In another incident, a young family servant, who thought Tolkien a beautiful child, took the baby to his kraal to show him off, returning him the next morning. When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.
Childhood
J. R. R. Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien | Childhood
England The Republic of South Africa. Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State Bloemfontein
where is sauron during the lord of the rings
user
He rules the land of Mordor
assistant
where is this land?
user
It lay to the east of Gondor and the great river Anduin, and to the south of Mirkwood.
assistant
where does this character and place make a mention?
user
The Lord of the Rings
assistant
what is this?
user
An epic high fantasy novel
assistant
can you explain the physical appearance of the ruler mentioned above?
user
Sauron took the form of a werewolf. Then he assumed a serpent-like form, and finally changed back "from monster to his own accustomed [human-like] form".
assistant
who has written the above mentioned novel?
user
J. R. R. Tolkien.
assistant
what was her view on religion?
user
He was a Roman Catholic and had a  special devotion to the blessed sacrament; he encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion to his son
assistant
where was he from?
user
Tolkien's Roman Catholicism was a significant factor in C. S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England. He once wrote to Rayner Unwin's daughter Camilla, who wished to know the purpose of life, that it was "to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks." He had a special devotion to the blessed sacrament, writing to his son Michael that in "the Blessed Sacrament ... you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that".
J. R. R. Tolkien | Religion
In another incident, a young family servant, who thought Tolkien a beautiful child, took the baby to his kraal to show him off, returning him the next morning. When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Childhood
J. R. R. Tolkien was an orphan, his father dying when he was three, his mother, a Roman Catholic, when he was twelve. He was then brought up under the supervision of a Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan, in industrial Birmingham, which was spreading over the English countryside that he had loved. He remained a devout Catholic all his life, and many Christian themes are visible in his Middle-earth writings. While at Oxford, he joined the informal literary circle of the Inklings, with C. S. Lewis and Owen Barfield among others.
Decline and fall in Middle-earth | Background
He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm Bag End, the name of which he used in his fiction.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Childhood
H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."
J. R. R. Tolkien | Linguistic career
Some locations and characters were inspired by Tolkien's childhood in rural Warwickshire, where from 1896 he first lived near Sarehole Mill, and later in Birmingham near Edgbaston Reservoir. There are also hints of the nearby industrial Black Country; he stated that he had based the description of Saruman's industrialization of Isengard and The Shire on that of England. The name of Bilbo's Hobbit-hole, "Bag End", was the real name of the Worcestershire home of Tolkien's aunt Jane Neave in Dormston.
J. R. R. Tolkien's influences | Childhood
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (later annexed by the British Empire; now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa), to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, "née" Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894. As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some think later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event and no special hatred of spiders as an adult.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Childhood
John Francis Reuel Tolkien (16 November 1917 – 22 January 2003) was the eldest son of J. R. R. Tolkien. He was born in Cheltenham. He was educated at the Dragon School, Oxford and The Oratory School in Caversham, Berkshire where in his final year he decided to become a priest. On the advice of the Archbishop he decided to go to college to study English and joined Exeter College, Oxford from where he received his B.A. degree in 1939. In November 1939, he went to the English College, Rome to train as a priest. Due to the outbreak of World War II, the college was moved to Stonyhurst in Lancashire where John trained as a priest during the war.
Tolkien family | John Francis Reuel Tolkien
He was born in Cheltenham on 16 November 1917 to J.R.R. Tolkien and Edith Tolkien. His middle name was in honour of Father Francis Morgan who had baptised him. He received his formal education at the Dragon School, Oxford and The Oratory School in Caversham, Berkshire where he decided to become a priest during his final year. Acting on the advice of the Archbishop he decided to study English at Exeter College, Oxford from where he received his B.A. degree in 1939. In November 1939, he went to the English College, Rome. Due to the outbreak of World War II, the college was moved to Stonyhurst in Lancashire.
John Tolkien (priest) | Biography
J. R. R. Tolkien's own knowledge of the family history was limited to its 18th-century German origin, according to Derdziński in part because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father."
Tolkien family | Etymology
Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien (17 February 1894 – 1976), the younger brother of J. R. R. Tolkien, was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The climate did not suit the young J. R. R. Tolkien and his mother took both her sons to visit her parents in Kings Heath in Birmingham. When her husband died in 1896 she decided to stay back in England with her sons. They moved to Sarehole, a village then outside Birmingham, in 1896. As a child, J. R. R. Tolkien used to tell stories to his younger brother Hilary, making ogres out of the adult people in the village.
Tolkien family | Hilary Tolkien
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English philologist, writer and professor of Oxford University. He was a devout Roman Catholic. Much of Tolkien's published fiction is a connected body of tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth (derived from the Old English word "middangeard", the lands inhabitable by humans) in particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our own world. Tolkien applied the word "legendarium" to the totality of these writings. Most of the "legendarium" was edited and posthumously published by his son Christopher.
