J.R.R.
Tolkien was undoubtedly the father of modern fantasy.
And while he may not have invented elves, dragons, and dark lords, he's the guy who
made them cool.
Without Tolkien, the fantasy landscape would look incredibly different today.
Here's the untold truth of the man himself.
According to Biography, Tolkien was born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in Bloemfontein South
Africa, in 1892.
When he was still pretty young, his mother moved him and his younger brother to Sarehole
in Birmingham, England.
His father stayed behind in South Africa and later died from rheumatic fever when Tolkien
was just 4 years old.
Then his mother died, too, when he was just 12.
Tolkien spent his teenage years as an orphan, living with a relative and in a number of
boarding homes, before he was finally taken under the guardianship of a Catholic priest
named Father Francis.
It's impossible to say how much of that difficult childhood informed his writing, but Tolkien
stories do tend to have an edge to them ... so it's entirely possible that Tolkien's early
days made him the writer he was.
In the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Frodo almost falls prey to Shelob, a giant spider who lives
in the mountain pass into Mordor.
And that's not the only Tolkien story that features monstrous arachnids ... Bilbo also
encounters a forest full of spiders in The Hobbit.
So clearly Tolkien had a thing about spiders.
But why?
Well, Tolkien's fear may have stemmed from an encounter he had as a small child living
in South Africa.
According to J.R.R.
Tolkien: A Biography, Tolkien was bitten by a tarantula while learning to walk.
Tolkien, however, admitted he had little memory of the event and actually claimed to like
spiders, to the point where he would rescue them if he found them in distress.
Having dismissed the idea that his spider encounter had anything to do with Shelob,
Tolkien instead blamed his son Michael.
Michael was evidently terrified of spiders, so Tolkien did what any good father would
do ... he wrote two of the world's scariest spider attack scenes with the sole intention
of scaring the hell out of his son.
At first glance, the name "Bag End" might seem like it was plucked out of thin air.
After all, it's vaguely similar to the surname of Tolkien's two most famous heroes, and you
can't help but get the impression that the word "end" refers to a final destination ... the
place the hobbits plan to return to when they're done saving Middle-Earth.
Amazingly, however, Tolkien didn't actually make up the name "Bag End."
According to the Tolkien Library, he borrowed it from his Aunt Jane, who owned a farm in
Dormston, in Worcestershire, England.
That farm was not only called Bag End, but it may have been called that since as far
back as the Anglo-Saxon era.
There are some Tolkien scholars who even think he adopted more than just the name, and that
some of the farm's features also showed up in his description of the fictional Bag End.
But Tolkien himself never had much to say about the real Bag End, besides saying it
was "at the end of a lane leading to it and no further," so it's really impossible to
say how much inspiration he took from the place.
When Tolkien was 16, he befriended a 19-year-old neighbor named Edith, and the two soon fell
in love.
According to Biographics, Tolkien's guardian, Father Francis, thought the relationship between
Tolkien and Edith was scandalously inappropriate ... because Edith was a Protestant.
Consequently, Francis forbade Tolkien from seeing her again until he turned 21 years
old.
Tolkien dutifully obeyed, and the night before his 21st birthday he wrote Edith a letter
containing a marriage proposal.
Their marriage produced four children and at least two memorable characters.
One of Tolkien's most famous tales is that of Beren and Luthien, which tells of a mortal
who fell in love with the daughter of the Elven King after watching her dance in a glade.
"What happened to her?”
“She died."
This story was, in fact, inspired by a real-life moment in which Tolkien watched Edith dance
in a clearing of white hemlock flowers.
Tolkien took his adoration of Edith ... and Lúthien ... quite literally to the grave.
On their shared headstone, the word "Lúthien" is inscribed below Edith's name, and the word
"Beren" is inscribed below Tolkien's.
Even as a child, Tolkien had a talent for languages ... and a great interest in learning
them.
Biographics called Tolkien "an exceptional student who was capable of easily mastering
ancient and modern languages."
He knew four languages by the time he was a teenager, and as an adult he could speak
Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, German, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Welsh, Russian,
and Finnish.
He wasn't content with just languages that you could use to speak to actual, living people,
either.
He also knew a whole load of ancient languages, including Old Norse, Old English, Middle English,
and medieval Welsh.
And when Tolkien wasn't learning how to speak languages, he was inventing them.
According to Hobbits, Elves and Wizards: The Wonders and Worlds of J.R.R.
Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," Tolkien had already created a couple of brand new languages
before he'd even become a teenager.
Over the course of his lifetime, he would go on to create more than a dozen more languages.
These weren't just some cute pseudo-languages like Pig Latin, either.
