The Childhood and Youth of J. R. R. Tolkien
The First World War, the steppes of the African Orange Republic, linguistics, and a small garage on the outskirts of Oxford — all this is united by the life of one person. A man who is considered the father of modern fantasy and one of the most famous writers. Friends called him simply Ronald, but the rest of the world respectfully — John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
Usually, when talking about Tolkien, the reader immediately imagines the green English meadows, Oxford, that’s all. However, the childhood of one of the greatest writers was not at all cloudless. The future writer was born in South Africa, in the city of Bloemfontein, on January 3, 1892.
Later, Tolkien himself described the impressions of the first four years of his childhood:
At night on the steppe jackals howl and lions roar, neighboring monkeys try to either communize or put on clean underwear, and you can’t go to the barn without adults, because there are snakes, and tarantulas bite very painfully
By the way, little Ronald felt the last on himself and ran around the yard screaming for a long time until he was caught by a nanny who sucked the poison. Of course, the writer himself claimed that this did not particularly affect his life and work, but readers believe that the images of Shelob, Ungoliant, and heaps of other arachnid creatures in his works came from childhood memories.
At the age of three, he goes to England to take a break from the hot southern prairies in the cozy dank English fogs and to see relatives at the same time. One of the letters that the family wrote in response has survived. On February 14, when Ronald was 4, a letter was written for his father under his dictation:
Now I have become so big, and I, just like a big one, have a coat and help (note: suspenders) … You probably don’t even you will recognize both me and the baby …
The letter was preserved because it was not sent, because on the same day a telegram arrived that the father of the family had a brain hemorrhage. The next day, a second telegram arrived. About his death…
The Tolkien family was left in Birmingham with almost no means of subsistence. Relatives also could not help in any way. Ronald’s mother, Mabel knew several languages, knew how to draw, play the piano, and therefore decided to give lessons for money in order to somehow feed herself. Over time, she converted to Catholicism, and with a fair amount of zeal took up the education of children.
First of all, she rented a small cottage outside the city, because she believed that children should grow up in nature, a forest, a river, a field, that’s all. Plus, she herself took up the education of children.
At the age of 4, the future writer knew how to write his first letters. And although his religious upbringing did not make him a zealous fanatic, it gave him firm and transparent convictions like glass. Speaking of glass, the professor has never been a fan of strong alcohol, but it’s easy to guess what he gravitated toward from the addictions of the characters in his books.
It was thanks to the efforts of his mother that Tolkien became addicted to literature. This could not but be reflected in the love of poetry and the old legends of ancient languages. In a word, the guy had abilities and a huge love for the language from childhood.
This allowed him in 1903, at the age of 11, to go to school on a “budget”. And if not for this, then no one knows how his fate would have developed, because a year later Mabel Tolkien dies of diabetes. Ronald was 12 years old.
Life with Father Francis Morgan
Until the age of 21, the children were cared for by their mother’s confessor, Father Francis Morgan. Despite a name that would make any fan of Jack London’s chest hair rise, he was a very strict but caring guardian.
In 1908, when Ronald was 16 years old, in the midst of that period when the brains of the guys are turned off, the guardian found him a boarding house. He did not notice that the nineteen-year-old illegitimate orphan Edith Bratt lived on the floor below.
By that time, Ronald already knew several languages - Latin and Greek, “tolerably” — French and German, and in addition — Gothic, Old English, Old Icelandic, and Finnish. He bit into tongues as greedily and as deeply as the Dwarves of Moria bit into the mountains in pursuit of mithril.
And then he met Edith, who graduated from a music school, and was going to become a music teacher. In her free time, she sewed in her room and sang, without knowing it, turning in the head of the future writer into the future image of the beautiful elf Luthien. They got together and walked together for a long time.
The guardian finally put two and two together, seeing his ward in the company of a girl, and promptly stopped their meetings. It was explained to Ronald in an accessible language that after 21 years, when the guardian will not have to look after him, he has the right to do anything.
Love story
In fairness, separation from love also does not have a positive effect on the study, and as a result, Tolkien fails to enter Oxford. Having diligently sat down for books, in 1910 he became an Oxford scholarship holder. The teachers immediately recognized the extraordinary talent of the student and directed him in the right direction.
Tolkien translated old texts, compared them with related languages, adapted them, and gradually moved further and further from the original, resulting in his own poems, and sometimes he himself cannot even say what exactly they were written about.
He did not hesitate to mix languages, and drew parallels. He created his own words and speech turns, which never existed, but which could exist. As a result of these mixtures, he made completely new languages. They were nowhere close to Sindarin, the language of the elves, on which he would labor all his life.
In 1914, when England entered the war, thousands of students went to the front but not Tolkien. He enlisted with a couple of friends in the Lancashire Fusiliers and continued to share his studies with military training so that he could complete his studies. Along the way, he married Edith — in 1913, on the day he turned exactly 21 years old, he wrote to her and made her a confession and proposal in the best traditions of romantic stories.
It turned out that she had engaged to another. She did not know the reason why Tolkien disappeared and decided that he had forgotten her. But having received a letter, she returned the ring to the groom and agreed to Ronald’s wedding. In 1916, with the blessing of the former guardian, they got married, and three months later the writer was sent to the front, to France.
Tolkien and Two World Wars
Somme. Do you know what it is? This is the river at which on July 1, 1916, a grandiose offensive began and one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War. A river where more than 60,000 Englishmen died on the first day of the offensive, including Tolkien’s associates and one of his friends.
July, August, September, October — Tolkien’s battalion was thrown into the attack for four months, and miraculously he came out of them unscathed. Later, he would write many times about the people with whom he happened to knead the mud in the trenches on the Somme side by side. Their images served as a prototype for Sam, the gardener Frodo Baggins. Simple, but inflexible, uncomplicated in everyday life, but huge people in a purely human sense.
But about the war in general, about the leadership, about the officers, Tolkien expressed himself within the maximum limits allowed for his upbringing and education. And later, when readers began to find parallels to the Second World War in the writer’s work, he was terribly indignant precisely because he felt the whole taste of war from his own experience.
And four months later, he caught not a bullet or a shell — but typhoid fever. Until the end of the war, he spent almost two years in hospitals, from where he was discharged to the rear. During this period, he rose to the rank of lieutenant in England and began work on the Book of Lost Tales, which would become the starting point for all his prose.
From that moment on, a large white streak begins in his life, filled with family life, writing, teaching, and publishing. I will only add that he lived with his wife for 56 years, raised four children, left behind a huge layer of mythological and fantasy heritage, and set an unsurpassed standard of “high fantasy”, which everyone knows about anyway, and which cannot be put into a couple of lines of text. On September 2, 1973, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien died at the age of 81.
My friends, thank you for reading this article. I will be very happy if you clap and subscribe to me. Also, don’t forget to write in the comments have you read Lord of The Rings? What about other novels?
My other articles:
Love that has come down through the millennia?
“Death of Ophelia”. The Amazing Story of the Famous English Painting