Tolkien family | J. R. R. Tolkien
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and in his religious and political views he was mostly a traditionalist moderate, with libertarian, distributist, localist, and monarchist leanings, in the sense of favouring established conventions and orthodoxies over innovation and modernization, whilst castigating government bureaucracy; in 1943 he wrote, "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy." Although he did not often write or speak about it, Tolkien advocated the dismantling of the British Empire and even of the United Kingdom. In a 1936 letter to a former student, the Belgian linguist Simonne d'Ardenne, he wrote, "The political situation is dreadful...
J. R. R. Tolkien | Views
Tolkien's immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and Birmingham. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town Kreuzburg near Königsberg, which was founded during medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg. His son Christian Tolkien (1706–1791) moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family; the younger brother was J.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Ancestry
John Francis Reuel Tolkien (16 November 1917 – 22 January 2003) was an English priest and the eldest son of J. R. R. Tolkien. He served as a parish priest in Oxford, Coventry, Birmingham, and Stoke-on-Trent. He was also a chaplain at the University College of North Staffordshire and to two schools. During his lifetime and after his death, there were a number of allegations of child sexual abuse against him: he was questioned by the police but never charged or convicted.
John Tolkien (priest) | Introduction
He was ordained as a priest at St Gregory & St Augustine Church in North Oxford. His first position was as a curate from 1946 to 1950 at the St Mary and St Benedict Church in Coventry where he taught weekly classes to 60 children and organized the building of church schools. From 1950 to 1957, he was a curate at the English Martyrs Church in Sparkhill, Birmingham. Thereafter he moved to North Staffordshire, where he was the chaplain of University College of North Staffordshire, now Keele University and at two grammar schools, St Joseph's College, Trent Vale and St Dominic's High School, Hartshill.
Tolkien family | John Francis Reuel Tolkien
He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of Holy Communion, again writing to his son Michael that "the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is Communion." He believed the Catholic Church to be true most of all because of the pride of place and the honour in which it holds the Blessed Sacrament. While he did not disparage the Second Vatican Council – describing it as "needed" – he felt that the reforms of Pope Pius X "surpass[ed] anything...that the Council will achieve." In the last years of his life, Tolkien resisted some of the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, especially the use of English for the liturgy; he continued to make the responses in Latin, ignoring the rest of the congregation.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Religion
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, best known as the author of the high fantasy works "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings". He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as The Inklings.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Introduction
During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love." His guardian, Father Morgan, viewed Edith as the reason for Tolkien's having "muffed" his exams and considered it "altogether unfortunate" that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older, Protestant woman. He prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with her until he was 21. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop. On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Courtship and marriage
In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled: "In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage." Instead, Tolkien, "endured the obloquy", and entered a programme by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were "becoming outspoken from relatives".
J. R. R. Tolkien | First World War
Arthur Reuel Tolkien (c. 18 February 1857 – 15 February 1896), the father of author J. R. R. Tolkien, was born in Handsworth, Staffordshire, England (now a suburb of Birmingham). He was the eldest child of John Benjamin Tolkien and Mary Jane Stow, who had married on 16 February 1856 in All Saints Parish Church, Birmingham, Warwickshire, England. Arthur's father John had previously been married to Jane Holmwood, with whom he had four children: Emily (b. 1838), Louisa (b. 1840), John Benjamin (b. 1845), and Jane (b. 1846). John Benjamin Tolkien had been a piano teacher and tuner, as well as a music seller, but he had gone bankrupt in 1877, when he was described as "John Benjamin Tolkien, of High-street, Birmingham, in the county of Warwick, Pianoforte and Music Seller".
Tolkien family | Arthur Tolkien
According to Ryszard Derdziński the Tolkien name is of Low Prussian origin and probably means "son/descendant of Tolk." Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word "tollkühn", meaning "foolhardy", and jokingly inserted himself as a "cameo" into "The Notion Club Papers" under the literally translated name Rashbold. However, Derdziński has demonstrated this to be a false etymology. While J. R. R. Tolkien was aware of the Tolkien family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father".
J. R. R. Tolkien | Ancestry
H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt "on the shelf" and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Courtship and marriage
Sayer had been a student of Lewis, and became his biographer, and together with them Tolkien would walk the Malvern Hills. Recordings of Tolkien reading excerpts from "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" were made in Malvern in 1952, at the home of George Sayer. The recordings were later issued on long-playing gramophone records. In the liner notes for "J.R.R Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Fellowship of the Rings", George Sayer wrote that Tolkien would relive the book as they walked and compared parts of the Malvern Hills to the White Mountains of Gondor.
Malvern, Worcestershire | Literature
Some writers were certainly important to him, including the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris, and he undoubtedly made use of some real place-names, such as Bag End, the name of his aunt's home. Tolkien stated that he had been influenced by his childhood experiences of the English countryside of Worcestershire and its urbanisation by the growth of Birmingham, and his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War.
