Julius La Rosa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born January 2, 1930 (1930-01-02) (age 78), Brooklyn, New York, United States
Genre(s) Traditional Pop
Years active 1951-1972
Label(s) Cadence
Website Official Julius La Rosa Web site
Julius La Rosa (born January 2, 1930) is an American pop singer, whose reputation as a respectful and crafty interpreter of traditional pop music is still overshadowed by his controversial on-the-air firing from Arthur Godfrey's television show in 1953.
Early years and big break
La Rosa was born in Brooklyn, New York. He joined the United States Navy after finishing high school, becoming a radioman who sang informally. The young sailor's Navy buddies managed to promote him to Godfrey---at the time one of America's leading radio and television personalities, and himself a Naval Reserve officer, whom the Navy often accommodated as a nod to the good publicity he gave the service. Godfrey, for his part, was impressed by La Rosa's singing and had him flown to New York to appear on his television show, with Godfrey ending the spot by saying, "When Julie gets out of the Navy he'll come back to see us." It was, as La Rosa discovered soon enough, a bona-fide job offer.
Arthur Godfrey and His Friends
Discharged from the Navy on a Friday, La Rosa went to Godfrey on the following Monday, and a week later he appeared on Godfrey's variety show. He was a regular on both the morning Arthur Godfrey Time and the Wednesday night variety show Arthur Godfrey and His Friends. La Rosa's tenure lasted from November 19, 1951 to October 19, 1953. He was one of a number of regulars on the show, including Frank Parker, announcer Tony Marvin, Haleloke, The McGuire Sisters, The Mariners, Marion Marlowe and Godfrey's bandleader, Archie Bleyer. He also worked on other Godfrey shows during the week, and other engagements on weekends. Like the other "Little Godfreys," as the cast members were known, Godfrey discouraged La Rosa from hiring a manager or booking agent, preferring to have his staff coordinate and negotiate on La Rosa's behalf.
When Bleyer formed Cadence Records in 1952, the first performer signed was La Rosa. Cadence's first single, which was also La Rosa's first recording, was "Anywhere I Wander." It reached the top 30 on the charts, and his next recording, "My Lady Loves To Dance," was a moderate success, but La Rosa would hit gold with his third recording, "Eh, Cumpari" in 1953. It hit #1 on the Cash Box chart and #2 on the Billboard chart, and La Rosa got an award as the best new male vocalist of 1953. He became the beloved "son" in the Godfrey family---for the time being, anyway.
"That was Julie's swan song"
La Rosa's popularity grew exponentially, and his ego grew to some extent as well. At one point, La Rosa's fan mail eclipsed Godfrey's. Godfrey, too, underwent changes. In mid-1953 he underwent an early form of hip replacement surgery. When he returned to the show, he began to exhibit some erratic behavior. Though he could be truculent, this side of him began to dominate his management of the shows. He also noticed a sense of laziness and egotism among his cast members. This behavior carried on into his Talent Scouts broadcast. He canceled one show because he felt the talent on the show that night was not up to his standards.
Like other "Little Godfreys," La Rosa was required by Godfrey to take ballet lessons, supposedly so they could move with more polish onstage, particularly on the Arthur Godfrey and His Friends variety show, where dance numbers were common. A family emergency forced La Rosa to miss a lesson. Godfrey responded by posting a memo informing La Rosa he wouldn't be needed on the show since he missed the ballet class. La Rosa, upset, tried to talk to Godfrey who ignored him. He then hired his own agent and manager: Tommy Rockwell, considered one of the best in show business. Since Godfrey refused to deal with agents or managers, insisting he would never get his shows broadcast if he had to deal with a multitude of handlers, La Rosa had painted himself into a corner.
When Godfrey received a notification letter from Rockwell regarding La Rosa's representation, he became enraged at what he felt was disloyalty. During a consultation with CBS President Frank Stanton, he suggested Godfrey release La Rosa on the air, though it remains unclear whether Stanton intended Godfrey to do so without first advising La Rosa. On the morning of October 19, after La Rosa had finished singing "Manhattan" on Arthur Godfrey Time, Godfrey fired him on the air, announcing, "that was Julie's swan song with us." Unaware the firing was coming (or even what the phrase "swan song" meant), La Rosa tearfully met with Godfrey after the broadcast and thanked him for giving him his "break." La Rosa was then met at Godfrey's offices by his lawyer, manager and some reporters. The singer claimed he was "bewildered" by the events (Godfrey was quoted as saying, "Somebody must have told Julie to say that---he wouldn't know the meaning of a word that big"), but Rockwell was highly critical of Godfrey's behavior, angrily citing La Rosa's public humiliation.
