Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien! We may know John Ronald Reuel Tolkien as creator of Lord of the Rings, but his background as professor of Anglo-Saxon and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary.  Tolkien was born in South African and there was bitten by a baboon spider which he says he doesn’t remember, but may have appeared as Shelob.  His family moved to Birmingham, the inspiration for Hobbiton?, he married Edith Mary Bratt.  He fought in World War I and returned to England to work on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Tolkien wrote at Pembroke College The Hobbit and began Lord of the Rings.  He started work on translating Beowulf.  His younger years is seen in the film Tolkien (2019).  The Hobbit was published in 1937.  The adaptation that I know well was the tv animated movie of The Hobbit from Rankin and Bass in 1977, a formative year with Star Wars.  Farmer Giles of Ham, a comic tale in the spirit of Medieval stories, was published in in 1949.  Tolkien published The Adventures of Tom Bombadil in 1962.  Of course, we know that Peter Jackson filled the book as a trilogy from 2012 to 2014.  At Oxford, Tolkien was in a group called the Inklings which included C.S. Lewis, their fantasy worlds have interesting reflections. Tolkien completed Lord of the Rings during his time at Oxford.  Project Northmoor is currently raising funds to preserve the Tolkien home in Oxford as a place of literary study for visitors. 

We of course know Tolkien best from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films which begun in 2001 and completed in 2003.  Ralph Bakshi produced an animated film The Lord of the Rings (1978) which adapted the first two books.  In 1980, Rankin and Bass adapted in television movie, The Return of the King.   Most of Tolkien’s work was compiled and finished by his son, Christopher Tolkien, including The Silmarillion in 1977.  The Silmarillion is the sweeping history of Middle Earth from its creation to the Third Age of Lord of the Rings, only hints of it are seen in the films and books.  There is an Amazon Prime series focused on the Second Age of Middle-Earth set to debut this year.  Christopher Tolkien edited and published The Fall of Arthur (2013).  The Tolkien book on Norse myth was published in 2010  as The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún. The Fall of Arthur was published in 2013.   Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary was published in 2014.  The Finnish epic that was influential for Lord of the Rings, The Story of Kullervo, was published in 2017.   He also compiled his father's work in several books collected in The Great Tales of Middle-Earth; Children of Húrin (2007), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and The Fall of Gondolin (2018).  J.R.R. Tolkien died in 1973, one of the most famous professors and novelists from his Middle Earth work.  He is buried in Oxford with his wife, on the headstone, Edith Mary Tolkien Lúthien, and his name, John Ronald Ruel Tolkien Beren.  Happy Birthday J.R.R. Tolkien!

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