J. R. R. Tolkien's influences | Introduction
The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 15 January 2020) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (born 18 June 1929). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young. Each year more characters were added, such as the North Polar Bear (Father Christmas's helper), the Snow Man (his gardener), Ilbereth the elf (his secretary), and various other, minor characters. The major characters would relate tales of Father Christmas's battles against goblins who rode on bats and the various pranks committed by the North Polar Bear.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Family
In the unsent letter, Tolkien made the point that "Aryan" was a linguistic term, denoting speakers of Indo-Iranian languages, and stated that "if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of "Jewish" origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have "no" ancestors of that gifted people." In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, he expressed his resentment at the distortion of Germanic history in "Nordicism", referring to "that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler ... Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light." In 1968, he objected to a description of Middle-earth as "Nordic" for a similar reason.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Opposition to Nazism
Letters 29 and 30 show that a German translation of "The Hobbit" was being negotiated in 1938. The German firm enquired whether Tolkien was of "Arisch" (Aryan) origin. Tolkien was infuriated by this, and wrote two drafts of possible replies for his publisher to choose. The first one is not present – in it Tolkien is assumed to have refused to give any declaration whatsoever of his racial origins. The second, surviving, draft included:
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien | Nazi racial politics
A specifically Christian influence is the notion of the fall of man, which influenced the Ainulindalë, the Kinslaying at Alqualondë, and the fall of Númenor.
J. R. R. Tolkien's influences | Christianity
He was parish priest at Knutton Roman Catholic Church from 1957 to 1966. In 1966, he became the parish priest at Our Lady of the Angels and St Peter in Chains Church, Stoke-on-Trent. He held the position until 1987 and there oversaw the building of a new school. He was chairman of governors at Bishop Bright School, chaplain to the North Staffordshire Catholic Teachers Association and area chaplain to the Young Christian Students. He moved back to Oxford in 1987, settling in Eynsham where he was the parish priest at St. Peter's Catholic Church until his retirement in 1994. Father Tolkien also served in parishes in Oxford, Birmingham, and Warwickshire.
Tolkien family | John Francis Reuel Tolkien
At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, "Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugarlumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. ... With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Courtship and marriage
Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (born 18 June 1929) is the fourth and youngest child of J. R. R. Tolkien, his only daughter and only living child. Priscilla had long been hoped for, and was born to Tolkien and his wife in their house at 22 Northmoor Road in Oxford shortly before the couple moved into their new one at 20 Northmoor Road in 1930. She took an active part in production of "The Lord of the Rings" by typing out some early chapters for her father at the age of fourteen. She completed her B.A. degree in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford in 1951.
Tolkien family | Priscilla Tolkien
Tolkien was born in Leeds, England, the third of four children and youngest son of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien and his wife, Edith Mary Tolkien (née Bratt). He was educated at the Dragon School (Oxford) and later at The Oratory School. He entered the Royal Air Force in mid-1943 and was sent to South Africa for flight training, completing the elementary flying course at 7 Air School, Kroonstad, and the service flying course at 25 Air School, Standerton. He was commissioned into the general duties branch of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve on 27 January 1945 as a pilot officer on probation (emergency) and was given the service number 193121.
Christopher Tolkien | Early life
He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name "Nodens", following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Academic and writing career
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C. S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel Prize in Literature. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult-figure, but admitted that "even the nose of a very modest idol ... cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!" Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper middle class.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Retirement and later years
Tolkien vocally opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party before the Second World War, and despised Nazi racist and anti-semitic ideology. In 1938, the publishing house Rütten & Loening, preparing to release "The Hobbit" in Nazi Germany, outraged Tolkien by asking him whether he was of Aryan origin. In a letter to his British publisher Stanley Unwin, he condemned Nazi "race-doctrine" as "wholly pernicious and unscientific". He added that he had many Jewish friends and was considering "letting a German translation go hang". He provided two letters to Rütten & Loening and instructed Unwin to send whichever he preferred. The more tactful letter was sent but is now lost.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Opposition to Nazism
Tolkien reacted with anger to the excesses of anti-German propaganda during World War II. In a 1944 letter to Christopher, he compared the local press to the verbal excesses of Joseph Goebbels, pointing out that if they advocated exterminating Germans, they were no better than the Nazis themselves. He lamented the treatment of native Africans by whites in his native South Africa.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Race
Mabel Tolkien, born Suffield (1870 – 14 November 1904) was the mother of J. R. R. Tolkien. Her parents, John Suffield and Emily Jane Sparrow, lived in Stirling Road, Birmingham and owned a shop in the city centre. The Suffield family had a business in a building called Lamb House since 1812. From 1812 William Suffield ran a book and stationery shop there; Tolkien's great-grandfather, also John Suffield, was there from 1826 with a drapery and hosiery business. Her husband Arthur Tolkien's death in South Africa in 1896 left her and their two young sons without a source of income.
