J.R.R. Tolkien transformed his love for arcane linguistic studies into a fantastic world of Middle Earth, a world of filled with characters that readers the world over have loved and learned from for generations.
Devin Brown focuses on the story behind how Tolkien became one of the best-known writers in the history of literature, a tale as fascinating and as inspiring as any of the fictional ones he would go on to write. Weaving in the major aspects of the author’s life, career, and faith, Brown shares how Tolkien’s beloved works came to be written.
With a third follow-up film and the book’s release the same month, there’s a large interest in the faith values for these works. This book addresses that deep hunger to know what fuels the world and worldview of The Hobbit’s celebrated author, Tolkien.
J.R.R. Tolkien transformed his love for arcane linguistic studies into a fantastic world of Middle Earth, a world of filled with characters that readers the world over have loved and learned from for generations.
Devin Brown focuses on the story behind how Tolkien became one of the best-known writers in the history of literature, a tale as fascinating and as inspiring as any of the fictional ones he would go on to write. Weaving in the major aspects of the author’s life, career, and faith, Brown shares how Tolkien’s beloved works came to be written.
With a third follow-up film and the book’s release the same month, there’s a large interest in the faith values for these works. This book addresses that deep hunger to know what fuels the world and worldview of The Hobbit’s celebrated author, Tolkien.
Tolkien: How an Obscure Oxford Professor Wrote The Hobbit and Became the Most Beloved Author of the Century
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Tolkien: How an Obscure Oxford Professor Wrote The Hobbit and Became the Most Beloved Author of the Century
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Overview
J.R.R. Tolkien transformed his love for arcane linguistic studies into a fantastic world of Middle Earth, a world of filled with characters that readers the world over have loved and learned from for generations.
Devin Brown focuses on the story behind how Tolkien became one of the best-known writers in the history of literature, a tale as fascinating and as inspiring as any of the fictional ones he would go on to write. Weaving in the major aspects of the author’s life, career, and faith, Brown shares how Tolkien’s beloved works came to be written.
With a third follow-up film and the book’s release the same month, there’s a large interest in the faith values for these works. This book addresses that deep hunger to know what fuels the world and worldview of The Hobbit’s celebrated author, Tolkien.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781426796715 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Abingdon Press |
| Publication date: | 10/21/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 192 |
| File size: | 519 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Tolkien
How an Obscure Oxford Professor Wrote The Hobbit and Became the Most Beloved Author of the Century
By Devin Brown
Abingdon Press
Copyright © 2014 Devin BrownAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4267-9671-5
CHAPTER 1
Son and Schoolboy
A Hot, Parched Country
Visitors to the U.K. will find tastefully understated, round plaques in a dignified shade of blue marking the birthplace of many of the country's most famous writers—figures such as Charles Dickens, Dorothy Sayers, C. S. Lewis, and Graham Greene. Although there is a plaque in the Oxford suburbs on the house at 20 Northmoor Road where J. R. R. Tolkien lived from 1930 to 1947, marking it as the very place where The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were written, there is no plaque marking his birthplace. His birthplace has no plaque because Tolkien was not born in Oxford or England but literally a world away in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, the former colony we now know as South Africa.
On January 3, 1892, just three days into the new year, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien came into the world. Born with his father's eyes and his mother's mouth, he was the first child of Arthur and Mabel Tolkien, who had recently emigrated from England. Named "John" after his grandfather, and "Reuel" because it was a family name, he would be called Ronald by his family and John Ronald by school chums. Later at Oxford, he would be Tolkien to his colleagues, and to his friends he would simply be Tollers.
Back in 1892, Bloemfontein was not quite fifty years old and not the bustling modern city it is today. Although it had two churches, a hospital, a library, a tennis club, and a railway station, it was still a dusty frontier town set on the edge of a treeless plain where wild dogs, monkeys, jackals, and the occasional lion still roamed. Tolkien later wrote that his earliest childhood memories were of a "hot parched country" and that the first Christmas he recalled was not a frosty, snow-covered morning, but a day with a blazing sun, curtains drawn against the heat, and in place of a cheerful English pine, a eucalyptus tree that was so dry it drooped.
