha in H. Rider Haggard's She:
Smaller she grew and smaller yet, till she was no larger than a monkey. Now the skin had puckered into a million wrinkles, and on the shapeless face was the stamp of unutterable age ... nobody ever saw anything like the frightful age that was graven on that fearful countenance, no bigger now than that of a two-months' child, though the skull remained the same size, or nearly so. ... I took up Ayesha's kirtle and the gauzy scarf... and, averting my head so that I might not look upon it, covered up that dreadful relic____[She, Chapter XXVI]
*‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ deals not with war but with rugby, being the tongue-in-cheek account of a match in 1911. Its model was Lord Macaulay’s then-popular Lays of Ancient Rome, and it is at least moderately amusing. In the guise of Roman clans it depicts the rival school houses, Measures’ in red and Richards’ in green, and it is full of boys charging around in names that are much too big for them. Wiseman surely lurks behind Sekhet, a nod to his fair hair and his passion for ancient Egypt. (Tolkien, it seems, did not then realize that Sekhet is a female deity.*)
He had perhaps only encountered the name in Rider Haggard’s She, which lists ‘Sekhet, the lion-headed’ among the Egyptian powers, but does not specify her gender.
*Massed together, trees comprise The Wood at the World's End [60], its title a commingling of two by William Morris {The Wood beyond the World and The Well at the World's End}.
*Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme. They owe more to William Morris and his Huns and Romans, as in The House of the Wolfings or The Roots of the Mountains.
*But that was the very reason that he now found The House of the Wolfings so absorbing. Morris's view of literature coincided with his own. In this book Morris had tried to recreate the excitement he himself had found in the pages of early English and Icelandic narratives. The House of the Wolfings is set in a land which is threatened by an invading force of Romans. Written partly in prose and partly in verse, it centres on a House or family-tribe that dwells by a great river in a clearing of the forest named Mirkwood, a name taken from ancient Germanic geography and legend. Many elements in the story seem to have impressed Tolkien. Its style is highly idiosyncratic, heavily laden with archaisms and poetic inversions in an attempt to recreate the aura of ancient legend. Clearly Tolkien took note of this, and it would seem that he also appreciated another facet of the writing: Morris's aptitude, despite the vagueness of time and place in which the story is set, for describing with great precision the details of his imagined landscape. Tolkien himself was to follow Morris's example in later years.
*No account of the external events of Tolkien's life can provide more than a superficial explanation of the origins of his mythology. Certainly the device that linked the stories in the first draft of the book (it was later abandoned) owes something to William Morris's The Earthly Paradise; for, as in that story, a sea-voyager arrives at an unknown land where he is to hear a succession of tales.
*The style of 'The Fall of Gondolin' suggests that Tolkien was influenced by William Morris, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that the great battle which forms the central part of the story may owe a little of its inspiration to Tolkien's experiences on the Somme – or rather to his reaction to those experiences, for the fighting at Gondolin has a heroic grandeur entirely lacking in modern warfare. But in any case these were only superficial 'influences': Tolkien used no models or sources for his strange and exciting tale. Indeed its two most notable characteristics are entirely his own device: the invented names, and the fact that the majority of the protagonists are elves. Strictly speaking it could be said that the elves of The Silmarillion grew out of the 'fairy folk' of Tolkien's early poems, but really there is little connection between the two. Elves may have arisen in his mind as a result of his enthusiasm for Francis Thompson's 'Sister Songs' and Edith's fondness for 'little elfin people', but the elves of The Silmarillion have nothing whatever to do with the 'tiny leprechauns' of 'Goblin Feet'. They are to all intents and purposes men: or rather, they are Man before the Fall which deprived him of his powers of achievement. Tolkien believed devoutly that there had once been an Eden on earth, and that man's original sin and subsequent dethronement were responsible for the ills of the world; but his elves, though capable of sin and error, have not 'fallen' in the theological sense, and so are able to achieve much beyond the powers of men. They are craftsmen, poets, scribes, creators of works of beauty far surpassing human artefacts. Most important of all they are, unless slain in battle, immortal. Old age, disease, and death do not bring their work to an end while it is still unfinished or imperfect. They are therefore the ideal of every artist. These, then, are the elves of The Silmarillion, and of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien himself summed up their nature when he wrote of them: 'They are made by man in his own image and likeness; but freed from those limitations which he feels most to press upon him. They are immortal, and their will is directly effective for the achievement of imagination and desire.'
*William Morris’s use of verse in his pseudo-medieval romances was also to leave its mark on Tolkien’s own early poetry.
