J.R.R. Tolkien and The Lord of the Rings

     Hi! Welcome to my blog... :) Today I'm going to be starting a month-long series on The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and The Quenta Silmarillion. Fair warning - I am a Lotr/Tolkien fanatic. In this post I'm going to cover the man behind the books, J.R.R. Tolkien.

     I'm basically going to give some of the most interesting (or important) facts of his life. This guy is pretty interesting! :)

     J.R.R.Tolkien (John Ronald Reuel Tolkien - mouthful!) was born on January 3, 1892 - in South Africa! His father died when he was four, and his mother, Mabel, died from diabetes when he was twelve. Before Mabel died, she, Tolkien, and his brother were all received into the Roman Catholic Church, estranging themselves from most of Mabel's family.

     Tolkien started attending Oxford in 1911, and continued to study there until 1915. It was at Oxford that Tolkien first started thinking about stories, some of which would be contained in The Silmarillion. Also while at Oxford, Tolkien met and started 'dating' with Edith Bratt. They were married on March 22, 1916, right before Tolkien was deployed overseas.

     During his time in the trenches, Tolkien worked his mythology and languages he was inventing. He came down with 'trench fever' - a type of typhus-like infection, and was sent home to England, there to remain for the rest of the rest of the war.

     After the war, he was appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (Oxford English Dictionary), and it was when he was at this post that the first public airing of what would later become the story of the Fall of Gondolin in The Silmarillion was read.

     In 1920, Tolkien was accepted as Reader of English Language at the University of Leeds, but he moved on in 1925 to man the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. (Is it just me, or do all these names seem really long??) 

     In 1929, Edith had the couple's last child, and only daughter. Their children were: John Francis Reuel (born 1917), Michael Hilary Reuel (born 1920), Christopher Reuel (born 1924) and finally Priscilla (born 1929).

     It was in the early 1930s that the infamous Inklings group was started, which was composed of such men as C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, besides Tolkien. Tolkien continued work on developing his mythology and languages and in 1945, Tolkien moved his chair to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature.

     When Tolkien was marking examination papers, he came across an answer that had been left blank. On the page he wrote the now infamous phrase: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Curious, Tolkien discovered what a hobbit was, why it lived in a hole, and what sort of hole it was. 

     He told the resulting story to his children, and passed it around. It eventually got into the hands of a publishing company, who asked Tolkien to finish it so they could publish it. After the publication of The Hobbit in 1937, the publisher returned to Tolkien and asked for more.

     It was then that Tolkien remembered his Quenta Silmarillion, which he had been working on since before World War I. He sent one of the tales to the publisher, who complemented the poetry and prose, but said they wanted something more along the lines of a sequel to The Hobbit. And so Tolkien began writing 'The New Hobbit'.

     After nearly sixteen years in the making (Tolkien was a perfectionist in every sense of the word, and would have continued working on it for a long time) the second Hobbit was published, under the title, The Lord of the Rings. 

     The book became so popular, especially after the paperback publication in 1965, that people started coming to gawk at Tolkien's house, and even call him with questions about the book! Tolkien ended up having to change addresses and his phone number went ex-directory.

     Tolkien wrote several other works before his death, but none were particularly popular - at least not to the extent as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Edith Tolkien died on November 29, 1971. Two years later Tolkien died, on September 2, 1973.

     After Tolkien's death, Christopher, his son, put together some of his father's unfinished works. These included The Silmarillion, The Unfinished Tales (composed of unfinished stories), and The History of Middle Earth (a twelve volume set!!).

     Concluding - I LOVE TOLKIEN. Okay, that's out of the system. :) I've read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion all twice, and I've read my favorite parts several more times than that. I've never read anything else written by Tolkien, even though I really want to. I probably will end up reading The Unfinished Tales and The History of Middle-Earth at some point - I just don't know when.

    So in this little series, I'm just going to cover the books (that I've read) and the movies. 

     I'm also going to start a new thing on the blog. We'll see how it goes. ;) I'm going to have a quote-of-the-week section. For this month, we'll focus on Tolkien related quotes. Other months, I have no idea. Maybe Christmas quotes for December? I'll just pick quotes I like. :)

The quote for this week?

"The road goes ever on and on, down from the door where it began. Now far ahead the road has gone, and I must follow if I can." - Bilbo in The Hobbit

     Thanks for reading, and come back in a week for a post about The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and their respective movie series. So excited! :)