After working for a time at Lloyds Bank in Birmingham, Arthur Tolkien had gone to South Africa, like many emigrants from England at the time, in search of a better position. Because of recent discoveries of gold and diamonds in the region, promotions in the banking business were speedier and more available there than in Britain. After a number of temporary postings, Arthur had been named as the manager of the Bloemfontein branch of the Bank of Africa. With a modest but adequate income and housing provided for him on the second floor above the bank, he felt ready to ask his young fiancée to join him.
Arthur Tolkien and Mabel Suffield were married in Cape Town's Anglican Cathedral on April 16, 1891. She was twenty-one. He was thirty-four. After a brief honeymoon on the coast in nearby Sea Point, Arthur and "Mab," as he called his new bride, boarded a train for the arduous 700-mile trek inland to Bloemfontein to begin their new life together. Nine months later, Arthur wrote to his mother back in England with the exciting news: "Mabel gave me a beautiful little son last night."
Among the many incidents that took place during Ronald Tolkien's first years, three bear noting. First there came a day when the infant was nowhere to be found, sending the household into a panic. Some time later it was discovered that Isaak, the local boy Arthur and Mabel had hired to help around the house, without saying a word to anyone, had taken tiny John Ronald back home with him to show with wonder and pride to his family and neighbors who had never seen a white baby. After the tumult subsided, Isaak was admonished but not dismissed, and in fact, remained on such good relations with the Tolkiens that later he named his first son Isaak Mister Tolkien Victor.
Several months after his adventure with Isaak, young Ronald was stung by a tarantula as he was outside learning to walk. Following his screams, his nurse ran after him, scooped him up, and quickly sucked out the poison, saving his life. Recalling this incident later for an interview, Tolkien pointed out that despite the fact that large, evil spiders appear in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, he did not particularly dislike spiders and even made a point of rescuing the ones that got trapped in the family bathtub.
The third memorable incident from this time was that on February 17, 1894, six weeks after his second birthday, Ronald got a new baby brother to play with when Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien was born.
As a small child, Ronald had trouble adjusting to the hot climate of Bloemfontein. In part because of this and in part because Mabel missed her family, it was decided that she would take the two boys back to England to visit their relatives by herself, with the understanding that Arthur would join them shortly afterwards on the scheduled furlough that had been postponed more than once already. In April 1895, four years after her arrival in Bloemfontein, Mabel made the long train ride back to Cape Town with her one-year-old and three-year-old in tow. Together with the nurse Arthur had hired to travel with them, they boarded the S. S. Guelph for the voyage up the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal, and across the Mediterranean. Three weeks later they arrived in England, the place Mabel still considered home.
Later in life Tolkien would remember looking down from the deck of a ship into the clear waters of the Indian Ocean, which were filled with agile black and brown bodies diving for coins thrown by the passengers. He would also remember the sight of a great city set high on a hill, which he later understood had been Lisbon. He also retained an image of his father, a narrow brush in hand, painting A. R. Tolkien on the trunk they used on the trip. It would be the last memory Ronald would have of his father. After delaying his furlough once more, Arthur contracted rheumatic fever and died of a severe hemorrhage on February 15, 1896. Five days later, his body was laid to rest in Bloemfontein's Anglican graveyard. Ronald was four, and Hilary had just turned two. Mabel was twenty-six.
Given their shortage of money and the length of travel time, Mabel and the boys were not able to be present at Arthur's funeral, nor did Tolkien ever return to the land he was born in. During World War II, his youngest son, Christopher, served in the Royal Air Force and trained in South Africa. In a letter dated April 24, 1944, Tolkien wrote him: "If you fetch up at Bloemfontein I shall wonder if the little old stone bank-house where I was born is still standing." There is no record of whether Christopher made it to his father's birthplace. If he did, he would have discovered that the original bank building was gone, having been wiped out by a flood and replaced by a new structure built in 1933. In the early 1990s members of the South African Tolkien Society located Arthur's grave and along with the Tolkien family had a new gravestone placed on it.