The following day, Godfrey, amazed by the angry public response to La Rosa's firing, held his own press conference in rebuttal, alleging that La Rosa had lost the "humility" he had when he first hired him and in fact had requested he be released, a detail that would become a bone of contention between the two. A few days later, Godfrey, featured on an episode of the CBS interview show Person to Person hosted by Edward R. Murrow, was questioned by Murrow about the way he fired La Rosa. In response, Godfrey rambled through a monologue that made little sense.
Godfrey claimed La Rosa had requested release from his contract, the reason he'd consulted Stanton about him in the first place. La Rosa flatly denied this. Some, however, say Godfrey simply called Stanton to angrily report La Rosa's apostasy in hiring a manager and agent. Stanton, for his part, never substantiated Godfrey's claims that La Rosa wanted to leave, claims which came from Godfrey alone. The CBS executive said at the time that Godfrey contacted him, that Stanton suggested announcing La Rosa's departure on the air, a far cry from suggesting he be "dismissed on the air" per se. Stanton also declared that "maybe (the entire strategy) was a mistake." Rumors also circulated La Rosa had incurred Godfrey's wrath because of jealousy for dating Dorothy McGuire of the McGuire Sisters; Godfrey was said in this rumor to be particularly fond of her.
Given the blend of aw-shucks earthiness and ego Godfrey regularly showed on his broadcasts, traits audiences considered part of his appeal, the La Rosa firing forever altered the public perception of Godfrey, making his declarations the singer had "lost his humility" seem disingenuous and hypocritical given Godfrey's undeniable ego. Over time, the more Godfrey addressed the subject, even though he was careful to praise La Rosa, the more the host damaged his beloved public image. The matter might have faded sooner had Godfrey simply quit discussing it. Comedians began working the phrase "no humility" into their routines, essentially holding Godfrey up to public ridicule for the first time in his career, while La Rosa appeared the wronged, righteous victim. Singer Ruth Wallis, known for her raunchy double entendre novelties, recorded "Dear Mr. Godfrey," a biting satire on the matter, which made it to #25 on the Billboard charts in November of 1953. Days after firing La Rosa, Godfrey also fired bandleader Archie Bleyer, owner of La Rosa's label Cadence Records.
Firing haunts career
The firing did not hurt La Rosa's career in the short run, however. Immediately afterwards, "Eh, Cumpari" became a major hit, followed by "Domani." Ed Sullivan immediately signed La Rosa for appearances on his CBS Toast of the Town TV variety show, which sparked a nasty feud between him and Godfrey. La Rosa's first appearance on Toast of the Town following the firing got a 47.9 Trendex rating, and La Rosa would appear 12 more times on Sullivan's show that year. Sullivan compounded the animosity by signing other "Little Godfreys" who'd been fired, declaring that if Godfrey were fired, Sullivan would try to sign him as well. The ongoing controversies and subsequent firings of other "Little Godfreys," as well as some of Godfrey's controversial antics while piloting his airplanes, damaged Godfrey's public reputation though he remained a regular TV personality until 1959 and on radio until 1972. Only his successful 1959 battle with lung cancer softened his negative image.
La Rosa, who worked in musical comedy and nightclubs, was incessantly questioned about the firing through the remainder of his career. He eventually moved on to a long-time disk jockey position at New York's WNEW and continued to sing and occasionally record. The Godfrey affair always remained close by, though in later years, as Godfrey was all but forgotten except by nostalgia and vintage broadcasting buffs, a mature, seasoned La Rosa established himself as a fine singer of American popular tunes in the mold of Tony Bennett.
In 1980 Godfrey's advisors, aware that Godfrey had wanted to return to television, tried to organize a reunion show of the old Godfrey cast that would feature as its high point, Godfrey's public reconciliation with La Rosa. La Rosa, who had met Godfrey cordially on the streets of Manhattan some years earlier, agreed to the idea. But at a preliminary meeting Godfrey, unable to let go of the past, foolishly revisited his claim La Rosa had requested to be released from the show. When La Rosa again denied that and reminded Godfrey of the events as he recalled them, Godfrey exploded. La Rosa walked out of the office, ending the meeting. The reunion never took place. Godfrey died in 1983.
After Godfrey
La Rosa had a three times a week television series, The Julius La Rosa Show, during the summer of 1955, featuring Russ Case and his Orchestra. The short-lived series lasted only 13 weeks.
In the 1980s, Julius La Rosa had something of a return when he appeared in a non-contract, recurring role in the NBC soap opera Another World. He has also been a frequent contributor to comedian Jerry Lewis's marathon annual Labor Day telethon programs for the Muscular Dystrophy Association, often hosting the New York outpost of the shows.
