Every January 3rd, I think of an easygoing fellow with a pipe in his mouth, a bright, unforced smile and comfortable tweeds or tromping clothes as I toast: “To the Professor!” This man wanted to tell a story. In fact, he told many enduring stories. J.R.R. Tolkien (called Ronald by his friends and family) liked to think of himself as somewhat of a hobbit, a creature of his own creation. He was unassuming, diligent in his scholarship, slow and steady and always reliable in a pinch. He passed these traits on to my favorite diminutive denizens, the hobbits of his sub-creation, Middle Earth.
The father of hobbits and the Middle Earth from which they sprang was born on Jan. 3, 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Growing up in the West Midlands and the industrial Birmingham area of England, young Ronald showed an early aptitude for languages, even creating his own synthetic languages in his teen years. He formed a group of like-minded friends called the TCBS (Tea Club and Barrovian Society, a precursor to the later Inklings, which included C.S. Lewis) that would be tragically decimated by World War I. Tolkien married his sweetheart, Edith Bratt, in 1916, just before he was shipped off to France. He fought on the Somme battlefield and was invalided after succumbing to trench fever, which would keep him out of the rest of the war. As it turned out, only Tolkien and one of his TCBS friends would survive the war.
Tolkien pursued his university studies before and during the war at Exeter College, Oxford, and soon thereafter he worked on the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary for a short time. Then he obtained positions in teaching, first as a Reader (Associate Professor) of English Language and Literature at the University of Leeds and subsequently at Oxford in 1925. All this time, he continued to compile tales of the Elves and the histories of Arda, which would slowly come together over time. Ronald and Edith would have three sons, John, Michael and Christopher and a daughter, Priscilla. With the arrival of his children, he began to compose stories and poems for their delight. One day, while marking examinations, he scribbled the phrase:
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
Naturally, Tolkien had to figure out what a hobbit was, and so he developed the idea, putting together the story of Bilbo Baggins and his great adventure to retrieve the Dwarves’ treasure from the dragon Smaug. The great tales of Elves and the wars of Arda that he had worked on in his early days made their way into the hobbit’s tale, and what started as a simple adventure, or “There and Back Again,” morphed into hints of larger menaces and greater world events that hung around the edges of the insular land of the hobbits, threatening to destroy their bucolic peace. Bilbo’s adventure would culminate not merely in the destruction of Smaug and recovery of Thorin’s treasure but in the Battle of Five Armies, which stirred up sleeping menaces in Middle Earth as Bilbo’s Ring would later do under Frodo’s care in The Lord of the Rings.
After the success of Tolkien’s 1937 book The Hobbit, his publishers wanted more material from him. It was clear that Tolkien’s audiences wanted to know more about hobbits, for they were earthy, understandable and rather like English country gentlemen or plain-spoken people anywhere. They were one thing in Tolkien’s sub-created world that people could really identify with.
Whereas Bilbo’s adventures took him into danger and warfare in a greater landscape, they also brought him back again, relatively intact and laden with treasures that did not have (as far as he or anyone else knew) curses attached to them.
It was a terrible battle. The most dreadful of all Bilbo’s experiences, and the one which at the time he hated most – which is to say it was the one he was most proud of, and most fond of recalling long afterwards, although he was quite unimportant in it. Actually I must say he put on his ring early in the business, and vanished from sight, if not from all danger. A magic ring of that sort is not a complete protection in a goblin charge, nor does it stop flying arrows and wild spears; but it does help in getting out of the way, and it prevents your head from being specially chosen for a sweeping stroke by a goblin swordsman.-The Hobbit, Chapter 17, The Clouds Burst (The Battle of Five Armies)
Bilbo’s adventures made him many friends and a few enemies (most notably Gollum). Although it did introduce many myriad cultures and races across Middle-Earth, it did not go deeply into their histories, and the tone was somewhat light until Tolkien just couldn’t stand it anymore and gathered everyone for the big battle. But The Hobbit was, after all, told as a children’s tale. There was a disconnect between his then-unpublished Silmarillion tales and the jaunty yet perilous adventures of Bilbo Baggins.
The gap was filled slowly over the years between 1937 and 1954. His youngest son Christopher worked closely with him in forming the stories that would become the Lord of the Rings trilogy, even reading some in letters his father sent to him as he served in the RAF during World War II. The Lord of the Rings tied Tolkien’s entire sub-created reality firmly together, from his early tales of Beren and Luthien and the Fall of Gondolin to the rise of Sauron in the Second Age. All are referenced in his LOTR, published in three parts in 1954-55.
I have used the term “sub-creation” or “sub-created” in reference to Tolkien’s Middle Earth. In his 1939 essay entitled “On Fairy Stories,” he draws a carefully considered picture of just why, in telling a supernatural story, that is, one concerning “fairies” or the realm of “Faerie,” the tale must be told as if completely true. And, in order to do this, a constructed “sub-created” realm must allow the intrusion of the fairy element. Thus, the realm in which the fairy story occurs can be said to be the secondary or sub-created world, the world of the author’s creation, not that of God’s creation (in Tolkien’s estimation). He is perhaps the first speculative fiction writer to so carefully define this characteristic of what would become a widely-used technique for creating alternate universes and other worlds in both science fiction and fantasy works in the modern day.