With very little memory of his father, Tolkien was more influenced by his absence than anything he had said or done. When it came time to write his fiction, fatherless characters and foster fathers would appear in key roles, notable among them Frodo, who is raised by Bilbo, and Aragorn, who is only two when his father dies and is subsequently raised by Elrond.
A Childhood Paradise
After they arrived back in England, Mabel and the boys initially stayed with her parents in the family home in the King's Heath subdivision located on Birmingham's south side. Everyone assumed the cramped living conditions would be temporary, that soon Arthur would join them, and that shortly afterwards they would again return to South Africa. Mabel's sister and brother were still at home at the time, and the addition of two small boys made life chaotic in the small house. Despite the ruckus Ronald and Hilary caused, the Suffields were glad to get the chance to spend time with their grandsons, whom they had never seen, and to have their daughter safe at home again.
After Arthur's death, Mabel knew she needed to find a more permanent living arrangement, though exactly where to go was a problem. The investments Arthur had made provided barely enough for the three of them to survive on. Coupled with the modest assistance she received from her relatives, the money would need to be stretched as far as possible. Deciding that the soot and factory smoke of Birmingham were not good for young children and that an inexpensive place in the country would at least provide the boys with a wholesome place to play, Mabel began to look for housing beyond the city's southern edge. It was not long before she found a semi-detached brick cottage for rent about a mile out in the country. As biographer Humphrey Carpenter notes, it would be a home that could make them happy in spite of their poverty.
It would also be a home that would have a great influence on Tolkien's fiction.
In the summer of 1896, Mabel and her two sons moved to Sarehole, a small hamlet consisting of a handful of farms and houses nestled alongside the equally modest River Cole. The name Sarehole originally came from the holme—the low, rich land alongside a river—belonging to Sare, and the area offered everything two young boys could want: fields and meadows to run in, magnificent old trees to climb, strawberries to pick, mushrooms to steal, and a mysterious mill and mill pond to explore.
The Stratford Road outside their door, which led to Birmingham in the north and to Stratford-upon-Avon in the south, was then only a narrow lane lined by farms and fields. In those days before the advance of the automobile, it would have had no traffic louder than a tradesman's wagon or a farmer's cart passing by. Later Tolkien would recall the pastoral setting of his youth and would have The Hobbit begin on a morning "long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green."
While today, due to the influence of Peter Jackson's films, Tolkien fans in search of a real-life Middle-earth often travel to New Zealand, Tolkien himself made it clear that The Shire was based on his memories of Sarehole and his experiences as a young boy living there. "I took the idea of the hobbits from the village people and children," he pointed out in an interview. "I was brought up in considerable poverty, but I was happy running about in that country."
Besides the idea of the hobbits, there were other elements from Tolkien's youth that would make it into his fiction. One was the name Gamgee, which would be used as Sam's last name and that of his father, Gaffer Gamgee. In 1880, Dr. Joseph Sampson Gamgee, a surgeon at Queen's Hospital in Birmingham, had invented the first medical dressing made of cotton, which became known thereafter as a Gamgee Tissue. Tolkien later explained that the name was "caught out of childhood memory" and noted that it was the association of Gamgee with cotton that led to his whimsical creation of the Cottons as a family Sam would be associated with and eventually marry into.
Even late in life, Tolkien was still able to remember the area around Sarehole in precise detail. "There was an old mill that really did grind corn with two millers, a great big pond with swans on it, a sandpit, a wonderful dell with flowers, a few old-fashioned village houses, and further away, a stream with another mill," he told the Oxford Mail. "I could draw you a map of every inch of it," he added. "It was a kind of lost paradise."
Tolkien would have this map of his childhood paradise in mind for the path Bilbo takes from Bag End as he sets off on his great adventure as readers of The Hobbit are told: "To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside ... pushing his keys into Gandalf's hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a mile or more."