La Rosa today
La Rosa has tired of revisiting the Godfrey affair, in part because it's been rehashed so many times, but he's been known to declare publicly that Godfrey was indeed his discoverer and the individual who made his career, but always adding, "he wasn't a very nice man." The Godfrey affair may shadow him, but the acclaim his singing has engendered in recent years prove that the talent Godfrey originally saw indeed was real. La Rosa, superbly profiled by Gene Lees some years ago, has continued to work clubs and record albums that show his greater maturity and skills as a jazz vocalist, talents honed over half a century.
Roger Miller
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Roger Dean Miller (January 2, 1936 - October 25, 1992) was an American singer, songwriter, and musician who is best known for his 1965 hits King of the Road and "Dang Me."
Life and work
Roger Miller, the youngest of three boys, was born in Fort Worth, Texas, to Laudene Holt Miller (mother) and father Jean Miller. Jean died when Roger was only a year old, and he was subsequently sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Elmer and Armelia Miller, in Erick, Oklahoma.
Miller had a lonely and unhappy childhood. Heavily influenced by the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday nights and the Light Crust Doughboys on Fort Worth radio, he desperately wanted to be a singer-songwriter. When he was 17 he stole a guitar, but turned himself in and chose to join the Army rather than go to jail. He later quipped, "My education was Korea, Clash of '52." Upon leaving the army, he went to Nashville to work on his music career. In 1959 he wrote his first number-one song, "Billy Bayou" recorded by Jim Reeves.
Although usually grouped with country music singers, Miller's unique style defies easy classification. He had a string of pop hits in the 1960s, and also his own TV show in 1966. Many of his recordings were humorous novelty songs with whimsical lyrics, coupled with scat singing or vocalese riffs filled with nonsense syllables. Others were sincere ballads, which also caught the public's fancy, none more so than his signature song, "King of the Road", a major 1965 hit, about a presumed hobo who relishes his life and freedom, riding the rails.
Miller wrote and performed three songs in the 1973 animated Robin Hood film as the rooster/minstrel Alan-a-Dale. (One of these songs was later sampled and sped up to form the basis of the Hampster Dance.) In the 1970s, Miller appeared in ads for Monroe shock absorbers, backed by a re-recording of "King of the Road".
Miller was married to Mary Arnold, who herself was a musician, a member of Kenny Rogers' backing band, Kenny Rogers and The First Edition. Band leader Kenny Rogers introduced the two. Arnold now manages Miller's estate.
His eldest son, Dean Miller, is a singer-songwriter in his own right. Roger's Christmas song "Old Toy Trains" was written about his son who was only 2 years old when the song came out in 1967.
Miller provided the voice of Speiltoe, the equine narrator of the Rankin-Bass holiday special Nestor, The Long-Eared Christmas Donkey (1977).
A lifelong cigarette smoker, Miller died of lung and throat cancer in 1992. In a TV interview, he once explained that he composed his songs from "bits and pieces" of ideas he wrote on scraps of paper. When asked what he did with the unused bits and pieces, he half-joked, "I smoke 'em!" One of his songs, "A Man Can't Quit", centered on the subject of addiction to cigarettes.
In addition to 11 Grammy Awards, Roger Miller won Broadway's Tony award for writing the music and lyrics for Big River, which won a total of 7 Tonys including best musical in 1985.
He was voted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1973 and the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1995. In Erick, Oklahoma where he grew up, a thoroughfare was renamed "Roger Miller Boulevard."
A high-pitched sample of his song Whistle Stop was used as the musical accompaniment for the internet phenomenon the hampsterdance.
The chorus of one of his songs, "England Swings", was used for the 1998 BBC radio program, 15 Minutes of Misery. The song was also featured in the 2003 movie Shanghai Knights.
In his 1997 autobiography Johnny Cash compared Miller's bass vocal range favorably with his own, saying it was the closest to his own that he had heard.
Miller ranked #23 in CMT's 40 Greatest Men in Country Music in 2003.
In early 2006, Roger Miller's 1967 single "Walkin' In The Sunshine" was featured in a Mastercard commercial.
In Sean Penn's 2007 critically acclaimed Golden Globe nominated film Into The Wild, The true story of Christopher Mccandless, Roger Miller's song King Of The Road can be heard, and is also mentioned in a letter from the main character.
Cuba Gooding, Jr.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born January 2, 1968 (1968-01-02) (age 40)
The Bronx, New York
Spouse(s) Sara Kapfer (1994-present)
[show]Awards
Academy Awards
Best Supporting Actor
1996 Jerry Maguire
Screen Actors Guild Awards
Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture
1996 Jerry Maguire
Cuba Gooding, Jr. (born January 2, 1968) is an Academy Award-winning American actor.
