Years of life: from 01/03/1892 to 09/02/1973
English writer, philologist, professor at Oxford University, founder of “high fantasy”, author of a number of fairy tales and the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 on the territory of modern South Africa, and then the Orange Free State, where his father was transferred for military service.
In 1895, Tolkien's father dies of tropical fever and the family is forced to return to England. Tolkien's mother Mabel, trying to find support in life, turns to religion, accepts Catholicism and passes on her deep religiosity to her children: John Tolkien remains a zealous Catholic until the end of his life.
In 1900, Tolkien entered King Edward’s School, where the writer’s brilliant linguistic abilities soon emerged. He studies Old English, Welsh, Old Norse, Finnish, and Gothic languages, on the basis of which he will later develop the “Elvish” language.
In October 1911, Tolkien entered Oxford, where he studied at Exeter College.
After graduating from university in 1915, Tolkien was sent to serve as a lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers regiment and soon found himself at the front - the First World War was underway.
Having lost two friends in the war, Tolkien experiences a severe shock and, having suffered typhus, returns to his homeland.
From this moment the writer's scientific career begins. He first taught at the University of Leeds, and in 1922 received a position as professor of Anglo-Saxon language and literature at Oxford University, where he became one of the youngest professors (at 30 years old).
At this time he begins to write a cycle of myths and legends of Middle-earth, known to us as
For his children, he composes a fairy tale, which is published by the writer's friend Sir Stanley Anwin. The book is an unexpected success, and Anuin asks Tolkien to write a sequel. However, the work was delayed and was completed only in 1954.
In 1971, the writer's wife died, whose death was a severe shock for Tolkien. He himself survived her only by two years, dying from a short serious illness in 1973.
As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a tarantula, the poison of which made the boy sick. The patient was cared for by Dr. Thornton Quimby, who, as some researchers suggest, became one of the prototypes of Gandalf the Gray.
Tolkien met his wife Edith Marie Brett in 1908, but she was older than him and a Protestant. Tolkien's guardian was against this marriage, so he set a condition: young people should not meet or write to each other until Tolkien was 21 years old.
When this day came, Tolkien wrote a letter to his beloved, declaring his love for her and asking her to become his wife. She replied that she was engaged to someone else because she thought that he had forgotten her over the years. In the end, she returned the ring to her groom and announced that she was marrying Tolkien! In addition, at his insistence, she converted to Catholicism.
The engagement took place in Birmingham in January 1913, and the wedding took place on March 22, 1916 in the English city of Warwick, in St. Mary's Catholic Church. Their union with Edith Brett turned out to be long and happy. The couple lived together for 56 years and raised 3 sons: John Francis Ruel (1917), Michael Hilary Ruel (1920), Christopher Ruel (1924), and daughter Priscilla Mary Ruel (1929).
Named after Tolkien:
asteroid(2675) Tolkien;
sea crustacean Leucothoe tolkieni from the Nazca and Sala y Gomez submarine ridges (Pacific Ocean);
staphylinide Gabrius tolkieni Schillhammer, 1997 (Lives in Nepal (Khandbari, Induwa Khola Valley));
genus of fossil trilobites Tolkienia from the family Acastidae (Phacopida).
The names of geographical features of Middle-earth and the names of characters appearing in Tolkien's works are used to name many real geographical features and animals.
Members of the rock group The Beatles, who liked The Lord of the Rings, wanted to make a musical film based on the book and star in it themselves. Paul McCartney was cast as Frodo, Ringo Starr as Sam, George Harrison as Gandalf, and John Lennon as Gollum. Tolkien was shocked by this idea.
(1892-1973)
Tolkien, John Ronald Ruel, English writer, doctor of literature, artist, professor, philologist-linguist. One of the creators Oxford English Dictionary. Author of the tale Hobbit(1937), novel Lord of the Rings(1954), mythological epic The Silmarillion (1977).
Father - Arthur Ruel Tolkien, a bank employee from Birmingham, was forced to seek his fortune in South Africa.
In 1891, his bride, Mabel Suffield, sails to him from Birmingham. On April 16, 1891 they got married in the central cathedral of Cape Town. In January 1892, a boy appears in the house of happy parents. With blue eyes, golden hair, looking like an elf. The surname Tolkien, translated into Russian as meaning “recklessly brave,” largely corresponded to the character of the baby.
It was this boy who was destined to actually confirm one of his principled statements. “Man has no higher purpose than the co-creation of the Secondary World.”
The writer John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, whose gift was multiplied many times over by the knowledge of an outstanding philologist, gave us his unique Tolkien-like world. Fascinatingly immeasurable, magnificent and sometimes terrifying, illuminated by the radiance of many unknown dimensions.
Tolkien created hobbits - “short ones” - endlessly charming, captivatingly reliable creatures, similar to children. Combining perseverance and frivolity, curiosity and childish laziness. Incredible ingenuity with simplicity, cunning and gullibility, courage and courage with the ability to avoid trouble.
First of all, it is the hobbits who give such authenticity to Tolkien’s world.
Fate began to test Tolkien's strength literally from the first steps. Directly behind their house, in Bloemfontein, was the open veld - the wild steppe. Even lions sometimes appeared here. Sometimes inquisitive monkeys entered the garden through the fence. IN wooden shed From time to time snakes crawled in.
When Ronald was just learning to walk, he stepped on a tarantula. The spider bit the baby. Fortunately, the efficient nanny sucked the poison out of the child’s heel... Perhaps this is why various nightmare spiders often appear in Tolkien’s works.
The local heat had a bad effect on the children's health. Therefore, in November 1894, Mabel took her sons to England.
By the age of four, thanks to his mother’s efforts, baby John could already read and even dare to write his first letters.
In February 1896, Tolkien's father began bleeding heavily and died suddenly.
Mabel Suffield took upon herself all the care of the children, amazing her relatives with courage, energy and will. John and Hilary's mother received a good education. She spoke French and German, and knew Latin. She drew excellently and played the piano professionally. She tirelessly passed on all her knowledge and skills to her children.
His grandfather John Suffield, who was emphatically proud of his lineage of skilled engravers, also had a great influence on the initial formation of John’s personality. John's mother and grandfather strongly supported John's early interest in Latin and Greek.
In 1896, Mabel and her children moved from Birmingham to the village of Sarehole. The hills and copses overgrown with heather lead the boys into frantic delight. It was in the vicinity of Sarehole that Tolkien forever fell in love with the beauty of the trees, struggling to discern their endless secrets. It is no coincidence that unforgettable, most interesting trees appear in all of Tolkien’s works. And the mighty giants of Listven amaze readers in the famous trilogy - Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien is no less passionate about elves and... dragons... Dragons and elves will become the main characters of the first fairy tale written by Ronald, at the age of seven.
John's interest in Latin, and especially in the Greek language, “for its external brilliance and enchanting sound” is growing.
In 1904, when John was barely twelve years old, his mother died of diabetes. Their distant relative, a priest, Father Francis, becomes Ronald and Hilary's guardian. The brothers move back to Birmingham. Experiencing a burning longing for free hills, fields and beloved trees, John is looking for new affections and spiritual support. He becomes more and more interested in drawing, revealing extraordinary abilities in this form as well. By the age of fifteen, he amazes school teachers with his abilities and obsession with philology. He's reading an Old English poem Beowulf, experiencing genuine delight. Then he returns to Middle English, and the medieval legends about the Knights of the Round Table awaken his increasing interest in history. Soon he independently begins to study the Old Icelandic language. And then he gets to German books on philology.
The joy of learning ancient languages fascinates him so much that he dares to make his first mischievous attempt at inventing his own language “Nevbosh”, that is, “new nonsense”, which he excitedly creates in collaboration with his cousin Mary. Writing funny limericks becomes a fascinating pastime for young people, and at the same time acquaintance with such pioneers of English absurdism as Edward Lear, Hilaire Belok and Gilbert Keith Chesterton... Continuing to frantically study Old English, Old Germanic, and a little later Old Finnish, Icelandic and Gothic, John with great pleasure, “absorbs in immeasurable quantities” - fairy tales and heroic legends.
“Only in this world there were, in my opinion, too few of them to satisfy my hunger,” admits the young philologist.
At the age of sixteen, John will meet the charming Edith Bratt, his first and last love, which will win his heart forever... Five years later they will get married and live a long, happy life, giving birth to three sons and a daughter. In addition to ardent mutual love, they will be united by a passion for music and fairy tales... And in the first months of acquaintance, such naive fun as... carefully throwing tiny pieces of sugar from the balcony of a cafe onto the hats of passers-by...
But first, the lovers will face five years of difficult trials. John's first unsuccessful attempt to enter Oxford University. Categorical rejection of Edith by Father Francis. The horrors of the First World War. The deadly “trench fever” that John Ronald suffered from twice. And only then the long-awaited connection.
In April 1910, Tolkien watched a play at the Birmingham Theater Peter Pan, based on the play by James Barrie. What I saw was another shock in my life young man, and Ronald fell in love with the theater forever. “This is indescribable, but I will not forget this as long as I live,” John wrote. “It’s a pity that Edith wasn’t with me.”
Staging Peter Pan shocked Tolkien so much that he responded to the performance with a unique bouquet of poems dedicated to his beloved... elves.
During the spring term, John amazed his classmates with an improvised lecture - Modern Languages of Europe: origin and possible paths of development. And during the debate, acting as the Greek ambassador, he made the entire speech in Greek. The next time he stunned his fellow students, when he played a barbarian envoy, he spoke fluently in Gothic.
But John was not lucky enough to get into Oxford University on his first try. Or rather, Tolkien passed all the exams, but did not get the necessary points to receive a scholarship. And the tuition fees on a general basis were beyond the means of John’s guardian. In addition, Father Francis, having learned about his ward’s affair “with a pianist who is three years older than John,” considered Tolkien’s failure at admission to be the result of frivolity that distracted him from his studies. Francis, in the harshest form, demanded that his ward break up with his beloved... John promised Father Francis to obey, but he himself... continued to secretly meet with his beloved.
Still, luck smiled on John. After a second attempt at the exams, on December 17, 1910, Tolkien learned that he had been given an open classical scholarship to Exeter College. One of the oldest colleges at Oxford University. And thanks to an exit scholarship from King Edward's School and additional funds provided by Father Francis, Ronald could already afford to go to Oxford.
In the last terms, at King Edward's School, John read a report on the Icelandic sagas to his fellow students, supporting it with passages in the original language. And soon I discovered Kalevala, having read the great creation without translation, in Finnish.
The last summer term of 1911 ended with a performance at Greek Mira Aristophanes. Tolkien played the merry God Hermes in the play.
During his last summer vacation, John visited Switzerland. He will write in his diary. “Once we went on a long hike with guides to the Aletsch glacier, and there I almost died...” Before returning to England, Tolkien bought several postcards. One of them depicted an old man with a white beard, wearing a round wide-brimmed hat and a long cloak. The old man was talking to a white fawn... Many years later, having found a postcard at the bottom of one of the drawers of his desk, Tolkien wrote down: “The prototype of Gandalf...” This is how one of the most famous heroes first appeared in John’s imagination Lord of the Rings.
