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Children of Hurin

by J.R.R. Tolkien  

Author Information

(Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC)

J. R. R. Tolkien is best known to most readers as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, regarded by Charles Moorman in Tolkien and the Critics as "unique in modern fiction," and by Augustus M. Kolich in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as "the most important fantasy stories of the modern period." From 1914 until his death in 1973, Tolkien drew on his familiarity with Northern and other ancient literatures and his own invented languages to create not just his own story, but his own world: Middle Earth, complete with its own history, myths, legends, epics, and heroes. Tolkien's life's work, Kolich continued, "encompasses a reality that rivals Western man's own attempt at recording the composite, knowable history of his species. Not since Milton has any Englishman worked so successfully at creating a secondary world, derived from our own, yet complete in its own terms with encyclopedic mythology; an imagined world that includes a vast gallery of strange beings: hobbits, elves, dwarfs, orcs, and, finally, the men of Westernesse." Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy has drawn a readership from multiple generations and has been adapted to award-winning feature films. It is unquestionably one of the most popular and influential fantasy works ever written.

Tolkien began to create his secondary world while still in school, shortly before enlisting to fight in World War I. In 1914, according to Humphrey Carpenter in J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography, Tolkien wrote a poem based on a line from the works of an Old English religious poet. Entitled "The Voyage of Earendel, the Evening Star," the poem marked the first appearance in his work of the mariner who sails across the heavens through the night, and was "the beginning of Tolkien's own mythology"--the stories that, edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared after the author's death in "The History of Middle Earth" series and The Silmarillion. Nearly all of Tolkien's fiction drew on these stories for their background. The Hobbit had at first no connection with Tolkien's legendary histories; he wrote it to please his own children and later remarked that "Mr. Baggins got dragged against my original will" into his imagined mythos. The Lord of the Rings also moved into the realm of legend until it became the chronicle of the last days of the Third Age of Middle Earth. After The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien published a sequence of related poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, but the other fiction he published during his lifetime, including the satirical Farmer Giles of Ham, the allegorical "Leaf by Niggle," and Smith of Wootton Major, one of his last works, drew on other sources.

However, Tolkien held another reputation not as well known to readers of his fantasies: he was "in fact one of the leading philologists of his day," Kolich reported. His essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics"--a plea to study the Old English poem "Beowulf" as a poem, and not just as a historical curiosity--is regarded as a classic critical statement on the subject, and his renditions of the Middle English poems "Sir Orfeo," "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," and "Pearl" into Modern English are used as texts in literature classes. His academic work, teaching English language and literature at Leeds and later at Oxford, heavily influenced his fiction. Tolkien himself wrote that "a primary 'fact' about my work [is] that it is all of a piece, and fundamentally linguistic in inspiration."

"'Philology,'" wrote T. A. Shippey in The Road to Middle Earth, quoting Tolkien, "is indeed the only proper guide to a view of Middle Earth 'of the sort which its author may be supposed to have desired.'" Carpenter declared, "There were not two Tolkiens, one an academic and the other a writer. They were the same man, and the two sides of him overlapped so that they were indistinguishable--or rather they were not two sides at all, but different expressions of the same mind, the same imagination."

What is philology? The concise edition of the Oxford English Dictionary--a book that focuses on the meaning of words through time, rather than just their present definition, and on which Tolkien himself worked--derives the word "philology" from two Greek stems: philo, meaning "love of," and logos, meaning "words" or "language," and defines it as "the study of literature in a wide sense, including grammar, literary criticism and interpretation, the relation of literature and written records to history, etc." Tolkien was a philologist in the literal sense of the word: a lover of language. It was a passion he developed early and kept throughout his life, exploring tongues that were no longer spoken and creating languages of his own. Carpenter explained: "It was a deep love for the look and sound of words [that motivated him], springing from the days when his mother had given him his first Latin lesson." After learning Latin and Greek, Tolkien taught himself some Welsh, Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Gothic, a language with no modern descendant--he wrote the only poem known to exist in that tongue. Later he added Finnish to his list of beloved languages; the Finnish epic The Kalevala had a great impact on his Silmarillion, and the language itself, said Carpenter, formed the basis for "Quenya," the High-elven tongue of his stories.

