Tolkien’s world, still popular on the big screen, began with faith and words

In the beginning were the words.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth — the world of “The Lord of the Rings” and now the new animated film “The War of the Rohirrim” — was born, first and foremost, from Tolkien’s intense and lifelong love for language. Before there were Elves, there was Quenya, the Elven language that the British philologist began to invent as a student at Oxford.

There were also, of course, the Norse, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon myths, sagas and poems that Tolkien spent years studying. And, not least, there were his own experiences of faith, family, natural beauty, friendship, romance and war over a long and often eventful life.

Although Tolkien was not overly fond of drawing connections between art and artist, he acknowledged that stories like his grow “like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the depths.”

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa, where his British father, Arthur, was working as a banker. When he was 3 years old, his mother, Mabel, brought him and his younger brother back to England for health reasons. The separation, meant to be temporary, was final: Arthur died in South Africa of a rheumatic fever in 1896.

With help from family, Mabel settled in Sarehole, a small community in the countryside outside Birmingham. Tolkien would describe his four years there — from ages 4 to 8 — as “the longest-seeming and most formative part of my life.”

Sarehole’s meadows and mill, its trees and streams, impressed themselves deeply on Tolkien’s imagination. Mabel taught him botany, sparking a love for the natural world that never left him. As he explained to a publisher in 1955, “I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human mistreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals.”

At the same time, he was becoming aware of language in a new way. He enjoyed his first lessons in Latin but discovered that the sounds of French left him unmoved. The music of words mattered to him as much, if not more, than their meaning.

Most importantly, in this period his mother entered the Catholic Church, a momentous turning point in all their lives. Her conversion in 1900 caused an uproar in the family, and she was cut off from most support, financial and otherwise. Tolkien connected her death from diabetes four years later to the suffering this caused, yet it did not make him resentful of the church. On the contrary, it made the faith a precious gift that his mother sacrificed her life to give him.

Twelve-year-old Tolkien was an orphan, estranged from most of his extended family. He would have to find love elsewhere. One source of consolation was his guardian, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory. The affectionate, warm-hearted Father Morgan became, Tolkien said, “a father to me, more than most real fathers.”

Equally important were the friendships he found at King Edward’s School in Birmingham. He and three of his close friends gathered in the school library and a department store called Barrows to drink tea and discuss ideas. Cheered on by the “Tea Club and Barrovian Society,” Tolkien’s enthusiasm for languages grew, and he started inventing his own.

Then, at about 18, Tolkien fell in love. Edith Bratt was an orphan like himself, lodging in the same boarding house, one floor below him. She and Ronald would lean out their windows to talk at night and made excursions together into the city, drinking tea from a tea-room balcony and dropping sugar cubes into the hats of pedestrians below.

Concerned that Tolkien, distracted from his studies, would fail to earn a university scholarship, Father Morgan forbade him from seeing or writing to Edith until he was 21. Though “it was extremely hard, bitter and painful,” the teenager obeyed.

But he did not forget. On his 21st birthday, he wrote to Edith. Meeting a few days later, they quickly became engaged and married in March 1916. When she died in 1971, after 55 years of marriage, Tolkien wrote to his son, Christopher: “Someone close in heart to me should know something about things that records do not record: the dreadful sufferings of our childhoods, from which we rescued one another … the sufferings we endured after our love began — all of which (over and above personal weaknesses) might help to make pardonable, or understandable, the lapses and darknesses which at times marred our lives — and to explain how these never touched our depths nor dimmed the memories of our youthful love.”

Tolkien had joined the Army after graduating from Oxford in 1915 with First Degree honors in English Language and Literature. Two months after his wedding, he was sent to the Western Front in the buildup for the Battle of the Somme. Two of his three close friends from the Tea Club and Barrovian Society would die in the battle.

“I never expected to survive,” he recalled in 1941 in a letter to his son Michael, then fighting in another world war. “The intense emotion of regret, the vivid (almost raw) perception of the young man who feels himself doomed to die before he has ‘said his word,’ is with me still: a cloud, a patch of sun, a star, were often more than I could bear.”

Catching trench fever likely saved his life. Sent home to convalesce, Tolkien continued to work on what he acknowledged was a “mad hobby” — the private language he had begun developing in his college days, which he came to call Quenya. But, as he knew better than most, language cannot be separated from history and culture. Almost inevitably, he began writing stories of the world where such a language could have evolved and been spoken.

The tales and languages of Middle-earth remained Tolkien’s private project for many years as he pursued an academic career and he and Edith raised their family of four children, first in Leeds, then in Oxford.

When Middle-earth did emerge to a greater public, it was not by way of the great heroes Tolkien had conceived, but in the figure of Bilbo Baggins, a timid, comfort-loving hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground (not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, of course). The first sentence of “The Hobbit” came to him as he wearily graded School Certificate exam papers to make some extra money. From that sentence emerged a children’s story set in this world so familiar to him.

The publication of “The Hobbit” in 1937 generated calls for more. Though Tolkien offered his publisher material from his growing legendarium of Middle-earth stories, “the remote Elvish Legends were turned down.” He decided instead to write what he called a fairy tale for adults.

With the enormous success of “The Lord of the Rings,” published 1954-1955, Tolkien’s “remote Elvish Legends” were suddenly in demand. But he would never finish preparing for publication the great body of Middle-earth myth that he had worked on for more than half a century. That would fall to his son and literary executor, Christopher, after his death at 81 in 1973.

In his final years, Tolkien was sometimes distressed at his lack of progress at bringing order to his sprawling legendarium. But he may have derived comfort from the hope that man, made in the image and likeness of a Maker, might continue his creative work after death.

“There is a place called ‘heaven,'” he had reminded his son Michael years before, “where the good here unfinished is completed; and where the stories unwritten, and the hopes unfulfilled, are continued.”

J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien are buried in the Catholic section of Oxford’s Wolvercote cemetery.

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