Having entered the classics department at Oxford, Tolkien meets the famous self-taught professor Joe Wright. He strongly advises the aspiring linguist to “take up the Celtic language seriously.” John enthusiastically accepts the professor's offer. In addition, with no less zeal, the Oxford recruit continues to “bite into Finnish.”
Ronald's passion for theater intensifies. During the Christmas holidays, Tolkien visits King Edward's favorite school, and plays in Sheridan's play with great success. Rivals the role of Mrs. Malaprop. When John came of age, he wrote a play himself - Detective, cook and suffragette. For home theater their relatives. John plays successfully main role- Professor Joseph Quilter. At the same time, he is an outstanding detective. Everything in the play was dedicated to Tolkien's coming of age. And the opportunity to quickly marry Edith.
Tolkien's theatrical experiences turned out to be not only useful for him, but also necessary. Especially when for many years John mentally reincarnated himself into incomparable, phantasmagoric characters Lord of the Rings.
At the beginning of the summer term of 1913, Tolkien left the classics department and began attending lectures in the English department at Oxford.
Having finally received discreet encouragement from his guardian Francis to come of age, Tolkien at the beginning of 1914 carried out his long-awaited engagement to Edith Bratt.
In the same year, 1914, the First World War begins. Tolkien is in a hurry to finish his degree at Oxford so he can volunteer for the army. Simultaneously with speeding up the educational process, John enters a course for radio operators and communications operators. In July 1915, Tolkien brilliantly and ahead of schedule passed the exam in English language and literature for a bachelor's degree, and received first-class honors... And after undergoing military training in Bedford, he was awarded the rank of junior lieutenant. And he is assigned to serve in the regiment of Lancashire Fusiliers.
In March 1916, Tolkien married Edith Bratt. And already on July 14, 1916, junior lieutenant Tolkien went into the first battle with his second company of Lancashire riflemen.
Ronald was destined to find himself in the center of a grandiose meat grinder, on the Somme River, where tens of thousands of his compatriots died. Having experienced all the “horrors and abominations of the monstrous massacre,” John hated the war until the end of his days. As well as “the masterminds of the terrible massacres...”. At the same time, Second Lieutenant Tolkien forever retained admiration for his comrades in arms. “Ordinary British people. Stubborn, taciturn and mocking." Years will pass, and John Ronald will write in his diary - “perhaps without the soldiers with whom I fought, the country of the Hobbitan would not exist. And without Hobbits there would be no Hobbits Lord of the Rings...". Death passed John by. He wasn't even injured. But he was overtaken by another terrible scourge - “trench fever” - typhus... A disease that claimed more lives in the First World War than bullets and shells. Anyone who managed to overcome “trench fever” and survive was considered a rare lucky person... Typhus tried to drag Tolkien to the grave twice, exhausting him for several months... But John resisted and overcame death... From the hospital in Le- Tuke he was sent by ship to England. And upon arrival at home, he was taken by train to Birmingham. It was in Birmingham that Edith came to see him.
In rare hours, when a terrible illness leaves John, he conceives and begins to implement the first drafts of his fantastic epic - The Silmarillion. The story of three magic rings of omnipotent power.
Tolkien creates despite the breath of death and wins. On November 16, 1917, John Ronald's first son is born... Tolkien is awarded the rank of lieutenant.
In 1918, the First World War ends. John, Edith and their young son move to Oxford. “As a most capable linguist-philologist,” Tolkien is allowed to compile Universal Dictionary of the New English Language. Here is a review of this by a friend of the writer, the wonderful linguist Clive Stiles Lewis. “He (Tolkien) visited the inside of language. For he possessed unique ability to feel simultaneously the language of poetry and the poetry of language.”
In 1924, at the age of 32, Tolkien was promoted to the rank of professor. And in 1925 he was awarded the chair of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford.
At the same time, John Ronald continues to work on The Silmarillion, creating a new incredible world. A kind of other dimension. With its own history and geography. Phenomenal animals and plants. Real and unreal beings. By its placement in time.
At the same time, working on the “great dictionary”, Tolkien gets a unique opportunity to think about the composition and appearance of tens of thousands of words. Existing and existing in the native language, incorporating Celtic origins, Latin, Scandinavian, Old German and Old French influences
It is amazing that this mind-blowing work not only did not turn Tolkien into a “priest of sciences.” But contrary to all conventional ideas, it further stimulated the artist’s gift for reviving concepts, words and legends. Helped the true creator to unite the most diverse categories of living beings and different times and spaces into his Tolkienian world. A world that has received not only an incredibly visible expression, but has amazingly clearly connected the past with the present and the future, “with its prophecies, constant striving for good, multidimensionality and complexity of ideas about the interrelations of the most, at first glance, incompatible substances.”
Artist and scientist united in Tolkien, with a truly Leonardian uniqueness. Unlike many famous philologists, John Ronald never lost his “literary soul.” His scientific works are invariably imbued with the figurativeness of the writer's thinking. At the same time, like literary creations, one admires the strength of the foundation of scientific justification.
Speaking about Tolkien's amazing bouquet of talents, one cannot fail to mention his talent as a draftsman. John Ronald, with enviable consistency and enduring mischief, illustrated many of his fairy tales and inventions. Tolkien especially loved to depict humanized trees; each time he confirmed his enduring interest in the secrets of the forest giants. Tolkien the draftsman solved several scenes from The Silmarillion... A special place among the inventions of John Ronald is occupied by the letters of Father Frost, illustrated by him, to children... The letter was specially written in the “trembling” handwriting of Father Frost, “who had just escaped from a terrible snowstorm.” The snow-covered footprints on the carpet... of the barely disappeared Santa Claus captivate children's imagination and attract with their mystery.
Tolkien's most famous books are inextricably linked. Hobbit And Lord of the Rings were written, in total, from 1925 to 1949. That is, 24 years... It all started with a daily fairy tale for children by Professor Tolkien... “A hole was dug in the ground. And in this hole lived and there was a hobbit,” Tolkien wrote on clean slate paper... And before that, there were no hobbits in Tolkien’s mythological universe. But then he appeared and was born - this charming people (or rather, people), who came from nowhere in Middle-earth. Hobbits - “short people” - are cheerful and agile with a sweet tooth, inquisitive and plump. Subtly similar to children... The main character of the first Hobbit story, Bilbo Baggins, has the same opportunities for self-expression in a huge and complex world as a child discoverer. Bilbo constantly takes risks to escape from a waterfall of threatening adventures. He must be inventive and courageous all the time. Having conceived Bilbo Baggins this way, Tolkien, as if inadvertently, tells children about the limitlessness of their possibilities. And one more interesting circumstance. Hobbits are a free people. There are no leaders in The Hobbit. And Hobbits get along just fine without them. Reflecting on the design of Bilbo's character, Tolkien would say: "I have always been impressed by the fact that we all live and exist because of the indomitable courage shown by the smallest people in seemingly hopeless situations." And after the first, tremendous success of the book, he will add more. “I am very much a Hobbit myself. Besides growth, perhaps... I love gardens and trees. Good simple food. Patterned vests. I love mushrooms straight from the forest... I go to bed late. And, if possible, I get up late.”
But The Hobbit is just a prelude. A saying... A lure into an immeasurably great other world. The key to looking into other dimensions. And a warning. A serious reason for reflection... For the Ring of Power that Bilbo accidentally found, which gives him the ability to become invisible, he has to pay a cruel price... The action-packed tale repeatedly hints at a world of much more significant improbabilities lurking behind it. Two of the most mysterious characters are bridges to the immeasurable future Hobbit. Gray magician Gandalf. And a disgusting, elusive like mercury, creature named Gollum... But what is very important, the slippery monster Gollum, with all his disgustingness, evokes not only aching sympathy, but also an ever-growing interest... And behind the fantastic figure of the sorcerer Gandalf, The attractive light of another existence is already visible.
Hobbit published on September 21, 1937. The first edition sold out by Christmas.
The tale receives the New York Herald Tribune award as the best book of the year. Hobbit becomes a bestseller. And not only for children... But also for those thinking readers who saw in the book a prologue to penetration into other worlds.
Epic novel Lord of the Rings has become an elixir of vitality for tens of millions of people on planet Earth. A mind-blowing road into the unknown. Paradoxical proof that it is the thirst for knowledge of miracles that moves the worlds. Lord of the Rings grew and improved on phantasmagoric soil The Silmarillion. It is no coincidence that all the most incredible inhabitants of the epic novel do not raise even a second of doubt about their reality.
The authenticity of Tolkien’s world convinces precisely by the irresistibility of its necessity. In the stunning fantasies of Tolkien's world, all the most complex relationships between its inhabitants are extremely visible. Hobbits and orcs, people and elves, gnomes and goblins, wizards and fire monsters, monstrous insects and giant Listvins. Even the melting Eye of Evil is depicted with unusual specificity...
Nothing in Tolkien's novel is accidental. Be it the snarled faces that once flashed on the canvases of Bosch and Salvador Dali, or in the works of Hoffmann and Gogol... Everything here has a basis that is twenty times stronger... So the names of the elves came from the language of the former Celtic population of the Welsh peninsula. Dwarves and magicians are named as suggested by the Scandinavian sagas. People are awarded names from Irish heroic epics. Tolkien’s own imaginations of fantastic creatures have the basis of “folk poetic imagination.”
When the affair Lord of the Rings will already begin to bring Tolkien fame during his lifetime, the writer will jokingly say: “... in a sense, this story and all the mythology associated with it may turn out to be true.” And a little later he will add in earnest: “Every writer who creates a secondary world wants, to some extent, to be a real creator. And he hopes that he draws his ideas from reality... The world of his fantasies, perhaps, really helps to decorate and repeatedly enrich the real universe.”
The time of Tolkien's most active work on Lord of the Rings coincided with the Second World War. Undoubtedly, all the experiences and hopes, doubts and aspirations of the author at that time could not help but be reflected in the life of even his other existence. Why exactly in Lord of the Rings the hope for the victory of reason and light acquires such piercing irresistibility.
One of the main advantages of Tolkien's novel is the prophetic warning about mortal danger hidden in boundless Power. Power is multifaceted and insidious. Sizzling soul and body. Disastrous for all living, creative and constructive things. Irreversibly spreading hatred and death. Rapidly multiplying, breeding evil and violence.
Only the unity of the most courageous and wise champions of goodness and reason can resist this nightmare. Capable of stopping the gravediggers of the joy of being with an exorbitant feat.
The boundless Evil of terrible Power is personified in the novel by the almighty Black Lord Suaron and countless hordes of his subjects. Black ghosts, orcs and goblins. The sorcerer-demagogue Saruman. Fire monster Barlog. And many other destructive predators.
The first to take the blows of the forces of evil are the hobbits. Kids are “short”, freedom-loving and free. Accustomed to doing without leaders.