Personal life
Gooding was born in The Bronx, New York, the son of Shirley, a singer with the Sweethearts, and Cuba Gooding, Sr., a lead vocalist of soul group The Main Ingredient.[1] He has a brother, fellow actor, Omar Gooding. His family moved to Los Angeles after Gooding, Sr.'s music group had a hit single with "Everybody Plays the Fool" in 1972; the elder Gooding abandoned his family two years later. He became a born-again Christian at age 13.[2] Gooding was raised by his mother and attended four different high schools (including North Hollywood High School, Tustin High School, Apple Valley High School, and John F. Kennedy High School in Granada Hills in Los Angeles). He served as class president in three of them. During his appearance on the The Howard Stern Show, Gooding, Jr. revealed that after his father had left, his family lived in hotels throughout Los Angeles.
Gooding has been married to Sara Kapfer since 1994; the two have known each other since 1986. Together, they have three children: sons Spencer Gooding, born in 1994 and Mason Gooding, born in 1996; and a daughter, Piper Gooding, born in 2005.
Career
Gooding first appeared in a commercial for the clothing line Bugle Boy during the 1980's. His first major film role was in director John Singleton's 1991 film, Boyz N The Hood, a well-reviewed film about inner city youths. Prior to this, he had appeared in many TV shows, including a recurring role on MacGyver. He also had a very minor part in the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America.
Following the success of Boyz N The Hood, he was cast in a series of roles, both leading and supporting, including the 1996 film, Jerry Maguire, for which he won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Gooding Produced The murder mystery A Murder of Crows with longtime friend and partner Derek Broes and the movie has gained cult status among murder mystery buffs. Gooding's subsequent career has included box office successes like Men of Honor (2000), Snow Dogs (2002), and a supporting role as Navy Cross awardee Dorie Miller in the 2001 film, Pearl Harbor.
In 2006, Gooding appeared in the crime drama Dirty, which received a limited theatrical release, as well as the direct-to-DVD, 24-esque political drama End Game playing a Secret Service agent who uncovers a conspiracy after a presidential assassination. He hosted the 37th Annual NAACP Image Awards.[3] After a string of comedies that were mostly disliked by critics, Gooding has vowed to never appear in another comedy, saying that he "thought people wanted me to make them laugh, but I was wrong on so many levels. I try to take all my energy and take it into comedy, and that's when I'm terrible".[4] Since that statement in March 2006, Gooding appeared in two comedy films in 2007: Norbit and Daddy Day Camp. He also currently appears in advertisements for Hanes underwear with former NBA star Michael Jordan.
J. R. R. Tolkien
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Born 3 January 1892(1892-01-03)
Bloemfontein, Orange Free State
Died 2 September 1973 (aged 81)
Bournemouth, England
Occupation Author, Academic, Philologist
Nationality British
Genres High fantasy, Translation, Criticism
Debut works The Hobbit, 1937
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (3 January 1892 - 2 September 1973) was an English philologist, writer and university professor, best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon) from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a devout Roman Catholic. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis; they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's son Christopher Tolkien published several works based heavily on his father's notes. These include The Silmarillion and others, which taken together, form a connected body of tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth (derived from an Anglicized form of Old Norse Miðgarðr, the land inhabited by humans in Norse mythology) in particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our own world. Tolkien applied the word legendarium to the totality of these writings.
While other authors published fantasy works before Tolkien,[1] the great success and enduring influence of his works have led to him being popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature[2] ?- or to be precise, high fantasy.[3] L. Sprague de Camp and others consider him the "father of modern fantasy" together with sword and sorcery author Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian).[4][5] In any case, Tolkien has had an indisputable and lasting effect on later works, as well as on the genre as a whole.
Biography
Tolkien family origins
Most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in the German Kingdom of Saxony, but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English".[6] The surname Tolkien is Anglicized from Tollkiehn (i.e. German tollkühn, "foolhardy", etymologically corresponding to English dull-keen, literally oxymoron), and the surname Rashbold, given to two characters in Tolkien's The Notion Club Papers, is a pun on this).[7]
Tolkien's maternal grandparents, John and Edith Jane Suffield, were Baptists who lived in Birmingham and owned a shop in the city centre. The Suffield family had run various businesses out of the same building, called Lamb House, since the early 1800s. Beginning in 1812 Tolkien's great-great grandfather William Suffield owned and operated a book and stationery shop there; Tolkien's great-grandfather, also John Suffield, was there from 1826 with a drapery and hosiery business.[8]
Childhood
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State Province), part of what is now South Africa, to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857-1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield (1870-1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank he worked for. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on 17 February 1894.[9]
As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a baboon spider in the garden, an event which would have later echoes in his stories. Dr. Thornton S. Quimby cared for the ailing child after the rather nasty spider bite, and it is occasionally suggested that Doctor Quimby was an early model for such characters as Gandalf the Grey.[10] When he was three, Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them.[11] This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Stirling Road, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.[12] He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent Hills and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his fiction.[13]
Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil.[14] She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awakened in her son the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees. But his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early.[15] He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked Treasure Island and The Pied Piper. He thought Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll was amusing, but also thought that Alice's adventures in it were disturbing. But he liked stories about Native Americans and the fantasy works by George MacDonald.[16] In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and to some of his later writings.[17] He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace.[18] He later attended St. Philip's School and Exeter College, Oxford.
Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family[19] who then stopped all financial assistance to her. She died of acute complications of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which they were then renting. Mabel Tolkien was then about 34 years of age, about as long as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could live with no treatment - insulin would not be discovered until two decades later. For the rest of his own life Tolkien felt that his mother had become a martyr for her Faith, which had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs.[20] Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Christianity, though Tolkien was greatly disappointed that Lewis chose to return to the Anglicanism of his upbringing instead of entering the Roman Catholic Church.[21]
Prior to her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics.
J. R. R. Tolkien subsequently grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston Waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free public display from around 1908.
Youth
In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called "the T.C.B.S.", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illicitly, in the school library.[22] After leaving school, the members stayed in touch, and in December 1914, they held a "Council" in London, at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.
In the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter,[23] noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams"). They went across the Kleine Scheidegg on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.[24]
In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying in the University of Oxford where he was a member of Exeter College. While he initially studied Classics,[25] he graduated with a degree in English language in 1915.
Courtship and marriage
At the age of sixteen, Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years older. Father Francis, horrified that his young charge was romantically involved with a Protestant girl, prohibited him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter[26], with one notable early exception which made Father Morgan threaten to cut short his University career if he did not stop.[27]
On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. Edith replied saying that she had already agreed to marry another man, but that she had done so because she had believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love; Edith returned her engagement ring and announced that she was marrying Tolkien instead.[28] Following their engagement Edith converted to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence.[29] They were formally engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, at Saint Mary Immaculate Catholic Church on 22 March 1916.[30]
World War I
As the United Kingdom was then engaged in fighting World War I, Tolkien volunteered for military service and was commissioned in the British Army as a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers.[31] He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for eleven months, and was then transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the BEF in France on 4 June 1916.[32] He later wrote,
Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then... it was like a death.[33]
Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme. He came down with trench fever on 27 October 1916 and was evacuated to England on 8 November 1916.[34] Many of his dearest friends, including Gilson and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. In later years, Tolkien indignantly declared that those who searched his works for parallels to the Second World War were entirely mistaken.
One has indeed personally to come under the shadow of war to feel fully its oppression; but as the years go by it seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.[35]
The weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service.[36]
It was at this time that his wife, Edith, bore their first son, John Francis Reuel Tolkien.
Tolkien's Webley .455 service revolver was put on display in 2006 as part of a Battle of the Somme exhibition in the Imperial War Museum, London.[37][38] and several of his service records, mostly dealing with his health problems, can be seen at the National Archives.[39]
Aftermath
During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant.
When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock:
We walked in a wood where hemlock was growing, a sea of white flowers.[40]
This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as "my Lúthien."[41]
Academic and writing career
Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W.[42] In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there. While at Leeds he produced A Middle English Vocabulary and (with E. V. Gordon) a definitive edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, both becoming academic standard works for many decades. In 1925 he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College, which chair he held until he was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature in 1945.[43]
During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, largely at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford, where a blue plaque was placed in 2002. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name 'Nodens', following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepieion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.[44] Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" had a lasting influence on Beowulf research.[45] Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article Tolkien wrote about Beowulf is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to the purely linguistic elements.[46] He also revealed in his famous article how highly he regarded Beowulf; "Beowulf is among my most valued sources
" And indeed, there are many influences of Beowulf in The Lord of the Rings.[47] When Tolkien wrote, the consensus of scholarship deprecated Beowulf for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of Beowulf was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. (Where Beowulf does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements.)[48]
In 1945, he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien completed The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent. Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialization, which he considered to be devouring the English countryside. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle.[49] This attitude can be seen in his work, most famously in the portrayal of the forced "industrialization" of The Shire in The Lord of the Rings.
Family
The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel (17 November 1917 - 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel (22 October 1920 - 1984), Christopher John Reuel (born 21 November 1924) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel (born 18 June 1929). Tolkien was a very devoted family man, shown by the fact that he sent his children letters from Father Christmas when they were young. There were more characters added each year, such as the Polar Bear, Father Christmas' helper, the Snow Man, FC's gardener, Ilbereth the elf, his secretary, and various other minor characters. The major characters would relate tales of Father Christmas' battles against goblins who rode on bats and the various pranks committed by the Polar Bear.