*But first he launched into a retelling of part of the Kalevala, in the verse-and-prose manner of William Morris. This was the Story of Kullervo, about a young fugitive from slavery. It is a strange story to have captured the imagination of a fervent Roman Catholic: Kullervo unwittingly seduces his sister, who kills herself, and then he too commits suicide. But the appeal perhaps lay partly in the brew of maverick heroism, young romance, and despair: Tolkien, after all, was in the midst of his enforced separation from Edith Bratt. The deaths of Kullervo’s parents may have struck a chord, too. An overriding attraction, though, was the sounds of the Finnish names, the remote primitivism, and the Northern air.
*In its rather grandiloquent fashion (with a long line probably inspired by William Morris)
*Wormtongue - A '"modernized" form of the nickname of Grima, the evil counsellor of Rohan = Rohan [Old English] wyrm-tunge "snake-tongue"' {Nomenclature). Tolkien was undoubtedly familiar with the Icelandic tale of Gunnlaug the Worm-tongue, translated by William Morris and Eirikr Magnusson (published 1869), but there the name Wormtongue was given to a poet because of his sharp wit.
*In his hand he bore a single arrow, black-feathered and barbed with steel, but the point was painted red. - In A Tale of the House of the Wolfings by William Morris the Wolfings are summoned to war against the Romans in part by a messenger who carries 'the token of the war-arrow ragged and burnt and bloody' (Chapter 2).
*New Erewhon: Erewhon (= ‘Nowhere’) is the title of a satire by Samuel Butler (1872). News from Nowhere: a fantasy of the future by William Morris (1890).
*The sherd of Amenartas was in Greek (provided by Andrew Lang) of the period from which it was supposed to have survived, not in English spelt as well as might be in Greek letters. [For the sherd of Amenartas see H. Rider Haggard, She, chapter 3.]
*All's well as ends Better - A play on the proverb All's well that ends well.
*Bane – ring of words p. 93
*bee-hunter - ring of words p. 94
*beorn - ring of words p. 95
*skin-changer - ring of words p. 96
*blunderbuss - ring of words p. 97
*carrock - ring of words p. 98
*a little mist was laid on it - This is one of several similarities to King Lear which Michael D.C. Drout ('Tolkien's Prose Style and its Literary and Rhetorical Effects', Tolkien Studies 1 (2004)) finds in this part of The Lord of the Rings. In Act V, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's play, Lear, hoping that Cordelia is not dead, says: 'Lend me a looking glass / If that her breath will mist or stain the stone, / Why, then she lives.'
*All that is gold does not glitter - Compare the traditional saying all that glitters is not gold (in Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, 'All that glisters is not gold'). In his 'Canon's Yeoman's Tale' in the Canterbury Tales Chaucer says: 'But al thyng which that shyneth as the gold / Nis nat gold, as that I have heard told.'
*From the ashes afire shall be woken - For this Tom Shippey has suggested an inspiration by Spenser's Faerie Queene: 'There shall a sparke of fire, which hath long-while / Bene in his ashes raked up and hid / Be freshly kindled...' (quoted in The Road to Middle-earth, 2nd edn., p. 317, n. 9).
*A plague on Dwarves and their stiff necks - This (and 'i plague on the stiff necks of Elves', p. 347, I: 362) seems to echo 'a plagut o' both your houses', in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Act III, Scene 1.
*Gandalf bore his staff - The mention of Gandalf's staff here among swords, knife, bow, and axe suggests that it may be considered a weapon, but it is never used as such. Wizards or magicians traditionally have staffs which sometimes seem essential to the performing of magic (Prospero in Shakespeare's Tempest, for instance, breaks his staff when he renounces magic).
*Confusticate – ring of words p. 99
*bebother – ring of words p. 100
*flabbergastation - – ring of words p. 100
*a 'bagger' is a ring thief in 19th Century slang
*Smaug is (supposedly) the present tense of the prehistoric German word Smugan, to squeeze through a hole, so it means squeezed through a hole.
*Also found in the Eddas is the forest of Myrkwood
*I searched Nazgul and this is what it came up with.
It is of Persian origin and there is one Kazah origin which means "delicate flower" But of course if Tolkien ever intended to use it he CERTAINLY would NOT have known the Kazah term as a Ringwraith is not a delicate flower!
*According to one of Tolkien's letters, Irish Gaelic for ring is nasc; Scottish is nazg. But Tolkien admitted he had neither name in mind when he made up the word; he found these words years later while looking for something else! Of course, he mused, he may have seen the word[s] and had them in the back of his mind whislt composing..
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=212055
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=212033
*Arise now... - Tom Shippey has suggested that this 'call to arms' is influenced by Hnasf 's call in the Old English Finnesburg Fragment. 'Awaken now, my warriors! Grasp your coats of mail, think of deeds of valour, bear yourselves proudly, be resolute!' (translation in J.R.R. Tolkien, Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode (1982), p. 147).
*I do not recollect ever having heard the name Gondar (in Ethiopia) before your letter
*JS. Ryan in “German Mythology Applied--the Extension of the Literary
Folk Memory” notes that the Arkenstone’s name means “peerless stone” and . ’
that the name Gimli suggests “gimlet,” ”an appropriate notion of boring for a
delver and rock cutter.“28 Further, Gimli is the only dwarf to pass over the
sea to -the Grey Havens. Certainly, Snorri’s description of a hall called Gimle