Brave Frodo is the nephew of the resilient Bilbo Baggins. And Frodo's faithful friend - Sam Scrombie... Of course, the best of the fierce opponents of the Power of Evil rush to the aid of the Hobbits... The great wizard and life-lover Gandalf reveals to Frodo a deadly plan to destroy the Ring of Power, which Frodo inherited from Uncle Bilbo. All the brightest inhabitants of Middle-earth enter the battle for life against the Black Lord Suaron... The beautiful queen of the elves Galadriel. Most Noble Aragorn. The king of Erland is a merry giant, guardian of the nature reserve, Tom Bombadil. Proud gnomes and ancient Listvens... The path to freedom turns out to be endlessly difficult and sacrificial... The stern knight Borimor dies from the Ring of Power. The bravest and wisest wizard Gandalf himself categorically refuses to keep the Ring of Power with him until it is destroyed... And only little Froda, the ordinary hobbit Frodo, with all his weaknesses and imperfections, carries the disastrous Ring of Power through all the incredible trials... With each new one Stepping deeper into the terrible Mardor - the kingdom of the Black Lord Suaron, the hobbit Frodo shows more and more courage and dedication.
First two volumes Lord of the Rings published in 1954. The third volume was published in 1955. “This book is like a bolt from the blue,” exclaimed the famous writer C.S. Lewis. - For the very history of the novel-story, going back to the times Odyssey“This is not a return, but progress, moreover, a revolution, the conquest of a new territory.”
The novel was translated into many languages of the world with amazing speed, and first sold a million copies, and today has surpassed the twenty million mark.
The book has become a cult favorite among students.
To this day, endless squads of Tolkienists, dressed in knightly armor, organize “games, tournaments and marches of honor and valor” in the USA, England, Canada, and New Zealand.
Time always passes through the young first. The most gifted and formed first respond to future events. It’s no wonder that the multidimensionality and wisdom of the author’s talent Lord of the Rings Young intellectuals were the first to appreciate it.
Tolkien's works first began to appear in Russia in the mid-seventies. Today the number of fans of the work of one of best writers 20th century in our country is not inferior to the number of adherents of Tolkien’s world in other countries. Especially among those who immediately feel the blood of the heart of the great poet of Middle-earth, between the lines of his books.
Now that they have appeared on world screens Fellowship of the Ring And Two strongholds, directed by Peter Jackson (magically filmed in New Zealand), a new, huge wave of interest in the novel arose among young and very young people Lord of the Rings.
The last tale that Tolkien wrote in 1965 is called Blacksmith of Greater Wootton.
In 1968, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and Edith Bratt celebrated their golden wedding.
And in 1971 Edith passed away. In their recent years Tolkien is surrounded by universal recognition and showered with long-deserved honors.
In June 1972, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien received his greatest gift - the title of Doctor of Literature from Oxford University. And in 1973, at Buckingham Palace, Queen Elizabeth herself awarded the writer and scientist the Order of the British Empire, second degree.
In 1977, the final, complete version was published The Silmarillion, published by the writer’s son, Christopher Tolkien. As Tolkien biographer Humphrey Carpenter said, “His real biography is Hobbit, Lord of the Rings And The Silmarillion, because the real truth he is contained in these books.”
Tolkien's books have no end. They are bottomless, like the greatest books of humanity... The deeper you go into them, the more you see, hear and feel their infinity. For they are in tune with the Universe.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (English John Ronald Reuel Tolkien; January 3, 1892, Bloemfontein, Orange Republic - September 2, 1973 Bournemouth, England) - English writer, poet, philologist, professor at Oxford University. He is best known as the author of classic high fantasy works: The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.
Tolkien served as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. Oxford University (1925-1945), Merton's English Language and Literature at Merton College (English) Russian. Oxford University (1945-1959). Together with his close friend C.S. Lewis, he was a member of the informal literary society “Inklings”. On 28 March 1972 he received the title of Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) from Queen Elizabeth II.
After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher produced several works based on his father's extensive corpus of notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. This book, along with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, forms a single collection of tales, poems, histories, artificial languages and literary essays about the fictional world called Arda and its part of Middle-earth. From 1951 to 1955, Tolkien used the word "legendarium" to refer to most of this collection. Many authors wrote fantasy works before Tolkien, but due to his great popularity and strong influence on the genre, many call Tolkien the "father" of modern fantasy literature, meaning mainly "high fantasy".
In 2008, the British newspaper The Times ranked him sixth on its list of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945". In 2009, the American magazine Forbes named him the fifth highest-earning deceased celebrity.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
The Wizard of Oxford
Nowadays it is difficult to find a person who is not familiar with Tolkien’s books - or at least with the films made based on them. The army of Tolkien fans, formed half a century ago, is only growing every year. His few books have long occupied the top positions in the world bestseller lists, and the number of monographs and studies devoted to both the work and the biography of Tolkien himself has already been several times greater than the number of his own works - and new ones appear every year. Meanwhile, Tolkien himself once said: “The study of the biography of an author is the most empty and wrong way to knowledge of his works. Only a guardian angel or the Lord Himself could show us the true connection between the facts of personal life and the works of the writer.” But this does not stop or hinder anyone: every biographer tries to find a correspondence for the most insignificant fact of his life in his books, and for every plot twist in a novel an analogy in the author’s real life. What makes millions of people around the world not only read his books - but believe in them, get used to them, and even move into the world created and described by Tolkien? What makes them not only study this world, its history and language, but also describe in equal detail - day after day, line by line - the biography of its author?
His books contain magic and magic, the magic of actions and the magic of words. There are secrets, poetry, exploits and adventures. There was nothing of the kind in his long life, except for a few books that were the result of it. And yet they find adventures, exploits, and mystery in it.
According to family legend, the surname "Tolkien" comes from the German tollkuhn, – which means “recklessly, foolishly brave.” This nickname was given to the writer’s ancestor, Georg von Hohenzollern (who supposedly belonged to a junior branch of the famous imperial house), who fought under the banners of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria during the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1529: in a fit of desperate courage, Georg single-handedly made his way into the enemy camp and captured the banner Turkish Sultan. However, German researchers trace the writer’s surname to a more prosaic root, namely, to the name of the village Tolkynen in East Prussia. Be that as it may, back in the middle of the 18th century, the Tolkiens moved from their native Saxony to England. The writer's grandfather, John Benjamin Tolkien, was a piano tuner, music teacher and owner
sales companies musical instruments- however, he did not succeed in commerce and went bankrupt in 1877. The eldest son of John Benjamin and his second wife Mary Jane Stough, Arthur Ruel, did not follow in his father's footsteps and preferred banking to trading and music. He became a good bank clerk - and in 1891 he received a promotion: the position of manager of the African Bank branch in Bloemfontein, the capital of the Orange Republic (now the province of the Free Orange State, part of South Africa). The need to travel to the other side of the world paid off with a good salary and the opportunity to quickly career growth, unattainable at that time in the metropolis. A year later, his bride, Mabel Suffield, arrived and the young people got married in Cape Town Cathedral
April 16, 1891. Mabel was 21 years old, her husband was thirty-four. Exactly nine months later, on January 3, 1892, the Tolkiens' first child was born, christened John Ronald Ruel. Two years later, on February 17, 1894, Mabel gave birth to her second son, Hilary Arthur Ruel. The last name became traditional for this branch of the family: both the writer himself and all his children gave their sons - among others - the name Ruel, once borrowed by Benjamin from the Bible.
The future writer has very few memories of life in Africa, and even those are more likely known to him from his mother’s stories: once a black servant, who thought little John Ronald (that was the boy’s name in the family) was very handsome, dragged him out of the house for the whole day to show off to his relatives, and another time the baby was bitten by a tarantula - he was saved by a black nanny who sucked out the poison. From this case, many researchers draw significant conclusions, considering the tarantula to be a prototype of arachnid horrors in Tolkien’s books, for example, the monster Ungoliant and her offspring Shelob, although Tolkien himself was very sarcastic about such conclusions. It is known that he never suffered from arachnophobia and generally denied that he remembered that day. Doctor Thornton Quinby, who treated the boy, is considered one of the prototypes of Gandalf the Gray.
Arthur Ruel and Mabel Tolkien with their young son and servants, Bloemfontein, 1892
Over time, it became clear that the hot African sun and the rotten climate of Bloemfontein were not having the best effect on the health of the younger Tolkiens, and it was decided that Mabel and her sons would go to England, and Arthur would join them as soon as he put his affairs in order. In 1895, Mrs. Tolkien and her children arrived home and settled with Mabel’s parents in the village of King Heath near Birmingham. Little John Ronald was forever shocked by England, its grass and trees, fields and forests: he had never seen so much greenery before. When snow fell on Christmas and the tree was decorated, his delight knew no bounds - after all, eucalyptus was decorated in Bloemfontein, and snow only appeared in English newspapers. Traces of a child's admiration for nature will be noticeable in all his books.
Arthur sent letters where he wrote how he missed his family, how he was looking forward to meeting... And then someone else’s letter arrived: On February 15, Arthur Tolkien died of rheumatic fever.
Mabel was left alone with two children in her arms, and she could only hope for help from her relatives. She came from a respectable patriarchal English family that had lived in Middle England for centuries. The Suffields had been trading for generations; Mabel's parents, John Suffield and Emily Jane Sparrow, had a house and shop in the center of Birmingham. They were real Englishmen - leisurely, rooted to the ground, practical, full of common sense and self-respect. “Tolkien by name, I am, nevertheless, a Suffield by tastes, abilities and upbringing,” Tolkien later stated.
From her parents' house in Birmingham, Mabel soon moved to the nearby village of Sayre Hole, where she was able to rent cheap housing for the occasion. The money her husband left her was barely enough to live on. Her only joy was her children, and her main consolation was religion. Over time, she - under the influence of her sister May - began to lean towards Catholicism and in 1900 officially changed her faith, making her sons devout Catholics. This act sharply alienated her from her relatives: Catholics, “despicable papists,” were traditionally treated with great prejudice in England - the reason for this was more than one century of religious wars, persecution and mass repression. Neither Tolkien - adherents Church of England, nor the Suffield Baptists wanted anything more to do with the apostate.
But Mabel did not give up and did not despair. She decided to give her children a good education at all costs: at that time it included languages and other humanities, and Mabel, who played the piano and painted beautifully, knew Latin, German and French, taught her sons herself. She instilled in the children a love of botany: John Ronald not only painted trees and landscapes beautifully, but also knew all the surrounding plants by name. He retained his love and special affection for trees throughout his life.
As a child, John Ronald read a lot: he loved “Alice in Wonderland” and the collection of fairy tales by Andrew Lang, books by the founder of English fantasy George MacDonald and books about Indians (but he did not like the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm and “Treasure Island”). He and his brother explored all the surrounding areas of Sayrehole: there was a forest and a lake, the Cole River and an old mill, and everywhere adventures awaited them, knights and giants, princesses and dragons. “I was so eager to meet dragons,” he recalled many years later. – Naturally, being small and not very strong, I would not want to meet them on the outskirts. But still, the world where they were, even such terrible ones as Fafnir, seemed to me much richer and more beautiful. And to get there, I wouldn’t mind the price.” It is not surprising that even as a child the boy composed his own fairy tale, and, of course, it was about dragons. “I completely forgot it, except for one philological detail. My mother didn’t say anything about the dragon, but she noted that you shouldn’t say “big green dragon,” you should say “big green dragon.” I didn’t understand why then and I still don’t understand. The fact that I remembered exactly this is perhaps important: after that I did not try to write fairy tales for many years, but I was completely absorbed in the language.”
The boy really turned out to have an amazing talent for languages: he absorbed Latin like a sponge, and in ancient Greek he far surpassed his mother. It became clear that he had to be sent to a good school at all costs. Fortunately, one of the relatives agreed to pay for the tuition, and John Ronald entered the best King Edward School in Birmingham. True, for this I had to leave the Sairhole, which I had loved so much for four years. “Only four years,” the writer recalled, “but they still seem to me to be the longest and have influenced my entire life.”
At school it turned out that young Tolkien really had an extraordinary linguistic talent. He excelled in Latin and Greek, and, thanks to his English literature teacher, who enthusiastically recited Chaucer to the children in the original, he became interested in medieval English, and then Old English, and within a few months he was fluent in reading Beowulf and the romance of chivalry in the original. "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." The same teacher gave Tolkien a textbook of Anglo-Saxon. One of the students on occasion sold a Gothic textbook. Mysterious inscriptions on railway carriages heading to Wells aroused Tolkien's interest in Welsh, and his childhood admiration for the dragon Fafnir in sagas in Old Norse. Moreover, this was not just the study of grammars - Tolkien could calmly speak in them, write and even argue: once at a school debate, playing the role of an envoy of the barbarians, Tolkien considered traditional Latin unsuitable for a barbarian and spoke in Gothic.
John Ronald Tolkien with his brother Hilary, 1905
But this was not enough for Tolkien, and he began to construct his own languages, invent alphabets and grammars. He invented the first such language together with his cousins: it was called “animal,” and each of its words corresponded to the name of an animal or bird. Then there was “nevbosh”, which consisted of mangled English, French and Latin words. There was also a “Naffar” language based on Spanish, and a language based on Gothic, and many others, many of them so developed that Tolkien even wrote poetry in them. All his life he believed that his passion for inventing languages was a common thing, akin to a child’s writing poetry: “ Huge number children have what you call a creative streak: this is usually encouraged and not necessarily limited to anything specific: they may not want to do painting or drawing or music to a large extent, but, nevertheless, they want to create in some way. And since the bulk of education is linguistic, then creativity takes on a linguistic form. This is not at all an out of the ordinary event.”…
At school, John Ronald, contrary to expectations, was happy; he did well in all subjects and was even a member of the school rugby team. However, again his happiness was short-lived: at the very beginning of 1904, Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed with diabetes - and six months later, on November 14, she died in the hospital. No cure for diabetes was known at that time, but Tolkien was convinced all his life that his mother was killed by relatives who had turned their backs on her. religious reasons, and considered her almost a saint, who suffered for her faith. “My dear mother was truly a martyr - not everyone the Lord gives such an easy path to his great gifts as Hilary and me - he gave us a mother who killed herself with work and worries in order to strengthen us in the faith,” he will write at nine years old later. Tolkien would be faithful to Catholicism, which he inherited from his mother, all his life. “For Tolkien, Catholicism was one of the two most important components of his intellectual life,” his official biographer John Carpenter would once write.
In her will, Mabel entrusted her sons to the parish priest Francis Xavier Morgan, an extraordinary man with a beautiful soul, strong will and kind heart, in whose veins English, Welsh and Spanish blood were mixed. She could not have made a better choice: Father Francis truly loved the boys and did everything in his power so that they would not need anything. He also instilled in John Ronald an interest in philology: in his house there were many books, from theological works to entertaining novels, and the boy read them avidly, finally - as he later said - feeling the connection between language and text.
Thanks to Father Morgan, perhaps the most important meeting in Tolkien’s life took place. In 1908, Father Francis took the boys from their aunt's house, where they had lived after their mother's death, and moved them to Mrs. Faulkner's boarding house. On the floor below lived Edith Mary Bratt, a young gray-eyed and dark-haired beauty who dreamed of becoming a concert pianist and therefore rehearsed all day long. At first, John Ronald fell in love with music, then he dared to meet the performer. He and Edith quickly became friends: they walked for hours through the surrounding fields, and then sat on the balcony of a local teahouse, shooting sugar cubes at passers-by. They had a lot in common - both orphans (Edith's mother died a year ago, she never knew her father), both needed love and care, and it is not surprising that they soon discovered that they were in love with each other. Even the difference in age did not stop them: at that moment John Ronald was sixteen, and Edith was nineteen.
Edith Bratt, 1907
Tolkien devoted all his free time to Edith, and his studies began to noticeably falter. When, in the fall of 1908, Father Morgan was informed what his pupil was doing instead of studying, he was very angry: Tolkien had a wonderful future ahead of him, he definitely needed to study in order to pass the Oxford exams brilliantly and receive a scholarship to pay for the boy’s education at the university with Morgan, to Unfortunately, there was no money, and the scholarship was the only chance for John Ronald to get a higher education. Novels and early marriage will only ruin his career, Father Morgan convinces his student, and it turns out he’s right: Tolkien successfully failed the entrance exams. More precisely, he passed them, and quite well, but this was not enough to receive a scholarship. Then Father Morgan moved the boys from Mrs. Faulkner's boarding house and forbade Tolkien from seeing Edith until he came of age, that is, twenty-one: he could neither meet with her nor correspond with her. This condition, reminiscent of knightly vows, John Ronald fulfilled with honor.
Having lost Edith’s company, Tolkien creates a new one for himself: he and three of his school friends organize a “semi-secret” club of the ChKBO - “Tea Club and Barrovian Society”, which owes its name to the club members’ addiction to drinking tea in the school library and the Barrow store located next to the school. Tolkien, either jokingly or seriously, argued that when members of a club got together, their intelligence increased. The boys talked, dreamed, read to each other their first literary experiments and hoped to conquer the world. As one of the members of the PCBO, Jeffrey Beich Smith, wrote, the members of the society considered themselves “to have received the gift of a spark of flame - as a community, undoubtedly, and perhaps as individuals - which was destined to kindle a new light in the world, or, what amounts to the same thing , rekindle the old light; The ChKBO was destined to serve as a witness to God and Truth.” The friendship of the four Barrowwists continued after school.
In the summer of 1911, Tolkien and twelve friends traveled through Switzerland, traveling from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen. Later, in one of his letters, he admitted that it was this journey that served as the prototype for the journey of Bilbo Baggins and the twelve dwarves through the Misty Mountains. According to biographers, Tolkien also brought from Switzerland a postcard depicting a painting by Joseph Madelener entitled “The Mountain Spirit”: a gray-bearded old man, in a wide-brimmed hat and a long cloak, sat on a stone under a pine tree and fed a white deer from his hand. He kept this card for many years and eventually wrote on the envelope: “The Origin of Gandalf.” True, recent research has established that Madelener painted this picture no earlier than the twenties, and how it got to Tolkien is unknown.
Also in 1911, Tolkien finally entered Exeter College, Oxford, in the classics department. In college, life went on as before: meetings of the ChKBO (all its members ended up in Oxford), rugby classes, poetry and, of course, studying languages. Reading “Kalevala” in translation prompted him to study the Finnish language, and it charmed him with its beauty and melodiousness, and the epic itself made such an impression on him that he began to dream of one day creating a similar mythology for England.
Meanwhile, on January 3, 1913, he turned twenty-one. As soon as the clock struck midnight, he wrote to Edith and asked her to marry him. Perhaps, if Father Morgan had not separated them, first love, as often happens, would have quietly died away on its own, but the ban only served to strengthen Tolkien’s feelings. “Perhaps nothing else could have strengthened my will so much that this romance became for me the love of my life (even if this love was completely sincere from the very beginning),” Tolkien later wrote.
Edith replied that she was already engaged and was soon going to marry the brother of her school friend - after all, she was sure that John Ronald had long forgotten her. A week later, Tolkien rushed to see her in Cheltenham, where she was then living, and after a long conversation, Edith agreed to become his wife. The next day she returned the ring to the groom and announced her engagement to Tolkien.
Tolkien, meanwhile, passed his first bachelor's exams: it turned out that his success in classical philology was very good, but in comparative philology he was simply brilliant. On the recommendation of his teachers, Tolkien transferred to the English department, where he could fully devote himself to ancient Germanic languages and ancient texts. In the Anglo-Saxon poem “Christ” by Cynewulf, Tolkien came across a mysterious phrase: “Hail to you, Eärendel, brightest of angels, sent over Middle-earth to people.” “I was struck by the exceptional beauty of this word (or name),” he later wrote, “quite consistent with the usual style of the Anglo-Saxon language - but euphonious to an extraordinary degree in this pleasant to the ear, but not “delightful” language”... Many years later, the same The passage will serve as an impetus for immersion in ancient languages for the hero of his unfinished novel The Lost Way: “I felt a strange thrill, as if something was stirring within me, awakening from a dream. It was something distant, alien and beautiful, it was far beyond the words that I tried to comprehend, further than Old English.
At the beginning of 1914, Edith, at the insistence of her fiancé, converted to Catholicism. This decision cost her dearly: the landlord, a respectable Protestant, kicked the newly converted Catholic out onto the street, and her family and friends quarreled with her. Nevertheless, she was happy, looking forward to her wedding with her beloved. In the summer of 1914, he and John Ronald visited the Cornish coast: Tolkien, who saw the sea for the first time at a conscious age, was shocked to the depths of his soul - the motif of the sea, love and longing for it forever entered his work. That same summer, he would write the poem “The Journey of Eärendel the Evening Star,” where the echoes of ancient myths and the sound of the sea merged: the poem described the journey of a sailor who became a star. It is believed that "Eärendel's Voyage" was the first step on Tolkien's own journey to Middle-earth.
When the First World War began, Tolkien, contrary to the prevailing sentiment among young people, was not eager to go to the front: first he decided to graduate from Oxford. At the end of 1914, John Ronald met his friends from the ChKBO: “This meeting helped me find a voice to express everything that was looking for an outlet. I always attributed this to the inspiration that even a few hours spent together inspired in us,” he recalled. Tolkien is increasingly composing poetry, and increasingly in the “elvish” language of Quenya, which he invented, based on Latin, ancient Greek and Finnish. Tolkien created this language, with a rather complex grammar and its own runic alphabet, for reasons of beauty of sound and the logic of linguistic constructions.
At the final exams in 1915, he received the highest scores and first prize, and only after that he volunteered for the Lancashire Fusiliers, where he received the rank of sub-lieutenant. For several months the regiment was transferred across Staffordshire from camp to camp, and all this time Tolkien continued his studies in science, artificial languages and poetry. Over time, Tolkien realized that the existence of a language without those who spoke it was impossible - so a new impetus was given to the creation of Middle-earth: the most beautiful of the languages he created, Quenya, Tolkien gave to the elves living in the beautiful country of Valinor, where, in the end, In the end, Earendil ended up - Tolkien changed the name in accordance with the rules of the Elvish language he developed.
Finally it became known that the riflemen would soon be sent to France. In anticipation of an imminent separation - perhaps forever - John Ronald Reuel Tolkien married Edith Mary Bratt on March 22, 1916 at the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary in Warwick. Honeymoon The young couple spent a week in the seaside town of Clevedon. Already on June 4, Tolkien left his beloved wife and went to the front.
The regiment where Tolkien fought fought very successfully and took a worthy part in the famous Battle of the Somme - one of the largest operations of the First World War. And then, after sitting in the trenches and fruitlessly waiting for who knows what, he was struck down by “trench fever” - a type of typhus that was very common in unsanitary military conditions. In early November 1916, he was put on a ship bound for England, and Sub-Lieutenant Tolkien spent the days until Christmas in a hospital in Birmingham, and the Christmas holidays with Edith in Staffordshire.
For the entire next year, Tolkien either lay in the hospital (the disease gave constant relapses), or served in various camps in England, which, in the end, allowed him to receive the rank of lieutenant. Toiling from idleness, he began to learn new languages and bring his fantasies about the beautiful Valinor and the people inhabiting it into a more or less orderly form. For the nascent cycle, Tolkien chose the title “The Book of Lost Tales”: here many themes appear that were later embodied in “The Silmarillion” - the story of Turin, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, the wars with Morgoth...
Tolkien during his military service, 1916
On November 16, 1917, his and Edith’s first child was born, named John Francis Reuel Tolkien. At that time, Tolkien was serving in another camp in the town of Hull, and Edith settled next to him. In their free time, they walked for hours through the surrounding forests, overgrown with hemlocks, and Edith danced in the grove among the flowers. Thus was born the most beautiful tale of The Silmarillion - about how the mortal Veren fell in love with the elven maiden Lúthien Tinúviel, who danced among the hemlock thickets. Luthien and all the beauties from Tolkien’s books had a single prototype - his beloved Edith, whom he described as follows: “Her hair was black, her skin was fair, her eyes were clear, and she could sing and dance.”
In November 1918, a peace treaty was signed and the war ended for England. But for Tolkien, the victory was not as unconditionally wonderful as propaganda liked to say. Two of his best friends, members of the ChKBO, died in 1916. In the last letter, one of them wrote to Tolkien: “My main consolation is that if I get caught tonight, in a few minutes I will have to go to position, there will still be at least one member of the great ChKBO left in the world who will put into words everything about what I dreamed of and what we all agreed on... God bless you, my dear John Ronald! What I was trying to say, may I be able to tell you much later, when I am no longer there, if such is my fate...” Tolkien felt his “chosenness,” which he understood as the need to carry on to one person everything that was intended for many. all my life. And forever victories and happy endings in his books are overshadowed by sadness for what was lost, the feeling of the impossibility of returning to the past, grief for beauty and joy that has disappeared forever.
Tolkien petitioned to be allowed to return to Oxford "for the purpose of completing his education." He soon received the position of assistant lexicographer in the editorial office of the New English Dictionary (later called the Oxford Dictionary): Tolkien was responsible for words starting with the letter w. Work on the dictionary required a lot of time, but Tolkien did not stop working on the Book of Lost Tales and even read one of them - The Fall of Gondolin - in the student Essay Club of Exeter College. According to recollections, the usually demanding audience received him unexpectedly well.
In the summer of 1920, Tolkien applied for an open vacancy as a reader (roughly an assistant professor) of English at the University of Leeds, and, to his own surprise, was accepted. It was in Leeds that the second son, Michael Hilary Ruel, was born on October 22, 1920, and the third, Christopher John Ruel, on November 21, 1924. Tolkien loved his sons very much, telling them bedtime stories - many of them would later develop into full-fledged literary stories - and at Christmas he wrote letters with pictures on behalf of Father Frost. Every year these letters became larger and more interesting; new characters appeared there - Grandfather's assistant Polar Bear, gardener Snowman, elf secretary Ilberet and many others. In 1976, the messages were collected and published under the title “Letters from Santa Claus.”
In his new place, Tolkien plunged headlong into scientific work. In 1922, he published a Dictionary of Medieval English, and then, together with Eric Valentine Gordon, who had moved to Leeds from Oxford, he prepared a new edition of the translation of the Old English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. At the same time, he translated an allegorical medieval poem, presumably by the same author, “The Pearl,” written in alliterative verse, and the poem “Sir Orfeo,” a bizarre mixture of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus with Celtic folklore. Together with Gordon, who became Tolkien's close friend, they founded the student "Viking Club", which met to read sagas, drink beer and sing comic songs in Gothic, Anglo-Saxon or Old Icelandic, set to famous English tunes: in 1936, many of them were collected and published - without the permission of Tolkien or Gordon - under the title "Songs for Philologists". True, most of the already small circulation burned - only a dozen and a half copies survived.
He did not forget about Arda, as the world he invented began to be called, and about its languages: to Quenya, “Elvish Latin,” was added Sindarin, created on the model of Welsh, which the elves of Beleriand will speak; Adunaic is the language of Numenor, to the fate of which Tolkien devoted two unfinished novels, and several more, worked out in less detail. He later wrote: “For me, language and names are inseparable from the plot, and my stories are just a background through which I can embody my linguistic preferences.” Tolkien dreamed of making the emerging “Cycle of Arda” – no more nor less – a mythology for England, providing a replacement for those myths and tales that were not written or were lost due to the invasion of the Normans. “I decided to create a cycle of more or less interconnected legends - from legends of a global, cosmogonic scale to romantic fairy tale; so that the more significant are based on the lesser ones in contact with the earth, and the lesser ones acquire splendor against such a majestic background; a cycle that I could dedicate simply to my country, England. It must have the desired atmosphere and quality, something cold and clear that breathes "air" (by the soil and climate of the North-West I mean Britain and the regions of Europe closest to it, not Italy and Greece, and certainly not East), and at the same time it must have (if only I could achieve it) that magical, elusive beauty that some call Celtic (although in original works ancient Celts it is rare); these legends must be “high,” purified from everything coarse and obscene, and correspond to the more mature minds of the earth, imbued with poetry from ancient times. I would present some legends in full, in detail, but many I would outline only schematically. The cycles must be united into some majestic whole - and, however, leave room for other minds and hands, for which the tools are paint, music, drama. Arda, composed by Tolkien, is not another planet and not parallel reality, this is our world, only incredibly long ago: in those times, the memory of which lives only in ancient legends and the depths of memory. “Middle-earth is an objectively real World... The theater of action of my legends is the land on which we live now, although the historical period is imaginary,” the writer explained many years later.
In 1924, Tolkien reached the next level in his career, becoming the youngest professor of English in the history of Leeds. However, his soul yearned for Oxford: and when the chair of professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Pembroke College, Oxford, became vacant in 1925, he applied without hesitation. He was accepted, and the Tolkiens returned to Oxford. There, on June 18, 1929, Edith gave birth to her last child, daughter Priscilla Mary Ann Ruel.
At Oxford, Tolkien continued to participate in clubs. At first these were “Coal Eaters”, created for reading and studying Icelandic and Norwegian sagas. One of the members of the club was a teacher from Magdalen College, Clive Staples Lewis, who became Tolkien's closest friend. When the Coal Eaters naturally ceased to exist, having read all the sagas, Lewis founded the Inklings club, whose name included the word ink- ink, and inkling - allusion, and the meaning is “descendants of ink.” Members of the society included Major Warren Lewis (brother of C. S. Lewis), physician R. E. Hayward, Hugo Dyson and Lewis's friend Owen Barfield, and the later writer Charles Williams. Almost all of the club's "Inklings" had nicknames: Tolkien's name was Tollers. Club members met on Tuesdays in the Eagle and Child pub and on Thursdays in Lewis's drawing room. New manuscripts were read and discussed, ideas were hatched. It was at a meeting of this club that Tolkien first read his famous “The Hobbit” in 1936.
According to legend, hobbits arose by chance on the eve of 1930, when Professor Tolkien was checking tests. One of them had a blank page - and Tolkien, without thinking twice, took it and wrote on it “In a hole under the mountain there lived a hobbit.” No one knew who hobbits were at that time: later researchers derived this word from hob - Old English magical creature, prankster and mischief-maker, and rabbit rabbit. However, Tolkien himself once said that the only word that influenced him was the word hole - hole, hole.
John Ronald, Edith and children.
The professor remembered the hobbit. After some time, he, as usual, telling his children bedtime stories, composed a story about a hobbit, to whom twelve dwarves came to visit uninvited. Hobbits got their shaggy legs and silent gait from traditional fairy tales, and from the images of the “comical bourgeois” from English novels - their earthiness, limited outlook, conservatism and common sense. Around 1936, Tolkien wrote down the story of the hobbit Bilbo, but did not know what to do with it next. As often happens, chance intervened: one of the professor’s students was able to read the manuscript and was so inspired that she brought it to the publishing house Allen & Unwin, where she worked part-time. Director Stanley Unwin, who believed that children's books should be judged by children, gave The Hobbit to his eleven-year-old son Reiner, whose review was illiterate but favorable: "It is good and should appeal to all children aged five to nine."
In 1937, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again was published. The success was unexpectedly huge, and a second printing was immediately launched. The next year the book was published in America, where it was even more successful, and the newspaper Gerald Tribune called The Hobbit "the best children's book of the season." The main characters - the simple and roguish hobbit Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf, the brave dwarves and noble elves - were loved by readers on both sides of the ocean. Tolkien received enthusiastic letters from readers and requests for a continuation. “Dear Mr. Tolkien,” twelve-year-old boy John Barrow wrote to the professor, “I have just read your book The Hobbit for the eleventh time and I want to tell you what I think about it. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything more wonderful... If you have written any other books, would you please tell me what they are called?” The publishers also hinted at a sequel, and first asked if Tolkien had other similar things. He, without hesitation, brought them “The Silmarillion” and letters from Santa Claus, but both of these manuscripts were rejected - readers, they say, are thirsty for books about hobbits, period. After quite a lot of persuasion, Tolkien agreed to write The New Hobbit, but it took seventeen long years.
At first, Tolkien honestly tried to write a fairy tale about the hobbits, who became dear and beloved to him. The writer himself did not hide the fact that in a sense he wrote them from himself: “I am actually a hobbit, a hobbit in everything except height. I love gardens, trees and non-mechanized farms; I smoke a pipe and prefer good, simple food (not from the freezer!), and I can’t stomach French delights; I love and even dare to wear patterned vests in our sad times. I love mushrooms (straight from the forest); My humor is simple-minded, and even the most well-meaning critics find it tiresome; I go to bed late and get up late (if possible). I don’t travel often either.” However, gradually the sequel grew into something much more, absorbing echoes of The Silmarillion, the characters of The Lost Tales and the philosophy of Tolkien himself.
