> On Feb 18, 2016, at 1:32 AM, Richard Aiken <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The recent posts in which Tolkien was mentioned prompted me to pick up "J.R.R. Tolkien, Author of the Century" while browsing the shelves of my local library the other day. While I have read both The Hobbit and TLOTR (and saw the movies), I hadn't realized that when S. M. Stirling has his characters in the Emberverse books refer to JRRT as the "chronicler of Middle-Earth" some of them were being serious in earnest. Apparently, JRRT actually saw himself as telling a story that *could* plausibly be true (pre)history.

JRRT was, by avocation, a professor of linguistics and literature with a speciality in Old English and Icelandic Eddas; he also studied Finnish legends as well.

Many of the archetypes and characters in his works still show file marks from where he knocked the ‘Icelandic’ or ‘Finnish’ off them :-)

(Read through the names in this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_mythology and tell me you don’t hear Elvish…. :-)

His writings were both a way of exploring the character and structure of myth and history; how the latter becomes the former, and a result of his love of playing with languages and words. (he and his siblings made up rather complex languages, both spoken and written as children)

That it was a remarkable literary achievement was actually somewhat secondary. The Hobbit was originally written to divert himself, and to entertain his son, and he often viewed the trilogy as taking time away from his opus, the Silmarillion, which had to be written to provide the suitable history to draw from to write the LOTR.

He approached his entire corpus of fiction as if it were, instead, a corpus of oral history transcribed over the centuries to written history, and he often lamented that England didn’t have the kind of tradition

Humphrey Carpenter’s biography is a good read… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien:_A_Biography

--
Bruce Johnson
University of Arizona
College of Pharmacy
Information Technology Group

Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs