“Not all those who wander are lost.”
In the entire history of literature, few writers have achieved what John Ronald Reuel Tolkien accomplished in his lifetime. A mild-mannered Oxford professor who smoked a pipe, marked endless examination papers, and enjoyed nothing more than a pint at his local pub, Tolkien quietly constructed one of the greatest imaginative achievements in human history, an entire world, complete with its own geography, histories, peoples, and languages, rooted in a mythology as vast and rich as any in the ancient world. He gave us The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. He gave us hobbits and elves, orcs and wizards, the Shire and Mordor, and one Ring to rule them all. He essentially invented the modern fantasy genre. And he did almost all of it while holding down a day job.
But the story of how Tolkien became Tolkien, and how the rolling hills of Birmingham, the ancient poetry of Finland, and the dreaming spires of Oxford all flowed together to create Middle-earth, is one of the most extraordinary biographies in English letters.
Early Life: Born in Africa, Shaped by the Midlands
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s early life was marked by loss. Born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on 3rd January, 1892, Tolkien lost his father at age four. His father, Arthur Tolkien, had travelled to South Africa to manage a bank, taking his young wife Mabel with him. When he was three, Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them.
One small but telling detail from those earliest African years stayed with Tolkien always: while living in Africa, he was bitten by a large tarantula in the garden, an event which would have later parallels in his stories. The shadow of great spiders falls more than once across Middle-earth.
With their father gone, Mabel Tolkien returned with her two young boys to her own roots in the West Midlands of England, eventually settling in the village hamlet of Sarehole, just outside Birmingham. The West Midlands in Tolkien’s childhood were a complex mixture of the grimly industrial Birmingham conurbation, and the quintessentially rural stereotype of England, Worcestershire and surrounding areas, Severn country, the land of the composers Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gurney. This sharp contrast, between the unspoiled pastoral countryside of his earliest memory and the encroaching smoke and brick of industrial Birmingham, would never leave Tolkien’s imagination, and would ultimately shape the very soul of Middle-earth.
A Mother’s Gift: Language and Faith
Mabel Tolkien was a remarkable woman whose influence on her son can scarcely be overstated. Tolkien’s mother introduced him to Latin, French, and German. She also converted the family to Roman Catholicism, a decision that permanently severed ties with her Protestant family and left her financially isolated. For the rest of his life, Tolkien felt that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs. When Mabel died of diabetes in November 1904, the disease then being essentially untreatable, Tolkien was just twelve years old. The orphaned brothers, Ronald and Hilary, were left in the care of Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory.
By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun.
Birmingham: The Shire in the Shadow of the Factories
Birmingham looms large in the geography of Tolkien’s imagination, not always visibly, but always powerfully. Tolkien’s childhood in the English countryside, and its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham, influenced his creation of the Shire, while his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.
The green meadows and old mill at Sarehole, where young Ronald played and roamed, became the template for the peaceful, pastoral Shire, a place of rolling hills, hobbit-holes, and simple pleasures, always under threat from the wider, darker world pressing in upon it. The dichotomy between Tolkien’s happier days in the rural landscape of Sarehole and his adolescent years in the industrial centre of Birmingham would be felt strongly in his later works.
He lived in the shadow of Perrot’s Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston Waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Birmingham’s great Victorian towers, seen against the industrial sky, loom unmistakably behind the dark spires of Barad-dûr. And the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection, had been on free public display from around 1908. The luminous, otherworldly beauty of Pre-Raphaelite art seeped into the young Tolkien’s vision of the Elves.
At King Edward’s School in Birmingham, one of the finest grammar schools in England, Tolkien immersed himself in the study of philology. He delved into a wide array of languages, from the more common Latin and Greek to the historical depths of Old and Middle English, Gothic, and Old Norse, as well as the melodic complexities of Welsh and Finnish.
It was also during his time at King Edward’s that Tolkien met the woman who would become his wife. At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edgbaston. Their relationship blossomed in the Birmingham teashops, Edith and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham teashops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement, where they would sit and throw sugar lumps into the hats of passers-by. Their guardian, Father Francis, eventually forbade the teenage romance, ordering Ronald not to see or correspond with Edith until he turned 21. Ronald stoically obeyed this injunction to the letter. The moment he turned 21, he wrote to Edith and renewed his love. Their story, the faithful waiting, the long separation, the reunion, would echo in the great love story at the heart of his legendarium: the tale of Beren and Lúthien, whose names Tolkien had inscribed on their shared gravestone.
Oxford: Where Middle-earth Was Born
In the autumn of 1911, Tolkien took up his place at Exeter College, Oxford, and the course of literary history was changed forever
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In 1911, Ronald was admitted to Exeter College at Oxford, where he specialised in the classics and developed a special passion for philology, the study and comparison of languages. In addition to the typical course offerings in Greek and Latin, Tolkien studied more unusual ancient and modern languages, such as Gothic and Finnish. Also greatly interested in Old English, Anglo-Saxon, and Welsh poetry, Tolkien began to invent and develop entire languages of his own, languages that would form the groundwork for the world of Middle-earth in his novels.