It seemed that Tolkien's life at Oxford was surprisingly calm and quiet. He was considered a good lecturer, able to talk about even such boring things as dead languages as if they were magic stories. Club meetings, meetings with friends, walks in picturesque surroundings, raising children, rare scientific publications– one of the pinnacles of his scientific work was the lecture “Beowulf: Monsters and Critics,” which was later published as a separate publication and forever changed the way researchers view this famous poem. The memoirs describe his office: shelves with dictionaries and linguistic works, on the wall - a map of Middle-earth, a large wastepaper basket, pencil stubs, two typewriters, an inkwell, pipes and tobacco... Year after year slowly passed, the children grew up - John decided to become a priest and went to study in Rome, Michael was thinking about a teaching career, Christopher about a literary one. The New Hobbit, which gradually grew into the saga called The Lord of the Rings, was written very slowly; He either didn’t get around to it, or Tolkien rewrote entire chapters, changing the course of the history of the world he had invented. The Second World War, which shook the whole world, also delayed the writing of the novel: the professor was more worried about his sons, Michael and Christopher, who fought, than about the Guardians who stopped halfway. Later, he was repeatedly asked whether the Second World War influenced his work, and whether “Lord” was an allegorical description of its events. Tolkien explained: “It is neither an allegory nor a reflection of modern events... I sincerely do not like allegory in all its forms and never have. I prefer history, real or invented, with its varied reflections in the thoughts and feelings of readers.” Tolkien himself said that if his readers certainly want to compare the feeling of the horrors of war described in The Lord with recent historical events, then such a connection is more likely to arise with the First World War than with the Second. In one of his reviews, C.S. Lewis wrote that in Tolkien’s depiction of “the war has a lot of characteristic features of the war that my generation knew,” the writer himself said in one of his letters that “the dead marshes and approaches to the Morannon are partly due to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme." However, the most important thing he learned after the First World War was that all wars are alike, and they are all terrible, whether they are fought on the fields of Europe, in the valleys of Middle-earth or in human souls. It was not for nothing that he had an equally negative attitude towards all the warring politicians - Hitler and Stalin, Franco (excusing him, however, for one thing: the Republicans killed monks and burned monasteries, while Franco defended the Catholic faith) and even the British prime ministers, who made unforgivably many mistakes in thirties and forties. This point of view did not add to his popularity among ordinary Englishmen, but in Oxford, where in the early twenties they decided to consider any war an evil, he was not alone.
Another stumbling block was Tolkien's Catholicism, the basis of his worldview. The fact that his best friend, Clive Lewis, did not believe in God caused him a lot of suffering, and Tolkien made every effort to convert Lewis to Christianity. At first he managed to persuade Lewis to deism - belief in God without belief in the church. Finally, after one long conversation, Lewis wrote in his diary: “I have just passed from faith in God to conscious faith in Christ - in Christianity. A long night conversation with Dyson and Tolkien pushed me towards this.” However, Lewis, contrary to Tolkien's expectations, joined not the Catholic, but the Anglican religion. Very soon he became, thanks to lectures and radio appearances, a fairly well-known preacher. However, Tolkien did not approve of this, disapprovingly calling Lewis “a theologian for everyone.” However, they were close friends: when in the late thirties Lewis began to write the later famous “Space Trilogy” (the first novel “Beyond the Silent Planet” was published in 1939), Tolkien did a lot so that Lewis could finish and publish his novel – not without his patronage, “Planet” was accepted for publication by the publishing house Bodley Head - after being rejected by the other two.
By the end of the war, the text of The Lord of the Rings was almost completed, many of its parts were read at meetings of the Inklings. Lewis criticized the novel (he especially did not like the poetic inserts), but everywhere he gave the most enthusiastic reviews of it. Tolkien later wrote: “I am deeply indebted to him, and not at all because of any “influence”, as is usually understood; but because of the powerful support he gave me. For a long time he was my audience. He alone convinced me that my writing could be something more than an ordinary hobby.”
In 1949, Tolkien published a collection of fairy tales, Farmer Giles of Ham - the title tale is an elegant parody of a chivalric romance; however, the book is not particularly successful. Finally, Tolkien pulls himself together and finishes The Lord of the Rings. Some more time is spent on proofreading, drawing up maps and applications. Finally Tolkien offers the manuscript to the publisher Collins: his previous publishers Allen & Unwin do not want to publish The Lord together with The Silmarillion, as Tolkien intended, and in Collins they seem to agree. However, then they also refuse, rightly believing that a thousand-page novel, coupled with an equally thick book of obscure legends, will not arouse reader interest. And Tolkien places the "Lord" in Allen & Unwin.
The publishing house's directors also believe that the novel will not be able to sell; but they like it so much that it was decided to publish at least part of it: if they don’t buy it, they can stop there. “The Lord” was divided into three parts, each was given a name, and in 1954 the first part of the famous novel called “The Fellowship of the Ring” was published. Reviews were mixed: from enthusiasm to complete rejection. Reviewers wrote: "For a novel... it's a phenomenally expensive book, and I guess I should take it seriously, but I can't find any really good reason for it" (anonymous reviewer); “I have not read anything in recent years that would give me such joy” (poet Winston Hugh Auden); “The heroes of The Lord of the Rings, the hobbits, are just boys, the adult heroes are fifth-graders at best, and... none of them know anything about women except from hearsay!” (critic Edwin Muir). The second and third volumes were published nine months apart - they sold so well that Tolkien even regretted not retiring. His army of fans grew with each new volume. The novel was broadcast on BBC Channel 3; All over the country, readers opened discussion clubs where they discussed the novel and its characters. “Tolkien’s books were read by children and academics, hippies and housewives,” writes English researcher D. Ryan. In 1965, a “pirated” paperback edition was published in the United States - not only were thousands of readers able to buy the book cheaply, but the lawsuit surrounding it gave the novel good publicity. “The Lord of the Rings” fit so well into the nonconformist culture of the then American youth that it immediately became one of the cult books. The first living elves, trolls and gnomes appeared on the streets, and “Frodo lives” and “Gandalf for president” were written on the walls. Tolkien mania began, which has not stopped to this day.
Disputes between literary scholars are still ongoing, trying to explore the phenomenon of Tolkien and the mystery of his novel, his ideas and plot moves. Even its genre is interpreted by everyone in their own way - a modern epic, a fantasy novel, a linguistic saga... However, everyone agrees on one thing: this is truly a great work, and it is better to read it once than ten volumes about it. Professor Tolkien himself, when asked what his book was about, answered: “The true theme of the novel is Death and Immortality; the mystery of love for the world, possessing the hearts of a race doomed to leave it and supposedly lose it; melancholy, possessing the hearts of a race “doomed” not to leave the world until… its history is completed.”
The writer himself was initially flattered by the public's attention: in a letter he admitted that, “like all dragons, he is partial to flattery.” He personally answered all letters and calls, and eagerly talked with visiting fans. In addition, he finally became rich and could live without thinking about tomorrow. However, he, a deeply religious man, was very upset by the fact that people preferred his book to the Bible, and his world to Christ. In addition, over time, fans increasingly annoyed the elderly professor: they came to gawk at him, sitting for hours on the side of the road in front of his gate or unceremoniously breaking into the house. The Americans, regardless of the time difference, called him in the middle of the English night, calling him in the familiar American manner J.R.R.T., to chat in Quenya or find out how the matter with the Ring ended.
They say that one day a visitor came to him and brought several old reproductions: the landscapes on them coincided with amazing accuracy with some of the descriptions in “The Lord.” Tolkien assured that he was seeing these paintings for the first time. Then the visitor, according to Tolkien, “... fell silent and... looked at me for a long time until he suddenly said: “Well, you are certainly not so naive as to believe that you yourself wrote this book?” And the writer replied: “I once sinned with such thoughts, but now I don’t think so anymore.” It was only partly a joke.
Professor with his favorite pipe.
In the end, Tolkien had to change his phone number, and even his address: he finally retired, and in 1968 he and Edith moved to the small resort town of Bournemouth. Here, in November 1971, Edith Tolkien died - his only love, his Luthien. She is buried in the Catholic cemetery in Oxford; on her grave, at Tolkien's request, is written: "Edith Mary Tolkien, Luthien, 1889–1971"
Professor Tolkien and his wife in a garden in Bournemouth.
After the death of his wife, Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he settled in an apartment at Merton College, where he had been a professor since 1945. In 1972 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Literature, and in 1973 Queen Elizabeth awarded him the title of Knight of the Order of the British Empire. Until the last days of his life, he composed, wrote letters, prepared The Silmarillion for publication, but never finished it: however, this is understandable - a whole world lived and developed there, and how can you stop the development of the world?
At the end of August 1973, Professor Tolkien was visiting friends in Bournemouth. On the way back he caught a cold and died on September 3, 1973. He is buried in the same grave as his wife, and on the stone, by order of his son Christopher, the inscription was added: “John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Veren, 1892–1973.”
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Exactly so, and not at all Tolkien, as he himself repeatedly pointed out. The writer’s paternal ancestors came from Saxony, and their surname was derived from the German tollkühn (“recklessly brave” - the writer often sneered at the inapplicability of this epithet to him), and according to the laws of sound changes, ü becomes i, but never ie . Another difficulty, this time already connected with the laws of the Russian language, lies in the declension of this surname. The fact is that the names on -in Russian and foreign origin are inclined differently. Therefore, you can read Ku-pri-nym, but Tolkien. confidently holds the first position, but also about the influence on culture and literature. Tolkien's books made the previously marginal genre of fantasy one of the most popular, awakened an unflagging interest in the romance of battles and journeys, fairy tales and the early Middle Ages, and forced several generations of readers to fight with swords and call themselves by fictitious names. And this boom is not going away. The film adaptation of the novel, which became the fruit of a strange intellectual game of an Oxford professor, half a century after its publication turns out to be one of the most successful in the history of cinema. Tolkien's son Christopher regularly publishes all new materials from his father's inexhaustible archive: in June 2017, a hundred years after the creation of the first version of The Song of Beren and Lúthien, it was published for the first time as a separate edition. And in November of the same year, Amazon announced the purchase of the rights to film a series based on The Lord of the Rings. One of the reasons for the popularity of Tolkien’s books is their very special reality - linguistic.Who was Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. Oxford, 1950s Bodleian Library, Oxford / Fine Art Images / DIOMEDIAFormally, the biography of an academic scientist seems sparse in external events. From childhood he began to be interested in Germanic mythology and linguistics, at the age of 14 he became interested in inventing his own languages, and five years later, in 1911, he entered Exeter College at Oxford University. With short breaks during the First World War Tolkien took part in the famous Battle of the Somme in July 1916. and teaching at the University of Leeds in 1920-1925 Tolkien worked at Oxford all his life as professor of Anglo-Saxon literature: first at Pembroke College, then at Merton.
Tolkien began working on poems and tales of a fictional world - the future "Silmarillion" - in the mid-1910s, and in the mid-1930s he became a member of the informal literary circle"Inklings" members Clive Staples Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams and others. whom we met to read aloud to each other and discuss our own texts Tolkien described these meetings in his unfinished novel, The Notion Club Papers.. These meetings, as well as the support of his close friend C.S. Lewis, help Tolkien take his literary experiments more seriously.
From 1959 until his death in 1973, Tolkien devoted himself entirely to stories about Middle-earth, most of which would be published after the writer's death by his son.
Where it all began: the creation of new languages
Tolkien was a linguist and specialized in Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon (Old English) languages. His first serious academic work was preparing dictionary entries on several words starting with the letter W Many years later, in 1969, Tolkien again took part in the work on the Oxford Dictionary, but in a completely different capacity. The editor of the new volume of supplements asked him to edit the article on the word hobbit, which Tolkien eventually completely rewrote. Since then, the dictionary has included many words describing the realities of Middle-earth, including mathom, orc, mithril, balrog., for the Oxford English Dictionary. Tolkien also compiled a Dictionary of Middle English and taught Old Icelandic, Gothic, and Middle Welsh Tolkien's most notable academic achievements include the publication of the Middle English monuments Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Recluse's Guide, translated into modern English language“Sir Gawain” and the poems “The Pearl” and “Sir Orfeo”, as well as the lecture “Beowulf, Monsters and Critics”, which changed the attitude towards this Old English poem.. But his main passion was the creation of his own languages, the inspiration and basis for which were real languages. He began composing them while still in school, and already in his student years he began to write the first poetic works on them. Tolkien created two Elvish languages - Quenya based on Finnish (a kind of La-tyn) and Sindarin based on Welsh. The most famous Quenya text is Namárië, or Galadriel's Lament, and the Sindarin text is A Elbereth Gilthoniel, a hymn to Varda, the deity of light:
Namarië
Ai! laurië lantar lassi súrinen,
yéni únótimë ve rámar aldaron!