Friendships
C.S. Lewis, whom Tolkien first met at Oxford, was perhaps his closest friend and colleague, although their relationship cooled later in their lives. They had a shared affection for good talk, laughter and beer, and in May 1927 Tolkien enrolled Lewis in the Coalbiters club, which read Icelandic sagas, and, as Carpenter notes, 'a long and complex friendship had begun.' It was Tolkien (and Hugh Dyson) who helped C.S. Lewis return to Christianity, and Tolkien was accustomed to read aloud passages from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to Lewis' strong approval and encouragement at the Inklings?-often meeting in Lewis' big Magdalen sitting-room?-and in private.
It was the arrival of Charles Williams, who worked for the Oxford University Press, that changed the relationship between Tolkien and Lewis. Lewis' enthusiasm shifted almost imperceptibly from Tolkien to Williams, especially during the writing of Lewis' third novel That Hideous Strength. Lewis' growing reputation as a Christian apologist and his return to the Anglican fold annoyed Tolkien, who had a deep resentment of the Church of England. By the mid-forties, Tolkien felt that Lewis was receiving a good deal "too much publicity for his or any of our tastes."[50]
Tolkien and Lewis might have grown closer during their days at Headington but this was prevented by Lewis' marriage to Joy Davidman. Tolkien felt that Lewis expected his friends to pay court to her, even though as a bachelor in the thirties, he had often ignored the fact that his friends had wives to go home to. Tolkien also may have felt jealous about a woman's intrusion into their close friendship, just as Edith Tolkien had felt jealous of Lewis' intrusion into her marriage. It did not help matters that Lewis did not initially tell Tolkien about his marriage to Davidman or that when Tolkien finally did find out, he also discovered that Lewis had married a divorcee, which went against Tolkien's Catholic beliefs.
The cessation of Tolkien's frequent meetings with Lewis in the 1950s marked the end of the 'clubbable' chapter in Tolkien's life, which started with the T.C.B.S. at school and ended with the Inklings at Oxford.
His friendship with Lewis was nevertheless renewed to some degree in later years. As Tolkien was to comment in a letter to Priscilla after Lewis' death in November, 1963: "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."[51]
W. H. Auden was also a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with The Lord of the Rings: Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter,
I am [
] very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it.[52]
Retirement and old age
During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that he regretted he had not chosen early retirement.[53] While at first he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became more and more suspicious of emerging Tolkien fandom, especially among the hippie movement in the United States.[54] In a 1972 letter he deplores having become a cult-figure, but admits that
... even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish) cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense![55]
Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory[56] and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth on the south coast. Tolkien was awarded the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972.
Death
Edith Tolkien died on 29 November 1971, at the age of eighty-two. [57] Tolkien had the name Lúthien engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died twenty-one months later on 2 September 1973, at the age of eighty-one, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name, so that the engravings now read:
Edith Mary Tolkien
Lúthien
1889 - 1971
John Ronald
Reuel Tolkien
Beren
1892 - 1973
Memorials
Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid 2675 Tolkien discovered in 1982. Tolkien Way in Stoke-on-Trent is named after Tolkien's eldest son, Fr. John Francis Tolkien, who was the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains.[58] There is also a professorship in Tolkien's name at Oxford, the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language.[59]
Views
Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and in his religious and political views he was mostly conservative, in the sense of favouring established conventions and orthodoxies over innovation and modernization; in 1943 he wrote, "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood to mean abolition of control, not whiskered men with bombs) - or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy."[60]
Many[61] have commented on a number of potential parallels between the Middle-earth saga and events in Tolkien's lifetime. The Lord of the Rings is often thought to represent England during and immediately after World War II. Tolkien ardently rejects this opinion in the foreword to the second edition of the novel, stating he prefers applicability to allegory.[62] This theme is taken up in greater length in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", where he argues fairy-stories are so apt because they are consistent with themselves and some truths about reality. He concludes that Christianity itself follows this pattern of inner consistency and external truth. His belief in the fundamental truths of Christianity and their place in mythology leads commentators to find Christian themes in The Lord of the Rings.
Religion
As already given above, Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was greatly disappointed that Lewis chose to return to the Church of England,[21] which Tolkien despised as "a pathetic and shadowing medley of half remembered traditions and mutilated beliefs".
