History of J.R.R. Tolkien: A Century-long Love Affair
HISTORY OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN: A CENTURY-LONG LOVE AFFAIR
January 3 is the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien. He was born in 1892, the same year as my grandfather.
If I were stranded on a desert island and could have only two works with me, it would be The Bible and Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
His last work, edited and published by his youngest son and literary executor Christopher Tolkien, was The Fall of Gondolin, released in 2018. The first novel J.R.R. Tolkien published was The Hobbit in 1937, though he had poems published as early as 1911.
What explains the legacy of over a century of published works by this English scholar, why has he been called the “Author of the 20th Century,” and how have his books captured reluctant hearts?
Tolkien and High Fantasy
Tolkien’s epic fantasy of Middle-earth was not the first fantasy book published, but it launched a popular resurgence of the literary genre of “high fantasy.”
J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien. Image: Queridoclassico
The story of Beren and Luthien echoes Tolkien’s own romance with his wife, Edith, as we shall see. One of the earliest tales in the Middle-earth legendarium, “Of Beren and Luthien,” tells of two star-crossed lovers. So, too, were Tolkien and Edith.
When he moved into a boarding house where she lived, he was 16. She was three years older. At this time, he was an orphan, but his mother had entrusted him to her parish priest. His guardian, the Catholic priest Father Francis Xavier Morgan, believed that Tolkien’s association with Edith was the reason for his poor grades in his exams.
He forbade the boy from meeting or even corresponding with Edith, a Protestant (!), until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed his guardian and, on the evening of his 21st birthday, wrote a letter of proposal to Edith, who later became his wife.
The Love of a Woman
Second Lt. J.R.R. Tolkien
A little over 100 years ago, in 1916, a young Second Lieutenant Tolkien was serving at the Battle of the Somme on the Western Front in France during World War I when he contracted trench fever. Returned to hospital in England in November, he spent a year in convalescence in the Yorkshire countryside, where he spent time with his wife Edith, whom he had married the year before.
While recovering in 1917 in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, Tolkien began working on some of the stories of Middle-earth. While still on military duty at Kingston upon Hull in Yorkshire, Tolkien and his wife went for a walk in the woods when Edith began to dance in a clearing among the hemlock that was in bloom at that time. He later recalled:
Edith Tolkien
I never called Edith “Luthien” — but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing—and dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.
His memory of Edith dancing among the trees of the woodland glade in Yorkshire stayed with him as the inspiration for the initial meeting of Beren and Luthien; he later explained this to his son Christopher in a letter almost a year after Edith’s passing.
The story of Beren and Luthien is described in The Silmarillion and recounted briefly in The Lord of the Rings. It appears in an earlier form in The Book of Lost Tales, Part Two, as the Tale of Tinuviel, published in 1984.
In the 2001 Peter Jackson film Fellowship of the Ring, Aragorn sings a fragment of a song from the Lay of Luthien in Elvish while keeping watch at night in the Weathertop Hills after the group has passed through the Midgewater Marshes. He explains to Frodo that the song is about Luthien, an Elf-maiden who fell in love with a mortal man named Beren. What he does not mention is that he is their descendant.
However, it foreshadowed Aragorn’s own story. In the same way that Luthien, the Elf-maiden, forsook her immortality to marry the mortal man, Beren, so too would Aragorn’s Elvish love, Arwen, give up her immortality to marry him. If you think the story of Aragorn and Arwen in the Third Age of Middle-earth was long ago, those of Beren and Luthien took place 6,500 years before that in the First Age.
The story tells how Beren fell in love at first sight with Luthien as she was dancing in a woodland glade. Her elf-lord father forbade her from marrying Beren unless he could obtain a Silmaril jewel from the Iron Crown of Morgoth, the original Dark Lord, of whom Sauron was but a servant. The narrative recounts Beren and Luthien’s adventures to capture the priceless Silmaril from the Enemy’s fortress, overcoming many trials and dangers along the way.
The Love of a Friend
C.S. Lewis
The almost 40-year close friendship between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis is well known, though it wasn’t immediate. Lewis had been teaching at Oxford for only a year when he met the older Tolkien, who had already been the Chair of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford.