Tolkien family | Mabel Tolkien
J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife were among the guests. They had three sons: Thorlac Francis Samuel (born 6 January 1944), Merlin Oswald (born 2 July 1946) and Brendan Arthur Auberon (16 September 1948 – 6 December 1981).
Joan Turville-Petre | Introduction
When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club". He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish. Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture "English and Welsh", which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak. He considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote to W.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Linguistic career
After her husband's return from France, the Tolkiens' first child, John Francis Reuel (16 November 1917 – 22 January 2003) was born in Cheltenham. While Edith's husband was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, she and he went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock: We walked in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white flowers. This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and from that the Song of Beren and Luthien."
Edith Tolkien | Homefront
The Tolkien family is an English family of German descent whose best-known member is J. R. R. Tolkien, Oxford academic and author of the fantasy books "The Hobbit", "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion". The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town Kreuzburg near Königsberg, where the Tolkien name is attested since the 16th century. The verified paternal line of J. R. R. Tolkien starts with Michel Tolkien, born around 1620 in Kreuzburg. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg. His son Christian Tolkien (1706–1791) moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s, and became the ancestors of the English family.
Tolkien family | Introduction
Originally from Chicago, Illinois, Finder became a devotee of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien in 1964, when he "spent three straight days curled up at his parents’ house" reading "The Lord of the Rings". He studied academic administration at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and while there organized the "First Conference on Middle-earth", in 1969. In 1971, he held the second "Conference on Middle-earth" at Cleveland State University, where he was working as an assistant dean. He ended up spending most of his life as a career counselor for various employers, including a stint at the United States Army's Fort Drum.
Jan Howard Finder | Background and work
She made a bust of her father-in-law which the English faculty at Oxford presented to him on his retirement in 1959. He had it cast in bronze and in 1966 it was placed at the English Faculty Library. Her other subjects included Iris Murdoch and C. S. Lewis. She separated from Christopher in 1964 and divorced from him in 1967. In 1958, she produced a seated Madonna and Child for the Catholic Chaplaincy at Birmingham University. In the early 1980s she returned to religious themes, including working for the Corpus Christi Church in Headington, Oxford and the Church of the Sacred Heart in Sutton Coldfield.
Tolkien family | Faith Faulconbridge
He also wrote a long poem about the hills and their views, called simply "The Malverns". J.R.R. Tolkien found inspiration in the Malvern landscape which he had viewed from his childhood home in Birmingham and his brother Hilary's home near Evesham. He was introduced to the area by C. S. Lewis, who had brought him here to meet George Sayer, the Head of English at Malvern College. Sayer had been a student of Lewis, and became his biographer, and together with them Tolkien would walk the Malvern Hills. Recordings of Tolkien reading excerpts from "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" were made in Malvern in 1952, at the home of George Sayer.
Malvern Hills | Literature
A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called "The Book of Lost Tales", beginning with "The Fall of Gondolin". "Lost Tales" represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England, a project he would abandon without ever completing. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps. It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Home front
S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Manuscript locations
In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son John as "(conceived and carried during the starvation-year of 1917 and the great U-Boat campaign) round about the Battle of Cambrai, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now". Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on 6 January 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered,
J. R. R. Tolkien | Home front
J.R.R. Tolkien was influenced by the following couplet from "Christ I" (lines 104-5), which inspired his portrayal of Middle-earth and his character Eärendil.
Christ I | Influence on other writers
Tim is the great-nephew of the writer J. R. R. Tolkien. He was raised in the village of Hughenden Valley and went to the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe. He graduated with a degree in fine art (sculpture) from the University of Reading in 1984.
Tim Tolkien | Early life
At first, they lived with her parents in Birmingham, then moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.
Tolkien family | Mabel Tolkien
Peter Hastings, manager of the Newman Bookshop (a Catholic bookshop in Oxford), had written to Tolkien objecting to his writing of the reincarnation of Elves, saying: In a 1954 draft of a reply to Hastings, Tolkien, also a devout Roman Catholic, defended his creative ideas as an exploration of the infinite "potential variety" of God: that it need not conform to the reality of our world so long as it does not misrepresent the essential nature of the divine: Hastings had also criticised the description of Tom Bombadil by Goldberry simply as "He is", saying that this seemed to be a reference to the Biblical quotation "I Am that I Am", implying that Bombadil was God.
Cosmology of Tolkien's legendarium | Tolkien on Eru and subcreation
Tolkien stated that he grew up "in 'the Shire' in a pre-mechanical age".
England in Middle-earth | An English Shire
R. R. Tolkien. Excerpts from "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" were recorded in Malvern in 1952, at the home of George Sayer. The recordings were later issued on long-playing gramophone records. In the liner notes for "J. R. R. Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Fellowship of the Ring", George Sayer wrote that Tolkien would relive the book as they walked and compared parts of the Malvern Hills to the White Mountains of Gondor.