These were real languages.
His first attempt at a language was called Naffarin ... which was based heavily on Spanish,
but featured its own grammatical rules.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Tolkien didn't stop there.
The author also had his own system that encompassed not just the "modern" versions of his invented
languages, but their historical contexts, too.
On top of all that, he also designed his own alphabets from time to time, the most famous
of which are the scripts and symbols featured in his Middle-Earth stories.
Tolkien always denied that he'd been influenced by his time in the trenches during World War
I, but it's hard not to believe that the Battle of the Five Armies was at least subconsciously
influenced by his own personal experiences at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.
In a letter Tolkien wrote in 1960, he did admit that he might have drawn from the landscape
of Northern France after the Battle of Somme for his portrayal of the Dead Marshes, but
he seemed reluctant to take it any further than that.
There's no doubt, though, that Tolkien was affected by the Great War.
According to The Shell-shocked Hobbit: The First World War and Tolkien's Trauma of the
Ring, he spent months in and out of the trenches and, although he managed to avoid being wounded,
did end up with "trench fever," which was caused by bacteria spread via a body louse.
Trench fever finally got Tolkien sent home, but many of his friends died ... and no one
can live through war without changing just a little.
Unless you've received a specific education in early English literature, there's a good
chance you've never read Beowulf.
Tolkien had, though.
In fact he not only read it, but he also called it "the greatest of the surviving works of
ancient English poetic art," and ... as if he wasn't already busy creating his own languages
... also produced a translation of the story.
According to the New York Times, Tolkien was initially against the idea of translating
the original Old English into modern English, and wondered if it would be an "abuse" to
turn the famous poem into "plain prose."
He never really changed that view either, since he eventually expressed dissatisfaction
at his own translation and pretty much shelved it entirely until, 88 years later, his son
Christopher dusted it off and submitted it for publication.
Interestingly, Tolkien actually borrowed material from the thousand-year-old manuscript ... that
scene where Bilbo steals from the dragon Smaug, for example, was practically lifted right
off Beowulf's pages.
In the 1930s, Tolkien was working as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, and like
all college professors, part of his job was to grade the work of his students.
Now, that's the kind of gig that would bore anybody, but to someone with an imagination
as vivid as Tolkien's it must have been practically soul-destroying.
So Tolkien found a way to distract himself from his work.
According to The Independent, he put down his students' coursework and picked up a blank
sheet of paper.
On it, he wrote: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
That was the genesis of one of the most beloved children's stories of all time, a novel that
has been continuously in print ever since its original publication date in 1937.
It was an instant success, too ... Allen & Unwin printed an initial run of 1,500 copies, which
sold out within three months.
The Hobbit we know today is actually a revision of that first manuscript ... Tolkien rewrote
the second edition so it would be a better companion to its follow-up The Lord of the
Rings.
But it all began with a few dull exam papers at Oxford University.
Tolkien's Middle-earth may be pure fantasy, but like all authors he drew inspiration from
the things and places he encountered in his life.
The Independent says the One Ring at the center of the Lord of the Rings trilogy was based
on an anecdote Tolkien once heard about a cursed ring that was found near the ruins
of a Roman temple.
Bilbo's home, The Shire, was based on Tolkien's childhood home in Sarehole, England.
In fact the Sarehole Mill was a particular source of inspiration to Tolkien ... in The
Hobbit, Tolkien describes Bilbo:
"...running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill,
across The Water and then on for a mile or more."
If you were ever to go on a tour of the places that inspired Tolkien's Middle-Earth, you
would also need to visit the Malvern Hills in the English counties of Worcestershire,
Herefordshire, and Gloucestershire, which were the inspiration for Rohan and Gondor.
Rivendell was inspired by a valley in the Swiss Alps, while the Two Towers themselves
are echoes of Perrett's Folly and the Waterworks Tower in Edgbaston, a suburban area of Birmingham,
England.
The Hobbit was a runaway success, and whenever anything is a runaway success there are people
all over the world who want to get on board.
According to Newsweek, a publisher in Berlin wrote to Tolkien to ask about printing a German
translation of The Hobbit.
In the letter, the publisher explained that they really wanted to print The Hobbit for
sale in Germany, but before they could do that Tolkien would have to prove he had "Aryan
descent."
"Nazis.
I hate these guys."
Tolkien was not only disgusted by the request, but also told his publisher that he was inclined
to, quote, "let a German translation go hang."
And instead of just leaving it there, he actually wrote back.
In his response, Tolkien said:
"I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch.
I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-Iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors
spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects.
But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only
reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people."
You tell 'em, Tolkien.
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