In the last years of his life, he became greatly disappointed by the reforms and changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, as his grandson Simon Tolkien recalls:
I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.[63]
He later voiced his support on several occasions for the Pre-Conciliar Tridentine Mass in the Latin language, and spoke at traditionalist meetings - although he died in the early years of the Traditionalist movement. [64]
Politics
The question of racist or racialist elements in Tolkien's views and works has been the matter of some scholarly debate.[65] Christine Chism[66] distinguishes accusations as falling into three categories: intentional racism,[67] unconscious Eurocentric bias, and an evolution from latent racism in Tolkien's early work to a conscious rejection of racist tendencies in his late work.
Tolkien is known to have condemned Nazi "race-doctrine" and anti-Semitism as "wholly pernicious and unscientific".[68] He also said of apartheid in his birthplace South Africa,
The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain.[69]
He also spoke out against it in his valedictory address to the University of Oxford in 1959,
I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.[70]
In 1968, he objected to a description of Middle-earth as "Nordic", a term he said he disliked due to its association with racialist theories.[71]
Tolkien had nothing but contempt for Adolf Hitler, whom he accused of "perverting ... and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit" which was so dear to him.[72] However, he could get more agitated over "lesser evils" that struck nearer home; he denounced anti-German fanaticism in the British war effort during World War II. In 1944, he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:
But it is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic ... There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.[73]
He was horrified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the Bomb's creators as "these lunatic physicists" and "babel-builders".[74]
Others of his views were guided by his strict Catholicism. He voiced support for Francisco Franco's Falangist regime during the Spanish Civil War upon learning that Republican death squads were destroying churches and killing large numbers of priests and nuns.[75][76] He also expressed admiration for the South African poet, fellow Catholic, and Fascist sympathizer Roy Campbell after a 1944 meeting. Since Campbell had served with Franco's armies in Spain, Tolkien regarded him as a defender of the Catholic faith, while C. S. Lewis composed poetry openly satirising Campbell's "mixture of Catholicism and Fascism".[77]
Influences
His love of myths and devout faith came together in his assertion that he believed that mythology is the divine echo of "the Truth".[78] This view was expressed in his poem Mythopoeia,[79] and his idea that myths held "fundamental truths" became a central theme of the Inklings in general.
Writing
Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from illnesses contracted during The Battle of the Somme, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of Túrin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand).
Influences
One of the greatest influences on Tolkien was the arts and crafts polymath William Morris, whose prose and poetry romances Tolkien wished to imitate,[80] and whom he took elements from, including the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings[81] and Mirkwood.[82]
Edward Wyke-Smith's Marvellous Land of the Snergs with its 'table-high' Snergs strongly influenced the creation of Hobbits, as well as many of the themes and incidents that occur within The Hobbit[83]
Tolkien also cited H. Rider Haggard's novel She in a telephone interview: "I suppose as a boy She interested me as much as anything?-like the Greek shard of Amyntas [sic for 'Amenartas'], which was the kind of machine by which everything got moving."[84] A supposed facsimile of this potsherd appeared in Haggard's first edition, and the ancient inscription it bore, once translated, led the English characters on their journey that reached "She"'s ancient kingdom. Critics have compared this device to the Testament of Isildur in The Lord of the Rings[85] and Tolkien's efforts to produce as an illustration a realistic page from the Book of Mazarbul.[86] Critics starting with Edwin Muir[87] have found resemblances between Haggard's romances and Tolkien's.[88][89][90]
Also, Tolkien wrote of being impressed as a boy by S. R. Crockett's historical novel The Black Douglas and of basing the Necromancer (Sauron) on its villain, Gilles de Retz.[91] Incidents in both The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings are similar in narrative and style to the novel,[92] and its overall style and imagery have been suggested as an influence on Tolkien.[93]
Tolkien was much inspired by early Germanic, especially Anglo-Saxon, literature, poetry and mythology, which was his chosen field of expertise and for which he confessed a great love. These sources of inspiration included Anglo-Saxon literature such as Beowulf, the Norse sagas (such as the Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga[94]), the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Nibelungenlied and numerous other culturally related works.[95]
Despite similarities to the Volsunga saga and the Nibelungenlied, the basis for Richard Wagner's opera series Der Ring des Nibelungen, Tolkien dismissed critics' direct comparisons of his work to Wagner, telling his publisher: "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases."
Tolkien himself also acknowledged Homer, Sophocles, and the Finnish and Karelian Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas.[96] Tolkien also drew influence from a variety of Celtic ?- Scottish and Welsh ?- history and legends.[97][98]
A major philosophical influence on his writing is Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy, known as the Lays of Boethius.[99] Characters in The Lord of the Rings such as Frodo, Treebeard, and Elrond make noticeably Boethian remarks. Also, Catholic theology and imagery played a part in fashioning his creative imagination, suffused as it was by his deeply religious spirit.[100][101]
The Silmarillion
Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the legendarium that the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien hoped to publish it along with The Lord of the Rings, but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) got cold feet; moreover printing costs were very high in the post-war years, leading to The Lord of the Rings being published in three books.[102] The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-earth, which was edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis.
