John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who passed away on Sept 2, 1973, cast a spell over tens of thousands of Americans in the nineteen-sixties with his 500,000-word trilogy, “The Lord of the Rings,” in essence a fantasy of the war between ultimate good and ultimate evil.

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On Monday Sept. 9th, 2024, at 8:00 AM ( Alaska Time), our local public radio show celebrates the life of J.R.Tolkien with “Celtic fantasy” playlist and a few quotes from the Wizard Gandalf. Listen live on102.7fm, or 103.1fm. or https://www.ktoo.org/listen/krnn/

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Creating the complex but consistent world of Middle Earth, complete with elaborate maps, Tolkien peopled it with hobbits, elves, dwarves, men, wizards and Ents, and Orcs (goblins) and other servants of the Dark Lord, Sauron. In particular, he described the adventures of one hobbit, Frodo son of Drogo, who became the Ring Bearer and the key figure in the destruction of the Dark Tower. As Gandalf, the wizard, remarked, there was more to him than met they eye.

The creator of this monumental, controversial work (or sub-creator as he preferred to call writers of fantasy) was an authority on Anglo-Saxon, Middle English and Chaucer. The trilogy was written, he recalled, to illustrate a 1938 lecture of his at the University of Glasgow on fairy stories. He admitted that fairy stories were something of an escape, but didn’t see why there should not be an escape from the world of factories, machine-guns and bombs.

Discovering England

He settled these protected innocents in a land called Shire, patterned after the English countryside he had discovered as a child of 4 arriving from his birthplace in South Africa, and he sent some of them off on perilous adventures.

England seemed to him “a Christmas tree” after the barrenness of Africa, At the same time, he once noted in an essay on fairy stories, “I desired dragons with a profound desire. Of course, I in my timid body did not wish them to be in the neighborhood, intruding into my relatively safe world…”

Served in World War I

The war was said by his friends to have profoundly affected him. The writer C. S. Lewis insisted that it was reflected in some of the more sinister aspects of his writing and in his heroes’ joy in comradeship. Tolkien’s regiment suffered heavy casualties and when the war ended, only one of his close friends was still alive.

Invalided out of the Fusiliers, Tolkien decided in the hospital that the study of language was to be his metier. He returned to Oxford to receive his M.A. in 1919, and to work as an assistant on the Oxford Dictionary. Two years later he began his teaching career at the University of Leeds.

In 1954 “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first volume of the trilogy, appeared. “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King” were the second and third parts. The work, which has a 104-page appendix and took 14 years to write, is filled with verbal jokes, strange alphabets, names from the Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Welsh.

After his retirement in 1959 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. On 29 November 1971 Edith died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Ronald died on 2 September 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford.

SOURCE: N.Y.T. and Tolkien Society