Lewis described Tolkien in his diary after their meeting as
“a smooth, pale fluent little chap — no harm in him: only needs a smack or so.”
Nevertheless, the two discovered their mutual love of myth, especially of “true myth.”
Their friendship extended beyond their professional association. They’d go on long walks together in the hills and talk. Tolkien was raised as a Roman Catholic since his youth and was profoundly Christian in his thinking. Lewis credits Tolkien with his own return to the faith he had abandoned in his youth. They talked about their love of fairy tales and faith.
A Fateful Conversation
Addison’s Walk
After a months-long conversation, it was on an early Sunday morning, September 20, 1931, when three 30-something English professors took a stroll together on Addison’s Walk along the River Cherwell on the grounds of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford:
- 32-year-old C. S. Lewis (Fellow and Tutor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford)
- 39-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford)
- 35-year-old Hugo Dyson (Tutor and Lecturer at Reading University)
While their conversation began at dinner on Saturday evening, it continued late into the night. Tolkien left around 3 a.m., but Lewis and Dyson continued talking until they retired at 4 a.m.
The following Tuesday (September 22), Lewis recounted the scene to his longtime friend and correspondent, Arthur Greeves:
We began on metaphor and myth—interrupted by a rush of wind which came so suddenly on the still, warm evening and sent so many leaves pattering down that we thought it was raining. We all held our breath, the other two appreciating the ecstasy of such a thing almost as you would.
We continued (in my room) on Christianity: a good long satisfying talk in which I learned a lot: then discussed the difference between love and friendship—then finally drifted back to poetry and books.
Later in the letter, discussing the writings of William Morris (a 19th-century English novelist, poet, and textile designer who had greatly influenced Lewis from his youth), Lewis notes:
These hauntingly beautiful lands which somehow never satisfy—this passion to escape from death plus the certainty that life owes all its charm to mortality—these push you on to the real thing because they fill you with desire and yet prove absolutely clearly that in Morris’s world that desire cannot be satisfied.
The following month (October 18), Lewis wrote to Greeves again about their conversation:
Now what Dyson and Tolkien showed me was this: that if I met the idea of sacrifice in a Pagan story I didn’t mind it at all: again, that if I met the idea of a god sacrificing himself to himself . . .
I liked it very much and was mysteriously moved by it: again, that the idea of the dying and reviving god (Balder, Adonis, Bacchus) similarly moved me provided I met it anywhere except in the Gospels. The reason was that in Pagan stories I was prepared to feel the myth as profound and suggestive of meanings beyond my grasp even tho’ I could not say in cold prose ‘what it meant’.
Lewis concluded,
“Now the story of Christ is simply a “true myth”: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”
The Love of Authors
The Eagle and Child
Tolkien was acquainted with several writers during his time at Oxford. They had formed an informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. They would read their work-in-progress to each other and obtain criticism and encouragement. It lasted some two decades, from the early 1930s until the late 1940s. Among the members were:
C. S. Lewis, Warren Lewis, Owen Barfield, Hugo Dyson, Charles Williams, Lord David Cecil, Nevill Coghill, and Christopher Tolkien himself.
Warren Lewis, C.S. Lewis’s older brother and also a writer and an Inkling, wrote that,
“Properly speaking, it was neither a club nor a literary society, though it partook of the nature of both. There were no rules, officers, agendas, or formal elections.”
The Love of the Inklings
Rabbit Room, The Eagle and Child
The group met for many years in a backroom called the Rabbit Room at the pub The Eagle and Child in Oxford. They’d gather on Tuesdays to share a pint and a reading. It became, decades later, a tourist destination, or at least a pilgrimage destination. Today, the pictures on the room’s walls remind us of the members.
Of all the Inklings, it was Lewis, most of all, who greatly encouraged Tolkien on his mythic tales that he’d written primarily for his family and private audiences. The first was an early draft of what would become the cornerstone of Middle-earth, the story of Beren and Luthien. Lewis suggested he finish and publish his stories. Tolkien later admitted he would never have completed The Lord of the Rings without Lewis’ encouragement:
“The unpayable debt that I owe to Lewis was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.”