George Sayer | Career
He studied history at Trinity College, Oxford. In 1941, Michael Hilary Tolkien served in an anti-aircraft role during the Battle of Britain for which he was awarded the George Medal. He met a nurse named Joan Audrey Griffith (1916–1982) whom he married the same year. Later in World War II, he served as an anti-aircraft gunner in France and Germany. In 1944, he returned to Trinity College and finished his studies. He graduated in Modern History in 1945. From 1947 until the 1970s he worked as a teacher at various Catholic schools in Britain. In 1973, Michael Tolkien published an article about his father in "The Sunday Telegraph": "J.
Tolkien family | Michael Hilary R. Tolkien
Catholic theology and imagery played a part in fashioning Tolkien's creative imagination, suffused as it was by his deeply religious spirit. Specifically, Paul H. Kocher argues that Tolkien describes evil in the orthodox Christian way as the absence of good. He cites many examples in "The Lord of the Rings", such as Sauron's "Lidless Eye": "the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing". Kocher sees Tolkien's source as Thomas Aquinas, "whom it is reasonable to suppose that Tolkien, as a medievalist and a Catholic, knows well". Tom Shippey makes the same point, but, instead of referring to Aquinas, says Tolkien was very familiar with Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius' "Consolation of Philosophy", known as the "Lays of Boethius".
J. R. R. Tolkien | Catholicism
McGowan was the second of five children born into a working-class Roman Catholic family in Manchester. His parents were both nurses and his family moved to the village of Sherburn in Elmet, outside Leeds, when he was a small child. He has said that he read primarily non-fiction nature books when he was young, but when he was nine, a teacher gave him JRR Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings": "I don’t think I’d ever read a novel before, not even an Enid Blyton. It took me several years to finish reading it, but afterwards, I’d become a different kind of person; one who read novels and might one day write one." At age 11, he was sent to Corpus Christi Catholic College, a state school that he has called "one of the worst schools in Leeds...My upbringing until then had been fairly sheltered and quite rural.
Anthony McGowan | Early life and education
Pressure to study Tolkien seriously came initially from fans rather than academics; the scholarly legitimacy of the field was still a subject of debate in 2015.
Reception of J. R. R. Tolkien | Tolkien research
A small gift from a relative enabled the young Ronald Tolkien (as he was called by his family) to enroll in the prestigious King Edward's School in Birmingham. This required the family to relocate. Not finding the spiritual support she needed in the local Catholic parish there, Mabel Tolkien began to take her two boys on long walks into the country on Sundays. Through these she came to know the Oratory, and found a friend in the community in the person of Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan, Cong.Orat.
Birmingham Oratory | Tolkien and the Oratory
Christianity is a central theme in J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional works about Middle-earth, but always a hidden one. J. R. R. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic from boyhood, and he described "The Lord of the Rings" in particular as a fundamentally religious and Catholic work. While he insisted it was not an allegory, it contains numerous themes from Christian theology. These include the battle of good versus evil, the triumph of humility over pride, and the activity of grace. A central theme is death and immortality, but Tolkien's attitudes to mercy and pity, resurrection, salvation, repentance, self-sacrifice, free will, justice, fellowship, authority and healing can also be detected.
Christianity in Middle-earth | Introduction
In 1923, J. R. R. Tolkien, along with his wife and children, went to stay with Hilary for a while. A few months before his death, he visited Hilary in Evesham. Hilary married Magdalen Matthews in 1928. They had three sons. The first, Gabriel, was born in 1931, the second, Julian, in 1935, and the third, Paul, in 1938.
Tolkien family | Hilary Tolkien
The village was home to the newly married Edith Tolkien, wife of author J. R. R. Tolkien, from March 1916 to February 1917. Tolkien stayed with his wife in Cottage 1, Gipsy Green, on the Teddesley Park Estate, near the village during the winter of 1916, whilst recuperating from trench fever. The surrounding landscape was said to be an inspiration for his early literary works about Middle-earth.. At the cottage he began work on what would become "The Silmarillion". The village of Norbury lies about away and may relate to the "Norbury of the Kings" that appears in "The Lord of the Rings".
Little Haywood | J. R. R. Tolkien
The Birmingham Oratory was to play a major role in the life of J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of "The Lord of the Rings", who was a parishioner there for about nine years during his childhood. After the unexpected death of their father in South Africa, their mother, Mabel Suffield Tolkien, began to seek a spiritual home where she could find support in her struggle as a widow and single mother of little financial means. Fifty years after the establishment of the Oratorian community there, she started to attend the Church of St. Anne. The family was received into the Catholic Church in the spring of 1900, provoking opposition from the Tolkien family as well as her own.
