I Can’t Sleep - J. R. R. Tolkien | Gentle Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: May 21, 2023

Unwind with this calm bedtime reading as Benjamin explores the life and legacy of J. R. R. Tolkien, helping you relax and ease insomnia. You’ll learn about his early years, his work as a philologist, and the creation of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which shaped modern fantasy literature. Benjamin’s soothing cadence turns biography and creativity into peaceful storytelling that reduces stress and quiets the mind. This isn’t whispering or hypnosis—just gentle, fact-filled narration designed to guide you into rest. Press play, settle in, and drift into sleep with Tolkien’s story. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on J. R. R. Tolkien, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – J. R. R. Tolkien. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch.

I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause. With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, and become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled J.R.R. Tolkien.

John Ronald ruled Tolkien, January 3rd, 1892 to the 2nd of September, 1973, was an English writer and philologist. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. From 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C.S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group, the Inklings. He was appointed a commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on the 28th of March, 1972. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including the Silmarillion.

These together with the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and within it Middle Earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term Legendarium to the larger part of these writings. While many other offers have published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused him to be popularly identified as the father of modern fantasy literature, or more precisely of high fantasy. Tolkien's immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches, and pianos in London and Birmingham. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kurtzburg near Kuninsberg,

which had been founded during the medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest known paternal ancestor, Michel Tolkien, was born around 1620. Michael's son Christianus Tolkien, 1663 to 1746, was a wealthy Miller in Critsburg. His son Christian Tolkien, 1706 to 1791, moved from Critsburg to nearby Donzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien 1747 to 1813, and Johann, later known as John Benjamin Tolkien, 1752 to 1819, emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family. The younger brother was J.R.R. Tolkien's second great-grandfather. In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravel took over the early Norton manufacturer in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravel and Tolkien.

Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. Other German relatives also join the two brothers in London. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J.R.R.R. Tolkien live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who evacuated his Prussia in 1945 at the end of World War II. According to Rizard Dhrzinski, the Tolkien name is of low Prussian origin, and probably means son descendant of Tolk. Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word, Tolkien, meaning foolhardy, and jokingly inserted himself as a cameo into the

Notion Club papers under the literally translated name Rashbold. However, Dredzinski has demonstrated this to be a false etymology. While Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father. John Ronald Roald Tolkien was born on the 3rd of January, 1892, in Bloomfontein in the Orange Free State, later annexed by the British Empire, now Free State Province in the Republic of South Africa, to Arthur Rolteulking, 1857 to 1896, an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, Nay Suffield, 1870 to 1904.

The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloomfontein office of the British Bank, for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hillary Arthur Rull Tolkien, who was born on the 17th of February 1894. As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event some believed to have been later echoed in his stories, although he admitted no actual memory of the event and no special hatred of spiders as an adult. In an earlier incident from Tolkien's infancy, a young family servant took the baby to his homestead,

returning him to the next morning. When he was three, he 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. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kingshell's Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Searhole, now in Hall Green, then at Worcestershire Village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Searhole Mill and Mosley Bog, and the Clint, Lickie and, and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with nearby towns and villages

such as Bromsgrove, Alchester, and Alva Church, and places such as his Aunt Jane's Farm, bag end, the name of which he used in his fiction. Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him, the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favorite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early. Tolkien 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, and thought Alice's adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll was amusing but disturbing. He liked stories about Red Indians, Native Americans, and works of fantasy by George McDonald. In addition, the fairy books of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him, and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings. Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900, despite vehement protest by her

Baptist family, which stopped all financial assistance to her. In 1904, when J.R.R. Tolkien was 12, his mother died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage and Redenol, which she was renting. She was then about 34 years of age, about as old as a person with diabetes, mellitis type 1, could survive without treatment. Insulin would not be discovered until 1921, two decades later. Nine years after her death, Tolkien wrote, My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy away to his great gifts as he did to Hillary and myself,

giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith. Before her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to her close friend, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory. he was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics. In a 1965 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled the influence of the man whom he always called Father Francis.

