Tolkien

From t2twiki

This page is in need of content. This page needs sources, formatting, links, and could have other issues (see talk page)

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien - Jan. 3 1892 - September 2 1973

Author of the Lord of the Rings trilogy and The Silmarillion. Tolkien was an English Professor at Oxford. During World War 1 (The Great War) he served as an Commuications Officer in the British Army and fought in the trnches of France with the 11th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. In the war Tolkien lost all of his close friends with whom he went to high school. It was during this time that he began writing The Silmarillion which he never completed. After contracting trench fever he was sent back to England and was never deployed to France again, insted he spent the remainder of the war touring England doing home service; he was promoted to the rank of First Lieutenant, and after the war he was Honorably Discharged from the service and he began working at Oxford. His first job war to aid in the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary. After becomeing a professor he was gradeing papers one day and wrone on one of the papers "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." this was to become the first sentence in The Hobbit which he wrote as a story to read to his children; later his family convinced him to publish it and write more to the story. Tolkien wanted to publish the Lord of the Rings as one large book but the editors thought it would be too long and no one would buy it so they agreed to split it into a trilogy the first book was the Fellowship of the Ring next followed the Two Towers and finally the Return of the King. Tolkien like the title of the first but not the other two, the Two Towers he found confusing because not even he knew which two towers it was refering to; Isengard, Barad Dur, or Minas Tirith. He didn't like the name for the Return of the King because he felt that it gave away too much of the ending, but in the end he agreed and the books were published. Tolkien loved his family and showed that by writeing them letters to them from Father Christmas and in Tolkien style he created several different charicters who would write his children and tell them news from the North Pole. On November 29, 1971 Tolkien's wife, Edith Tolkien, died and on her grave stone he had the name Luthien inscribed and two years later after his own death his family had Beren inscribed on his grave stone. The reason for this was Edith had inspired the story of Beren and Luthien from the Silmarillion; when walking in the woods one day while they were still young Edith began to dance for him in a small clearing and it was that event the is paralleled when Beren comes upon Luthien danceing in the woods. Tolkien left charge of his literary estate to his third child Christopher Tolkien who shortly after his father's death edited and published The Silmarillion and later The Book of Lost Tales. Most recently published is The Children of Hurin which focuses on the children of a human king named Hurin, Turin and Nienor.