from the Poetic Edda was in the soup pot: “At the southern end of the
heaven is that hall which is fairest of all, and brighter than the sun; and it is
c&led Gimle.“29 If the dwarfs name has been suggested by Northern
literature, so has his character. Gimli’s flowery statement, ” . l l the Lady
Galadriel is above all the jewels that lie beneath the earth,” epitomizes the
typical concerns of a dwarf with the treasures of the earth.
*Tolkien records this idea of a vanishing people in
the prologue to The Lord of the FZings, but not for his dwarves. He says that ’
hobbits are a very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are
today. . l Even in ancient days they were as a rule, shy of ‘the big folk,’ as
they call us, and now they avoid us with dismay and are becoming hard to
find” (I, 10). The dwarves of the sagas and the hobbits of Middle-earth
share a shyness about the company of men.
*In The Unfinished Tales, Tolkien also names the proud wife of Tar-Aldarion, Erendis, again employing the dwarf name as part of the compound.
The story of the Scandinavian god Njord and his wife Skadi seems relevant.
Njord wishes to live in his home by the sea but Skadi protests that the
screaming seagulls keep her from sleeping. Similarly, Njord does not like
the mountain wolves howling in Skadi’s home Thrymheim: he misses the
song of the seaside swans.37 Aldarion cannot live without the sea while
Erendis would perish with it. The scene in which Aldarion rides up from
the haven of Andunie, looks back over the sea, and succumbs to the sealonging
recalls a similar scene in the NW’s Saa. Gunnar has been exiled
and prepares to take ship from Iceland, but riding down to the ship, his
horse stumbles, he looks around at the land, sees that it is fair, and
determines to stay.38 AIdarion continues in his love of the sea and Erendis
in her proud disdain for his trips. She does indeed have a dwarfish stiff
neck.
*Mîm exemplifies the dwarves of the sagas: he is proud, has healing power, loves gold, curses freely, lives in a stone home, and barters shrewdly.
*Noel also sees an interesting parallel between the Ents and
Entwives and the Scandinavian god Njord and his wife Skadi, as discussed
above in the section on dwmes .68 Like Skadi and Njord whose living
preferences are diverse, the Entwives choices about domestic
arrangements do not agree with the Ents’. The wives separate themselves to
live in a land of domestic plants and agriculture while the Ents prefer wilder
woods.
*Zimmermann also notes that the 16th century Guve of Gisborne quoted in Tolkien’s 1925 essay contains a meter which may be detected in the “Song of the Ents and Entwives” (II, 800 8 1)
*he became professor at Oxford at age 33 [which, as he tells us is the hobbits' 'coming of age']
*university of birmingham clock tower - eye of sauron, orthanc ?
*http://fan.theonering.net/writing/reviews/files/spain_trail1.html
*elven – ring of words p. 117
*glittering caves - cheddar gorge, chronology p. 238
*''hyne wyrdfornam,
**sypdan he for wlenco wean dhsode,
**fahde to Frysum. He pa fatwe wag,
**eorclan-stdnas ofer yda ful,
**rice peoden; he under rande gecranc.''(lines 1205-09)
**This is translated by R. M. Liuzza in his Beowulf (2000) as follows:
**''Fate struck him down
**when in his pride he went looking for woe,
**a feud with the Frisians. He wore that finery,
**those precious stones, over the cup of the sea,
**that powerful lord, and collapsed under his shield.'' (P- 9o)
**(The origin of the name Theoden, King of Rohan in The Lord of the Rings, is seen in line 1209, where in ''peoden'' the Anglo-Saxon character ''p'' (thorn) represents th. It is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning "prince" or "king," here translated lord.)
*the old lists - Treebeard's 'lore of living creatures' recalls the list of fish, animals, and so forth, with suitable epithets for poetry, included in the Skaldskaparmal in Snorri Sturluson's Edda.
*the lost and regained sun and the moon from towards the end of the Kalevala
*Gondor and Arnor- Rome and it's later split into east and west (or in middle earth's case north and south).
*the Arthurian story of Balin and Balan, as in f.e. Malory/Tennyson/Swinburne, with the strong but 'unlucky' warrior who is banished from a king for his rough manners and who eventually kills a beloved - Túrin?
*"The Iliad" was a pretty big influence on Tolkien. A lot of his heroes borrow from Homeric archetypes. And the fall of Troy also inspired the Fall of Gondolin. [Michael Martinez]
*Tolkien said that Turin’s story was “an attempt to reorganise the tale of Kullervo the hapless into a form of my own”. Kullervo appears in the Finnish Kalevala. Both characters were born after their fathers were lost in battle (though Hurin, Turin’s father, was imprisoned rather than killed). Both commit accidental incest; and, in both cases, the sister throws herself into a river. Both Kullervo and Túrin die by falling on their sentient black swords, both of which speak, and agree to drink their masters’ blood. There are other sources, too: the battles of Túrin and Glaurung the dragon echo Beowulf, but they are closer to the Norse saga of Sigurd and Fafnir. Sigurd digs a trench and stabs Fafnir from beneath; Túrin hides in a gorge and does the same. Both are abandoned by their fearful companions, Regin and Dorlas respectively.
*Gandalf’s feelings on pity and his speech on mercy (and Frodo’s eventually actions towards Gollum) strike true of Portia’s speech on mercy in Shakepeare’s "A Merchant of Venice."
*lord dunsany
*odyssey, homer ?
*agamemnon, electra ?
*xanadu ?
*Horn of Gondor (Boromir) - Horn in Song of Roland ?
*deor - deor's complaint
*the first riddle ?
*the seafarer