He was an upper-class Welsh Spaniard Tory and seemed to some just a pottering old gossip. He was, and he was not. I first learned charity and forgiveness from him, and in the light of it, Pierce, even the liberal darkness out of which I came, knowing more about Bloody Mary than the mother of Jesus, who was never mentioned except as an object of wicked worship by the Romanists. After his mother's death, Tolkien grew up in the edge-bastened area of Birmingham, and attended King Edward's School Birmingham, and later St. Philip's School. In 1903, he won a foundation scholarship and returned to King Edwards. While in his early teens, he was a early teen, he,

Tolkien had his first encounter with a constructed language, Anamelik, an invention of his cousins, Mary and Marjorie, Inkladin. At the time, he was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon. Their interests in Anamilic soon died away, but Mary and others, including Tolkien himself, invented a new and more complex language called Nevbosch. The next constructed language he came to work with, Nafarin, would be his own creation. Tolkien learned Esperanto sometime before 1909. Around June 10, 1909, he composed the book of the Fox Rook, a 16-page notebook where the earliest example of one of his invented alphabets appears.

Short texts in his notebook are written in Esperanto. In 1911, while they were at King Edward's school, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Jeffrey Bach Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society they called the TCBS. The initials stood for Tea Club and Borovian Society, alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in borough's stores near the school and secretly in the school library. 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 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's journey across the misty mountains, including the glasad down the slithering stones into the pine woods, directly based on his adventures, as their party of twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauder Brunnen and on to the camp in Moraines beyond Murren.

Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn, the Silver-Tyne-Selabdil of my dreams. They went across the Klein Scheidig to Grindenwald, and on across the Grosse-Sciedig of of Merringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass through the Upper Valas to Brigg and on to the Oledge Glacier and Zermont. In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially read classics, but changed his course in 1913 to English language and literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honors. Among his tutors at Oxford was Joseph Wright, whose primer of the Gothic language, had inspired Tolkien as a schoolboy,

courtship and marriage. At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Brat, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hillary moved into the boarding house where she lived in Duchess Road, Edge Boston. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Edis and Ronald took to frequenting Birmingham empty shops, especially one which had a balcony overlooking the pavement. There they would sit and throw sugar lumps into the hats of passers-by, moving to the next table when the sugar bowl was empty. With two people of their personalities and in their position, romance was bound to flourish. Both were orphans in need of affection, and they found that they could give it to each other. During the summer of 1909, they decided that they were in love. His guardian, Father Morgan, considered it altogether

unfortunate that his surrogate son was romantically involved with an older Protestant woman. Tolkien wrote that the combined tensions contributed to his having muffed his exams. Morgan prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Tolkien obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable. early exception, over which Father Morgan threatened to cut short his university career if he did not stop. On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with a family friend C. H. Jessup at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field,

the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to Mary Field only because she felt on the shelf and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that because of Tolkien's letter, everything had changed. On the 8th of January 1913, Tolkien traveled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien's proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring.

Field was dreadfully upset at first, and the Field family was insulted and angry. Upon learning of Edith's new plans, Jessup wrote to her guardian, I have nothing to say against Tolkien. He is a culture gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in position to marry, I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession, it would have been different. Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Jessup, like many others of his age in class, strongly anti-Catholic, was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings. Edith Brad and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St. Mary Immaculate Catholic Church at Warwick on the 22nd of March, 1916.

In his 1941 letter to Michael, Tolkien expressed admiration for his wife's willingness to marry a man with no job, little money, and no prospects except the likelihood of being killed in the Great War. First World War In August 1914, Britain entered the First World War. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to volunteer immediately for the British Army. In the 1941 letter to his son Michael, Tolkien recalled, In those days, chaps joined up or were scorned publicly. It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage.

Instead, Tolkien endured the obloquy and entered a program by which he delayed enlistment until completing his degree. By the time he passed his finals in July 1915, Tolkien recalled that the hints were becoming outspoken from relatives. He was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers on the 15th of July 1915. He trained with the 13th Reserve Battalion on Canock Chase, rudely camp near to Rudley Staffordshire for 11 months.

In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained, gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed. Following their wedding, Lieutenant and Mrs. Tolkien took up lodgings near the training camp. On the 2nd of June 1916, Tolkien received a telegram summoning him to Folkstone for posting to France. The Tolkien spent the night before his departure in a room at the Plough in Harrow Hotel in Edgebast in Birmingham. He later wrote, Junior officers were being killed off a dozen a minute, parting from my wife then, it was like a death.

