archive:sf:tolkien.art
Topic: Tolkien, J. R. R. {tohl'-keen} Text: The English writer and scholar John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, b.
Bloemfontein, South Africa, Jan. 3, 1892, d. Sept. 2, 1973,
reestablished fantasy as a serious form in modern English
literature. As professor of medieval English literature at
Oxford University, he presented (1936) the influential lecture
"Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," an aesthetic
justification of the presence of the mythological
creatures--Grendel and the dragon--in the medieval poem; he then
went on to publish his own fantasy, The HOBBIT (1937). There
followed his critical theory of fantasy, "On Fairy-Stories"
(1939), and his masterpieces, the mythological romances The Lord
of the Rings (1954-55) and The Silmarillion (1977).
Brought to England as a child upon the death of his father in 1896, Tolkien was educated at King Edward's School in Birmingham and at Oxford. He enlisted in 1915 in the Lancashire Fusiliers; before leaving for France, he married his longtime sweetheart, Edith Bratt. Tolkien saw action in the Battle of the Somme, but trench fever kept him frequently hospitalized during 1917. He held academic posts in philology and in English language and literature from 1920 until his retirement in 1959.
Inclination and profession moved Tolkien to study the heroic literature of northern Europe--Beowulf, the Edda, the Kalevala. The spirit of these poems and their languages underlies his humorous and whimsical writings, such as Farmer Giles of Ham (1949) and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), as well as his more substantial works. RANDEL HELMS
bliog: Carpenter, Humphrey, Tolkien: A Biography (1977); Helms,
Randel, Tolkien's World (1974).
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