Yeni ve lintë yuldar avánier
mi oromardi lissë-miruvóreva
Andúne pella, Vardo tellumar
nu luini yassen tintilar i eleni
ómaryo airetári-lírinen.
Sí man i yulma nin enquantuva?
An sí Tintallë Varda Oiolossëo
ve fanyar máryat Elentári ortanë
ar ilyë tier undulávë lumbulë
ar sindanóriello caita mornië
i falmalinnar imbe met,
ar hísië untúpa Calaciryo míri oialë.
Sí vanwa ná, Rómello vanwa, Valimar!
Namarië! Nai hiruvalyë Valimar!
Nai elyë hiruva! Namarië!
Galadriel's Lament
Oh! Leaves fall like gold in the wind! Long years are countless, like the wings of trees, long years pass like quick sips of sweet honey in the high halls of the far West under the blue arches of Varda, where the stars tremble with the song that her royal voice sings. Who will fill the cup for me today? Varda, the Queen of the Stars from the eternally white mountain raises her hands above the world, like clouds. And the paths of the world are drowning in the shadows, and the fog from the gray country lay on the foamy waves between us, hiding the fog forever Kalakiria stones. Now for those who mourn in the East, Valimar has disappeared! Goodbye! Maybe you will still find Valimar. Maybe you will be the one to find Valimar. Goodbye!
Translation by I. Grinshpun
A Elbereth Gilthoniel
A Elbereth Gilthoniel,
silivren penna miriel
o menel aglar elenath!
Na-chaered palan-díriel
o galadhremmin ennorath,
Fanuilos, le linnathon
nef aear, sí nef aearon!
A Elbereth Gilthoniel
o menel palan-diriel,
le nallon sí di-nguruthos!
A tiro nin, Fanuilos!
About Varda
[The lightning of the all-night dawn
Beyond the distant seas,
Burn with eternal hope
Over our mountains!]
O Elbereth! Giltoniel!
The light of hope is far away!
From our shadowy lands
I bow to you deeply!
I overcame that evil darkness
On a black sky
And lit the clear stars
In your night crown.
Giltoniel! O Elbereth!
Shine in the blue temple!
We remember your eternal light
Beyond the distant seas!
Translation by A. Kistyakovsky
While creating new languages, Tolkien thought about what kind of world they would be spoken in. As Lewis wrote of him, “he had been inside a language, and his invention was not complete until he realized that every language presupposes its own mythology.” Quote from an obituary published in the Times on September 3, 1973. Its author is C.S. Lewis, who died 10 years earlier (the text was sent to the newspaper in advance and was kept in the editorial office). It is noteworthy that Tolkien himself refused the request to write an obituary for Lewis.. The author of The Lord of the Rings called his text an “essay on linguistic aesthetics”:
“[My work] is a unified whole and is fundamentally inspired by linguistics. It is based on the invention of languages. It is more likely that “stories” were composed in order to create a world for languages, rather than vice versa. In my case, the name comes first, and then the story. I would actually prefer to write in Elvish." J. R. R. Letters. M., 2004..
The remaining languages that are mentioned in Tolkien's books are not completely invented, like the languages of the Elves, but are incredibly carefully thought out and “translated” by the author. The world of Middle-earth is not the European Middle Ages, which means its inhabitants cannot speak English. Modern English in the trilogy conveys Westron, the universal dialect of Middle-earth, and related human languages Adunaic language, Rohirrik, Talisca.. Moreover, the translation reproduces the degree of relationship between these languages: the Rohirrim language is translated into Old English, because it relates to Westron in the same way as Old English relates to modern English; Dale's language, in which dwarves communicate with other creatures, is translated into Old Icelandic, because it is to Westron as Icelandic is to modern English. And so on. We don't know exactly what a real Westron sounds like, but we do know that "hobbit" will be "kuduk" and Frodo Baggins' name is actually Maura Labingi. Only languages of non-human peoples - elves, gnomes - that are not related to Westron are not translated. Khuzdul., Ents and Orcs.
How Tolkien invented English mythology
The complexity of the game that Tolkien played with himself, constructing a mythological reality based on linguistic reality, is visible in the details. As linguist Tom Shippey, author of one of the best books on Tolkien, notes, although the language of the Riders of Rohan In some Russian translations, Rohan is called Ristania or Mustangrim.- one of the peoples inhabiting the pages of The Lord of the Rings - is transmitted to Old English, the names of their ancient rulers are Gothic. Thus, Tolkien hints that the ancestors of the horsemen spoke a different language and lived in a different era than their descendants. There are many such allusions: the language of the Rohans is conveyed by the Mercian dialect of Old English, their songs are reminiscent of Old English lament songs, the emblem of the Land of Horsemen ( white horse on a green background) refers to the Uffington White Horse on the hills of ancient Mercia, and numerous hidden quotes from the poem "Beowulf" Anglo-Saxon epic poem set in Jutland, before the migration of the Angles to Britain.- to the Anglo-Saxons. Finally, the self-name of Rohan - Mark - sounds exactly the same as the name of Mercia should have sounded in the local dialect. Thus, the Riders of Rohan are not fictional barbarian people, but a unique reconstruction of the heroic myth about the Anglo-Saxons. This is how they would have been if they had stood up to the Norman Conquest.
Uffington horse. Chalk figure. Around the 10th century BC. e. Wikimedia Commons
Flag of Rohan. Souvenir based on the film trilogy “The Lord of the Rings”© New Line Cinema
Ardently loving the language and nature of England, Tolkien believed that the English were offended by the lack of mythology, in any way comparable with neighboring peoples: “From a very young age, I was saddened by the poverty of my beloved homeland, it does not have its own legends (associated with its language and soil), at least of the quality that I was looking for and found (as a component) in the legends of other lands. There are Greek and Celtic epics, Romanesque, Germanic, Scandinavian and Finnish (the latter made a strong impression on me); but absolutely nothing English, except for cheap editions of folk tales.” J. R. R. Letters. M., 2004..
The Arthurian myth, to which Tolkien paid tribute (in the 1930s he wrote drafts of a poem about Arthur, trying to connect these tales with his mythology), was not English enough for him: tales about the military leader that arose on Celtic soil -Nike, who successfully fought with the ancestors of the English, known mostly in the French retelling, are hardly suitable for the role of the English national myth.
How The Silmarillion Was Made
Cover of the first edition of The Silmarillion. 1977 George Allen & Unwin “The Silmarillion” is an early, but never published during the writer’s lifetime, collection of tales about the creation of the world, the awakening of elves and people, and the struggle for the wondrous stones of the Silmaril. Tolkien himself did not consider his work to be fiction and preferred to talk about it in terms of discovering something hidden rather than inventing something new. He began to create his own mythology after seeing the following words in the text of the Old English poem "Christ", written around the 9th century by the Anglo-Saxon poet Cunewulf:
éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sent “Rejoice, earendel, the brightest of the angels, sent [to shine] to people above the middle of the earth.”.
The word "äärendel", from Cynewulf meaning a shining ray and apparently referring to the morning star Venus For other authors, this is a symbol of John the Baptist, preceding the appearance of Christ, just as Venus precedes the rising of the Sun., struck Tolkien with its beauty. In the early poems, written first in English and then in Elvish, the image of Earendil appears, a wonderful sailor whose ship moves among the stars and gives hope to people. This image became one of the lyrical cores of Tolkien’s mythology. The hero, in whose veins flows the blood of elves and people, turned out to be the link between the peoples inhabiting Middle-earth and the main plots of Tolkien's legend-rium This word, which in medieval Latin denoted a collection of the lives of saints, was used by Tolkien to describe the body of his tales.- about the marvelous stones Silmarils, created by the elves at the dawn of time The stones were created to preserve the light of the wonderful Primordial Trees, which were destroyed by the embodiment of evil Melkor. But Melkor steals the Silmarils and hides from Vali-no-ra, the land of the gods, to Middle-earth. The creators of the Silmarils, vowing revenge on anyone who encroaches on their creation, also leave Valinor. The hero Beren, who stole the stone from Melkor's crown, bequeaths it to his descendants. Elwing, his granddaughter, miraculously carries the stone onto the ship to her husband, Earen-dil. He asks the Valar to help the exiled elves in the battle with Melkor. Melkor is defeated, the other two stones are destroyed due to the greed of their creators, and the third remains to shine on the mast of the ship of Eärendil, ranked among the gods., about the love of the man Beren and the Elven princess Luthien For the sake of his beloved, Beren did the impossible and obtained the Silmarils from the crown of Melkor. Luthien sacrifices his immortality for the sake of love for Beren, and he, who died in the fight against monsters, turns out to be the only person who returned from death to life. The story of Beren and Lúthien partly reproduces the love story of Tolkien and his wife Edith. On their tombstone he bequeathed to write: “Edith Mary Tolkien - Luthien” and “John Ronald Ruel Tolkien - Beren.”, about Eärendil, his wife Elwing and their son Elrond Children of an elf and a man, they are a symbol of the union of elves and people. Elrond will play an important role in the war described in The Lord of the Rings, and his daughter Arwen will enter into the third and last marriage in the history of Middle-earth with a mortal, Aragorn, one of the main characters of the book..
How did The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come about?
Dust jacket of the first edition of The Hobbit. Illustration by John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. 1937 Fine Art Images / DIOMEDIA Like The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings arose thanks to the word. According to Tolkien, one day, while checking student essays, he accidentally wrote on a blank sheet of paper: “In a hole under the mountain there lived a hobbit.” The word “hobbit” was unknown to Tolkien, and the desire to find out what it meant became the driving force of the plot.
Tolkien did not even consider The Hobbit to be of interest from a publishing point of view. He was convinced of this by Lewis and the son of the head of the publishing house Allen & Unwin, Rainer Unwin, to whom his father gave the manuscript to read. The book turned out to be extremely successful, and the publishers turned to Tolkien with a request for a sequel. The world briefly described in The Hobbit was acquiring more and more distinct features of the world that Tolkien had created since his youth, and the children's fairy tale with a simple plot turned out to be a key episode preceding the largest war of good and evil forces in the history of Middle-earth.
The secret of the special reality of the world of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings” is that the reader clearly feels: the piece that he is given to see is part of a much larger whole, which he is told about in half a hint or not told at all. As Lewis wrote in his review of the first edition of The Hobbit, “Professor Tolkien obviously knows much more about his creatures than is necessary for this tale.”
Is there European history hidden in The Lord of the Rings?