Birmingham Oratory | Tolkien and the Oratory
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as his special subject. He worked on the "Oxford English Dictionary" from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including "walrus", over which he struggled mightily. In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Linguistic career
J. R. R. Tolkien worshipped at the church when he lived in Moseley and converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900.
St Anne's Church, Birmingham | Construction
He also studied Old Norse from his father in Oxford.
John Tolkien (priest) | Biography
I have the greatest sympathy with Belgium—which is about the right size of any country! I wish my own were bounded still by the seas of the Tweed and the walls of Wales... we folk do at least know something of mortality and eternity and when Hitler (or a Frenchman) says 'Germany (or France) must live forever' we know that he lies." Tolkien hated the side effects of industrialization, which he considered to be devouring the English countryside and simpler life. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of cars, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude can be seen in his work, most famously in the portrayal of the forced "industrialization" of the Shire in "The Lord of the Rings".
J. R. R. Tolkien | Views
In 1928, a 4th-century pagan cult temple was excavated at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire. Tolkien was asked to investigate a Latin inscription there: "For the god Nodens. Silvianus has lost a ring and has donated one-half [its worth] to Nodens. Among those who are called Senicianus do not allow health until he brings it to the temple of Nodens." The Anglo-Saxon name for the place was Dwarf's Hill, and in 1932 Tolkien traced Nodens to the Irish hero "Nuada Airgetlám", "Nuada of the Silver-Hand". Shippey thought this "a pivotal influence" on Tolkien's Middle-earth, combining as it did a god-hero, a ring, dwarves, and a silver hand.
J. R. R. Tolkien's influences | Nodens
In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served as an external examiner for University College, Dublin, for many years. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which U.C.D. was a constituent college). Tolkien completed "The Lord of the Rings" in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Second World War
Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984) was a British teacher. He was J. R. R. Tolkien's second son and was named after J. R. R. Tolkien's brother Hilary. When young Michael lost his toy dog and became sad about this, his father began to write the story of "Roverandom" to comfort him. Michael's fear of spiders was J. R. R. Tolkien's inspiration for the encounter of Bilbo Baggins and the spiders of Mirkwood in "The Hobbit". Michael also used to own a Dutch doll which became an inspiration for Tom Bombadil. In 1939, Michael volunteered for the British Army but he was told to continue his university studies.
Tolkien family | Michael Hilary R. Tolkien
R. R. Tolkien – The Wizard Father". Michael and his wife Joan had three children: Michael George Reuel (b. 1943), Joan Anne (b. 1945) and Judith (b. 1951). Royd Tolkien is the son of Michael's daughter Joan. Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien died in 1984 from leukaemia.
Tolkien family | Michael Hilary R. Tolkien
His 1955 valedictory lecture "English and Welsh" expounds upon his philosophy of language, his notion of native language and his views on linguistic aesthetics (c.f. "cellar door"). Ross Smith published a monograph on Tolkien's philosophy of language.
Reception of J. R. R. Tolkien | Reception of non-fiction works
In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as "The Father Christmas Letters"). Other works included "Mr. Bliss" and "Roverandom" (for children), and "Leaf by Niggle" (part of "Tree and Leaf"), "The Adventures of Tom Bombadil", "Smith of Wootton Major" and "Farmer Giles of Ham". "Roverandom" and "Smith of Wootton Major", like "The Hobbit", borrowed ideas from his "legendarium".
J. R. R. Tolkien | Children's books and other short works
After World War I, the Tolkiens had three more children: Michael Hilary Reuel (October 1920 – 1984), Christopher John Reuel (1924–2020) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929–).
Edith Tolkien | Post war
He regarded the end of "The Return of the King" as akin to the re-establishment of the "Holy Roman Empire with its seat in Rome [more] than anything that would be devised by a 'Nordic'."
J. R. R. Tolkien | European mythology
Humphrey Carpenter has written "" (1977) and edited "The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien", the latter assisted by Christopher Tolkien (1981). John Garth has published "Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth" (2003).
Tolkien research | Biography and letters
Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) was an English and French academic editor. He was the son of author J. R. R. Tolkien and the editor of much of his father's posthumously published work. Tolkien drew the original maps for his father's "The Lord of the Rings".
Christopher Tolkien | Introduction
He was ordained as a priest at St Gregory and Augustine Church in North Oxford. He first served as a curate from 1946 to 1950 at the St Mary and St Benedict Church in Coventry, teaching 60 children every week and organizing efforts for rebuilding the church's schools. From 1950 to 1957, he was a curate at the English Martyrs Church in Sparkhill, Birmingham. He later went to North Staffordshire, where he served as the chaplain of University College of North Staffordshire (now Keele University) and of two grammar schools namely, St Joseph's College in Trent Vale and St Dominic's High School in Hartshill.
