J. R. R. Tolkien Dead at 81; Wrote 'The Lord of the Rings'
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
ONDON,
Sept. 2 - J. R. R. Tolkien, linguist, scholar and author of "The Lord
of the Rings," died today in Bournemouth. He was 81 years old. Three
sons and a daughter survive.
Creator of a World
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien cast a spell over tens of thousands of
Americans in the nineteen-sixties with his 500,000-word trilogy, "The
Lord of the Rings," in essence a fantasy of the war between ultimate
good and ultimate evil.
Creating the complex but consistent
world of Middle Earth, complete with elaborate maps, Tolkien peopled it
with hobbits, elves, dwarves, men, wizards and Ents, and Orcs (goblins)
and other servants of the Dark Lord, Sauron. In particular, he described
the adventures of one hobbit, Frodo son of Drogo, who became the Ring
Bearer and the key figure in the destruction of the Dark Tower. As
Gandalf, the wizard, remarked, there was more to him than met they eye.
The story can be read on many levels. But the author, a scholar and
linguist, for 39 years a teacher, denied emphatically that it was an
allegory. The Ring, discovered by Frodo's uncle, Bilbo Baggins, in an
earlier book, "The Hobbit," has the power to make its wearer invisible,
but it is infinitely evil.
Tolkien admirers compared him
favorably with Milton, Spenser and Tolstoy. His English publisher, Sir
Stanley Unwin, speculated that "The Lord of the Rings" would be more
likely to live beyond his and his son's time than any other work he had
printed.
'Escapist Literature'
But
detractors, among them the critic Edmund Wilson, put down "The Lord of
the Rings," Tolkien's most famous and most serious fantasy, as a
"children's book which has somehow gotten out of hand." A London
Observer critic condemned it in 1961 as "sheer escapist literature...
dull, ill-written and whimsical" and expressed the wish that Tolkien's
work would soon pass into "merciful oblivion."
It did anything
but. It was just four years later, printed in paperback in this country
by Ballantine and Ace Books, that a quarter of a million copies of the
trilogy were sold in 10 months. In the late sixties all over America fan
clubs sprouted, such as the Tolkien Society of America, and members of
the cult-many of them students-decorated their walls with the maps of
Middle Earth. The trilogy was also published in hard cover by Houghton
Mifflin and was a Book-of-the-Month Club Selection.
The creator
of this monumental, controversial work (or sub-creator as he preferred
to call writers of fantasy) was an authority on Anglo-Saxon, Middle
English and Chaucer. He was a gentle, blue-eyed, donnish-appearing man
who favored tweeds, smoked a pipe and liked to take walks and ride an
old bicycle (though he converted to a stylish car with the success of
his books).
From 1925 to 1959 he was a professor at Oxford,
ultimately Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and a
fellow of Merton College. He was somewhat bemused by the acclaim his
extracurricular fantasy received-at the endless interpretations that
variously called it a great Christian allegory, the last literary
masterpiece of the Middle Ages and a philological game.
Tolkien
maintained, however, that it wasn't intended as an allegory. "I don't
like allegories. I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he
was always getting at me," he said.
The trilogy was written, he
recalled, to illustrate a 1938 lecture of his at the University of
Glasgow on fairy stories. He admitted that fairy stories were something
of an escape, but didn't see why there should not be an escape from the
world of factories, machine-guns and bombs.
It was joy, he said,
that was the mark of the true fairy story: "...However wild its events,
however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or
man that hears it, when the 'turn' comes, a catch of the breath, a beat
and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as
keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar
quality."
His own fantasy, it was said, had begun when he was
correcting examination papers one day and happened to scratch at the top
of one of the dullest "in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
Then hobbits began to take shape.
They were, he decided, "little
people, smaller than the bearded dwarves. Hobbits have no beards. There
is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort
which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk
like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants
which they can hear a mile off. They are inclined to be fat in the
stomach; they dress in bright colors (chiefly green and yellow); wear no
shoes, because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm
brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly); have long
clever brown fingers, good-natured faces and laugh deep fruity laughs
(especially after dinner which they have twice a day when they can get
it)."
Discovering England
He settled
these protected innocents in a land called Shire, patterned after the
English countryside he had discovered as a child of 4 arriving from his
birthplace in South Africa, and he sent some of them off on perilous
adventures. Most of them, however, he conceived as friendly and
industrious but slightly dull, which occasioned his scribble on that
fortuitous exam paper.
"If you really want to know what
Middle-earth is based on, it's my wonder and delight in the earth as it
is, particularly the natural earth," Tolkien once said. His trilogy was
filled with his knowledge of botany and geology.
