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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892
– September 2, 1973) is the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord
of the Rings.
He attended King Edward's School,
Birmingham and Oxford University; he worked as reader in English
language at Leeds from 1920 to 1925, as professor of Anglo-Saxon at
Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and of English Language and Literature, also
at Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was a strongly committed Catholic. He
belonged to a literary discussion group called the Inklings, through
which he enjoyed a close friendship with C. S. Lewis.
In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of
the Rings, Tolkien's published fiction includes The Silmarillion and
other posthumous books about what he called a legendarium, a fictional
mythology of the remote past of Earth, called Arda, and Middle-earth
(from middangeard, the lands inhabitable by Men), in particular. Most of
these posthumously published works come from Tolkien's drafts and were
put together as books by his son, Christopher Tolkien. The enduring
popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the
"father of the modern high fantasy genre". Tolkien's other published
fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children
and not directly related to the legendarium.
****
Biography
The Tolkien family
As far as is known, most of Tolkien's
paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in
Saxony (Germany), but had been living in England since the 18th century.
The surname Tolkien is anglicised from Tollkiehn (i.e. German tollkühn,
"foolhardy", the etymological English translation would be dull-keen, a
literal translation of oxymoron). The character of Professor Rashbold in
The Notion Club Papers is a pun on the name.
Childhood
Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892 in
Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State), South Africa, to
Arthur Tolkien, an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel Tolkien
(maiden name Suffield). Tolkien only had one sibling, his brother Hilary
Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on February 17, 1894.
When he was three, Tolkien 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 a severe brain
hemorrhage before he could join them. This left the family without an
income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in
Birmingham, England for a short time. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to
Sarehole, then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He
enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent Hills and
Lickey Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with
other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and
Alvechurch, as would places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, whose
name would be used in his fiction.
Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as
he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great
deal of botany, and she awoke in her son the enjoyment of the look and
feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees. But
his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother
taught him the rudiments of Latin very early. He could read by the age
of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. He attended King
Edward's School, Birmingham, and while a student there, helped "line the
route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just
outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. He later attended St Phillip's
School and Exeter College, Oxford.
His mother converted to Roman Catholicism
in 1900, despite vehement protests by her Baptist family. She died of
diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was 12, and he felt for the rest of his
life that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound
effect on his own Catholic beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was
significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity and in his
writings, which express a Christian mythos and worldview.
During his subsequent orphanhood he was
brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, in
the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of
Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which
may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works.
Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of
Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham
Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of
works and had put it on free public display from around 1908.
Youth
Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith
Bratt, three years his senior, at the age of 16. Father Francis forbade
him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was
21. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter.
In 1911, while they were at King Edward's
School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey
Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they
called "the T.C.B.S.", the initials standing for 'Tea Club and Barrovian
Society', alluding to their fondness of drinking Tea in Barrow's Stores
near the school and, illegally, in the school library. After leaving
school, the members stayed in touch, and in December 1914, they held a
'Council' in London, at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this
meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.
In the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on
holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968
letter (Letters, no. 306), noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty
Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the
pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of 12
hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen,and on to camp in the morains
beyond Mürren. 57 years later, Tolkien remembers his regret at leaving
the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the
Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams"). They went across the Kleine
Scheidegg on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen.
They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to
Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.
On the evening of his 21st birthday,
Tolkien telephoned Edith and asked her to be his bride and she converted
to Catholicism for him. They were engaged in Birmingham, in January
1913, and married in Warwick, England on March 22, 1916.
With his childhood love of landscape, he
visited Cornwall in 1914 and he was said to be deeply impressed by the
singular Cornish coastline and sea. After graduating from the University
of Oxford with a first-class degree in English language in 1915, Tolkien
joined the British Army effort in World War I and served as a second
lieutenant in the 11th battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. His
battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a
communications officer during the Battle of the Somme, until he came
down with trench fever on October 27, and was moved back to England on
November 8. Many of his fellow servicemen, as well as many of his
closest friends, were killed in the war. During his recovery in a
cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on
what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of
Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918, his illness kept recurring, but he
had reconvalesced enough to do home service at various camps, and was
promoted to lieutenant. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, one
day he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith
began to dance for him in a thick grove of hemlock. The memory of this
is wrought into the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and
Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.
Leeds, Oxford
Tolkien's first civilian job after World
War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary (among others, he initiated
the entries wasp and walrus). In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in
English language at the University of Leeds, but in 1925 he returned to
Oxford as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, where he wrote
the The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings. In
1945 he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor
of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his
retirement in 1959.