But philology also refers to a discipline: linguistics, the science of language, the application of observed, consistent change of tongues through time to reconstruct languages no longer spoken. After recognizing the common ancestry of certain tongues, philologists devised laws--such as Grimm's Law of Consonants, devised by the great philologist Jacob Grimm, of Grimm's Fairy Tales fame--to describe the changes these languages underwent in their development to modern form. Because the changes were regular, these laws make it possible to reconstruct words that do not exist in written records. Reconstructed words are marked with an asterisk (*) to show that the word in question is inferred and does not appear in any known document. Modern philologists have used the principles of linguistics to recover and interpret ancient languages and their literatures ranging from Mycenaean Linear B script--the language contemporary with The Iliad's heroes--to the Hittite language of Old Testament times.

Throughout his fiction, from the early tales of The Silmarillion to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien exercised his philological talents and training to create an "asterisk-epic"--an inferred history--that revealed elements of the Northern (and especially the English) literature he loved, and of which so little remains. "The dwarf-names of 'Thorin and Company,' as well as Gandalf's," declared Shippey, "come from a section of the Eddic poem Voluspa, often known as the Dvergatal or 'Dwarves' Roster.'" "In the case of the 'ents,'" stated A. N. Wilson in the Spectator, quoting Tolkien, "'as usual with me they grew rather out of their name than the other way about. I always felt that something ought to be done about the peculiar Anglo-Saxon word ent for a 'giant' or a mighty person of long ago--to whom all old works are ascribed.'" Wilson added that Tolkien "was not content to leave the ents as they appear on the page of Beowulf, shadowy, unknown figures of an almost forgotten past." In the opinion of Ursula Le Guin in The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction: "That is lovely. That is the Creator Spirit working absolutely unhindered--making the word flesh."

The value of linguistics, or comparative philology, lies in its applicability. Knowing the history of the words forgotten people used can reveal something about the way those people thought and about the modern languages descended from their tongues. Once philologists recognized the relationship between English and Gothic (the oldest recorded Germanic language), for instance, they were able to explain why certain English words are pronounced and spelled the way they are: "a whole series of things which people said, and still say, without in the least knowing why, turn out to have one very old but clear, 100 percent predictable reason. It's almost like genetics," declared Shippey. Historians frequently use linguistic principles to trace patterns of settlement through place names. In England, for example, towns whose names end in the element -caster or -chester (from the Latin castrum, a fort) mark sites where Roman legions built fortifications, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Towns whose names end in -ham or -wich were once inhabited by speakers of Old English; in that language, wic is an encampment or village, while hamme can mean a meadow or a manor-house. Towns whose names end in -by, however, were settled by invading Vikings; byr is an Old Norse term for a dwelling-place. Tolkien, Shippey pointed out, uses place names in a "Celtic 'style,' to make subliminally the point that hobbits were immigrants too, that their land had a history before them." The Carrock, the rocky island in the middle of the river of Wilderland in The Hobbit, is derived from the Welsh carrecc, a rock, while the town of Bree in The Lord of the Rings comes from a Welsh word for a hill.

One of the reasons that philologists have to rely on terms like place names is that so few manuscript sources have survived from ancient times. "The philologist," wrote E. Christian Kopff in Chronicles of Culture, "lives in the tragic world of the partially lost or broken. He knows the eighteenth-century fire that ate away just that page of Beowulf that explains why the dragon attacks after so many years." Of the sixteen epic poems that originally told the entire history of the Trojan War and its aftermath, only Homer's Iliad and Odyssey remain intact; the others survive only in fragments or summaries. But careful examination of the fragments of ancient literature that do survive can often reveal facets of the writer's culture, and can contain echoes of still older tales. In Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode, wrote Kopff, "Tolkien takes a brief and fragmentary tale sung by a bard in Beowulf and a fragment of a separate version of the same story that survives on a single manuscript page and tries to reconstruct the history that lies behind the two sources."