The author was
born in Blomfontein on Jan. 3, 1892, a son of Arthur Reuel Tolkien, a
bank manager, and Mabel Suffield Tolkien, who had served as a missionary
in Zanzibar. Both parents had come from Birmingham, and when the boy's
father died, his mother took him and his brother home to the English
Midlands.
England seemed to him "a Christmas tree" after the
barrenness of Africa, where he had been stung by a tarantula and bitten
by a snake, where he was "kidnapped" temporarily by a black servant who
wanted to show him off to his kraal. It was good, after that, to be in a
comfortable place where people lived "tucked away from all the centers
of disturbance."
At the same time, he once noted in an essay on
fairy stories, "I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I
in my timid body did not wish them to be in the neighborhood, intruding
into my relatively safe world..."
His mother was his first
teacher, and his love of philology, as well as his longing for
adventure, was attributed to her influence. But in 1904 she died.
The Tolkiens were converts to Catholicism, and he and his brother
became the wards of a priest in Birmingham. (Some critics maintained
that the bleakness of industrial Birmingham was the inspiration for his
trilogy's evil land of the Enemy, Mordor.)
Served in World War I
Young Tolkien attended the King Edward's Grammar School and went on to
Exeter College, Oxford, on scholarship. He received his B.A. in 1915.
But World War I had begun, and, at 23, he began service in the
Lancashire Fusiliers. A year later he married Miss Edith Bratt.
The war was said by his friends to have profoundly affected him. The
writer C. S. Lewis insisted that it was reflected in some of the more
sinister aspects of his writing and in his heroes' joy in comradeship.
Tolkien's regiment suffered heavy casualties and when the war ended,
only one of his close friends was still alive.
Invalided out of
the Fusiliers, Tolkien decided in the hospital that the study of
language was to be his metier. He returned to Oxford to receive his M.A.
in 1919, and to work as an assistant on the Oxford Dictionary. Two
years later he began his teaching career at the University of Leeds.
Within four years, he was a professor, and had also published a "Middle
English Vocabulary" and an edition (with E. V. Gordon) of "Sir Gawayne
and the Green Knight." He received a call to Oxford, where his lectures
on philology soon gave him an extraordinary reputation.
His
students remember him as taking endless pains to interest them. One
recalled that there was something of the hobbit about him. He walked,
she said, "as if on furry feet," and had an appealing jollity.
Meanwhile, once he had scratched that word "hobbit" on the examination
paper, his curiosity about hobbits was piqued, and the book of that
name-the precursor of the more serious "The Lord of the Rings"-began to
grow.
It was nurtured by weekly meetings with his friends and
colleagues, including the philosopher and novelist C. S. Lewis and his
brother, W. H. Lewis, and the mystical novelist Charles Williams. The
Inklings, as they called themselves, gathered at Magdalen College or a
pub to drink beer and share one another's manuscripts.
C. S.
Lewis thought well enough of "The Hobbit," which Tolkien began to write
in 1937 (and told to his children), to suggest that he submit it for
publication to George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. It was accepted, and the
American edition won a Herald Tribune prize as best children's book.
The author always insisted, however, that neither "The Hobbit" nor "The Lord of the Rings" was intended for children.
"It's not even very good for children," he said of "The Hobbit," which
he illustrated himself. "I wrote some of it in a style for children, but
that's what they loathe. If I hadn't done that, though, people would
have thought I was loony."
"If you're a youngish man," he told a
London reporter, "and you don't want to be made fun of, you say you're
writing for children."
"The Lord of the Rings," he admitted,
began as an exercise in "linguistic esthetics" as well as an
illustration of his theory on fairy tales. Then the story itself
captured him.
Took 14 Years to Write
In
1954 "The Fellowship of the Ring," the first volume of the trilogy,
appeared. "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King" were the second
and third parts. The work, which has a 104-page appendix and took 14
years to write, is filled with verbal jokes, strange alphabets, names
from the Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Welsh. For its story, it calls, among
others, on the legend of "The Ring of the Nibelung" and the early
Scandinavian classic, the "Elder Edda."
Meanwhile, Tolkien was
also busy with scholarly writings, which included "Chaucer As a
Philologist," "Beowulf, the Monster and the Critics" and "The Ancrene
Wisse," a guide for the medieval anchoresses.
After retirement,
he lived on in the Oxford suburb of Headington, "working like hell," he
said, goaded to resume his writing on a myth of the Creation and Fall
called "The Silmarillion," which he had begun even before his trilogy.
As he said in an interview a few years ago, "A pen is to me as a beak is
to a hen."