Visitors to Sarehole today can still find the old mill alongside the pond. A plaque marking it as Sarehole Mill records that it has been the site of a water mill since 1542 and that it served as a source of inspiration for the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, who lived nearby from 1896 to 1900.
Mabel had a deep fondness for plants and knew a good deal of botany, and she passed on this love and knowledge to her two boys. Her older son would later lovingly write about trees in his fiction, and Hilary would become an orchard keeper. Two of the trees that appear in Tolkien's fiction—the Party Tree where Bilbo makes his farewell speech, only to have it felled later by Saruman's workers, and Old Man Willow—can be linked to a specific tree from his childhood in Sarehole. Tolkien recalled: "There was a willow hanging over the mill-pool 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."
Tolkien's memories of Sarehole and his anguish at the urbanization that slowly spread from Birmingham to the rural countryside he so loved can be found in The Fellowship of the Ring in the vision of the Shire that Sam sees in the Mirror of Galadriel. Tolkien would later write:
Like a dream the vision shifted ... and he saw the trees again.... They were falling, crashing to the ground.
"Hi!" cried Sam in an outraged voice. "There's that Ted Sandyman a-cutting down trees as he shouldn't. They didn't ought to be felled: it's that avenue beyond the Mill that shades the road to Bywater. I wish I could get at Ted, and I'd fell him!"
But now Sam noticed that the Old Mill had vanished, and a large red-brick building was being put up where it had stood.... There was a tall red chimney nearby. Black smoke seemed to cloud the surface of the Mirror.
It was also during Ronald's time living in Sarehole and playing in the flat meadows alongside the banks of the River Cole that he began to have a strange, recurring dream. In it a great wave would rise up and pour over the fields and forests, completely covering them. This dream, which Tolkien referred to as his Atlantis Complex, would trouble him throughout his life. "It always ends by surrender," Tolkien later explained. "I wake gasping out of deep water."
The great wave from Tolkien's childhood in Sarehole would find its way into The Lord of the Rings as the fictional account of the destruction of Numenor, and Faramir's dreams, like those of his creator, would be haunted by this same vision. At the climactic moment just before the defeat of Sauron, Tolkien describes Faramir standing with Eowyn on the walls of Gondor. As they look out into the distance, Faramir tells her that he is reminded of a "great dark wave climbing over the green lands and above the hills, and coming on, darkness unescapable." And then, surprised that he has broken his silence and spoken about it, Faramir also confesses: "I often dream of it."
The house at Number 5 Gracewell Road that served as the Tolkiens' first home in England is still standing. Given a new address, Number 264 Wake Green Road also has been given a new purpose. Retaining the old road name, it is now a part of Gracewell Homes, a cluster of retirement residences. Its exterior has not changed much since the time when Mabel and her two young sons lived there. But except for the old mill, which has been preserved, the rural hamlet where Ronald and Hilary romped and played is gone, and in its place is a residential suburb.
The Tolkiens lived in Sarehole for four years. During this period—from the time Ronald was four until he was eight—both he and Hilary were taught at home by their mother. Ronald proved an apt pupil, quickly learning to read and write and developing a passion for drawing and lettering that stayed with him all his life.
Ronald also showed a remarkable skill in language learning, but only when the language appealed to him—a trait that would be characteristic of him. When passionate for a subject, he would display signs of genius. When uninterested, he would be lazy and undisciplined. Ronald learned enough Latin and German from his mother to later be awarded a scholarship to the best private school in Birmingham, but he proved resistant to French. He was equally unaffected by the piano lessons Mabel gave the boys. Later Tolkien would explain to the Daily Telegraph: "My interest in languages was derived solely from my mother.... She was also interested in etymology, and aroused my interest in this; and also in alphabets and handwriting."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tolkien by Devin Brown. Copyright © 2014 Devin Brown. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Prologue,Part One Son and Schoolboy,
Part Two Scholar and Soldier,
Part Three Storyteller and Mythmaker,
Epilogue,
Curious Facts of Tolkien's Life and Writing,
Fourteen Tolkien Sites to Visit without Ever Leaving Your Armchair,
Resources,