It may be significant that Tolkien disliked
intensely the devouring of the English countryside by the suburbs, even
though, given his profession, he generally found it convenient to live
in them. But for most of his adult life he eschewed automobiles,
preferring to ride a bicycle. This strong dislike of industrialization
influenced some parts of his work, such as the forced industrialization
of the Shire in The Lord of the Rings, where he mentions ugly brick
buildings as a negative development. Tolkien and Edith had four
children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917), Michael Hilary Reuel
(October, 1920), Christopher John Reuel (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel
(1929). During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic
holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent.
W.H. Auden was a frequent correspondent and
longtime friend (although they rarely saw each other) of Tolkien's.
Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise The Lord of
the Rings. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, "I am... very deeply in
Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work
has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews,
notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular
thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it." ("Letters," no. 327).
Retirement, Old Age
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up
to his death in 1973, Tolkien increasingly turned into a figure of
public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so
profitable that Tolkien regretted he had not taken early retirement.
While at first he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he
became more and more suspicious about emerging Tolkien fandom,
especially among the Hippy movement in the USA. Already in 1944, he made
a somewhat sarcastic comment about a fan letter by a 12-year-old
American reader ( It's nice to find that little American boys do really
still say 'Gee Whiz'., Letters no. 87). In a 1972 letter he deplores
having become a cult-figure, but admits that
even the nose of a very modest idol
(younger than Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish) [idols in a story
by Lord Dunsany] cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of
incense! (Letters, no. 336).
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 at the south coast.
Tolkien was awarded a CBE by Queen
Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on March 28, 1972.
Edith Tolkien died on November 29, 1971, at
the age of 82, and Tolkien had the name Lúthien engraved on the stone at
Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford, and when Tolkien died, 21 months later at
the age of 81 on September 2, 1973, he was buried in the same grave,
with Beren added to his name, so that the engraving now reads: Edith
Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889-1971 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren,
1892-1973
Posthumously named after Tolkien are the
Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid 2675 Tolkien.
Tolkien Way in Stoke-On-Trent is named after J.R.R.'s son, Father John
Francis Tolkien, who used to be the priest in charge at the nearby Roman
Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains.
Writing
Tolkien's earliest literary ambition was to
be a poet, but his primary creative urge in his younger days was the
invention of imaginary languages, including early versions of what would
later evolve into the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin. Feeling that
a language required a people to speak it, and that a people would tell
stories which influenced and reflected their languages, he began writing
(in English, but with many names and terms from his invented languages)
the mythology and tales of a fictional people he associated with
legendary fairies. In later works, Tolkien's fairy-folk were replaced by
Elves -- a name he adapted from English folklore (with some regret, for
he came to consider the name misleading).
Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales,
written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien
devised several themes - including the love story of Beren and Lúthien -
that were reused in successive mythologies. The two most prominent
stories, the tales of Beren/Luthien and of Túrin, were carried forward
into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand). Tolkien
wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to
represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an
epic history that Tolkien started three times but never finished. The
story of this continuous re-drafting is told in the posthumous series
The History of Middle-Earth. From around 1936, he began to extend this
framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired
by the legend of Atlantis.
Tolkien was strongly influenced by
Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish
folklore, the Bible, and Greek mythology. Other inspirations included
Babylon and Egypt. The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's
stories include Beowulf, Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, Plato's Atlantis,
Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga [1]. Tolkien himself acknowledged
Homer and Oedipus as influences or sources for some of his stories and
ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and
poems.
In addition to his mythological
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 stories included Mr.
Bliss, Roverandom, and Smith of Wootton Major. Roverandom and Smith of
Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from the mythological
compositions.
Tolkien never expected his fictional
stories to become popular but he was persuaded by a former student to
publish a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in
1937. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became
popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien
to work on a sequel.
Despite feeling uninspired on the topic,
this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous
work: the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955).
Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and
appendices for Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the
constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S.
Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The
Lord of the Rings are set long after The Silmarillion but Tolkien
infused the Silmarillion and Númenor myths into a new mythology which is
properly called The Middle-earth Mythology.
The Lord of the Rings became immensely
popular with students in the 1960s and has remained popular ever since,
ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth
century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 “Big Read”
survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the
"Nation's Best-loved Book”. In 1999 a poll of Amazon.com customers
judged The Lord of the Rings to be their favorite book of the
millennium. In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd "greatest Briton" in a
poll conducted by the BBC and in 2004 he was voted 35th in a list of the
Greatest South Africans. He is the only person to appear in both the
British and South African Top 100. His popularity is not limited just to
the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK’s “Big
Read” survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings (Herr
der Ringe) to be their favorite work of literature by a wide margin.
