J.R.R. Tolkien

J.R.R. Tolkien is often regarded as the founder of the modern fantasy novel. Fantasy writing, itself, dates back along way (Gulliver's Travels, for instance), however Tolkien's work sparked off the current boom.

A Brief and probably Inaccurate Biography

He joined up with the Lancashire fusiliers in the 1st World War and fought at the Somme, after which he spent much of the rest of the war in hospital with a series of nervous disorders.

After the war he moved back to Oxford, working first at the Oxford English Dictionary. After 5 years in the English department at Leeds, ending up as professor of English language he returned to become a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke college until 1945 when he became Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton.

He retired in 1959 and in 1968 moved to Bournemouth for 3 years until his wife died when he returned to Oxford. He died in 1973.

Tolkien's Works and Friends

Tolkien was a distinguished philologist (studying the form and composition of languages) and Anglo-Saxon scholar and translated several anglo-saxon and middle-english works into modern english including Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Beowulf.

He also wrote and illustrated a number of books for children, including The Father Christmas Letters and Mr Bliss. These were written for his own childrena and subsequently published. The Father Christmas letters in particular were written one each Christmas and left with the children's stockings.

He was great friends with C.S.Lewis (author of the Narnia books among other things) and they were the central figures in a small literary group of friends, called the Inklings, who used to meet in The Bird and Baby pub in Oxford (now called the Eagle and Child) and who allegedly used to read out an compare their works. In fact the story says that C.S.Lewis's christian SF works (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength) was written as a space-faring trilogy intended to complement a time-travel trilogy of Tolkien's. Typically for Tolkien, the time-travel trilogy was never written, but much of the work for it reappears as the history of an atlantis-like island called Numenor, in his works on Middle-Earth.

Both Lewis and Tolkien were committed Christians, Lewis an Anglican and Tolkien a Roman Catholic and their faith infuses both their works, although it is generally much more obvious and allegorical in Lewis's books. The Inklings group (which also included people like Charles Williams and George MacDonald) produced between them a vast mixture of fantasy and christian prose and fiction.

Middle-Earth

Tolkien's most famous works are the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. These are set in his own, intensely detailed world, Middle-Earth. Middle-Earth is a complex place, on one level it is a childish fantasy world full of dragons, elves, mysterious quests, treasure hoards and magic spells. It is this reading of the stories that has lead them to be relegated to children's literature by many critics. In fact The Hobbit was indeed written for children. However, there is much more to the novels which wrestle with such thorny problems as immortality, death, the after-effects of war and personal responsibility. On the whole people either love them or loathe them. They are certainly not without their faults (some sections are very hard going and many of the characters are fairly stereotypical and don't show much development (many but not all!) and feminists tend to dislike it for its scarcity of female characters at all (let alone realistic ones)). Many people have seen The Lord of the Rings as an allegory of the second world war, something Tolkien always denied.

The Lord of the Rings sparked of a whole plethora of similar books in which magical worlds full of strange beasts were invented and the heroes dashed about on quests for treasure etc. etc. Those I have read (and I have not read many) were generally very shallow affairs. It is only recently that the fantasy novel has begun to emerge from the shadow of Tolkien and find its own feet. (I say all this advisedly because after my initial run-ins with sub-Tolkien fantasy I swore never to read another one and went back to Detective fiction, so the above paragraph is merely reporting what others have told me).

The relevance of all this to Roleplaying is the link (whether real or not) that exists in many people's minds between Middle-Earth and the world of Dungeons and Dragons, the first roleplaying game. Gary Gygax, creator of D&D has insisted that Middle-Earth was only a minor inspiration on D&D which drew on many sources from myth and literature, and in many ways this is true. However, the two are often linked in gamers minds and it undeniable that several D&D monsters and characters classes (e.g. Halflings (another name for Tolkien's invented race, Hobbits)) are drawn from Tolkien's works. There is now a game actually set in Middle-Earth called Middle Earth Role Playing(MERP).

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are both tales of particular events in Middle-Earth, however part of the fascination they hold for people is the impression they give of a detailed history behind them. Tolkien is believed to have started work on Middle-Earth during the first world war. The Hobbit was written in the 1930s and The Lord of the Rings appeared after the second world war. At the time of his death Tolkien was working on a history of Middle-Earth which was published posthumously as The Silmarillion (pretty much for the converted only) by his son Christopher. Christopher has gone on to collect together nearly all Tolkien's writings into an ever increasing series of books: The History of Middle Earth which painstakingly details the creation process that Tolkien went through. Since his death the Tolkien Society has grown up and flourished, promoting interest in all aspects of Tolkien's life and work. A particular active subgroup of this are those studying Tolkien's languages which he invented in great detail.