John Tolkien (priest) | Clerical career
He cites, too, Carpenter's mention that Tolkien "disapproved of biography as an aid to literary appreciation", agreeing that this may have been correct, with the two famous works telling what readers most need to know about Tolkien, but adding that it is helpful to know that Tolkien liked ordinary working men, like the batmen who served officers in the First World War trenches. Lloyd finds Carpenter's account of Tolkien's youth "gripping and astounding", and extremely good on his friendships and Catholicism.
J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography | Reception
Tolkien voiced support for the Nationalists (eventually led by Franco during the Spanish Civil War) upon hearing that communist Republicans were destroying churches and killing priests and nuns. He was contemptuous of Joseph Stalin. During World War II, Tolkien referred to Stalin as "that bloodthirsty old murderer". However, in 1961, Tolkien sharply criticized a Swedish commentator who suggested that "The Lord of the Rings" was an anti-communist parable and identified Sauron with Stalin, stating that the situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Anti-communism
To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he also developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements. He left Étaples on 27 June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubempré, near Amiens. He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly from the mining, milling, and weaving towns of Lancashire. According to John Garth, he "felt an affinity for these working class men", but military protocol prohibited friendships with "other ranks". Instead, he was required to "take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters ... If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty."
J. R. R. Tolkien | France
On 3 November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant. His first civilian job after World War I was at the "Oxford English Dictionary", where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter "W". In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest professor there. While at Leeds, he produced "A Middle English Vocabulary" and a definitive edition of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight" with E. V. Gordon; both became academic standard works for several decades.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Academic and writing career
Fimi pointed out that despite this, Tolkien was fluent in medieval Welsh and declared when delivering the first O'Donnell lectures at Oxford in 1954 that Welsh was "beautiful". Tolkien objected to the description of his works as "Nordic", both for that term's racist and pagan undertones. Responding to a claim made in the "Daily Telegraph Magazine" that "the North is a sacred direction" in Tolkien's works, he claimed that his love of the North was based mainly on the fact that he was an inhabitant of northwestern Europe, and that the north was not sacred to him nor did it "exhaust [his] affections".
J. R. R. Tolkien | European mythology
(In fact, according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been "dwarrows" or "dwerrows".) He also coined the term "eucatastrophe", though it remains mainly used in connection with his own work.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Language construction
Shippey was born in 1943 in Calcutta, British India, where he also spent the first years of his life. He was sent to a boarding school in England, and studied at King Edward's School in Birmingham from 1954 to 1960. When he was 14 years old, he was lent "The Hobbit". Like Tolkien, Shippey became fond of Old English, Old Norse, German and Latin, and of playing rugby.
Tom Shippey | Youth
Steyn was born in Toronto on December 8, 1959. He was baptized a Catholic and later confirmed in the Anglican Church. He has stated that "the last Jewish female in my line was one of my paternal great-grandmothers" and that "both my grandmothers were Catholic". Steyn's great-aunt was artist Stella Steyn. His mother's family was Belgian. Steyn was educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham, in the United Kingdom, the same school that author J. R. R. Tolkien attended and where Steyn was assigned a Greek dictionary that had also been used by Tolkien. Although it was reported by "The Age" in 2006 that Steyn had left school at age 16, his name appears in the King Edward's School yearbook for 1977-78 as a member of "Cl.VI", that is, the "Classics [Upper] 6th form", which is the normal final year for students at that school.
Mark Steyn | Life and career
Winter was born in Dubuque, Iowa on December 8, 1957. Winter attended Catholic school for grade school and high school, and had two years of Catholic college before he transferred to Iowa State University at Ames. “A nun introduced me to the works of J. R. R. Tolkien in high school ... Previously, I had been mostly into historical novels and military history. For the next several years, I read all the fantasy I could get my hands on — but I didn’t enjoy very much of it. I couldn’t find anything with the same sense of humor and style as Tolkien.
Steve Winter | Early life
He translated "Sir Gawain", "Pearl", and "Sir Orfeo". In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College. In mid-1919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately, most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall and St Hugh's College, given that the women's colleges were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien as a married professor (then still not common) was considered suitable, as a bachelor don would not have been. During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote "The Hobbit" and the first two volumes of "The Lord of the Rings", while living at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford (where a blue plaque was placed in 2002).
J. R. R. Tolkien | Academic and writing career
Edith died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford, where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city. Tolkien was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year Honours and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In the same year Oxford University gave him an honorary Doctorate of Letters. He had the name Lúthien engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Final years
Tolkien lived from 1975 in the French countryside with his second wife, Baillie Tolkien (née Klass), who edited his father's "The Father Christmas Letters" for posthumous publication. They had two children, Adam Reuel Tolkien and Rachel Clare Reuel Tolkien. In the wake of a dispute surrounding the making of "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy, he disowned his son by his first marriage, barrister and novelist Simon Mario Reuel Tolkien, though they reconciled prior to Christopher's death. He died on 16 January 2020, at the age of 95, in Draguignan, Var, France.