*hengest (hengist) and horsa ?
*crist
*Túrin’s proclivity for falling into trances is difficult to understand and justify as a plot device. His trancelike state recalls Brynhild’s sleep on the magic mountain, but her trance is a punishment for disobedience to Odin.
*Túrin’s character flaw is not well enough defined. He suffers from hubris but also from a kind of unbecoming fecklessness, which is not quite a tragic quality. All of this is equally true of Sigurd.
*The incest theme seems underused; its plot significance in the Volsunga Saga is much more compelling.
*Túrin’s fate is overdetermined. Like Oedipus, he is doomed by the curse on his father, though the curse here is the personal and seemingly disproportionate malice of a fallen archangel, mediated by a malevolent dragon. Like Kullervo, he is doomed by his own flawed character: reckless, brooding, unyielding in pride.
*nirnaeth arnoediad - battle of the somme ?
*Look at the wizard Väinamöinen or something. He`s the real hero and disappeard in the deep. After a while he took form in a body, not a soul. What does this look alike? GANDALF the WIZARD.
*Yes I agree that there are some traces of the sootsayer Väinämöinen in Gandalf. They both are powerfull in lore and (with nothing better to call it) chant (for Väinämöinen’s ’magic’, again for the lack of a better word, happens through song and Gandalf’s through prayer.) and they are still no gods or prime creators. They both have the same kind of appearance too, but that can be said for many other characters that also have other qualities in common with Gandalf and may have ´been an influence when coming up with him. One of them is the Norse headgod Odin.
*And to me at least Väinämöine resembles much more Radagast with his powers of being able to communicate with animals and taking care of nature. Of course Gandalf posesses some of these qualities too, but not as much as Radagast. But then again I would have to go with the grey colour instead of the brown for Väinämöinen if there would be one appointed to him.
*For me, most of the similarities between Vainamoinen and Gandalf stop at the repeated line "Old reliable Väinämöinen" (or so it is translated), though there are I guess some other small similarities (such as being saved by an eagle): the characters of the two characters are quite distinct.
*halls of mandos - valhalla
*Finrod Felagund (slaying werewolf with hands and teeth, thus saving Beren) - Sigurd (killing wolf with hands and teeth)
*Angainor on Melkor - The chaining of Fenris
*The Eye of Woden - The Eye of Sauron ?
*ragnarök - dagor dagorath
*Röac - Hugin and Munin ?
*ilúvatar - ilmatar ?
*sador labadal's injury - chronology p. 42, 5 jun 1913 ?
*the house of the wolfings by william morris: Thiodolf's lover is not human, but one of the Vala, who has given up her immortality for love. Afraid that he may die in battle she tries to save his life with a dwarfish coat of mail. The coat of mail is magic; but it is also cursed, and it is only towards the end of the story that Thiodolf fully understands that it can only save his life at the cost of betraying others: "This mail is for the ransom of a man and the ruin of a folk". And in this society, if the folk is ruined the individual is also ruined.
*booth (WotJ p. 279) - WotJ p. 303, note 36
*elvish words ending with -nen and -tar - finnish
*Tolkien's Finnish Connection: Echoes of the Kalevala in Middle-earth by Anne Petty [actively writing this now]
*The hag Louhi's theft of the sun and moon, which plunges Kaleva-land into darkness, suggests Tolkien's myth of Melkor's destruction of the two Lamps.
*The Hobbit, hobbits - beowulf, andrew lang, brothers grimm, e.h. knatchbull-hugessen, rudyard kipling, william morris, george macdonald, especially the princess and the goblin and the princess and curdie. And certainly, you don’t have to look far to see numerous connections between the Hobbits and the Snergs — in their physical descriptions, their love of communal feasting, the numerous similar locations through which the heroes of the two stories travel, such as dangerous forests and underground caverns
*'mellon' - 'sesam' ?
* I just finished reading H. G. Wells’s 1908 novel The War in the Air, a grimly prophetic tale of high-tech war and aerial bombardment, and I find myself wondering whether Tolkien ever read it. Because not only is the main character, Bert Smallways, remarkably hobbity (as is his character arc), but Bert’s return home at the end of the novel is strikingly similar to “The Scouring of the Shire.”
*exchange between bilbo and gandalf - AH p. 39
*Turin Turambar (name) - reminds one of the name of a hero of a Kullervo-themed song, Turu (?) Tuurikkainen
*http://praxeology.net/unblog12-05.htm#09
*http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2007/05/06/in_the_beginning_/
*The Hobbt, later part - HotH1 p. 25
*http://www.lotrplaza.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=216402
*execution of eöl - execution at the tarpeian rock in rome ?
* While debating whether to break up the chair for winter firewood, Sador talks to Túrin, the young son of Húrin who will soon be sent into exile and become the wandering, accursed hero of this gloomy, gory and highly compelling tale. "I wasted my time," Sador says of his long labors, "though the hours seemed pleasant. But all such things are short-lived; and the joy in the making is their only true end, I guess." It's impossible not to hear John Ronald Reuel Tolkien reproaching or consoling himself with these words.
*http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3777/is_200210/ai_n9135926/print
*http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OON/is_4_23/ai_99848426/print

