One Birthday to Rule Them All...

115 years ago today, little John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in the wilds of Bloemfontein, South Africa, to Arthur and Mabel Tolkien. When he was still an infant, he was bitten by a tarantula (probably the prototype for Shelob) and would have died had not a quick-thinking servant sucked out the poison immediately. So I suppose we should take time to thank Tolkien's babyhood nurse for her part in keeping little Ronnie alive.

Due to venomous snakes, mischievous monkeys, the Boer War, and various rampant South African diseases, J. R. R.'s mother wisely chose to move little Ronald (as he was called by his friends and family) and his brother Hilary to Birmingham, England. Not long after they arrived, Tolkien's father fell ill with rheumatic fever back in South Africa; he later suffered a hemorrhage and died. Tolkien's mother died of diabetes when he was twelve (after homeschooling both her sons and introducing the all-important fairy stories of Andrew Lang and George MacDonald to her son Ronald), and he and his brother were sent by Mabel's priest, Father Morgan, to live with their Aunt Beatrice at Stirling Road. Tolkien loved his studies at King Edward's School, particularly Old and Middle English, and thus began his lifelong love affair with language.

At sixteen, after he and his brother had been moved yet again by Father Morgan, this time to the home of Mrs. Faulkner in Duchess Road, Tolkien fell hopelessly in love with Edith Bratt, a nineteen-year-old seamstress who also lodged in Mrs. Faulkner's home. Tolkien wanted to marry her after just a few dates, but the Catholic Church mandated that a young man had to be 21 to propose in those days, so Ronald had to wait. The very day that Tolkien turned 21, he ran to Edith and proposed; though Edith was engaged to another young man at the time, she broke off that engagement to become betrothed to J. R. R. Good choice, Edith.

In 1911, the young Tolkien entered Oxford along with several of his old school chums from King Edward's, including Christopher Wiseman and Robert Q. Gilson. There they continued the small, exclusive club known as the T. C. B. S. (formerly the Tea Club and the Barrovian Society) that they had begun as librarians at King Edward's. Tolkien did well at Oxford, and he began to branch out into new languages like Old Norse, German, and Finnish, from which he took a good deal to create Quenya, the language of the high elves of Middle Earth. Tolkien stayed on at Oxford after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 in order to graduate, but soon after graduation, he was commissioned as an officer in the 13th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. While on leave from his duties with the 13th, Tolkien and Edith Bratt were married on March 22, 1916. Ronald and Edith Tolkien would have four children: John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla.

After fighting on the front line in France, including the disastrous Battle of the Somme, Tolkien eventually succumbed to post-traumatic shock syndrome and trench fever and was sent home. Several of his close friends from the T. C. B. S. died in the war, and Tolkien was powerfully affected by it for the rest of his life. After his service in the army, Tolkien began teaching at the University of Leeds and then at Oxford as Professor of Anglo-Saxon in 1925. Over six years later, Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Warren Lewis (C. S.'s elder brother), Charles Williams, and others began meeting on Tuesdays in a small Oxford pub called the Eagle and Child (known affectionately by its patrons as 'the Bird and Baby'), and so began the group known today as the Inklings. This small group was responsible for a renewed interest in Christianity in Oxford, despite the growing atheism and agnosticism that grew out of the despair and disillusionment following WWI.

But in 1930, while grading a stack of students' essays (I'm still waiting for this type of inspiration to happen to me...), Tolkien turned over one of the pages and scribbled randomly, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Thus began what would eventually be named the most influential work of literature of the 20th century. The Hobbit was first published in 1937 and received a good deal of critical and public success, but the main event wasn't to come until almost 20 years later, when Tolkien finally found a publisher willing to take on his enormous draft of The Lord of the Rings in 1954. The initial print of the first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, sold out in less than 2 months.


The tremendous success of Tolkien's masterwork made him an almost instant literary celebrity, something almost unheard of in the mid-20th century, and he had some trouble adjusting to public scrutiny. Despite his vast financial success, he continued to live his life in the simple way to which he was accustomed. Sadly, his wife Edith died in 1971, and Tolkien only lived for two more years, passing into the west himself on September 2, 1973 from an infection in his digestive tract.

One of my favorite quotes about Tolkien is a simple statement by Diane Duane: "Because of Tolkien, the universe will forever genuinely contain magic." I guess it is his legacy that thousands of young and old readers are still inspired by the power of this simple man's imagination and probably will be for centuries to come. I often tell my wife, friends, and students that Tolkien will one day be regaled by scholars in much the same way that Shakespeare is today. True, as many Tolkien scholars and biographers point out, Tolkien is still not studied with any seriousness in higher academic curriculums, and most professors in the humanities would laugh at the idea of anyone specializing in Tolkien (whereas specializing in Franz Kafka or James Joyce is a perfectly legitimate choice?), but someday, probably long after I'm dead, Tolkien's epic contribution to literature will at long last be recognized by those who claim to be literary scholars. After all, Shakespeare was considered populist tripe in his day, too.


Works Consulted

Baldwin, Stanley P. J. R. R. Tolkien: His Life and Works. Library of Great Authors Ser. New York: Spark, 2003.

Carpenter, Humphrey. J. R. R. Tolkien: The Authorized Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977.