When Lewis died a decade ahead of him, Tolkien was devastated. He wrote:
“So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age — like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one: This feels like an axe-blow near the roots.”
The Love of Readers
While Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings became popular in the 1960s, long before the films emerged, people could not get enough. They devised games that let them immerse themselves in the mythical world of Middle-earth and relive the world of wizards, elves, and dwarves. It was called Dungeons and Dragons. It spawned many alternatives.
Among Tolkien’s readers, many writers have publicly shared their admiration of the author and their indebtedness to him. This is reflected in their writings, which show Tolkien’s unmistakable influence.
Most of these I’ve read:
Star Wars
- Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea series
- Terry Brooks’ The Sword of Shannara
- Stephen R. Donaldson’s The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever
- Guy Gabriel Kay‘s (who assisted Christopher Tolkien on The Silmarillion) The Fionavar Tapestry
- Stephen King’s The Stand
- J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series.
- George Lucas‘ Star Wars
- George R.R. Martin‘s Game of Thrones
The Love of Mine
It was more than half a century ago, in 1966, that Tolkien’s Middle-earth captured my imagination and has never released its hold on my heart.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, US Paperback Edition by Ballantine, 1966
I came to it the hard way. A friend of mine in a freshman high school English class had encouraged me to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy. She told me about the fantasy world of elves, dwarves, and dragons. I declined, saying, with youthful hubris, that I was interested in more believable themes, like science fiction.
But she would not let it go. So I bought The Hobbit and The Trilogy and began reading them. Initially, I was dismayed by the multitude of foreign-sounding names, but by the fourth chapter of The Hobbit, I was hooked. I devoured the remaining books, including the Appendices.
As I read the book, which has many languages, I was especially impressed by the sense of history behind it, for Tolkien wrote it in part to explain the history of his invented language. It hinted at untold origins, backgrounds, and creation. I would have to wait years for the publication of The Silmarillion to learn about the beginnings of Middle-earth, the story of creation, and the angelic powers who played a part in it. Though I was studying science, it left me longing to understand history. Eventually, I would switch from studying chemistry to do my undergraduate and graduate studies in history.
The books inspired me to study languages, and I’ve studied five over my lifetime (and a few programming languages too.) It gave me a desire to travel the world, inspired by his maps of Middle-earth, as Frodo had, and I’ve been to scores of countries. I’ve been especially keen to visit the places where Tolkien lived, visited, or was influenced by. I’ve been to Birmingham (where he grew up), Yorkshire (where he recuperated during World War I), the Cottswolds (where he visited his brother), and Oxford (where he taught).
Touring Oxford
Thirty-five years ago, even before the Peter Jackson movies came out, I was taking a guided walking tour of Oxford when it became clear that we were going to end the tour at Magdalen College, where C.S. Lewis taught, but would not hear about J.R.R. Tolkien. I kept asking the tour guide if we were going to stop where Tolkien taught. She kept putting me off, saying that Tolkien wanted to be thought of as a scholar rather than as a popular novelist. I pointed out that most of the Americans on her tour were there because of Tolkien’s novels. She finally relented and said:
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a Tolkien fanatic on our tour so we’re going to make an unplanned stop.”
Merton College, front quadrangle, Oxford. Image: Wikimedia
She took us into the courtyard of Merton College and pointed to a window on the second floor.
“There, in that room, is where Tolkien taught.”
A visit to Tolkien’s Cotswolds
Tolkien’s younger brother Hilary had a farm in Evesham, England, in the Cotswolds. J.R.R. would often visit his brother and his wife, bringing his family along. The Cotswolds, a rural area near Cheltenham, is about an hour west of the University of Oxford by car. Having visited the area myself a few times, I got to see some of the places that inspired locations in his books.
The Bell Inn plaque
The Bell Inn in Morton-in-Marsh inspired the Prancing Pony. The Four Shire Stone in the Cotswolds inspired the Three Farthing Stone in Hobbiton. St. Edward’s Church Door in Stow-on-the-Wold inspired the Doors of Durin. The Barrow-downs were likely inspired by the King’s Men Stone Circle near Long Compton. You can read more about it here.