France. The 5th of June 1916, Tolkien boarded a troop transport for an overnight voyage to Calais. Like other soldiers arriving for the first time, he was sent to the British Expedentiary Forces-based Depot at Ede-Plae. On the 7th of June, he was informed that he had been assigned as a signals officer to the 11th Service Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers. The battalion was part of the 74th Brigade, 25th Division. While waiting to be summoned to his unit, Tolkien sank into boredom.

To pass the time, it composed a poem titled The Lonely Isle, which was inspired by his feelings during the sea crossing to Calais. To evade the British Army's postal censorship, he developed a code of dots by which Edith could track his movements. He left at a play on the 27th of June 1916 and joined his battalion at Rubon Pre near Abin. He found himself commanding enlisted men who were drawn mainly for the mining, milling, and waving towns of Lancashire. According to John Garth, he felt an affinity for these working-class men, but military protocol prohibited friendships with other ranks. Instead, he was required to take charge of them, discipline them, train them, and probably censor their letters.

If possible, he was supposed to inspire their love and loyalty. Tolkien later lamented, The most improper job of any man is bossing other men, Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. Battle of the Psalm Tolkien arrived at the Psalm in early July 1916. In between terms behind the lines at Bousencourt, he participated in the assaults on the Schwabin-Radaut and the Leipzig salient.

Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. Edith could track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front. The Reverend Mervyn S. Evers' Anglican Chaplain to the Lancashire fusiliers recorded that Tolkien and his fellow officers were eaten by hordes of lice, which found the medical officer's ointment merely a kind of hors d'oeuvre, and the little beggars went at their feast with renewed vigor. On the 27th of October 1916, as his battalion attacked Regina Trench, Tolkien contracted trench fever, a disease carried by lice. He was invalided to England on the 8th of November 1916. According to his children, John and Priscilla Tolkien,

in later years he would occasionally talk of being at the front of the horrors of the first German gas attack, of the utter exhaustion and ominous quiet after a bombardment, of the whining scream of the shells and the endless march always on foot, through a devastated landscape, sometimes carrying the men's equipment, as well as his own to encourage them to keep going. Some remarkable relics survive from that time, a trench map he drew himself, pencil-ridden orders to carry bombs to the fighting line. Many of his dearest school friends were killed in the war. Among their number were Rob Gilson of the Tea Club and Borovian Society, who was killed on the first day of the Somme while leading his men in the assault on Beaumont-Hammel.

Fellow TCBS member Jeffrey Smith was killed during the battle when a German artillery show landed on the first aid post. Tulkin's battalion was almost completely wiped out, following his return to England. According to John Garth, Kitchener's army, in which Tolkien served, at once marked existing social boundaries and counteracted the class system by throwing everyone into a desperate situation together. Tolkien was grateful, writing that it had taught him a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy, especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties, home front.

A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service. During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called the Book of Lost Tales, beginning with the fall of gondolin. Lost Tales represented Tolkien's attempt to create a mythology for England. a project he would abandon without ever completing. Throughout 1917 and 1918, his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps.

It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Role Tolkien. In a 1941 letter, Tolkien described his son, John, as conceived and carried during the starvation year of 1917, and the great U-boat campaign roundabout the Battle of Cambri, when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now. Tolkien was promoted to the temporary rank of lieutenant on the 6th of January, 1918. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull,

he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby ruse, and Ediths began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered, I never called Edith Luthian, but she was a source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Ruse in Yorkshire, where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humbergarrison in 1917. She was able to live with me for a while. In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them,

and she could sing and dance. But the story has gone crooked, and I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable mandos. On the 16th of July 1919, Tolkien was taken off active service at Fovann and Salisbury Plain with a temporary disability pension. academic and writing career. On the 3rd of November 1920, Tolkien was demobilized and left the army, retaining his rank of lieutenant. His 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. In 1920, he took up a post as reader in English language at the University of Leeds,

becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there. While it leads, he produced a Middle English vocabulary and a definitive edition of Sir Gwain and the Green Knight with E.V. Gordon. Both became academic standard works for several decades. He translated Sir Gwain, Pearl, and Sir Orfeo. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon. was a fellowship at Pembroke College. In mid-191919, he began to tutor undergraduates privately,

most importantly those of Lady Margaret Hall in St. Hugh's College, given that the women's college were in great need of good teachers in their early years, and Tolkien, as a married professor, then still not common, was considered suitable, as a bachelor, Don would not have been. During his time at Pembroke College, Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and the first two volumes of the Lord of the Rings, while living at 20 Northmore Road in North Oxford. He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name Nodens,

following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Aslepian at Lidney Park, Gloucestershire in 1928, Beowulf. In the 1920s, Tolkien undertook a translation of Beowulf, which he finished in 1926, but did not publish. It was finally edited by his son and published in 2014, more than 40 years after Tolkien's death, and almost 90 years after its completion. Ten years after finishing his translation, Tolkien gave a highly acclaimed lecture on the work Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics, which had a lasting influence on Beowulf research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article is widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulf. Beowulfian criticism, noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work,

as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, 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 Finsberg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf. Beowulf is among my most valued sources. This influence may be seen throughout this Middle Earth legendary. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien began his series of lectures on Beowulf in a most striking way,

entering the room silently, fixing the audience with a look, and suddenly declaiming in Old English the opening lines of the poem, starting with a great cry of Hoyt. It was a dramatic impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon barred in a mead hall, and it made the students realize that Beowulf was not just a set text, but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry. Decades later, W. H. Auden wrote to his former professor, thanking him for the unforgettable experience of hearing him recite Beowulf, and stating, The Voice was the Voice of Gandalf.

Second World War In the run-up to the Second World War, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked to serve in the cryptographic Department of the Foreign Office and the event of national emergency. Beginning on the 27th of March, he took an instructional course at the London H.Q. Of the Government Code in Cypher School, he was informed in October that his services would not be required.

In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English language and literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in He served as an external examiner for University College Galway, now NU.I. Galway for many years. In 1954, Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland, of which University College Galway was a constituent college. Tulking completed the Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. Family The Tolkien's had four children, John Francis Roltocking, 17th of November, 1917, to the 22nd of January 2003. Michael Hillary Rolting, 22nd of October 1920, to the 27th of February 1984.

Christopher John Rolting, 21st of November 1924, to 16th of January 2020, and Priscilla Mary Ann Rolting. 18th of June 1929 to 28th of February 2022. Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young. Retirement. During his life and retirement from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. In 1961, his friend C.S. Lewis even nominated him for the Nobel. prize in literature. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cold figure, but admitted that

even the nose of a very modest idol cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense. Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort, patronized by the British upper middle class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place.

The genuine and deep affection between Ronald and Edith was demonstrated by their care about the other's health, in details like wrapping presents in the generous way he gave up his life at Oxford, so she could retire to Bournemouth, and in her pride and has become a famous author. They were tied together, too, by love for their children and grandchildren. In his retirement, Tolkien was a consultant and translator for the Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966, He was initially assigned a larger portion to translate, but due to other commitments only managed to offer some criticisms of other contributors and a translation of the Book of Jonah. Final years.

Edith died on the 29th of November 1971 at the age of 82. Ronald returned to Oxford where Merton College gave him convenient rooms near the High Street. He missed Edith, but enjoyed being back in the city. Tolkien was made a commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 1972 New Year honors and received the insignia of the Order of Buckingham Palace on the 28th of March, 1972. In the same year, Oxford University gave him an honorary doctorate of letters. He had the name Lucian engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on the 2nd of September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection at the age of 81,

he was buried in the same grave with Baron added to his name. Tolkien's will was proven on 20th of December 1973, with his estate valued at 190,577 pounds, equivalent to 2,452,000 pounds in 2021. Views, Religion. Tolkien's Catholicism was his significant factor in C.S. Lewis's conversion from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England. He once wrote to Rainer Unwin's daughter, Camilla, who wished to know the purpose of life, that it was to increase according to our capacity, our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. He had a special

devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, writing to his son Michael that in the Blessed Sacrament, you will find romance, glory, honor, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth, and more than that. He accordingly encouraged frequent reception of the Holy Communion, again writing to his son Michael that the only cure for sagging of fainting faith is communion. He believed the Catholic Church to be true, most of all, because of the pride of place and the honor in which it holds the blessed sacrament. In the last years of his life, Tolkien resisted the liturgical changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, especially the use of English for the liturgy. He continued to make the responses

in Latin loudly, ignoring the rest of the congregation. Race Tolkien's fantasy writings have often been accused of embodying a racist attitude. Scholars have noted that he was influenced by Victorian attitudes to race and to a literary tradition of monsters, and that he was anti-racist in peacetime and during the World Wars. With the late 19th century background of eugenics and a fear of moral decline, some critics saw the mention of race mixing in the Lord of the Rings as embodying scientific racism. Other commentators saw in Tolkien's orcs a reflection of wartime propaganda caricatures of the Japanese. Critics have noted, too, that the work embodies a moral geography with good in the

West, evil in the East. Against this, scholars have noted that Tolkien was outraged in peacetime by Nazi racial theory, while during the Second World War he was equally disgusted by anti-German racial propaganda. Other scholars have stated that Tolkien's Middle Earth is definitely polycultural and polylingual, and that attacks on Tolkien based on the Lord of the Rings often emit evidence from the text. Nature During most of his own life, conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views, except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-filling.

In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world. Writing influences Tolkien's fantasy books on Middle Earth, especially the Lord of the Rings and the Simlerillian, drew on a wide array of influences,

including his philological interest in language, Christianity, medievalism, mythology, archaeology, ancient and modern literature, and personal experience. His philological work centered on the study of old English literature, especially Beowulf, and he acknowledged its importance to his writings. He was a gifted linguist, influenced by Germanic, Celtic, Finnish, Greek language and mythology. Commentators have attempted to identify many literary and topological antecedents for characters,

places, and events in Tolkien's writings. Some writers were important to him, including the arts and crafts polymath William Morris, and he undoubtedly made use of some real place names, such as Bag End, the name of his ansoam. He acknowledged to John Buckin and H. Ryder Haggard, authors of modern and adventure stories that he enjoyed. The effects of some specific experiences have been identified. Tolkien's childhood in the English countryside, and its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham, influenced his creation of the Shire, while his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War affected his depiction of Mordor.

Publications Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics In addition to writing fiction, Tolkien was an author of academic literary criticism. His seminal 1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English Literatured

to this day. Feowulf is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings adapted from the poem. On Fairy Stories This essay discusses the fairy story as a literary form. It was initially written as a 1939 Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Tolkien focuses on Andrew Lang's work as, as a folklorist and collector of fairy tales.

He disagreed with Ling's broad inclusion in his fairy book collections of Traveler's Tales, Beast Fables, and other types of stories. Tolkien held a narrower perspective, viewing fairy stories as those that took place in fairy, an enchanted realm, with or without fairies as characters. He viewed them as the natural development of the interaction of human imagination and human language, children's books and other short works. In addition to his mythopeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. 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 works include Mr. Bliss and Reverendum for children, and leaf by niggle, part of tree and leaf. The adventures of Tom Bombadil, Smiths of Wooten Major, and Farmer Giles of Ham. Roverandum and Smiths of Wooten 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 called The Hobbit, which he had written some years before his own children,

came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm, George Allen and Unwin, who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for a publication. When it was published a year later, the book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel, The Lord of the Rings.

The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what became his most famous work, the epic novel, The Lord of the Rings, originally published in three volumes in 1954 to 1955. Tolkien spent more than 10 years writing the primary narrative independencies for the Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the inklings, in particular his closest friend C.S. Lewis, the offer 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.

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. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense backstory of Billy Ariand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publications

in the Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien strongly influenced the fantasy genre that grew up after the book's success. 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. In the 2003 Big Read survey conducted by the BBC, the Lord of the Rings was found to be the UK's best-elower. novel. Australians voted the Lord of the Rings, my favorite book in a 2004 survey, conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, the Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favorite book of the millennium. In 2002, Tolkien was voted the

92nd Greatest Britain in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted 35th, and the SABC-3s, the 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 UK's Big Read survey, about 250,000 Germans found the Lord of the Rings to be their favorite work of literature.