John Ronald Reuel Tolkien ˈɹʷɒnldˈɹʷuːəlˈtʰɒlkiːn}}, often called J.R.R. Tolkien (“Ronald” for its family), was a Philologue and British writer , born the January 3rd 1892 with Bloemfontein (South Africa) and dead the September 2nd 1973, with Bournemouth (the United Kingdom).

It was a catholic enthusiast . Friend close to C.S. Lewis, it formed to part like him literary group of the Inklings .

Biography

Childhood

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is born on January 3rd, 1892 with Bloemfontein, in South Africa. His/her mother, Mabel Suffield, fact part of a commercial family of the Midlands, while the family of its father, Arthur Tolkien, is of German origin.

In 1896, following health issues, it comes to England close to Birmingham where it will pass the remainder of its childhood. His/her father, remained in South Africa, dies over there. In 1904, his/her mother dies in her turn. It will be initially placed under the supervision of a priest Catholique, the father Francis Morgan, then of an aunt starting from 1905.

Youth

In 1916, it marries Edith Bratt, a friend of childhood with which it was in love for a long time, but that the priest of its childhood had held remotely, because this one wanted that John devotes himself fully to his studies before launching out in stories in love.

It engages then in the army and will serve in the Lancashire Fusiliers during the First World War where it will be engaged in the loophole Bataille of the Sum. It is repatriated in 1917 due to “fever of the trenches”. It is at that time that, already impassioned imaginary languages, it creates the language of the Elfes, the haut-elfique one or Quenya and writes the first steps of the mythology of the Silmarillion .

The academic and the writer

In 1919, it is graduate of Oxford. He works first of all like lexicographer on the famous Oxford English Dictionary of 1919 with 1921, then obtains a post of lecturer with Leeds. In 1924, he becomes professor of English language. In 1925, it returns to Oxford (Merton College) for a pulpit of old language (Anglo-Saxon). In 1945, it will teach the English language and the literature until its retirement in 1959.

Its first book Bilbo the Hobbit was invented in oral form, then put in writing (unfinished), for his/her children. Discovered by a coed, then by an editor, the manuscript is completed, then published, in 1937. He worked as from 1938 on the Lord of the Rings who will be published in 1954, and whose success will never be contradicted, as of the Fifties, but especially starting from the middle of the years 1960. In 1978 appears a first animated film adaptation, carried out by Ralph Bakshi. This film, partially carried out in Rotoscopie, stops the account in the middle of the volume, the two turns . The New Zealand realizer Peter Jackson adapted as for him the entirety of work in three successful films made together, but successively left in rooms in 2001, 2002 and 2003.

Tolkien was philologist as much that linguist. Specialist in the dialect mercian ( Mercian ) of the Old English (whom one spoke in the center about Great Britain, between 450 and 1150) and of the Middle English (1150 - 1500), it taught others Germanic Langues (norrois and Gotique). He spoke the Afrikaans, the Latin , the Greek , the Hebrew , the Welsh and the Finnois that he liked particularly, which was not, on the other hand, at all the case of the French (the Francophobie of Tolkien is evoked by all the biographers, in particular by Humphrey Carpenter, which considers it “almost unexplainable”).

End-of-life

It is the September 29th 1971 which Edith, his wife, dies. On its tomb, it makes engrave after its name, Lúthien . It joined it the September 2nd 1973, and had asked that be engraved, for him, the name of Beren (Lúthien and Beren are two characters of the universe which it created, the Ground of the Medium, the first couple combining elf and human). It is buried with the Cimetière Wolvercote with Oxford.

Overflight of work

As a writer, Tolkien is particularly famous to have imagined a universe of fiction very complete and coherent, with its Cosmogonie and its history, its people like their languages and cultures.

Usually quoted under the name (somewhat reducing) of Ground of the Medium , this world is the theater of its accounts of which its most famous novel, the Lord of the Rings , in which he saw only one small portion of his mythology.

Its second work as a celebrity, but preceding in chronology, is Bilbo the Hobbit , whose title appears in good place in the Lord of the Rings. In third position, one will quote the Silmarillion , published on a purely posthumous basis by his son Christopher Tolkien, who has the merit or the blame to perhaps give the backdrop of the Lord of the Rings, and to explain the many ones waited and implied. In fact, the Lord of the entire Rings holds in a short final chapter of Silmarillion…

There is also news, short novels, and collections of poems in the Anglo-Saxon style of the “worms alliterative”, poems whose professional poets often gaussés themselves. Without judging quality of the worms in question, at least can one detect a major source there: impassioned love of the old languages, in the species old English, purely Germanic language, whose Tolkien regretted bitterly, its life during, corruption by French of the Norman conquerors.

For the risk to discourage the explorer in front of the extent of the task, it should well be acknowledged: the heart of the work of J.R.R Tolkien, it is indeed Silmarillion… Work early started, ever finished, since published after its death. In its first outlines, it was entitled the “book of the Lost Legends”, pompeux title, but reflecting well the ambition of its author. Silmarillion starts with the Creation of the World! J.R.R Tolkien written there its own version of the Genesis.

Some keys of the work of Tolkien:

1. Tolkien was enthusiastic catholic (what, in England, is not inevitably easy to carry). Perhaps this explains the apparent absence of religion in the Lord of the Rings. But all the work of J.R.R Tolkien is soaked with religion.

2. Of its own consent, J.R.R Tolkien wanted to build all its stories to give a context to its own linguistic inventions (see below).
3. J.R.R. Tolkien having lost very early his/her father, still returned young child to England. He lived in a small village close to Birmingham, Sarehole, since then swallowed by the tentacular suburbs of Birmingham. These elements, loss of the father, loss of a rurality grabbed by the industrial world, probably played a part in the genesis of work.
4. Lastly, the talents of storyteller of Tolkien were exerted on its own offspring, at the time of going to sleep… Not confirmed, if need be, by its biographers.

