How old is tolkien

Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. The Inklings regularly met for conversation, drink, and frequent reading from their work-in-progress. Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages.

As mentioned above, he told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously as Mr. Bliss , Roverandom , etc. However, according to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank.

In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. In an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin merged in with HarperCollins.

She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more similar material available for publication. By this time Tolkien had begun to make his Legendarium into what he believed to be a more presentable state, and as he later noted, hints of it had already made their way into The Hobbit.

He was now calling the full account Quenta Silmarillion , or Silmarillion for short. Unwin tactfully relayed this message to Tolkien, but asked him again if he was willing to write a sequel to The Hobbit.

Suffice it to say that the now adult Rayner Unwin was deeply involved in the later stages of this opus, dealing magnificently with a dilatory and temperamental author who, at one stage, was offering the whole work to a commercial rival which rapidly backed off when the scale and nature of the package became apparent. The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews, ranging from the ecstatic W. Auden, C. Lewis to the damning E.

Wilson, E. Muir, P. Toynbee and just about everything in between. So far from losing money, sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales.

The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition.

This development produced mixed feelings in the author. On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously. Arthur C. Fans were causing increasing problems; both those who came to gawp at his house and those, especially from California who telephoned at 7 p. Meanwhile the cult, not just of Tolkien, but of the fantasy literature that he had revived, if not actually inspired to his dismay , was really taking off—but that is another story, to be told in another place.

The long-awaited Silmarillion , edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared in After his retirement in Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. Ronald died on 2 September He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford.

The grave is well signposted from the entrance. The legend on the headstone reads:. Tolkien Timeline. Lewis reads and critiques the Lay of Leithian. Spring Tolkien composes a large part of The Fall of Arthur. Autumn Quenta Noldorinwa , an expansion of the Sketch of the Mythology may have been written at this time. Lewis, who begins to shift from believing in God to accepting Christ. Autumn The essay A Secret Vice about inventing private languages is probably written at this time. Lewis, which at this time ends with the death of Smaug.

Early Autumn Tolkien probably writes lectures on Beowulf , which will provide the basis for his famous essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics. Autumn The Inklings meetings under the auspices of C. She urges him to finish the narrative, and it is accepted for publication. Some time this year Songs for the Philologists by Tolkien, E.

Gordon et al is privately printed by students at University College, London. April Tolkien takes an exhausting walking holiday in the Quantock Hills with C. Lewis and Owen Barfield.

Because of its success, Stanley Unwin subsequently urges Tolkien to write a sequel, which he begins. This is the germ of The Lord of the Rings. Late August The narrative has reached the seventh chapter — the Hobbits arrival at the Prancing Pony.

April Tolkien writes Leaf by Niggle. January Leaf by Niggle is published in the Dublin Review. Winter Tolkien resumes work on The Lay of Leithian. April Tolkien gives an ultimatum to Sir Stanley Unwin requesting an immediate response in answer to his suggestion to publish both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

July-August The Tolkiens holiday in Ireland. Late Tolkien probably writes a long letter to Waldman explaining why The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings are indivisible and interconnected. April Collins, the publishers, decline to publish The Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien works on the appendices and index throughout much of the second half of the year. Litt from Dublin University. August Tolkien wins an International Fantasy Award. September Tolkien meets Forrest J. Ackerman to discuss an animated film of The Lord of the Rings. August Tolkien struggles to complete his edition of Ancrene Wisse. April Although he had toyed with the idea previously, at about this time, Tolkien begins developing his round-earth cosmology of Arda.

January Tolkien expands Aldarion and Erendis. The Tolkien Society of America is formed. May The Fellowship of the Ring is published in an unauthorised American paperback version by Ace books. Summer Tolkien has to spend a lot of time revising the text of The Lord of the Rings to establish copyright in the US. Jun-Sep Clyde S. September Publication of The Tolkien Reader.

Benson silver medal for outstanding services to literature. March Humphrey Carpenter visits Tolkien, and later describes the encounter in his biography. Summer Ronald and Edith move to Poole, near Bournemouth.

Tolkien has a bad fall and is hospitalised for over a month. Litt from Nottingham University. August Tolkien writes about Galadriel and Celeborn — probably the final addition to his legendarium. Tolkien from a stomach ulcer. Tolkien as Honorary President in perpetuo.

Tolkien, edited by Christopher Tolkien is published. Tolkien: a Biography by Humphrey Carpenter. Tolkien , with foreword and notes by Christopher Tolkien. Nicholson noted that the article Tolkien wrote about Beowulf is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to the purely linguistic elements.

Tolkien's desk on which he drafted The Hobbit , on display at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College , Illinois. In , he moved to Merton College, Oxford , becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in , close to a decade after the first sketches.

During the s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent. Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialisation which he considered a devouring of the English countryside. For most of his adult life, he eschewed automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. The last known photograph of Tolkien, taken October 9, , next to one of his favourite trees a Pinus nigra in the Botanic Garden, Oxford.

Auden was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with The Lord of the Rings : Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a letter, "I am [ 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. During his life in retirement, from up to his death in , 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. Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, [36] and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth at the south coast.

The grave of J. Peter in Chains. Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales , written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that would be reused in initial successive drafts of his legendarium. 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 published.

It was originally to be published along with the Lord of the Rings, but printing costs were very high in the post-war years, later leading to the Lord of the Rings being published in three books. Tolkien was strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature , Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish mythology , the Bible , and Greek mythology.

In addition to his mythological compositions , Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. Other stories included Mr. Leaf by Niggle appears to be an autobiographical work, where a "very small man", Niggle, keeps painting leaves until finally, he ends up with a tree.

Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by C. Lewis to publish a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in Even though he felt 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 published — Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings , during which time he received the constant support of The Inklings , in particular his closest friend C.

Lewis , the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings as a children's tale like The Hobbit , but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings. 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 , organized some of this material into one volume, published as The Silmarillion in In Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title Unfinished Tales , and in subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth. All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories.

There is not even complete consistency to be found 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 while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book. The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys.

Humphrey Carpenter chronicled all of Tolkien's published poems and writings in "Appendix C" of his authorized biography, J. Tolkien: A Biography Six of Tolkien's major academic lectures, such as his important lecture on Beowulf , and one essay were compiled into The Monsters and the Critics and other essays in by Christopher Tolkien. Over 11, pages were included, text and a few illustrations. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Hobbit , and other manuscripts including Farmer Giles of Ham , while the Bodleian holds The Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.

Tolkien 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 graduated with Old Icelandic as a special subject.