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He made the first public presentation of his tales when he read "The Fall of Gondolin" to an appreciative audience at the Exeter College Essay Club. Tolkien then became a professor in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he collaborated with E. Gordon on the famous edition of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'. Tolkien remained at Leeds until , when he took a position teaching Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University.

Tolkien at Oxford Tolkien spent the rest of his career at Oxford, retiring in Although he produced little by today's "publish or perish" standards, his scholarly writings were of the highest caliber. One of his most influential works is his lecture "Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics. Another prominent member was C. Lewis, who became one of tolkien's closest friends. Tolkien, a devout Catholic, and Lewis, an agnostic at the time, frequently debated religion and the role of mythology.

Unlike Lewis, who tended to dismiss myths and fairy tales, Tolkien firmly believed that they have moral and spiritual value. Said Tolkien, "The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the Universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale? This grew into a story he told his children, and in a version of it came to the attention of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin now part of HarperCollins , who published it as The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, in It become an instant and enduring classic.

Lord of the Rings Stanley Unwin, the publisher, was stunned by The Hobbit's success and asked for a sequel, which blossomed into a multivolume epic. While The Hobbit hinted at the history of Middle-earth that Tolkien had created in his "Lost Tales" which he was now calling "The Silmarillion" , the sequel drew heavily upon it. So determined was Tolkien to get every detail right that it took him more than a decade to complete the book "Lord of the Rings. While the book was eagerly received by the reading public, critical reviews were everything but neutral.

Some critics, such as Philip Toynbee, deplored its fantasy setting, archaic language, and utter earnestness. Others, notably W. Auden and C. Lewis, lauded it for its straightforward narrative, imagination, and tolkien's palpable love of language. The Lord of the Rings did not reach the height of its popularity until it finally appeared in paperback.

Tolkien disliked paperbacks and hadn't authorized a paperback edition. In , however, Ace Books exploited a legal loophole and published an unauthorized paperback version of The Lord of the Rings.

Within months Ballantine published an official version with a rather cross note about respecting an author's wishes. Deep Elves, the later Noldor , with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Throughout and his illness kept recurring, although periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to lieutenant. It was when he was stationed in the Hull area that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him.

However, Tolkien did not stay in this job for long. In the summer of he applied for the quite senior post of Reader approximately, Associate Professor in English Language at the University of Leeds, and to his surprise was appointed. At Leeds as well as teaching he collaborated with E. It was for this club that he and Gordon originally wrote their Songs for the Philologists , a mixture of traditional songs and original verses translated into Old English, Old Norse and Gothic to fit traditional English tunes.

In a sense, in returning to Oxford as a Professor, Tolkien had come home. In fact, his academic publication record is very sparse, something that would have been frowned upon in these days of quantitative personnel evaluation.

His academic life was otherwise largely unremarkable. In he changed his chair to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he retained until his retirement in Apart from all the above, he taught undergraduates, and played an important but unexceptional part in academic politics and administration.

His family life was equally straightforward. Edith bore their last child and only daughter, Priscilla, in Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in as The Father Christmas Letters.

He also told them numerous bedtime stories, of which more anon. Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. The Inklings regularly met for conversation, drink, and frequent reading from their work-in-progress.

Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages. As mentioned above, he told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously as Mr. Bliss , Roverandom , etc. However, according to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank.

In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round.

In an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin merged in with HarperCollins.

She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more similar material available for publication. By this time Tolkien had begun to make his Legendarium into what he believed to be a more presentable state, and as he later noted, hints of it had already made their way into The Hobbit.

He was now calling the full account Quenta Silmarillion , or Silmarillion for short. Unwin tactfully relayed this message to Tolkien, but asked him again if he was willing to write a sequel to The Hobbit. Suffice it to say that the now adult Rayner Unwin was deeply involved in the later stages of this opus, dealing magnificently with a dilatory and temperamental author who, at one stage, was offering the whole work to a commercial rival which rapidly backed off when the scale and nature of the package became apparent.

The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews, ranging from the ecstatic W.

Auden, C. Lewis to the damning E. Wilson, E. Muir, P. Toynbee and just about everything in between. So far from losing money, sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. Tolkien Biography Tolkien Library. Tolkien Mental Floss.

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