File:Sarehole Mill.jpg

2007-05-13T08:24:42Z

Findegil:

Seventh Level

2007-05-13T08:15:55Z

Findegil:

The '''Seventh Level''' of [[Moria]] or [[Khazad-dûm]] was its highest level of chambers, corridors and rooms, being six levels above the [[Great Gates]]. The term ''level'' or ''levels'' in the ancient [[Dwarf|Dwarven]] kingdom generally refer to the eastern area of Moria, nearest the eastern gate which was most populated when Khazad-dûm was a mighty city of the Dwarves.

The [[Chamber of Mazarbul]] was located on the Seventh Level of Moria.

Song of the Great Bow

2007-05-13T08:04:04Z

Findegil:

'''Song of the Great Bow''' (''Laer Cú Beleg'' in [[Sindarin]]) was sung and composed by [[Túrin Turambar]] as a lament for the death of his friend [[Beleg Cúthalion]]. The song, which echoed out over the [[Pools of Ivrin]], was a release for Túrin after he had murdered Beleg through a terrible misfortune.

Song of the Great Bow

2007-05-13T08:03:30Z

Findegil:

'''Song of the Great Bow''' (''[[Laer]] [[Cú]] [[Beleg]]'' in [[Sindarin]]) was sung and composed by [[Túrin Turambar]] as a lament for the death of his friend [[Beleg Cúthalion]]. The song, which echoed out over the [[Pools of Ivrin]], was a release for Túrin after he had murdered Beleg through a terrible misfortune.

Laer Cú Beleg

2007-05-13T08:01:26Z

Findegil:

'''Laer Cú Beleg''' ([[Sindarin]] for ''Song of the Great Bow'') was sung and composed by [[Túrin Turambar]] as a lament for the death of his friend [[Beleg Cúthalion]]. The song, which echoed out over the [[Pools of Ivrin]], was a release for Túrin after he had murdered Beleg through a terrible misfortune.

Laer Cú Beleg

2007-05-13T07:59:44Z

Findegil:

'''Laer Cú Beleg''' (Sindarin: ''Song of the Great Bow'') was sung and composed by [[Túrin Turambar]] as a lament for the death of his friend [[Beleg Cúthalion]]. The song, which echoed out over the [[Pools of Ivrin]], was a release for Túrin after he had murdered Beleg through a terrible misfortune.

Great Enemy

2007-05-13T07:51:20Z

Findegil:

'''Great Enemy''' was a term for [[Morgoth]], the first evil of [[Middle-earth]].

The Childhood of Túrin

2007-05-13T07:49:59Z

Findegil: /* Synopsis */

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Childhood of Túrin''' is the first chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
[[Húrin]] was born to [[Galdor]] and [[Hareth]], and was the older brother to [[Huor]]. In young adulthood, [[Húrin]] and [[Huor]] were involved in an orc skirmish where they were overrun. They were saved by the grace of [[Ulmo]] and taken by [[eagles]] to the hidden city of [[Gondolin]] where they stayed for a year and learned of [[Elves|Elven]] lore. They soon yearned for their own people and were given leave to return to their homeland; however they were forced to swear an oath never to reveal the secrets of Gondolin.

