Biography

[Ingwë]

Biogaphy of Tolkien can be found in this site: http://home.freeuk.net/webbuk2/tolkien-biography.htm
What do you think about his biography? Isn`t it great? Which do you think is greatest and most intersting in his life?

[Eledhwen]

A FILM? - Tolkien's life would make a much more interesting film than CS Lewis' 'Shadowlands'. He was hit by family tragedies very early on, and when he fell in love the relationship was banned for three years. Then no sooner had they got together properly than he went off to war, and that's even before we really get started on the stuff he's famous for.

WORLD WAR ONE:- You asked me, Dreadlord, for my own take on Tolkien's biogaphy. Here are some musings. My Grandad West was in the Lancashire Fusiliers during WW1, and also fought on the Somme battlefield. Grandad was an ordinary private soldier, who had turned down a higher rank (he was a club manager when he signed up) because he didn't want a front row seat if possible. He survived. Then, when he was near the end of his life, he constantly hallucinated that he was back in the Somme. He tried to burn ticks off his arms and asked my brother to deal with the rodent problem (which was in the trenches, not our house!).

I saw first hand the terrible imprint this battle had on my Grandad, and he was just an ordinary tommy. You only have to look at those old guys on TV, over 100 years old now, most of them, who are taken for the first time to visit the graves of their friends from WW1; to see the distress and tears welling up like it was yesterday, to see how terrible the impact of that war was.

And we can't underestimate the effect it had on JRRT. The long slog, the carnage, the discomfort, filth, damp, and disease all went into the mythology. It is said that the Dead Marshes were probably born of the hideous memory of corpses lying in pools on the battlefield. The First World War was also the last Western war where massed cavalry charges were staged. If Tolkien didn't witness these first hand, he must have heard of them, maybe in the long nights between skirmishes in the trenches there was another impromptu talking club; or maybe Tolkien suffered the loneliness of incompatible company among his fellow officers (In those days, you could still get a high rank by simply being the son of an Earl etc.).

But like many old soldiers, they spoke little of the horrors of war, except that during WWII, Tolkien's son Christopher was off with the Royal Air Force; and I wonder if he ever dreaded what thankfully only came to pass in his stories: the son who never came home. And also during WWII he was compiling the sequel that was to make him a household name worldwide, and each Christmas writing beautiful letters from Father Christmas for his youngest child Priscilla; He wrote wonderful excuses for the shortage of presents owing to the war, and in 1941, the Goblins attacked the North Pole again! The last FC letter was in 1943, after which presumably Priscilla didn't need them anymore.

I would advise anyone interested in Tolkien's biography to read his letters, if they haven't already done so. There is much autobiographical material in them, and it comes across as being very real and immediate, being written by JRRT himself and in largely informal style.

There are Tolkien related sites I haven't visited yet, which are on my list of things to do. Sarehole, (http://www.bplphoto.co.uk/TolkiensBirmingham/TolkienSarehole.htm) for instance. I could get there and back in a day I expect. I would also like to visit Roos when the hemlocks are in flower; though maybe I'll find a housing estate instead. The Eagle and Child (http://users.ox.ac.uk/~tolksoc/TolkiensOxford/bird_and_baby.html) is near enough for a pub lunch, and it is not a disappointment. Extensions have been done discretely and the pub has kept the character that the inklings would recognise. If you didn't know it was Tolkien's watering hole, you wouldn't find any clues on the outside.

[Eledhwen]

Here is a more traditional source of biographical material on Tolkien: http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html where many other interesting papers can be read too.