This sense of loss helps explain why Tolkien came to write the history of Middle Earth. "Like Walter Scott or William Morris before him," Shippey observed, "he felt the perilous charm of the archaic world of the North, recovered from bits and scraps by generations of inquiry. He wanted to tell a story about it simply, one feels, because there were hardly any complete ones left." In British Book News, Jessica Yates suggested that Tolkien "began to write The Book of Lost Tales in 1916-17, as his first attempt on 'a mythology for England.' He felt that the English people, as opposed to the Greeks or the Celts for example, had no 'body of . . . connected legend' of their own. All we had was Beowulf (imported from Denmark) and our native fairy stories. So partly with the sense of mission and partly as an escape from the horrors of the First World War, he wrote a series of tales about the creation of the world and the coming of the Elves, of evil Melko and the wars of Elves and Men against him."

Tolkien used the evocative power of language to create his English legend. Names in Tolkien's fiction are not merely identifying sounds, Shippey pointed out; they are also descriptions of the people, places and creatures that bear them. The name Gandalf, for instance, is made up of two Norse words: gandr, a magical implement (probably a staff), and alfr, an elf. Tolkien's Gandalf, therefore, is an elf with a staff, or a wizard. Shippey explains, "Accordingly when Gandalf first appears [in The Hobbit], 'All that the unsuspecting Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a staff.' . . . He turns out not to be an elf, but by the end of The Lord of the Rings it is clear he comes from Elvenhome." The character Gollum continually refers to himself and to the Ring throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Ring as "my precious"; Douglas A. Anderson, in his notes to The Annotated Hobbit, cited Constance B. Hieatt, who declared that "Old Norse gull/goll, of which one inflected form would be gollum, means 'gold, treasure, something precious' and can also mean 'ring,' a point which may have occurred to Tolkien." In the last appendix to The Lord of the Rings, Shippey pointed out, Tolkien derives the word hobbit itself from an Old English asterisk-word--*hol-bytla, meaning "hole-dweller" or "-builder"--although he worked out the meaning long after he first used the word. Tolkien also drew on ancient words for inspiration. Shippey traces the origins of the Balrog--the evil creature Gandalf faces on the bridge in Moria--to an article Tolkien published in two parts in the journal Medium Aevum on the Anglo-Saxon word Sigelhearwan, used to translate Latin biblical references to natives of Ethiopia. Tolkien suggested that the element sigel meant both 'sun' and 'jewel,' and that the element hearwa was related to the Latin carbo, meaning soot. He further conjectured that when an Anglo-Saxon used the word, he did not picture a dark-skinned man but a creature like the fire-giants of Northern myth. "What was the point of the speculation," asked Shippey, "admittedly 'guess-work,' admittedly 'inconclusive?' It offers some glimpses of a lost mythology, suggested Tolkien with academic caution, something 'which has coloured the verse-treatment of Scripture and determined the diction of poems.' A good deal less boringly, one might say, it had helped to naturalise the 'Balrog' in the traditions of the North, and it had helped to create (or corroborate) the image of the silmaril, that fusion of 'sun' and 'jewel' in physical form." In the New York Review of Books, Janet Adam Smith suggested that Tolkien's attitude to language "is part of his attitude to history . . . to recapture and reanimate the words of the past is to recapture something of ourselves; for we carry the past in us, and our existence, like Frodo's quest, is only an episode in an age-long and continuing drama."

Tolkien's ability to use ancient tongues--"tending," according to Shippey, "to focus on names and words and the things and realities which lie behind them"--helps create a sense of history within Middle Earth, a feeling many reviewers have noticed. Joseph McLellan wrote in the Washington Post Book World: "Tolkien's stories take place against a background of measureless depth. . . . That background is ever-present in the creator's mind and it gives Frodo and company a three-dimensional reality that is seldom found in this kind of writing." Shippey explained that Tolkien's use of language "gave The Lord of the Rings a dinosaur-like vitality which cannot be conveyed in any synopsis, but reveals itself in so many thousands of details that only the most biased critical mind could miss them all." Time and Tide correspondent C. S. Lewis stated: "In the Tolkinian world, you can hardly put your foot down anywhere from Esgaroth to Forlindon or between Ered Mithrin and Khand without stirring the dust of history."

Although many readers have viewed The Lord of the Rings as an allegory of modern history (especially of the Second World War), Tolkien explicitly rejected such an interpretation. In the foreword to the Ballantine edition of The Lord of the Rings, he stated, "As for any inner meaning or 'message,' it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical." He continued: "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed dominations of the author." He expanded on these comments in a letter to his publisher Stanley Unwin in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien: "There is a 'moral,' I suppose, in any tale worth telling. But that is not the same thing. Even the struggle between light and darkness (as [Rayner Unwin] calls it, not me) is for me just a particular phase of history, one example of its pattern, perhaps, but not The Pattern; and the actors are individuals--they each, of course, contain universals or they would not live at all, but they never represent them as such." Tolkien concluded: "You can make the Ring into an allegory of our own time, if you like, an allegory of the inevitable fate that waits for all attempts to defeat evil power by power. But that is only because all power magical or mechanical does always so work. You cannot write a story about an apparently simple magic ring without that bursting in, if you really take the ring seriously, and make things happen that would happen, if such a thing existed."

Tolkien did, however, suggest that his work had an underlying theme. "The Lord of the Rings, " he wrote in a letter to the Jesuit Father Robert Murray published in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, "is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision." Shippey pointed out that the rejoicing of the forces of the West after the downfall of Sauron in The Return of the King is an example of what Tolkien called a "eucatastrophe." Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher that in his essay "On Fairy Stories," he "coined the word 'eucatastrophe': the sudden happy turn in a story which pierces you with a joy that brings tears (which I argued it is the highest function of fairy-stories to produce). And I was there led to the view that it produces its peculiar effects because it is a sudden glimpse of Truth." He went on to explain, "It perceives . . . that this is indeed how things really do work in the Great World for which our nature is made. And I concluded by saying that the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story--and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy which produces tears because it is qualitatively so like sorrow, because it comes from those places where Joy and Sorrow are at one." He added: "Of course, I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is only a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story."

"A good way to understand The Lord of the Rings in its full complexity," noted Shippey, "is to see it as an attempt to reconcile two views of evil, both old, both authoritative, each seemingly contradicted by the other." To the orthodox Christian, evil does not exist by itself, but springs from an attempt to separate one's self from God--an opinion expressed most clearly in The Consolation of Philosophy, a work by the early medieval thinker Boethius, a Roman senator imprisoned and later executed for his views. Tolkien was probably most familiar with it through King Alfred's Old English translation, made in the ninth century A.D. An alternate view--labelled Manichaean, and considered heretical by the church--is that good and evil are separate forces, equal and opposite, and the world is their battleground. King Alfred's own career, campaigning against marauding Norsemen, wrote Shippey, emphasized the "strong point of a 'heroic' view of evil, the weak point of a Boethian one: if you regard evil as something internal, to be pitied, more harmful to the malefactor than the victim, you may be philosophically consistent but you may also be exposing others to sacrifices to which they have not consented (like being murdered by Viking ravagers or, as The Lord of the Rings was being written, being herded into gas-chambers)." In The Lord of the Rings, Shippey stated, Tolkien strikes a balance between these two views of evil, using the symbol of the shadow: "Shadows are the absence of light and so don't exist in themselves, but they are still visible and palpable just as if they did." Tolkien's attitude "implies the dual nature of wickedness," which can also be found in the Lord's Prayer: "'And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.' Succumbing to temptation is our business, one might paraphrase, but delivering us from evil is God's." Shippey concluded: "At any rate, on the level of narrative one can say that The Lord of the Rings is neither a saint's life, all about temptation, nor a complicated wargame, all about tactics. It would be a much lesser work if it had swerved towards either extreme."

Nonetheless, Tolkien implies consistently that to take The Lord of the Rings too seriously might be a mistake. "I think that a fairy story has its own mode of reflecting 'truth,' different from allegory or (sustained) satire, or 'realism,' and in some ways more powerful," he stated. "But first of all it must succeed just as a tale, excite, please, and even on occasion move, and within its own imagined world be accorded literary belief. To succeed in that was my primary object." Tolkien also wrote: "The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. That the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of ?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way . . . as if it were a report of 'real' times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly in others." He concluded: "Having set myself a task, the arrogance of which I fully recognized and trembled at: being precisely to restore to the English an epic tradition and present them with a mythology of their own: it is a wonderful thing to be told that I have succeeded, at least with those who have still the undarkened heart and mind."

