He went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911, where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1913, when he swiftly though not without difficulty picked up the threads of his relationship with Edith. He then obtained a disappointing second class degree in Honour Moderations, the "midway" stage of a 4-year Oxford "Greats" (i.e. Classics) course, although with an "alpha plus" in philology. As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature. One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf - he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet:
"Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast
Ofer middangeard monnum sended"
- Hail Earendel brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men. ("Middangeard" was a ancient expression for the everyday world between Heaven above and Hell below.)
This inspired some of his very early attempts at realising a world of ancient beauty in his versifying.
Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape, "...in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire" [ Letters 66]. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the "Gnomes", (i. e. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien.
His family life was equally straightforward. Edith bore their last child and only daughter, Priscilla, in 1929. Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters. He also told them numerous bedtime stories. In adulthood John entered the priesthood, Michael and Christopher both saw war service in the Royal Air Force. Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. They lived quietly in the North Oxford suburb of Headington.
Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages. According to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what, he wrote In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (merged in 1990 with HarperCollins).
She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his 10-year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in 1937. It immediately scored a success, and has not been out of children's recommended reading lists ever since.
The Lord of the Rings was published in three parts during 1954 and 1955, with USA rights going to Houghton Mifflin. It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work's public appeal.
Between 1925 and his death Tolkien did write and publish a number of other articles, including a range of scholarly essays, many reprinted in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays; one Middle-earth related work, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil; editions and translations of Middle English works such as the Ancrene Wisse, Sir Gawain, Sir Orfeo and The Pearl, and some stories independent of the Legendarium, such as the Imram, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun - and, especially, Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, and Smith of Wootton Major.
After his retirement in 1969 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. On November 22, 1971 Edith died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Tolkien died on September 2, 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. The legend on the headstone reads:
Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889-1971
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973
The flow of publications was only temporarily slowed by Tolkien's death. The long-awaited Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared in 1977. In 1980 Christopher also published a selection of his father's incomplete writings from his later years under the title of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. In the introduction to this work Christopher Tolkien referred in passing to The Book of Lost Tales, "itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study, if at all" (Unfinished Tales, p. 6, paragraph 1).
The sales of The Silmarillion had rather taken George Allen & Unwin by surprise, and those of Unfinished Tales even more so. Obviously, there was a market for this material and they decided to risk embarking on this "lengthy and complex study". Even more lengthy and complex than expected, the resulting 12 volumes of the History of Middle-earth, under Christopher's editorship, proved to be a successful enterprise. J.R.R. Tolkien's painting - "Glorund sets forth to seek Turin"
Frodo and the Marshes of the Great War
By Nic van Holstein and Rob Ruggenberg
In a BBC television documentary Priscilla Tolkien, daughter of the late J.R.R. Tolkien, spoke about her supposition that the Journey through the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings was in fact a description of the experiences her father had in The Great War.
During the First World War John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a second lieutenant in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers. He had learned Morse code, the use of signal rockets and field telephones and he served in action as Batallion Signaling Officer.
In June 1916 he was sent to the Somme area in France to participate in the great offensive that was to start on the 1st of July. But in the first weeks of this terrible battle Tolkien's battalion stayed in reserve, safely behind the frontline, in the village of Bouzincourt.
Tolkiens first experience on the front came on Friday July 14th with an unsuccesful attack on the village of Ovillers. British gunfire should have destroyed the barbed wire defences in front of the German trenches, but it had not, as the men found out when they crawled and runned towards the German lines. Many of his battalion were killed by machine gun fire.
After 48 hours of carnage, followed by 24 hours in a dug-out, Tolkien's unit was relieved. When he returned to his hut in Bouzincourt he found a letter telling him that Rob Gilson, one of his dearest friends, had been hit by a shell.
Lieutenant Gilson had been in action on the 1st of July near Bécourt, not far from where Tolkien stayed. The letter was sent by another close friend, Lieutenant Geoffrey Smith:
My dear John Ronald,
I saw in the paper this morning that Rob has been killed. I am safe but what does that matter? Do please stick to me, you and Christopher. I am very tired and most frightfully depressed at this worst news. Now one realises in despair what the T.C.B.S. really was.
O my dear John Ronald what ever are we going to do?
Yours ever,
Geoffrey B. Smith
T.C.B.S. stood for the Tea Club and Barrovian Society. It was an unofficial and semi-secret reading club formed in 1911 by Tolkien and his friends Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, who at that time were all students of the King Edward's School in Birmingham. The boys shared a great interest in ancient languages, philosophy. literature, natural sciences, mathematics, arts and music. An intense friendship had developed between the four and although they went to different universities, they continued to meet each other. All four had joined the army, though they served in seperate units.
