In Memoriam: J R R Tolkien

There have been a number of posts recently about my favourite author, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE.

Today is the anniversay of Tolkien's death. He died 40 years ago, on 2 September 1973, aged 81.

Both PythonMagus and Thygocanberra are also fans of Tolkien, and of his great books "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy. The trilogy consists of "The Fellowship of the Ring", "The Two Towers" and "The Return of the King". Much has been written about Tolkien and his works, and I have read most of it. On this day I offer some random thoughts about Tolkien and my life.

When I was a young boy I used to travel to Albury to visit my grandparents. One of my oldest and happiest memories is staying in bed all morning, reading "The Lord of the Rings" for the first time, while my grandfather brought me cups of tea and bread & butter.

I also remember as a boy being intrigued by the Middle Earth alphabets in the appendices at the end of "The Return of the King". My favourite was the Dwarvish runes - the Angerthas - and I had hours of fun writing messages using these runes. I can't resist now grabbing my old copy of "The Return of the King", yes my original 1974 edition with a nice musty smell, and providing a copy of The Angerthas from Appendix 3 for any budding students of Dwarvish languages.

The world of Middle Earth created by Tolkien is so deep and so vivid that it remains in the mind like a real memory. Whereas the contents of other books fade, my imagining of Middle Earth still lives in me as fresh as it ever was. Perhaps I prefer Middle Earth to the world we live in now, and perhaps I keep Middle Earth alive by visiting it frequently in my mind.

Tolkien is one of the lucky soldiers who went to the trenches in World War I and returned. He created a code he could use in correspondence with his wife Edith to avoid the British army's postal censorship. This is pure Tolkien. He went on to invent entire languages and alphabets for the races of Middle Earth. When one thinks of the creative energy and achievements of Tolkien, only one returned soldier, the enormous tragedy of the loss of 10 million military personnel comes into perspective. The total number of casualties including wounded and civilians exceeded 37 million.

My father is an avid reader but he has never liked Tolkien's works. I wonder whether Tolkien is an author that you either love or hate. Or perhaps it is the fantasy genre that you love or hate. Tolkien has been described as the father of 'high fantasy' but I don't even know what that is. I have always been much more of a science fiction buff than a reader of fantasy novels. To me, Tolkien's creation is so unique that it deserves a category, even a genre, all of its own.

I have always admired the 'Catholicity' of Tolkien's works. For over two decades now I have attended the Traditional Latin Liturgy (the Tridentine rite, now the Extraordinary Form) and fought the good fight against modernism, and other heresies and uglinesses in the Catholic Church. Only recently I found out that Tolkien's grandson Simon Tolkien had offered the following recollection: "I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right". This is fantastic: Tolkien was a traditionalist like me!

When I was at university in the 1980s I rembering thinking how great it would be if there was a movie of "The Lord of the Rings", but I thought it would be impossible to ever translate the book to the screen. I was wrong. Special effects and computer graphics and Tolkien fans rising in the ranks of movie making all came together in 2001-2003 when Peter Jackson released the amazing trilogy of Lord of the Rings movies. Jackson was, in my opinion, largely faithful to Tolkien and he managed to capture the magic of Middle Earth. The casting, the music, the cinematography, the script - it was all amazing and most Tolkien fans were not disappointed.

The Lord of the Rings movies depicted some things exactly as I had imagined: Strider / Aragorn, Gandalf, the inside of hobbit holes, and the Argonauth. I'm sure every Tolkien fan has their own list. There was only one chapter in the whole "The Lord of the Rings" that I never really warmed to, being chapter VII in "The Fellowship of the Ring": 'In the House of Tom Bombadil'. Jackson left this out of the movies and I agree with this decision. However, I don't agree with leaving out chapter VIII of "The Return of the King": 'The Scouring of the Shire'. This is one of my favourite chapters.

Last year Peter Jackson released the first of the Hobbit movies, 'An Unexpected Journey'. While it was not as serious as the Lord of the Rings movies (and neither was Tolkien's book) the movie was great fun.

Just as Tolkien interesects with many happy childhood memories, so the movies intersect with newer happy memories. I remember seeing 'The Fellowship of the Ring' with my sister on one of her rare 10 year home visits from her religious order. My memories of 'An Unexpected Journey' are associated with my daughters, and a new generation of Toklien fans.

Tolkien was happily married to Edith for over 50 years, and they had four children. Tolkien and his wife share a grave in Oxford, which includes the inscription 'Edith Mary Tolkien, Luthien, 1889-1971' and 'John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973'. In Middle Earth lore, Luthien was a princess who forsook her immortality for her love of the mortal warrier Beren.

Tolkien lives on, in his great books, and in the movies.

Comments

[PythonMagus]

Great blog. You forgot the horror from our university days of the anime version of Lord of the Rings. You also should have mentioned our wargaming days playing the Lord of the Rings. I remember trying to cover the map with orc patrols and you responded by have a stack of Gondor knights lead by Faramir wiping them out using the overrun rules!

I have a Silmarillion from my teen years. It was a gift from my best friend in America (I've totally lost touch with him - he was working on missile systems so probably the NSA blocked all correspondence with communist nations like Australia) and he left a message on the cover sheet in Dwarvish. I have never managed to translate it. I'll blog it so you can have a go, but I suspect he made some errors.

Here's a cool idea. Let's invent a coded language for this blog. That'll drive the NSA bonkers!