March 17, 2012

Tolkien, J R R

Tagged: Author

(1892-1973) South-African-born UK writer and philologist who specialized in early forms of English; his academic career was crowned by his appointment as Merton Professor of English at Oxford University in 1945, a post he held until his retirement in 1959. It was at Oxford, before World War Two, that he formed a close literary association with Owen Barfield, C S Lewis and Charles Williams, a group which came to be known as The Inklings. It was at their regular meetings that much of their fiction received a first hearing, including draft portions of a long High Fantasy epic by Tolkien which put into definitive fictional form his concept of the Secondary World (> The Encyclopedia of Fantasy), as embodied in the creation of Middle-earth, the intensely imagined land- or world-scape in which the central action of all his work takes place. No reasonable definition of sf would encompass the works of Tolkien; but this concept and its embodiment in The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955 3vols) have had enormous influence on both sf and fantasy.

Although Secondary Worlds, "inside which the green sun will be credible", long predate Tolkien, it was "On Fairy Tales" – a 1939 lecture he expanded for Essays Presented to Charles Williams (anth 1947) edited anonymously by C S Lewis, and further exp for its appearance in Tree and Leaf (coll 1964; rev 1988) – that first gave legitimacy to the internally coherent and autonomous land of Faerie as part of the geography of the human imagination. For the sf and fantasy writers who followed, and who found in The Lord of the Rings a model for their own subcreations (his coinage for invented fantasy worlds), this affirmation of autonomy was of very great importance. No longer did fantasy writers feel any lingering need to "normalize" their Secondary Worlds by framing them as traveller's tales, dreams or Timeslip adventures, or as beast-fables (> The Encyclopedia of Fantasy). For sf writers, especially practitioners of the Planetary-Romance, the example of Tolkien was equally liberating – though it must be emphasized that Middle-earth is not in fact a world in any sf sense but an autonomous landscape, and pure High Fantasy.

Tolkien's profound interest in philology permeated his work from its beginnings, which, as the posthumous publication of a vast assemblage of drafts and fragments (see below) has demonstrated, predated World War One. His first published tale of Middle-Earth, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again (1937; rev 1951; rev 1966), a Faerie-story for children, introduced its readers to an already achieved and named Secondary World, with a history and geography that had already long existed in its subcreator's mind; as The Hobbit, it was made into an animated film directed by Arthur Rankin Jr in 1977. The tale of the hobbit, Bilbo, and of his quest through a portion of Middle-earth to help some dwarves (Tolkien's preferred spelling of "dwarfs") retrieve a treasure, gave Tolkien the opportunity to reveal some of that history and geography. But it was not until the release of the The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955 3vols) – broken for publishing reasons into three volumes, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954; rev 1966), The Two Towers (1954; rev 1966) and The Return of the King (1955; rev 1966), assembled as The Lord of the Rings (omni 1968) – that the full expanse of his world began to come clear. (The first portion of Lord of the Rings was made into an animated film in 1978; the expected conclusion failed to appear.)

Middle-earth is perhaps the most detailed of all invented fictional worlds, rivalled only by Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia (1942), the published version of which (as in Tolkien's case) represents only a portion of what was written; Tolkien differed from Wright, however, in having a compelling story to tell. Some of the background material appeared in the form of appendices to The Lord of the Rings and in The Silmarillion (1977) edited by Christopher Tolkien (Tolkien's son); the latter comprises 5 interconnected texts on which Tolkien had been working most of his life, and which supply an historical background for all his other work. Poems and songs belonging to the cycle are assembled as The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (coll 1962 chap) and The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (coll 1967) with music by Michael Swann. In Unfinished Tales of Númenór and Middle-Earth (coll 1980) Christopher Tolkien continued the long task of publishing his father's literary remains. The main sequence of these works, various volumes containing the History of Middle-Earth, all edited by Christopher Tolkien, comprises The History of Middle-Earth #1: The Book of Lost Tales 1 (coll 1983), #2: The Book of Lost Tales 2 (coll 1984), #3: The Lays of Beleriand (coll 1985), #4: The Shaping of Middle-Earth (coll 1986), #5: The Lost Road and Other Writings (coll 1987), #6: The Return of the Shadow: The History of the Lord of the Rings l (coll 1988), #7: The Treason of Isengard: The History of the Lord of the Rings 2 (coll 1989), #8: The War of the Ring: The History of the Lord of the Rings 3 (coll 1990), #9: Sauron Defeated: The History of the Lord of the Rings 4 (coll 1992) and #10: Morgoth's Ring (1993).

Tolkien's influence on fantasy and sf has been not merely profound but also – with no discredit to Tolkien himself – demeaning. Fortunately for readers of sf, the fairies and elves and orcs and cuddly dwarves and loquacious plants and bargain-counter Dark Lords and kings in disguise and singing barmen have been restricted in general to commercial market-driven Fantasy, caveat emptor; the main exception being hybrid productions like the Star Wars films, which are filled with blurred and decadent copies of Tolkien's own creations. It can only be hoped that the genuine Tolkien will survive this assault, the Tolkien for whom the heart of the enterprise of Faerie lay in "the desire of men to hold communion with other living things". [JC]

Other works: Farmer Giles of Ham (1949 chap) and Smith of Wootton Major (1967 chap), assembled as Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham (omni 1975); The Tolkien Reader (coll 1966); Bilbo's Last Song (1974 chap); The Father Christmas Letters (coll 1976 chap); Poems and Stories (coll 1980); Mr Bliss (1982 chap).

Nonfiction: A Middle English Vocabulary (1924) is the earliest of a number of works of varying interest, including an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (1925) with E V Gordon.

see also: Adventure; Children's SF; Computer Role Playing Game; Computer Wargame; Ditmar Award; Fantastic Voyages; Fanzine; Heroic Fantasy; Linguistics; Play by Mail; SF Music; Sword and Sorcery.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien

born South Africa: 1892

died 1973

works

about the author

Books about Tolkien and his work are very numerous, so much so that the annual Mythopoeic Awards for fantasy have a category devoted solely to work of scholarship about Tolkien, C S Lewis and their Oxford "Inklings" cronies. A selection:

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