Back to the roots - J.R.R Tolkien

When I was 10 years old someone in our family came home with a copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings (LotR in short). This is a trilogy published in 1955 (Fellowship of the Ring) and 1956 (Two Towers, Return of the King). I finished the book quite fast and was fascinated by it. I'm not really sure what exactly it was that so made me crave for more. But it happened and I wanted to read more from fantasy worlds like the one of Middle Earth. I read everything from Tolkien that was published by that time and then read his biography and commentary on his work. Later I started reading many fantasy novels and books that I could get my hands on. So where does this crave come from? We'll look on it after a brief biography of J.R.R. Tolkien.

J.R.R. Tolkien was born on 3rd January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State. His both parents died when he was young. Mabel - his mother - left J.R.R. Tolkien in the care of Father Francis Morgan - a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. At King Edward's School he developed his linguistic talent and later began inventing his own languages. (elven languages - sindarin and quenya mainly)

John Ronald Raul graduated at Oxford (English language and literature). During the World War he served the army. After war he worked as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford where he soon prove himself to be one of the finest philologists in the world. At that time he was already working on a collection of myths and legends that were later published under the name of Silmarillion. (HarperCollins 2003)

In 1937 The Hobbit was published. It was successful and people wanted more 'hobbits'.
The Lord of the Rings was published in 1955-1956. The book became so popular that it started a completely new era of 'Modern Fantasy Genre' (Christopher Mitchell 2003).

Professor Christopher Mitchel of Wheaton College, Director of the Marion E. Wade Center and also Assistant Professor of Theological Studies at Wheaton made a series of seminars and discussions concerning J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. In those he looked closer on the new 'taste' among the reading public and why Tolkien's work was so successful.

In late 1950s there was a huge discrepancy between critics considering LotR an inferior literature even 'juvenile trash' and the phenomenal popularity among the reading public. In the upcoming decade critics said that the Tolkien craze would fall into oblivion in few years. But even after 40 years we are still here with many Tolkien fans and people wanting simply more. At that time people noted that Tolkien's work is not read by a certain group of people(in this case - children, as this kind of stories were considered children's stories) but by a doctor graduated from harvard, solicitor, police officer, farmer, another writer etc. All these people though had something common. What was it that Tolkien gave them?

Later in his speech Mitchel started to talk about something called 'hoarding memory'. Tolkien used this term to talk about the memory Elves have. Elves in Tolkien's world are 'immortal beings' (they can be killed but if not they live eternally) and carry on the memory of the world. The hoarding memory can be found in myths and legends and in even later stories. All of those bear the memory of one original - religious - story. All the stories are a shadow to the very first story (the eden, kain and abel). We perceive such memories even in LotR (if we are familiar with the legends and myths from Silmarillion). All these try to awaken something in us.

Tolkien is taking us out from our own world to awaken us. All this starts with imagination. We reject our world thus we need to be awakened in another world and return back our own world to become awakened in it. This is not escapist as many people and mainly critics think so. (Tolkien/Lewis)

Why I write about this? In a way I agree. The thing is that the hoarding memory is there, it is something that we can trace. We might not consider it religious and looking at Tolkien influenced work (it isn't religious) but still it started somewhere and at that time it was religious. There is the universal truth underline in all there is in the nowadays work (and not necessary christian). J.R.R. Tolkien said that he is christian and that this can be deduced from his work. But did anyone notice that?

There are many people who noticed that but for most the fact that the LotR is cut from anything religious makes it hard to understand why such a book should be religious. One has to look deeper and find it for that it is good to read J.R.R. Tolkien letters and his biography. (J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter, edited by J.R.R. Tolkien and The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter).

In these books we learn about Tolkien's personal and academic life. Ronald's life was a difficult one. Death of his father when he was 4 years old, death of his mother in 1904 and the stay with Father Morgan marked Tolkien a lot. Living during both World Wars is also something that has influence on one. (I would like to quote Tolkien when he was talking of himself as a hobbit, but I don't remember it exactly and I don't remember from which book it came). The claim 'I'm a hobbit' though tells us a lot about Tolkien if we are familiar with hobbits as a race or (Frodo or Bilbo Baggins).

Anyway in the letters we learn more about the spiritual look on Middle Earth and this cannot be denied as Tolkien wrote it himself.

Nowadays J.R.R. Tolkien LotR or Hobbit is considered as a must read book even by high schools (at least both I attended had this under 'obligatory literature'). But no one at the school actually gave me any insight on why and how LotR/Middle Earth was created.

In both books we learn about where certain things came from - Norse mythology for example and we learn about the creation of elven language and tengwar (written elven language - it means letters in quenya).

stsung's note:
When I was around 12 I was able to write in tengwar and was capable of reading a text in quenya. Study of this language taught me about other scripts and languages. Tengwar is alphasyllabary writing system and as I wasn't familiar with such systems it led me to discover primarily Devanagari and Sanskrit (I was familiar with phonetic writing systems - Japanese, Chinese, latin letters and cyrilic based systems). Elvish language is a constructed one but has a rules that can be easily followed and that tell one from the writing system what to expect and thus memorize and easily use.
In LotR and Hobbit Tolkien also uses two different runic systems that are based on anglo-saxon and norse writing systems (this is much more familiar as this system uses letters both consonants and vowels and uses the same way as latin letters. Germanic languages were using these before they started using latin letters).

By studying the writing systems, we fall back on ancient languages and mythology that also help us understand more the constructed world of Middle Earth.