Christopher Tolkien | Personal life
The author of the bestselling fantasy novel "The Lord of the Rings", J. R. R. Tolkien, was orphaned as a boy, his father dying in South Africa and his mother in England a few years later. He was brought up by his guardian, a Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan, and educated at boys' grammar schools and then Exeter College, Oxford, which at that time had only male students. He joined the British Army's Lancashire Fusiliers and saw the horror of trench warfare, with life as an officer made more bearable by the support of a male batman or servant. After the war he became a professor of English Language at the University of Leeds, and then at the University of Oxford, where he taught at Pembroke College.
Women in The Lord of the Rings | Tolkien's background
Following her engagement in January 1913, Edith announced that she was converting to Roman Catholicism at her fiancé's insistence. As Edith was heavily involved in her local Anglican parish, she first resisted the demands. Despite Edith's misgivings, her landlord, a staunch Protestant, was enraged and instantly turned her out of the house. The Tolkiens were married in the Catholic Church of St. Mary Immaculate in Warwick on 22 March 1916. Their week-long honeymoon was spent at Clevedon, in North Somerset, and included a visit to the Cheddar Caves. The Tolkiens had four children, three sons and one daughter, born in 1917, 1920, 1924 and 1929.
Edith Tolkien | Marriage
J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle-earth, especially "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion", drew on a wide array of influences including language, Christianity, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. He was inspired primarily by his profession, philology; his work centred on the study of Old English literature, especially "Beowulf", and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, Slavic, and Greek language and mythology. His fiction reflected his Christian beliefs and his early reading of adventure stories and fantasy books. Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and topological antecedents for characters, places and events in Tolkien's writings.
J. R. R. Tolkien's influences | Introduction
A former signals officer at the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien frequently expressed his great dislike for war, whatever the cause. This is evident in a great many letters which he wrote during the Second World War to his son Christopher, which often invoke a sense of gloom. Notable among these is his reaction to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, in which he refers to the bombmakers of the Manhattan Project as "lunatics" and "Babel builders".
The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien | War
Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924 – 16 January 2020) was the youngest son of J. R. R. and Edith Tolkien. He is best known as his father's literary executor; he is the editor of much of his father's posthumously published work. "The Fall of Gondolin" was published on 30 August 2018. During the Second World War he served in the RAF as a pilot. After the war, he followed in his father's footsteps, becoming a lecturer and tutor in English Language at New College, Oxford from 1964 to 1975. In 2001, he received some attention for his stance on New Line Cinema's "The Lord of the Rings" film trilogy, directed by Peter Jackson.
Tolkien family | Christopher Tolkien
Rateliff relocated to Wisconsin in 1981 in order to study original Tolkien manuscripts at Marquette University. Rateliff is an expert in Tolkien studies, and he earned a PhD in 20th-century British literature from Marquette University.
John D. Rateliff | Early life and education
On 2 September 2017, the Oxford Oratory, Tolkien's parish church during his time in Oxford, offered its first Mass for the intention of Tolkien's cause for beatification to be opened. A prayer was written for his cause.
J. R. R. Tolkien | Canonization process
Chambers was a friend of J.R.R. Tolkien and their careers parallel each other at many points: both were Catholics (Tolkien a Roman and Chambers an Anglo-Catholic), scholars of Old English literature, both experienced the horrors of trench warfare in World War I (Chambers was too old to be an enlisted man, however), and both wrote influentially on "Beowulf" (Chambers' writings were one of the inspirations for Tolkien's ""). Thomas Shippey described Chambers as "a patron and supporter of Tolkien in his early years." Chambers wrote an article of criticism on a piece of prose relating to the earlier Middle English period "Ancren Riwle".
Raymond Wilson Chambers | Chambers and Tolkien
Beckett was born in the Union of South Africa, and raised in Edinburgh, Scotland, where her father was studying medicine. In 1946, she entered the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, a Roman Catholic congregation of religious sisters dedicated to education. She was sent to England where she completed her novitiate and then studied at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she was awarded a congratulatory first class honours degree in English Literature. J. R. R. Tolkien was president of her final examinations board and asked her to stay on at the University, an invitation which she declined. Outside her academic work, she lived in a convent which maintained the strict code of silence typical in convents prior to the changes following the Second Vatican Council (1962–65).
Wendy Beckett | Early life
Tolkien was strongly opposed to both Nazism and Communism; Hal Colebatch in the "J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia" notes that his views can be seen in the somewhat parodic "The Scouring of the Shire". Leftist critics have accordingly attacked Tolkien's social conservatism. E. P. Thompson blames the cold warrior mentality on "too much early reading of "The Lord of the Rings"". Other Marxist critics, however, have been more positive towards Tolkien. While criticizing the politics embedded in "The Lord of the Rings", China Miéville admires Tolkien's creative use of Norse mythology, tragedy, monsters, and subcreation, as well as his criticism of allegory.
Reception of J. R. R. Tolkien | Marxist criticism