Tolkien at first thought that The Lord of
the Rings would tell another children's tale like The Hobbit, but it
quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct
sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the
immense back-story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous
years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The
Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on
the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the
Rings.
Tolkien was a professional philologist, and
the languages and the mythologies he studied clearly left an imprint on
his fiction. In particular, the dwarves' names in the Hobbit, are taken
from the Völuspá of the Edda, while certain plot-elements (for example:
the thief stealing a cup from a dragon's hoard) are taken from Beowulf.
Tolkien was a recognised authority on Beowulf, and published several
important works on the poem. A previously unpublished translation of
Beowulf by Tolkien was found in 2004 and is being edited for publication
by Michael Drout. Many of the names Tolkien used in The Lord of the
Rings may be found in Middle English poems, The Bible, and other
sources.
Tolkien continued to work on the history of
Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher, with some assistance
from fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, organised some of this material
into one volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. Christopher
Tolkien continued over subsequent years to publish background material
on the creation of Middle-earth. Note that the posthumous works such as
The History of Middle-earth and the Unfinished Tales contain unfinished,
abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory versions of the
stories simply because Tolkien kept inventing new mythologies which
reused older ideas over the course of decades.
There is no true consistency to be found
between the various works, not even between The Lord of the Rings and
The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was
never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He
commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he
would have preferred to rewrite the entire book completely.
The library of Marquette University in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts,
notes and letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian
Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Lord of the
Rings and The Hobbit, manuscripts of many "lesser" books like the Farmer
Giles of Ham, and Tolkien fan material, while the Bodleian holds the
Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.
Languages
Both Tolkien's academic career and his
literary production are inseparable from his love of language and
philology.
He specialized in Greek philology in
college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Icelandic as special subject. He
worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918. In 1920, he went to
Leeds as Reader in English Language, 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. When in 1925, aged 33, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and
Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of
Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".
Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things
of racial and linguistic significance" and he entertained notions of an
inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as
opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which
is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered
west-midland Middle English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to
W. H. Auden in 1955 (Letters, 163), "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)".
Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as
a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that
his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for the
construction of artificial languages. The best-developed of these are
Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which are at
the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for
Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular
was designed from 'phonaesthetic' considerations. It was intended as an
'Elvenlatin', and was phonologically based on Latin basis with
ingredients from Finnish and Greek (Letters, 144). A notable addition
came in late 1945 with Numenorean, a language of a "faintly Semitic
flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis myth, which by The Notion
Club Papers ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of
language, and via the "Second Age" and the Earendil myth was grounded in
the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th century
"real primary world" with the mythical past of his Middle-earth.
Tolkien considered languages inseparable
from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim
view of auxiliary languages. In 1930 A congress of Esperantists were
told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language
construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük,
Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused
languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends."
(Letters, 180).
The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a
small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in
particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly
accept Tolkien's spellings dwarves and elvish (instead of dwarfs and
elfish). Other terms he has coined, like legendarium and eucatastrophe
are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.
Art based on Tolkien's works
See also Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien.
In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman (Letters
131), Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or
less connected legend", of which
The cycles should be linked to a majestic
whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and
music and drama.
The hands and minds of many artists have
indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were
Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom
Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to
The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created
illustrations to the Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them
to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own
drawings.
But Tolkien was not fond of all the
artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime,
and was sometimes harshly disapproving.
In 1946 (Letters, 107), he rejects
suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of
the Hobbit as "too Disnified",
Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as
a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.
He was sceptical of the emerging fandom in
the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the
dust-jackets of the American edition of the Lord of the Rings (Letters,
144):
Thank you for sending me the projected
'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all
amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor
that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.
And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a
proposed movie adaptation of the Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady
Zimmerman (Letters, 207) he writes
I would ask them to make an effort of
imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the
resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his
work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places
recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is
all about.
He went on to criticize the script scene by
scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings").
But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He
sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord
of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism
towards future productions, he forbade that Disney should ever be
involved (Letters, 13, 1937):
It might be advisable […] to let the
Americans do what seems good to them – as long as it was possible […] to
veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose
works I have a heartfelt loathing).
United Artists never made a film, though at
least John Boorman was planning a film in the early seventies. It would
have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more
to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold
to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the
first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of The Lord of the
Rings appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by Ralph
Bakshi). This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half
of the story that is The Lord of the Rings. In 1977 an animated TV
production of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass. In 2001–2003 The Lord
of the Rings was filmed in full and as a live-action film as a trilogy
of films by Peter Jackson.