In the epic clash of the free peoples of Middle-earth with the forces of darkness described in the pages of The Lord of the Rings, they often see an allegory of the Second World War, or even the Cold War - after all, Tolkien’s darkness approaches from the east, and not from the west, as in classical myths. Tolkien himself persistently rejected such interpretations. “My story does not contain symbolism or conscious allegory,” he writes to one of his correspondents. — Algories like “five magicians = five senses” are absolutely alien to my way of thinking. There were five magicians, and this is simply a specific component of history. Asking whether orcs are “really” communists is, to me, no more reasonable than asking whether communists are orcs.” J. R. R. Tolkien. Letters. M., 2004.. There is a well-known anecdote that during one of his lectures at Oxford, Tolkien was once again asked whether by “darkness from the east” he meant the USSR. The professor replied: “No, what do you mean, what do the communists have to do with it? Of course I meant Cambridge." The rivalry between England's two main universities is a traditional joke..
Battle of the Catalaunian Fields, July 15, 451. Miniature from the “Mirror of History” manuscript. Netherlands, around 1325-1335 KB KA 20, fol. 146 / Koninklijke Bibliotheek / Wikimedia Commons If we look for historical allusions in the text, then the War of the Ring is reminiscent of another great war preserved in European cultural memory, namely the confrontation of the Western Roman Empire with the Huns in the 5th century. The Battle of the Pelennor Fields on March 15, 3019 of the Third Age is in many ways reminiscent of the Battle of the Catalaunian Fields on July 15, 451, which united the Romans and Visigoths under the leadership of Aetius and the Visigothic king Theodoric, against the Huns and Ostrogoths under the leadership of Attila. “The last of the Romans” Aetius, who spent many years among the barbarians, resembles Aragorn, “the last of the Numenoreans”, who spent many years wandering, and the death of the elderly Visigoth king Theodoric, who fell from his horse, is the death of an elderly man crushed by a horse king Supreme ruler. Rohans of Theoden.
Where did the dragon, ring and other important details come from?
The main plots and minor details of the world invented by Tolkien are taken from German-Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon legends. The plot of the theft of the cup, which awakens the dragon from a long hibernation, is taken from the second part of Beowulf and turns out to be the main one not only in The Hobbit, but also in The Lord of the Rings - only in the role of the kidnapper, whose greed turns into a huge war , Tolkien has first Gollum, who found and appropriated the ring, and then Bilbo, who also took possession of it in a not entirely honest manner.
The plot of a treasure that brings a curse on its owner, which can be gotten rid of only by destroying it forever, is typical of many examples of ancient Germanic epic. Both the “Saga of the Volsungs”, and the “Elder”, and the “Younger Edda” tell how Loki, traveling with Odin and Hoenir, killed an otter with a stone, which caught a fish and ate it, dragging it ashore. It turned out that one of the three sons of the wizard Hreidmar took the form of an otter. Hreidmar and his sons, one of whom was called Fafnir, bound the gods, demanding a ransom in exchange for freedom. Loki, having caught the dwarf Andvari in the water, took his gold from him, and along with the gold, a magic ring capable of increasing wealth. Angry Andvari placed a curse on the ring, according to which it would destroy all its owners. Hreidmar and his sons receive the gold, but at night Fafnir kills his father and, turning into a dragon, remains to guard the cursed treasure.
Siegfried kills the dragon Fafnir. Illustration by Arthur Rackham. 1901 Wikimedia Commons Bilbo's conversation with the dragon Smaug is reminiscent of the conversation between Siegfried (or Si-gurd), the main hero-serpent fighter of northern myths, with Fafnir, who has taken the form of a dragon: the hero refuses to give his name and speaks to the monster in riddles. And even the murder of Smaug, thanks to the clue about the unprotected belly, is similar to how Siegfried deals with Fafnir.
The motive for the destruction of the cursed treasure can be found in the finale of the poem "Beowulf", where the treasure of the defeated dragon is buried in a mound along with Beo-wulf, or in the "Song of the Nibelungs", where the cursed gold of the Nibe-lungs is forever buried at the bottom of the Rhine.
The names of the dwarves in The Hobbit and Gandalf are taken from the "Divination of the Völva", one of the most famous songs of the Elder Edda. Many place names are borrowed from there, for example Mirkwood or the Misty Mountains.
The story of the sword Narsil, with a fragment of which Isildur defeats Sauron in the last battle of the Second Age, after which the sword is reforged and given to Aragorn, is reminiscent of the story of Gram, the sword of Siegfried-Sigurd. In addition, the hero hits the dragon with a fragment of his sword in the finale of Beowulf.
Finally, the ring is an important attribute and symbol of power in Scandinavian and Germanic mythology. In Beowulf, one of the epithets of a ruler is “ring-giver,” because granting a ring to a vassal meant granting power over a particular territory. The fact that rings are the magical center of power for Tolkien also testifies to the influence of the German epic tradition on the author.
How texts about Middle-earth relate to religion
Tolkien was a deeply religious person, and creativity, as well as mythological creativity, was for him participation in the divine act of creation of the world. At the same time, Middle-earth is striking in the absence of mentions of God and any manifestations of religion. Tolkien deliberately reverses the traditional orientation of good and evil to the cardinal points, placing Valinor, the land of gods and immortals, in the west, and the stronghold of evil forces, Mordor, in the east.
But there is no contradiction in this. “The Lord of the Rings,” as conceived by Tolkien, is certainly a religious and even Catholic work, but it is such not because the heroes know the catechism and perform rituals correctly, but because worship and Christian ethics are woven into its spirit, plot and symbolism.
Evil is devoid of creative potential and can only pervert good. Melkor, the evil spirit antagonist of The Silmarillion, perverted the original melody of creation, causing the first angels to fall away from the creator, and then created the orcs, perverting the nature of the elves. No one in Middle-earth is good or evil by nature: the most important scene of the entire trilogy is the tenderness of Gollum, one of the most hopeless villains of the book, at the sight of the sleeping Frodo, rudely and cruelly interrupted by Sam, one of the kindest heroes. The main ethical message of the trilogy is that the most powerful strongholds of evil are defeated not by the strength and greatness of virtue, but by humility and sacrificial love, deeply Christian in its essence. God is present in Middle-earth invisibly, but persistently in the form of Providence, of which all the heroes turn out to be assistants or involuntary instruments. This is especially evident in the scene on Mount Doom, when it turns out that without Gollum the ring would have been impossible to destroy Frodo's finger bitten off by Gollum is an allusion to the gospel: “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away from you, for it is better for you that one of your members should perish, and not that your whole body should be cast into hell” (Matthew 5 :30).
Who are elves
Of all the creatures inhabiting Tolkien's legendarium, only elves and hobbits are Tolkien's original inventions. Hobbits are a people completely invented by Tolkien, who have no parallels in mythology or folklore. The elves of German mythology and English folklore, a ghostly fairy people akin to fairies, have almost nothing in common with the people of immortal artists and musicians in Tolkien. Dwarves, goblins, trolls are familiar characters in German mythology. Ents come from Welsh legends about the battle of the trees. Orcs, although the word is mentioned in Anglo-Saxon texts, were invented by Tolkien as anthropomorphic creatures, but not described in as much detail as elves and hobbits.. It was they who unbalanced his imagination and became the impetus for the creation of two main works - The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien himself considered the main feature of The Silmarillion to be its lack of anthropocentrism. These tales are written from the point of view of the elves. The determination with which Tolkien reinterprets the elves of the German-Scandinavian tradition and places them at the center of his universe suggests that this image was very important to him. These immortal creatures became, according to Tolkien, the first creation of God. In the elves, Tolkien expressed two motives that deeply worried him - a love of creativity and a love of nature. Several of the writer’s “favorite trees” are still known in Oxford..
John Ronald Ruell Tolkien. Oxford, 1970s Topfoto/Fotodom Unlike people, whose purpose of existence, according to Tolkien and the Catechism, lies outside the material world, elves exist as long as this world exists, and even if killed, they can return to life. They are the spirit of this world, their main gift and their main temptation, as is clear from the history of the Silmarils - creativity, in which they know no equal and are able to compete with the gods.
The immortality of the elves in Tolkien is not a carefree eternity ancient gods. It is imbued with a pessimism very characteristic of the writer: it is an attempt to describe human mortality from the opposite. The mortal nature of the people of Middle-earth is not doom, but a gift that makes them “free from the circles of the world,” allowing them to be involved in the Creator’s plan for the future that will come after the end of the physical world. For the elves, this gift of people is a source of sadness and an object of envy. Just as people tell each other fairy tales, the heroes of which manage to escape from death, so elves tell each other fairy tales, the heroes of which manage to escape from immortality. In particular, the already mentioned stories of the elven princesses Luthien and Arwen turn out to be such a tale of escape..
In Tolkien's stories about elves, the motif of weariness from life, bright and wise sadness is very noticeable. The best examples of elven poetry are full of this sadness; it permeates the last pages of The Lord of the Rings, dedicated to seeing off the heroes to the west, to the borders of the immortals. Perhaps the originality of Tolkien's mythology lies precisely in the interpretation of immortality. Unlike the classical myths that arose at the beginning of human history, this is the experience of a 20th century man who knows that history can be not only a fascinating tale, but also a heavy burden.
How Tolkien was translated into Russian
Tolkien's books are difficult to convey in another language. But the writer himself was happy with the new translations (but was hostile to the film adaptations) and helped the translators as best he could, explaining the opaque etymologies of names and titles. The history of Tolkien's translations into Russian began quite late, but it developed quite happily. The first translation was “The Hobbit” by Natalia Rakhmanova, published in 1976. The prototype of the hobbit for the illustrator of the first Russian edition, Mikhail Belomlinsky, was the actor Yevgeny Leonov. Later Leonov was happy with this choice and even read excerpt from a book on camera. This translation is still considered one of the most literary, although more than a dozen have been published.
Translations and retellings of The Lord of the Rings have existed since the 1960s in self-publishing, and the first official edition, translated by Vladimir Muravyov and Andrei Kistyakovsky, was published only in 1989 An abridged edition was published in 1982.. Since then, a dozen more translations have been published, and debate about which one is better continues to this day. The main subject of discussion is the translation of names and titles. Since in Tolkien they always involve a language game, translators find it difficult to resist: Frodo Baggins becomes Baggins or Sumniks, Rivendell becomes Rivendell, and Rohan becomes Ristania.
"The Hobbit." Illustrations by Mikhail Belomlinsky, translation by Natalia Rakhmanova. 1976 Publishing House "Children's Literature" It is difficult to say to what extent Tolkien succeeded in creating a “mythology for England.” The Silmarillion and other tales of his legendarium are hardly perceived as something exclusively Anglo-Saxon It is known that a reviewer, who was shown some materials from the Sil-marillion by the publisher Allen & Unwin in 1937, saw in them “something of that crazy, bright-eyed beauty that so confuses the Anglo-Saxons when they encounter Celtic art.". One way or another, these tales became over time almost more popular than the German-Scandinavian mythology that gave birth to them. Being, like Alice in Wonderland, created on specifically English material, they became the property of world culture - not mythology for England, but mythology for the whole world.
Chi-tai-the same ma-teri-ala Nikolay Ep-ple about that, and.
Sources
- Carpenter H. John R.R. Tolkien. Biography.
- Tolkien J.R.R. Letters.
- Shippy T.A. Road to Middle-earth.
- The Complete History of Middle-Earth. Books I–XII. Ed. by Christopher Tolkien.