It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as ‘true.’ …But since the fairy-story deals with ‘marvels,’ it cannot tolerate any frame or machinery suggesting that the whole framework in which they occur is a figment or illusion. -“On Fairy Stories,” 1939
Tolkien’s Middle Earth adheres to this requirement, whereas his friend C.S. Lewis’ Narnia stories would seem to step outside the framework to speak to the reader as if he or she is a child reading a fictional story. This, in my opinion, renders the created world of Narnia somewhat less authentic than that of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
Some of my favorite passages in The Lord of the Rings are, of course, concerning hobbits. Those most prosaic and earthy creatures of Tolkien’s creation seem more real at times than some Hollywood movie stars, for they are authentic within their realm.
As Bilbo is preparing to depart following his eleventy-first birthday party, he finds that he has trouble carrying through his intent to will the Ring to Frodo. The slight “push” given by Gandalf brings out the smallest of hints about the frightful aspects of its power. It is a wonderfully realistic way to introduce a menacing supernatural effect from something that had never before seemed to be more than a treasured curio for Bilbo:
‘I’ll do as I choose and go as I please,’ said Bilbo obstinately.
‘Now, now, my dear hobbit! ‘ said Gandalf. ‘All your long life we have been friends, and you owe me something. Come! Do as you promised: give it up! ‘
‘Well, if you want my ring yourself, say so!’ cried Bilbo. ‘But you won’t get it. I won’t give my precious away, I tell you.’ His hand strayed to the hilt of his small sword.
Gandalf’s eyes flashed. ‘It will be my turn to get angry soon,’ he said. ‘If you say that again, I shall. Then you will see Gandalf the Grey uncloaked.’ He took a step towards the hobbit, and he seemed to grow tall and menacing; his shadow filled the little room.
… ‘I don’t know what has come over you, Gandalf,’ he said. ‘You have never been like this before. What is it all about? It is mine isn’t it? I found it, and Gollum would have killed me, if I hadn’t kept it. I’m not a thief, whatever he said.’
‘I have never called you one,’ Gandalf answered. ‘And I am not one either. I am not trying to rob you, but to help you. I wish you would trust me, as you used.’ He turned away, and the shadow passed. He seemed to dwindle again to an old grey man, bent and troubled…’
-Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 1: A Long-Expected Party
The circumstances under which Frodo undertakes his quest differ quite starkly from those attending Bilbo’s first and second departures. Bilbo’s ponderous “walking-tour” attitude from The Hobbit will do Frodo no good, for the very demons out of Tolkien’s Second Age tales, the Black Riders (once nine kings of men, now enslaved to Sauron through other lesser magic rings), are pursuing him in search of the One Ring. It seems that Bilbo’s innocent adventures in The Hobbit had quite an effect on the larger forces acting across Middle Earth. This sudden speed-up and Frodo’s frantic departure, draws the thousands of years of Tolkien’s histories into stark alignment with the story’s present. Suddenly the fate of all of Middle Earth lies on the shoulders of one small hobbit.
‘A mortal, Frodo, who keeps one of the Great Rings, does not die, but he does not grow or obtain more life, he merely continues, until at last every minute is a weariness. And if he often uses the Ring to make himself invisible, he fades: he becomes in the end invisible permanently, and walks in the twilight under the eye of the dark power that rules the Rings. Yes, sooner or later – later, if he is strong or well-meaning to begin with, but neither strength nor good purpose will last – sooner or later the dark power will devour him.’
‘How terrifying!’ said Frodo. There was another long silence. The sound of Sam Gamgee cutting the lawn came in from the garden.
-Fellowship of the Ring, Chapter 2: Shadow of the Past
With Frodo’s sudden propulsion into flight from the Ringwraiths, who have entered the Shire, he is faced with the unbearable vastness of things and his own position in the larger world. As Frodo and his friends flee into the Old Forest outside the Shire, they are rescued from ancient angry trees by a curious figure, Tom Bombadil, a jolly character created as early as 1934 in verses that delineate some geographical features of Middle Earth that would later be expanded upon in LOTR. He is also strangely outside the realm in which Frodo and his friends live. Bombadil is also oddly impervious to the effects of the One Ring. He is a paradox along the hobbits’ path. Tolkien weaves these mysteries into his story with beauty and the deftness of a born storyteller, and they give his world authenticity.
The success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings would afford Ronald and Edith a comfortable and even wealthy lifestyle. He became somewhat dismayed by the counterculture popularity of his books in America, and he even entered into talks with over a possible film adaptation, although it is clear from his correspondence that he was not pleased with the treatment, and nothing further came of it during his lifetime. Ronald “The Professor” Tolkien would pass from this life on September 3, 1973, two years after his beloved Edith. On their graves are inscribed “Beren” on his and “Luthien” on hers, after his tale of the human who loved and won the hand of a beautiful Elven maiden in his tales of ancient Arda. In a sense, he lived in both worlds and made his secondary creation almost as real as this primary one.
References:
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Hobbit, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, Return of the King, Ballantine Books, 1973.
J.R.R. Tolkien: The Tolkien Reader, Del Rey Books, 1986.
J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien, Humphrey Carter: The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Mariner Books, 2000.