On his return, Húrin married [[Morwen]], and shortly after [[Túrin]] and [[Urwen]] ([[Lalaith]]) were born.

As Túrin grew up he was loved less than his sister and matured quickly; he had a fierce temper much like his father but was also quick to pity. Sorrowfully, Lalaith was soon consumed by the [[Evil Breath]] and perished, though her beauty was not forgotten.

Húrin was little at home, and Morwen was stern with her children, so Túrin looked toward his friend [[Sador]] for comfort, who was also called [[Hopafoot]] as his foot had been lost to an awry axe stroke. Sador was a lowly servant from whom Túrin learned much that he perhaps should have gathered from his mother; but she was a strong woman and cool in her emotions.

As the [[Great Enemy]] grew, Húrin set out to wage war at the [[Nirnaeth Arnoediad]] leaving his family.

==Analysis==
This chapter lays much of the foundations for the life of the children of Húrin, focusing on the history of Húrin and the development of his eldest son, Túrin. These are the two main characters within the chapter. Although Húrin is illustrated as a rounded, balanced figure, Morwen is shown as a cold but strong mother, realistic and perhaps already defeated; perhaps little empathy is asked to be drawn from the reader for her.

Túrin however is developed as a complex and already intriguing character. His early childhood is the basis of much of his character, and there may be much in this time which can be seen to affect his later behavior and temperament:

* His mother was a stern, cool woman - a distant figure for a child.
* Túrin's father was away much at the marches. He greatly revered his father, and from him learned to see how [[Men]] had bettered themselves by learning from the Elves.
* His primary companion was an older, lowly servant, Sador, whom he respected greatly.
* The death of his sister, Lalaith, was a disturbing memory and he received no comfort from his parents but sought solace from Sador.

Túrin's childhood was not an easy one. Both of his parents were remote figures - he admired them greatly and from them became a self-disciplined, stern and independent child - attributes well required for his later life.

The death of his sister, whom he treasured dearly, from a pestilence delivered by [[Morgoth]], demonstrated how even at an early age he had the independence to deal with a deep grief. He must have felt a huge anger at The Enemy for taking away a crucial part of his life and this must have remained with him for a very long time.

His friendship with Sador illustrates a common trait amongst families of the ruling classes for children to search out a companion from the enclosed circle around them. Perhaps this was Túrin's choice as a mature child or perhaps no other children lived within close quarters. Whatever the reason, Túrin's respect for Sador and his deep ability to pity others can be seen in his giving of the elven knife to support Sador in his work.

The Death of Beleg

2007-05-11T20:25:54Z

Findegil: /* Analysis */

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Death of Beleg''' is the ninth chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
When [[Beleg]] could not find the body of [[Túrin]] amongst the fallen on the summit of [[Amon Rûdh]], he knew the [[orcs]] of [[Morgoth]] had took him; so after he was healed he took to the heels of the enemy and followed their tracks northward beyond [[Brithiach]].

In the heights of [[Taur-nu-Fuin]] and the [[Pass of Anach]], he came upon the shrunken form of an [[elf]]. [[Gwindor]] it was who had only recently escaped from the evil mines of [[Angband]] – the very elf who had fought in the [[Battle of Unnumbered Tears]] and had been taken at the doors of Morgoth.

There Beleg and Gwindor witnessed a horde of orcs swarm northward and in their midst was Túrin, chained and whipped. The evil soldiers took camp, guarded by wolves in a deep vale; and Beleg came silently with his great bow and shot each wolf dead so that he could steal into the heart of the encampment. There he seized Túrin and took him away.

Now Beleg cut Túrin’s bonds with the sword [[Anglachel]]; but misfortune was amongst them and the blade slipped and pricked Túrin’s foot. In rage, thinking he was to be tormented by orcs, Túrin leaped forth, and swiftly taking Anglachel, he slayed his attaker, only too late to see it was his friend Beleg.

There Túrin stood as stone in shock; for his friend lay dead before him.

He was roused only by Gwindor to help in burying Beleg, and the mighty bow [[Belthronding]] was laid upon his brest; but dark Anglachel Túrin took himself to take vengeance on Morgoth.

Then Gwindor took Túrin in his grief and they passed away westward to the calm and holy [[Eithel Ivrin]] where Túrin shook off his grief and was healed of his madness. There he sang the [[Laer Cú Beleg]], the [[Song of the Great Bow]], in memory of his friend.

Southward then they passed to Gwindor’s realm until the elven scouts of [[Nargothrond]] took them as prisoners.

==Analysis==
This chapter marks the greatest evil of the fate of Túrin thus far: his murder of his closest friend.

This doom struck Túrin deep.

His grief and madness lay heavy about him for many days; indeed this dark and terrible event had a deep authority over his future choices. The very action of his keeping Anglachel to take vengeance on Morgoth sets the tone of his later life; it is one more step in an effort to counter the enemy.