Children's books
In addition to his mythopoetic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children.[103] He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other stories included Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, Smith of Wootton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium.
The Hobbit
Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book he had written some years before for his own children, called The Hobbit, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded him to submit it for publication.[104] However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel.
The Lord of the Rings
Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (published 1954-55). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it.
Tolkien's monogram, and Tolkien Estate trademark.Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing.[105] Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings.
Legacy
After the publication of the final volume of The Lord of the Rings in 1955, Tolkien continued to work both on the earlier stories and the later stories and material concerning Middle-earth. He continued such work right up until his death 18 years later in 1973. (His tale Leaf by Niggle appears to be, in part, an allegory of his problems with completing a definitive version of the legendarium. In it, a "very small man", Niggle, works on a painting of a tree, but is so caught up in painstakingly painting individual leaves or elaborating the background, or so distracted by the demands of his neighbour, that he never manages to complete it.[106]) Tolkien had appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor, and he (with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of the unpublished material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977?-his father had previously attempted to get a collection of 'Silmarillion' material published together with The Lord of the Rings. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed The Silmarillion with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title Unfinished Tales. In subsequent years (1983-1996) he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials together with notes and extensive commentary in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book due to the style of its prose.[107]
The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both sales and reader surveys.[108] In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted The Lord of the Rings "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC.[109] In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium".[110] In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK's "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings to be their favourite work of literature.[111]
The Children of Húrin
In September 2006, Christopher Tolkien, who had spent 30 years working on his father's unpublished manuscripts, announced that The Children of Húrin had been edited into a completed work for publication in 2007; it was released on April 17, 2007. J. R. R. Tolkien had first written what he called Húrin's saga (and later the Narn) in 1918, and rewritten it several times as an epic poem, but never completed his mature, novelistic version. Extracts from the latter had been published before by Christopher Tolkien in Unfinished Tales, with other texts appearing in The Silmarillion and his later literary investigations of The History of Middle-earth.
It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of The Children of Hurin as an independent work, between its own covers.[112]
Manuscript locations
The John P. Raynor, S.J., Library at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin preserves many of Tolkien's manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material is in Oxford University's Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit and other works, including Farmer Giles of Ham, while the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work.[113]
Languages and philology
Linguistic career
Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in Ancient Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918, and is credited with having worked on a number of W words, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily.[114] In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English language, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club".[115]
Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)".[116]
Language builder
Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for the construction of artificial languages. The best developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.[117] A notable addition came in late 1945 with Adûnaic or Númenórean, a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis legend, which by The Notion Club Papers ties directly into his ideas about inability of language to be inherited, and via the "Second Age" and the story of Eärendil was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's twentieth-century "real primary world" with the legendary past of his Middle-earth.
Views
Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c, &c, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".[118]
Legacy
The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish (alongside dwarfs and dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-1800s and earlier. He also coined the term eucatastrophe, though it remains mainly used in connection with his own work.
Legacy
Adaptations
In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which
The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama.[119]
The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to The Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings.[120]
But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving.
In 1946, he rejected suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of The Hobbit as "too Disnified",
Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of.[121]
He was sceptical of the emerging Tolkien fandom in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of The Lord of the Rings:
Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it.[122]
In film
In 1958, after receiving a screenplay for a proposed movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman, Tolkien wrote:
I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.[123]
He went on to criticize the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968. However, guided by an intense hatred of their past work, Tolkien expressly forbade that The Walt Disney Company should ever become involved in any future productions.[citation needed]
United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie adaptation of The Lord of the Rings appeared in 1978, an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It covered only the first half of the story of The Lord of the Rings.[124] In 1977 an animated TV production of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980 they produced an animated The Return of the King, which covered some of the portions of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete.
In 2001-3, New Line Cinema released The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy of live-action films filmed in New Zealand by director Peter Jackson. Among veteran fans, reviews were mixed. Casting and characterizations were praised, while alterations to central story concepts provoked passionate arguments from hardcore fans. The series was extremely successful, however ?- performing well commercially and winning numerous Oscars. A third accomplishment was also attained: in an interview for the film Ringers: Lord of the Fans, Peter Jackson had expressed hope that his three films would draw more people towards the "real masterpiece" ?- namely, Tolkien's novel.
Blue plaques
There are five blue plaques that commemorate places associated with Tolkien, one in Oxford and four in Birmingham. The Birmingham plaques commemorate three of his childhood homes right up to the time he left to attend Oxford University. The Oxford plaque commemorates the residence where Tolkien wrote The Hobbit and most of The Lord of the Rings.
