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Tolkien's Foreward to "Lord of the Rings"
Christopher Tolkien's Foreword to "The Silmarillion"
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
(1892 - 1973)
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien,
creator of Middle-earth and author
of The Hobbit, "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Silmarillion"
was born in the town of Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where his
father, Arthur, had moved to take up a position with a bank. In early
1895 his mother, Mabel, returned to England with Ronald and his younger
brother, Hilary, exhausted by the climate. After Arthur's death from rheumatic
fever, the family made their home at Sarehole, near Birmingham. This beautiful
rural area made a great impression on the young Ronald, and its effect
can be seen in his later writing and his pictures.
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Mabel died in 1904, leaving
the boys to the care of Father Francis Morgan, a priest at the Birmingham
Oratory. At King Edward's School, Ronald was taught Classics, Anglo-Saxon
and Middle English. He had great linguistic talent, and after studying
old Welsh and Finnish he started to invent his own 'Elvish' languages.
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1914 saw the outbreak
of the First World War. Ronald was in his final year at Exeter College,
Oxford: he graduated the following year with a First in English Language
and Literature and at once took up his commission as a second lieutenant
in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Before embarking for France in June 1916,
he married his childhood sweetheart Edith Bratt. Tolkien survived the
Battle of the Somme, where two of his three closest friends were killed,
but later that year he was struck down by trench fever and invalided back
to England.
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The years after the Great
War were devoted to his work as academic: as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon
at Oxford, where he was soon to prove himself one of the finest philologists
in the world. He had already started to write a great cycle of the myths
and legends of Middle-earth which
was to become The Silmarillion. He and Edith had four children and it
was for them that he first told the tale of The Hobbit, published in 1937
by Sir Stanley Unwin. The Hobbit proved to be so successful that Sir Stanley
was soon asking for a sequel: but it was not until 1954, when Tolkien
was approaching retirement, that the first volume of his great masterpiece,
The Lord of the Rings, was published, and its terrific success took him
by surprise.
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After retirement Ronald
and Edith moved to Bournemouth but when Edith died in 1971, Ronald returned
to Oxford. He died after a brief illness on 2nd September 1973, leaving
his great mythological work, The Silmarillion, to be edited for publication
by his son, Christopher.
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