The breadth of Tolkien’s world, his imagination of ''depth'', and his use of entangled fates is demonstrated very simply through the reappearance of Gwindor. Such an event knits together Tolkien’s broad web of stories; they ground his tales in established lines of ancestry; and help support the passing centuries through familiarity and the development of key figures and their families. They also force the reader to engage with the story: What would have happened if Morgoth had not taken Gwindor prisoner? Would Túrin have been taken to Angband? Would Beleg now be dead? Would Túrin now be lost in the Pass of Anach, mantled in the grief of Beleg’s death? Would Túrin never come to Nargothrond?

The sword Anglachel rises forth here as a dark character in its own right, becoming the tool of retribution for Túrin; this also demonstrates the intricate web of Tolkien’s saga, for this is [Eöl|Eöl’s] blade, forged of iron from the sky and tempered with the darkness of the Eöl’s heart. His use of named weaponry with a developed heritage continues to add richness and a delicate intricacy to [[Middle-earth]].

The Death of Beleg

2007-05-11T19:46:09Z

Findegil: /* Synopsis */

The Death of Beleg

2007-05-11T19:44:12Z

Findegil: /* Synopsis */

User:Findegil

2007-05-09T23:10:22Z

Findegil:

[[Image:CTLetter.JPG|thumb|right|Letter from Christopher Tolkien]][[Image:Findegilofgondor.jpg|''Sigil of Scribes of Gondor'' by Findegil]]
Redactor of Middle-earth - apprentice!

[[User_talk:Findegil|Why not leave me a message?]]

===Edits:===
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[[Category:IRC users]]

User:Findegil

2007-05-08T20:20:47Z

Findegil:

Of Mîm the Dwarf

2007-05-07T20:30:42Z

Findegil: /* Analysis */

{{coh-chapters}}
'''Of Mîm the Dwarf''' is the seventh chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
Once [[Beleg]] had departed the outlaw’s camp, things went ill with the [[Gaurwaith]], for the rains came out of season and the [[orcs]] raided ever further southward. [[Túrin]] made up his mind to make a stronghold where his men could weather storm and make store against hunger – so they journeyed further southward through the [[Sirion|Vale of Sirion]].

There they caught [[Mîm]], one of the few [[Nibin-Nogrim]] (or [[Petty-dwarves]]), and he begged for mercy at Túrin’s feet; but when the other outlaws would have killed him, Túrin released Mîm for a ransom. In payment for his life, Mîm granted them passage to his home where they might share his halls and so also grant the Gaurwaith their sanctuary. But with darkness creeping about, the outlaws were loathe to follow Mîm for fear of him escaping, so they put him in bonds to await the morning, and Mîm took this darkly.

The following morn, Mîm led the band onward, up the slopes of [[Amon Rudh]], the barren hill to the west of the Sirion, through a rocky landscape, until they reached a secret dell. There they found the door to Mîm’s house, that now he named [[Bar-en-Danwedh]], the [[House of Ransom]]. The other Nibin-Nogrim were there also and sadly, Mîm’s son, [[Khîm]], lay dead from an arrow loosed by [[Androg|Andróg’s]] bow the night before.

Mîm’s anger was great and he cursed Andróg that if he might use his bow again so would he die from it – and Andróg was made to break his bow and swear never to hunt again, which he was wroth to do.

For a time the outlaws dwelt peacefully in Bar-en-Danwedh and learned its ways and entrance; and foods they shared with the Nibin-Nogrim; but the friendship was not warm, except perhaps that between Túrin and Mîm who would often talk alone. In this time Andróg searched out a hidden stair that passed to the heights of the hill but of his discovery he told no one.

With the coming of the deep snows of winter, Beleg came to Bar-en-Danwedh unlooked for; his heart had called him to his friend Túrin, and he brought the [[Helm of Hador]] and the [[Lembas]] bread that was the gift of [[Melian]]. So the Bow of Beleg and the Helm of Túrin were reunited.

==Analysis==
Once again the ‘spirit’ of the outlaw band is demonstrated in their capture of Mîm, his bondage, and their residence in the Nibin-Nogrim’s home – and what deed had the Petty-dwarves done to deserve such a ransom? They happened to pass the outlaws on their return from gathering food! Túrin also is a party to these actions, but his leadership seems to temper his men and stave off the worst of their angers and emotions.

Andróg continues to play a central role in the band throughout the chapter – he seems to ready himself to usurp Túrin at a ripe moment in locating the secret stair, watching Túrin and Mîm in their conversations, and distrusting Beleg.