Bibliography
Fiction and poetry
1936 Songs for the Philologists, with E.V.
Gordon et al.
1937 The Hobbit or There and Back Again
1945 Leaf by Niggle (short story)
1945 The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun,
published in Welsh Review
1949 Farmer Giles of Ham (medieval fable)
1953 The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth,
Beorhthelm's Son published with the essay Ofermod
The Lord of the Rings
1954 The Fellowship of the Ring: being the
first part of The Lord of the Rings
1954 The Two Towers: being the second part
of The Lord of the Rings
1955 The Return of the King: being the
third part of The Lord of the Rings
1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and
Other Verses from the Red Book
1967 The Road Goes Ever On, with Donald
Swann
1964 Tree and Leaf (On Fairy-Stories and
Leaf by Niggle in book form)
1966 The Tolkien Reader (The Homecoming of
Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son, On Fairy Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer
Giles of Ham' and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil)
1966 Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical)
1967 Smith of Wootton Major
Academic works
1922 A Middle English Vocabulary
1924 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with
E. V. Gordon)
1925 Some Contributions to Middle-English
Lexicography
1925 The Devil's Coach Horses
1929 Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad
1932 The Name 'Nodens' (in: Report on the
Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney
Park, Gloucestershire.)
1932/1935 Sigelwara Land parts I and II
1934 The Reeve's Tale (rediscovery of
dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual
criticism of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales)
1936 Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics
(lecture on Beowulf criticism)
1939 On Fairy-Stories (lecture on Tolkien's
philosophy on fantasy)
1944 Sir Orfeo (an edition of the medieval
poem)
1947 On Fairy-Stories (essay, very central
for understanding Tolkien's views on fantasy)
1953 Ofermod, published with the poem The
Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son
1953 Middle English "Losenger"
1962 Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the
Ancrene Riwle
1963 English and Welsh
1966 Jerusalem Bible (contributing
translator and lexicographer)
Posthumous publications
1975 Translations of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight, Pearl (poem) and Sir Orfeo
1976 The Father Christmas Letters
1977 The Silmarillion
1979 Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien
1980 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and
Middle-earth
1980 Poems and Stories (a compilation of
The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
Beorhthelm's Son, On Fairy-Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham
and Smith of Wootton Major)
1981 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (eds.
Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter)
1981 The Old English Exodus Text
1982 Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the
Episode
1982 Mr. Bliss
1983 The Monsters and the Critics (an essay
collection)
Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics
(1936)
On Translating Beowulf (1940)
On Fairy-Stories (1947)
A Secret Vice (1930)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
English and Welsh (1955)
1983–1996 The History of Middle-Earth:
The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
The Return of the Shadow (The History of
The Lord of the Rings vol. 1) (1988)
The Treason of Isengard (The History of The
Lord of the Rings vol. 2) (1989)
The War of the Ring (The History of The
Lord of the Rings vol. 3) (1990)
Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of
the Rings vol. 4, including an edition of The Notion Club Papers) (1992)
Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion vol.
1) (1993)
The War of the Jewels (The Later
Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)
The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)
Index (2002)
1995 J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and
Illustrator (a compilation of Tolkien's art)
1998 Roverandom
Audio recordings
1967 Poems and Songs of Middle-Earth,
Caedmon TC 1231
1975 JRR Tolkien Reads and Sings his The
Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an
August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)
Books about Tolkien
A small selection of the dozens of books
about Tolkien and his works:
1977 J. R. R. Tolkien - A Biography
(Humphrey Carpenter)
1981 Journeys of Frodo (Barbara Strachey —
an atlas of The Lord of the Rings)
1992 John & Priscilla Tolkien, The Tolkien
Family Album. London: HarperCollins.
2000 J. R. R. Tolkien - Author of the
Century (T. A. Shippey)
2000 Tolkien's Legendarium: Essays on The
History of Middle Earth ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter
2002 The Complete Tolkien Companion, 3rd
edition (J. E. A. Tyler — a reference, covers The Lord of the Rings, The
Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales; substantially improved
over the previous editions.)
2003 Tolkien the Medievalist, (ed. Jane
Chance, Routledge, London, New York)
2003 J.R.R. Tolkien – Mytenes mann by Nils
Ivar Agøy
2004 Tolkien studies, Vol 1 ed. Douglas A.
Anderson, Michael D. C. Drout and Verlyn Flieger
2004 Tolkien and the Invention of Myth, a
Reader ed. Jane Chance
2005 The Power of the Ring: The Spiritual
Vision Behind The Lord of the Rings by Stratford Caldecott
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