Tolkien wrote back to Geoffrey: "I do not feel a member of a complete body now. I honestly feel that the T.C.B.S has ended."
In the next weeks Tolkien participated in at least one of the disastrous stormings of the Schwaben Redoubt, an impregnable fortification of the German trenches. Again there were heavy losses in his battalion.
From then on he served on and off in the trenches. In his spare time off duty, in the barracks behind the front, and often disturbed by music from gramophones (as he would later say), Tolkien started writing in a notebook the beginning of a mythology that he initially called The Book of Lost Tales. He would never finish this book, although most of it would eventually be published as The Silmarillon.
In those months Death was omnipresent. Bodies of British and German soldiers lay unburied, stinking and rotting, around him in No Mans Land. Writing became for Tolkien a way to deal with this brutality and barbarity around him. He wrote whenever he found an opportunity, "in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even down in dugouts under shell fire". In a letter to his son Christopher, many years later, he explained:
"I took to 'escapism': or really transforming experience into another form and symbol with Morgoth and Orcs and the Eldalië (representing beauty and grace of life and artefact) and so on; and it has stood me in good stead in many hard years since, and I still draw on the conceptions then hammered out."
Those transformed experiences can easily be found in his books. For instance in the The Lord of the Rings Sam witnesses the death of a Haradrim soldier and realizes how much the enemy looks like himself:
"It was Sam's first view of a battle of Men against Men, and he did not like it much. He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace."
While many of his companions died, Tolkien remained unharmed, until he fell ill with severe trench fever at the end of October 1916. Trench fever was a much feared infectious disease characterized by the sudden onset of fever with headaches, sore muscles, bones, and joints, and outbreaks of skin lesions on the chest and back. It was transmitted from soldier to soldier by the body louse - and those parasites were here abundantly, hidden in the clothes of the men who lived in the trenches under bad hygienic circumstances. Thousands of men had already reported sick with it.
First Tolkien was taken to a hospital in Le Touquet, behind the front. A week later, when his condition worsened, he was shipped to England. On the 9th of November he arrived in a hospital in Birmingham, the city he had lived in during his youth.
In the meantime, on the Somme front the slaughter went on, although less fierce, because the great British offensive had turned into a total failure. The picture on the right shows soldiers of Tolkiens battalion having a day off, drinking coffee behind the trenches near Ovillers. Only a few of them survived this hell.
In December 1916, while he was still in the hospital, Tolkien received another letter from his reading club companion Geoffrey Smith:
My dear John Ronald,
My chief consolation is that if I am scuppered tonight - I am off on duty in a few minutes - there will still be left a member of the great T.C.B.S. to voice what I dreamed and what we all agreed upon. For the death of one of its members cannot, I am determined, dissolve the T.C.B.S. Death can make us loathsome and helpless as individuals, but it cannot put an end to the immortal four! A discovery I am going to communicate to Rob before I go off tonight. And do you write it also to Christopher. May God bless you my dear John Ronald, and may you say things I have tried to say long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot.
Yours ever,
Geoffrey B. Smith
When Tolkien got this letter his friend was already dead. Geoffrey Smith served with the 19th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. On November 29, 1916 the battalion was shelled near the village of Souastre, on the road from Doullens to Arras. Geoffrey was seriously injured by a shrapnel hit in a thigh and in his right arm. In the next days he developed gangrene. On December 3, 1916 at 3:30 in the morning, he died.
The next month, January 1917, Tolkien reported himself fit for orders. But soon he became sick again. His service record files (WO 339/34423) are largely concerned with the various health problems that dominated his time in the army. There are numerous reports made by army medical boards between December 1916 and September 1918 on Tolkien's recovery from trench fever - a slow process punctuated by relapses. Periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to full lieutenant - but he never returned to the front.
In spring 1918 Tolkien received news that those of his battalion who were still serving in France were all killed or taken prisoner at the battle of the Chemin des Dames.
In the Foreword to The Lord of the Rings he wrote:
"One has personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead."
The only one left was Christopher Wiseman, who served in the navy. Wiseman survived the war and remained a lifelong close friend to Tolkien. He was one who more than once urged Tolkien to write the fantastic epic he thought and talked about so much.
Some of the characters in LOTR also originate directly from the war. Tolkien, discussing the principal characters in his novel, wrote :"My Sam Gamgee is indeed a reflexion of the English soldier, of the privates and batmen I knew in the 1914 war, and recognized as so far superior to myself". Continued References
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien. Ed. Humphrey Carpenter with the assistance of Christopher Tolkien.
George Allen and Unwin, London, 1981.
The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays. Christopher Tolkien.
George Allen and Unwin, London, 1983.
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