Beleg’s return, although not a surprise, is one perhaps to illustrate Túrin’s charisma – the two formed a strong bond when they protected the northern marches of Doriath, and Beleg cannot shy away from his friendship. Looking back to his final conversation with Túrin in the previous chapter, and his discussion with Thingol, it might be seen that Beleg is coming to Túrin to ''save'' him. Beleg does not agree with Túrin’s choices and actions; but he cannot let him fail, so he must try to help him.

The hand (or mind) of [[Morgoth]] might be seen in some subtle ways in this chapter:
* The death of Khîm, Mîm’s son, from an awry arrow-shot sews the seed of doom in the relationship between the Petty-dwarves and the men.
* The festering anger of Andróg and his distrust and growing hatred of Túrin, Mîm and Beleg paves the way for rebellion and upheaval.
* Beleg’s return may have been more than ‘love over wisdom’ but an action designed to best bring anguish to Túrin in the future.

We also see the prophetic skill of Túrin in his retort to Andróg's description of Amon Rudh as having blood on its crown: '''"Not yet,"''' Túrin simply states.

The Land of Bow and Helm

2007-05-07T20:29:20Z

Findegil: /* Analysis */

{{coh-chapters}}
'''The Land of Bow and Helm''' is the eighth chapter of [[The Children of Húrin]].

==Synopsis==
The coming of [[Beleg]] to [[Bar-en-Danwedh]] and the return of the [[Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin|Dragon-helm]] to [[Túrin]] brought about a change in both the fortunes and focus of the men of [[Amon Rudh]]. As a host they seemed in their forays with the marauding companies of [[orcs]] that came down the [[Sirion]] and they spread fear and dread. So did Túrin’s whereabouts come to the knowledge of [[Morgoth]], and the enemy set his devices in motion to capture Túrin; for he was patient in his malice as he had been with his father, [[Húrin]], and put forward his forces only to test Túrin’s mettle and give him false confidence.

On a time, the valour of Beleg’s bow and the Dragon-helm brought forth those dispossessed men who were drawn to wage war with the enemy, and the force of men grew so that there were many camps about the woods of Amon Rudh. [[Dor-Cúarthol]] Túrin called his domain in pride, and himself [[Gorthol]], The Dread Helm; but Beleg was wary of the doom ahead and couselled caution but to this Túrin took little heed for he had confidence in his own will.

It was at this time that [[Mîm|Mîm’s]] curse of [[Andróg]] came to fruition: he once again took up a bow and was poisoned by an orc arrow; but the power of Beleg healed him of the wound. This went ill with Mîm, who already had a hatred of all things [[elf|elven]] and so he chose to betray Túrin’s men. Mîm passed to a company of orcs and revealed to them the stronghold of Bar-en-Danwedh and led a force to its doors.

There the outlaws were bested but Andróg revealed to Túrin the secret stair to the summit of the hill and there there was a final stand. Against a stone all but Túrin and Beleg were slain and Andróg was wounded mortally by an orc shaft. Beleg was pinned on the summit while Túrin was taken alive as prisoner – for so were Morgoth’s commands.

When all was passed, Mîm came to torment Beleg in that high place, but Andróg crept forth and thrust a sword at the [[Petty-dwarf]] who leapt from the heights in fear. In his final agony, Andróg released Beleg; then he died.

==Analysis==
This chapter seems to be a turning point in the fortunes of Túrin. The hand of Morgoth plays a direct blow against him and he becomes a real focus of his malice.

'''An important aspect of the tale is Beleg’s intervention.''' He arrives with the Helm of Hador with the intent of saving Túrin; but the power of the Dragon-helm of Dor-lómin and Morgoth’s designs to heighten Túrin’s self-confidence result in an arrogance. But in fact it is not this overconfidence which is Túrin’s downfall – it is ''Beleg’s presence and power in the camp'' – for Mîm despises him. He hates him as he is an elf, for his healing of Andróg, and for his friendship of Túrin who he had become close to. So does the seed of Mîm’s hatred from the previous chapter flower in his betrayal of the company.

As Mîm becomes the traitor, Andróg redeems himself; probably through the contribution of Beleg and his healing of the outlaw from the orc arrow. The stair which he kept secret becomes the saving escape of the outlaws and Andróg saves Beleg’s life by frightening Mîm from the summit of Amon Rudh before he himself dies.

One important point in this chapter is Morgoth’s ''doubt'' about his power over Túrin’s fate; it seems that there are ways Túrin might escape the curse of his family:
* Túrin may become a power in his own right and so outmatch his doom.
* If he is hidden from Morgoth’s power or vision then Túrin is outside of Morgoth’s influence; the only places where this might be are Doriath and possibly Gondolin.

This raises the question of how much of Túrin’s misfortune up to this point is based on the ill-will of Morgoth; for it might seem that Morgoth cannot have influenced events within Doriath or during the period up until the Dragon-helm comes to his knowledge in this chapter.