It is advisable to announce that J.R.R.Tolkien was not a writer by profession, that he did not use any the traditional tools of the writing (scripts, story boards, etc…). He wrote while letting himself carry by his inspiration. Thus, when it began the Lord of the Rings, it only thought of writing one following the “hobbit”, without only imagining what was going to leave there. The character of Aragorn, another example, did not exist before Tolkien wrote the scene of the inn of the Fringant Pony (“the Prancing Pony”), and in its first inspiration, he was not yet the remote heir and future king. From there, strange impression that it leaves with the first access, of a a little worrying character. Tolkien turns over the situation brilliantly afterwards, suggesting that it is necessary to go beyond appearances… Or: it is rather clear that Galadriel is a part added tardily in the vast genealogy of the Noldor, and due: it was created well after the first versions of Silmarillion.

Built languages

The academic career and the literary production of Tolkien are both indissociable of its passion first for linguistics and philology.

Specialist in the medieval Anglo-Saxon or, more precisely, of the dialect mercian, it was initially a scholar controlling more than one ten of other languages, with the number of which one can quote Welsh (of which it gave courses, cf Lettres , n°7) and Finnish (that it discovered via the Kalevala). Many languages which interested it thus had suddenly appeared in its works of fiction. Like it specifies it in the appendix F, section II, of the Seigneur of the Rings , Tolkien is presented, by the means of a Mise in abyme, like the supposed “translator” of the Red book of the Walk of the West. It takes the party consequently to return the names (toponyms or patronyms) of the “human” people of its fictitious universe by various real languages. It thus uses the Anglo-Saxon for the names and the language of Rohirrim (Eorl, Eomer, Theoden, éored , will mearas , etc) and the Vieux norrois for the names of the Dwarves (Dwalin, Narvi, etc) or of the Gandalf magus. The Unfinished Contes and Légendes mention also the use of the language Gotique for the ancestors of Rohirrim (Vidumavi, Vidugavia).

But simultaneously with its professional work, and sometimes even with their detriment (so much so that his academic publications remain rather very few), Tolkien impassioned for the built languages. In love with the words beyond its trade, it had a passion which it called its “vice secrecy”: the pure and simple construction of a whole imaginary vocabulary, with its batch of etymological notes and fictitious grammars. Not less than one ten built languages appear in the Lord of the Rings , through character or place names, short discursive allusion or song and poem. The unit takes part in the probability of the account, each people of the Earth of the Medium having its traditions, its history and its languages.

Tolkien approaches its personal design of the languages built in its test has Secret Defect . The composition of a language, for him, concerns a desire of esthetics and euphony, participant of a intellectual satisfaction and a “intimate symphony”. He said to have started to invent his own languages towards the 15 years age, and we can probably think that its trade of philologist was only one of the reflections of its major passion for the languages. If he regarded before all the invention of a language as a form of art to whole share, he did not conceive that it can exist without having a clean “mythology”, namely a unit of stories and legends to accompany his evolutions. He started to conceive his languages before the drafting of the first legends ( Lettres , n°163). Considering that there exists a fundamental bond between a language and the tradition which it expresses, he was naturally brought to conceive its clean “ Legendarium ” in which its languages could fit ( Lettres , n° 180).

Tolkien worked during all its life on its languages built without never truly completing them. Its pleasure was more in linguistic creation that in any drank to make languages usable of them. If two of them (quenya and sindarin) are relatively developed, with a vocabulary of more than 2000 words and a more or less defined grammar, much of others to which it refers in its writings are just outlined. Nevertheless these various languages are built on serious linguistic bases, with a will to respect the model of the natural languages. For example, the languages of the Dwarves (khuzdûl) and Númenóréens (adûnaic) resemble by certain aspects the Semitic languages (“faintly Semitic flavor”, Sauron Defeated , p. 241), in particular by adopting a structure trilitère or by implementing processes like the mimmation. If the quenya of the Top-Elves is an inflected language (like the Greek and Latin), its vocabulary and its phonology are conceived on a model close to Finnish. As for the language sindarine of the Gray Elves, it is inspired very freely by Welsh ( Lettres , n°165) in some of his phonological aspects like the changes by initial consonants or “lenitions”. However, the languages of Tolkien are not either of simple “copies” of the natural languages and they have their own specificities.

Some of the languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien:

• Adûnaic (language of Númenor)
• Khuzdûl (language of the Dwarves)
• Black speech (language of the Orcs)
• Quenya (language of the High Elves)
• Sindarin (language of the Elves of the Earth of the Medium)
• Westron or sovâl phârë (common language of the Men)
• Valarin (language of Valar)
• Rohirique (language of the Rohirrim)

Tolkien imagined also several written forms for its languages. A cursive writing ( Tengwar of Fëanor) and an alphabet of the runic type ( Cirth of Daeron) are illustrated in the body of the Seigneur of the Rings . Much earlier, Tolkien had also conceived other systems like the Sarati of Rúmil.

About Esperanto

It was also interested in the Esperanto, the young international language, born not very front him. He declared:

“I have sympathy in particular to the claims of the Esperanto. (...) but the main reason to support it seems me to rest on the fact that it already acquired the first place, that it received the broadest reception. ”

However, it moderated its matter later on:

“the volapük, Esperanto, the novial, etc, are died languages, much more dead than about the old languages than one does not speak any more, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legend. ” - Letters , n°180

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