He initially read classics but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honours. The decision to switch from classics to English language was decisive, it put him on the direct path to the study of Beowulf, Old Norse, and Middle English that would feed the deep mythological roots of his fiction.
War had broken out on the continent while Tolkien was at Oxford, and after graduation, he took up his commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He survived the Battle of the Somme, one of the harshest battles of World War I, and returned to England suffering from trench fever. Millions of young men, including many of Tolkien’s boyhood friends, did not come home. The experience of the Somme, the industrial slaughter, the blasted and poisoned landscape, the mud and the terror, burned itself into his imagination. Mordor was not conjured from nothing. It was remembered.
The Finnish Revelation: A Wine-Cellar of the Soul
Of all the many influences that shaped Middle-earth, perhaps none is more profound, or more surprising to those unfamiliar with the story, than the Finnish language and its great national epic, the Kalevala.
Finnish influences on Tolkien include both the Finnish language, which he especially liked, and the Kalevala, Elias Lönnrot’s 19th-century compilation of Finnish mythology, which Tolkien stated had powerfully affected him.
The story of how it happened is one of the most captivating moments in literary biography. While exploring the library of Exeter College, the young Tolkien stumbled upon a Finnish grammar book, and the encounter was, by his own description, nothing less than a revelation. Many years later, he wrote: “It was like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine of a kind and flavour never tasted before. It quite intoxicated me.” He taught himself Finnish, and then immersed himself in the Kalevala, the great mythological epic compiled in the 1830s by the Finnish scholar Elias Lönnrot from ancient folk songs and oral tradition passed down through generations of runo singers in the forests and lakes of Karelia.
Tolkien’s first love as a creator was language itself. The sounds and structures of Finnish went straight into the brewing pot of his own invented tongues. He had already been inventing languages for his Elves, but after discovering Finnish, he abandoned an earlier plan of a “mythic” Germanic language and instead “Finnicized” his Elvish. In a letter to W.H. Auden, Tolkien explained that after finding that Finnish grammar book, his “own language… became heavily Finnicized in phonetic pattern and structure.”
The result was Quenya, the High-Elven tongue of Middle-earth. Quenya flows with the same kind of melodic, vowel-rich sound as Finnish. Tolkien emulated Finnish phonology, for example, Quenya words rarely begin with consonant clusters (just as Finnish words do not), and certain hard consonant sounds like b, d, g are almost entirely absent from Quenya, giving it a soft, lyrical quality. Tolkien himself described Quenya as being “composed on a Latin basis with two other main ingredients that happen to give me ‘phonaesthetic’ pleasure: Finnish and Greek.”
The influence of Finland did not stop at language. Tolkien was “greatly affected”, indeed “fascinated by”, the Kalevala, especially the tale of Kullervo. He began adapting the story of Kullervo, a tragic, cursed hero who unknowingly commits incest with his sister and is destroyed by fate, into a tale of his own. The parallels between Kullervo and Túrin Turambar, one of the most tragic figures of the Silmarillion, are unmistakable. Each is a tragic hero who accidentally commits incest with his sister, who, upon finding out, kills herself by leaping into water. Each hero later kills himself after asking his sword if it will slay him, which it confirms.
Tolkien himself declared the significance plainly. He stated: “the germ of my attempt to write legends of my own to fit my private languages was the tragic tale of the hapless Kullervo in the Finnish Kalevala.” And in 1944 he wrote that “Finnish… was the original germ of the Silmarillion.”
The Kalevala also gave Tolkien something perhaps even more fundamental, the idea that a modern writer could compile and create a national mythology. He once rued how England’s ancient myths were “wiped out” by the Norman invasion of 1066, leaving a gap in the cultural soul. In response, Tolkien set out to create a mythology for his people, “something I could dedicate to England,” as he put it. He consciously emulated Lönnrot’s role by presenting his Middle-earth stories as if they were collected and translated from ancient sources.
The magic of song as a source of power, so central to the Kalevala, where wizards defeat each other through contests of verse, also flows deep through Middle-earth. In The Silmarillion, the Elven king Finrod Felagund duels with the dark lord Sauron through songs of power, a battle of enchantments fought in verse, just as in Finnish myth two sorcerers might sing charms to outdo their rival. The Music of the Ainur, by which the world of Arda is literally sung into existence at the very beginning of the Silmarillion, is perhaps the grandest expression of this Finnish-born idea.
The Oxford Professor: Leeds, Anglo-Saxon, and the Return
After the war, Tolkien’s first job was researching word origins for the Oxford English Dictionary. He soon found a position as Reader of English Language at the University of Leeds in 1920, and in 1924, the university appointed him Professor. At Leeds, he collaborated with the scholar E.V. Gordon on a celebrated edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the great works of Middle English literature. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic and Medieval Welsh.