An unexpected visit to Iceland
Poetic Edda depicting the tree Yggdrasil and a number of its inhabitants (1908) by W. G. Collingwood. Image: Wikipedia
On a recent trip back from Europe, my flight was diverted to Iceland after several crew members became ill. (I think it was the fish.) We had to spend the night in Reykjavik. While there, I reflected that Tolkien was powerfully influenced by Norse mythology, especially taken from the 13th-century Icelandic literary works known as the Elder Edda and the Prose Edda.
Indeed, many of his characters’ names come from that: Gandalf, meaning “(magical) staff Elf”, Gimli, Durin, and twelve of the thirteen Dwarf names.
Touring the Bernese Alps
Lauterbrunnen / Rivendell
I recently spent a week in the Bernese Alps in Switzerland, where, when Tolkien was 19, he hiked with a dozen others from Interlaken south to Lauterbrunnen. While there, he was inspired to create later Rivendell, the Misty Mountains, its three peaks of Caradhras, Celebdil, and Fanuidhol, and the Mines of Moria. I’ve written about it here.
The Lord of the Rings trilogy depicted the world as it should be, as indeed it really is if you have eyes to see: the true myth, as C.S. Lewis called it. After you read it, it colors everything you see in the here and now. Each re-reading reveals something new because you are at a different stage in your life. It cast its spell upon me and has never let me go.
Now the Circle is Complete
The Silmarillion, by J.R.R. Tolkien, 1977
As I mentioned above, his youngest son and literary executor — Christopher Tolkien, who died in 2020 — had been publishing his father’s unfinished works over the last 41 years, starting with the prequel to The Lord of the Rings, namely the epic pre-history, The Silmarillion, back in 1977.
Indeed, he published more of his father’s books after his father died in 1973 than his father had brought to print while he was alive. When he published The Silmarillion, I bought it the day it was available in the US and devoured it in two days. It contained fuller treatments of backstory that were only hinted at in The Lord of the Rings, most notably, the story of Luthien Tinuviel and Beren.
Beren and Luthien, by J.R.R. Tolkien, 2017
Conclusion
The story of Beren and Luthien is the central romantic myth that ties together Tolkien’s entire legendarium from first to last.
Edith and Ronald Tolkien
Divine and Mortal
It is the story of the union of the divine and the mortal. Luthien’s mother was Melian, one of the Maiar. The Silmarillion describes the Maiar as heavenly spirits who began before the world and took physical form to come to Middle-earth to aid the Valar, the “Powers.” The Maiar were of the same order as the great Valar but of lesser degree and power. Therefore, Luthien was more than an elf princess; she was the daughter of a divine being. But Luthien chooses mortality to be with the man she loves.
It is part of Tolkien’s Christian understanding of the world, and perhaps appropriate as I write this during the Christmas season, to mention that Jesus was both divine and human.
Eucatastrophe
Tolkien coined a word that gives a unique understanding of the beauty of tragedy. The word is eucatastrophe. He added the Greek prefix eu, meaning good, to the word catastrophe, meaning down turning, and used in literature to refer to the “unraveling” or conclusion of a drama’s plan. He meant it to describe the sudden turn of events when the hero does not meet the seemingly inevitable impending doom.
It was true of Frodo at the end of The Lord of the Rings trilogy when all hope was lost. He appeared to fail in his mission to Mount Doom, but for the sake of pity shown to Gollum, the quest succeeded. It was true of Beren and Luthien, who seemed forever lost but returned. And it was part of Tolkien’s understanding of the New Testament Gospel, or evangelium. Tolkien calls the Incarnation of Christ the eucatastrophe of “human history” and the Resurrection the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation. As Tolkien describes it:
“It denies universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
And so, the ending of Beren and Luthien is tragic, yet beautifully eucatastrophic.
P.S. When Tolkien’s wife died, he added the name Luthien to her tombstone. When Tolkien died two years later, the name Beren was added to their shared tombstone.
Tolkiens’ Tombstone
Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com
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