Then, in 1925, aged just 33, Tolkien returned to Oxford, this time as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. It was the beginning of a 34-year Oxford career that would run alongside, and in constant creative tension with, the slow unfolding of Middle-earth.
Tolkien was an excellent teacher, and his dramatic lectures on Beowulf were legendary. In 1936, he delivered what became one of the most celebrated academic lectures of the 20th century, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics”, in which he argued passionately that the great Old English epic should be appreciated as a poem of profound beauty and meaning, not merely mined for philological data. Tolkien spent the rest of his career at Oxford, retiring in 1959. He later held the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature from 1945 until his retirement.
The Inklings: Fellowship at the Eagle and Child
Oxford gave Tolkien more than a career, it gave him his fellowship. In 1926, he met C.S. Lewis, a fellow Oxford don and writer who would become one of his closest friends. Together they became the heart of the Inklings, an informal but extraordinarily talented literary group that met regularly in Oxford, most famously at the back room of the Eagle and Child pub on St Giles’ Street (affectionately known as the “Bird and Baby”), and in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College.
The group’s name was a pun, meaning both “people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas” and “those who dabble in ink.” They held meetings at the Eagle and Child pub in Oxford, where they shared camaraderie. The group also met in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalen College to read to each other their works-in-progress. Tolkien would dedicate the first edition of The Lord of the Rings to the Inklings, and he credited Lewis and the group with encouraging him to finish it.
Tolkien convinced Lewis to devote his life to Christianity, although Tolkien, a devout Catholic, was disappointed that Lewis became a Protestant. The two critiqued each other’s work as part of the Inklings. Other members included Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Warren Lewis (C.S. Lewis’s brother). It was within this close-knit circle of mutual encouragement and criticism that both The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia took shape.
The Works: From a Blank Page to a World
The birth of The Hobbit has become one of literature’s most delightful creation myths. In 1928, while grading exams, Tolkien absentmindedly wrote on a blank sheet of paper, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” With this sentence, Tolkien began to imagine what “hobbits” might be like and what they might do. From these imaginings grew The Hobbit, a children’s story and Tolkien’s first published work of fiction. Published in 1937, it was an immediate success.
Heartened by the profits of The Hobbit, Tolkien’s publisher encouraged him to start work on what later became The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien spent twelve years writing the novel. His initial goal was only to write a very long tale, but as the novel took shape, he related his story of Hobbits to the vast history and mythology of Middle-earth that he had developed in the Silmarillion stories.
The Lord of the Rings, completed in 1949 and published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955, was, extremely annoyingly to Tolkien, who had never intended the tale to become a trilogy, divided by his publisher for commercial reasons. It became one of the best-selling novels ever written.
But the deepest and most personal work was always The Silmarillion, the vast mythological history of the Elder Days, which Tolkien worked on throughout his entire life and never completed to his own satisfaction. In private, Tolkien amused himself by writing an elaborate series of fantasy tales, often dark and sorrowful, set in a world of his own creation. He made this “legendarium,” which eventually became The Silmarillion, partly to provide a setting in which “Elvish” languages he had invented could exist. It was published posthumously in 1977, edited by his son Christopher.
In addition to inventing 14 different languages and assorted alphabets for his Middle-earth dwellers, Tolkien while at school taught or taught himself Greek, Middle English, Old English, Old Norse, Gothic, Modern and medieval Welsh, Finnish, Spanish, and Italian. Other languages of which he had a working knowledge include Serbian, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, and Lombardic. He was, quite simply, one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century, and every one of those languages left its fingerprints on the world he built.
Legacy: The Father of Modern Fantasy
Tolkien’s achievements in fantasy writing have significantly influenced subsequent generations of writers who have imitated his style or written in reaction to his works. Ursula Le Guin is one of such authors who published a series of novels which used Tolkienian concepts. Internationally acclaimed horror writer Stephen King admitted to Tolkien’s influence in his fantasy series The Dark Tower and The Stand.
Tolkien’s deep connection to his myths is poignantly mirrored in the epitaphs “Beren” and “Lúthien” inscribed on his and his wife Edith’s gravestones, alluding to the legendary couple at the heart of his mythos. Edith died in 1971 and Tolkien followed her on 2nd September 1973, aged 81, his life’s great work done, though never entirely finished.
From the spider that bit him in South Africa, to the misty fields of Sarehole, to the towers of industrial Birmingham, to the Finnish poetry that lit a fire in his imagination, to the dreaming quadrangles of Oxford, to the back room of the Eagle and Child, every thread of Tolkien’s extraordinary life was woven into the fabric of Middle-earth. He did not merely write about a world. He built one, with the craft of a philologist, the faith of a Catholic, the grief of a man who had watched his friends die in the mud of the Somme, and the wonder of a child who had always believed, with absolute conviction, that the stories were true.
“I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which ‘Escape’ is now so often used.” — J.R.R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3rd January 1892, Bloemfontein, South Africa. Died 2nd September 1973, Oxford, England. Professor. Philologist. Storyteller. World-builder.
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