PERSONAL INFORMATION

(Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC)

Web Resources

Children of Hurin  Official Website

TolKien Website

Middle Earth (from Wikipedia)

Encyclopedia of Arda:  a reference guide to the works of J.J.Tolkien

An Interview with leading Tolkien scholar, Tom Shippey

Tolkien website from HarperCollins

Author's Awards: 

New York Herald Tribune Children's Spring Book Festival award, 1938, for The Hobbit; D.Phil., Liege, 1954; D.Litt., University College, Dublin, 1954, and Oxford University, 1972; International Fantasy Award, 1957, for The Lord of the Rings; Benson Medal, 1966; Commander, Order of the British Empire, 1972; Locus Award for best fantasy novel, 1978, for The Silmarillion; Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, 1981, for Unfinished Tales; The Lord of the Rings was voted Britain's number-one best-loved novel (and The Hobbit was voted into the top 100) by the British public as part of the British Broadcasting Corporation's "The Big Read," 2003.

Other Writings by this Author 

(Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2007. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: Thomson Gale. 2007. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRC)  (*titles in the Sherborn Library Collection)

Suggested Further Reading

(* titles in the Sherborn Library Collection)

A Guide to Middle Earth by Robert Foster *

Lord of the Rings, the Two Towers:  Visual Companion by Jude Fisher *

A Tolkien Bestiary by David Day *

The Tolkien Companion by J.E.A Tyler *

Tolkien's World by Randall Helms *

Washington Post  Review

The Return of the King A new novel from the creator of Middle Earth.

Author Interview

The Prevalence of Hobbits

By PHILIP NORMAN

Text of a January 15, 1967 New York Times Magazine interview with Tolkien.

obbits adore tobacco and fireworks. So does Professor Tolkien, who first wrote "hobbit" 30 years ago on a dull exam paper he was correcting. At Headington, near Oxford United soccer ground, Tolkien has a study in his garage. Dark-topped tobacco tins are left like markers along his shelves; and there is a good view of the rockets if some college beanfest explodes them. "I run to the window," Tolkien confesses, "every time I hear a whoosh."

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was once kidnapped in South Africa and was, until 1959, Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University. He has a square, big face and his coat and cardigan, both gray, are rumpled slightly; he talks rapidly, with his pipestem getting in the way. As well as hobbits-benevolent, furry-footed people, fond of bright colors-Tolkien has put into books a grizzly man who can change into a bear, a thieving, English-speaking dragon, dark horsemen in the sky who cast freezing shadows, and a dreadful war in which thousands of goblins perish. He has spilled them into a separate world called Middle-earth and dressed them with names, lineages and languages which he explains in a 104-page appendix. The explanation is sending Americans, especially students, half-mad with delight. One student's mother said: "To go to college without Tolkien is like going without sneakers."

There is a Tolkien Society of America and a Tolkien Journal. At meetings of the society it is usual to lie around eating fresh mushrooms, a favorite hobbit food, drinking cider and talking about family trees, which no hobbit can resist. One must remember to call wolves wargs, goblins orcs, treelike people ents and the sun She. A popular greeting is, "May the hair on your toes never grow less." Everyone wears a badge with a slogan naming a Tolkien character: Frodo the hobbit or Gandalf the wizard; and louder enthusiasts chalk them on walls, sometimes in three-foot-high letters, preferably at the 116th Street-Columbia University subway stop. Tolkien books sell in student cafeterias next to the cigarettes; they have been translated into nine languages including Japanese and Hebrew and are part of the degree course at Liege University. Their world sales are almost 3-million copies, but it is the Americans who are wildest about them. An unauthorized paperback edition sold well over a quarter of a million copies. In the fifties, World Science Fiction called Tolkien the best fantasy-writer of the year and gave him a model rocket. "It's upstairs somewhere," Tolkien thinks. "It has fins. Quite different from what was required, as it turns out."

Tolkien is famous for two works: "The Hobbit," which he began on that dull exam paper in the thirties, and his three-book saga, "The Lord of the Rings," which Tolkien typed two-fingered. It ran to over 1,200 pages and took him 14 years. "The Hobbit" told of Bilbo Baggins, who was press-ganged out of the Shire (the gentle, agreeable hobbit country) and into a venture to steal back treasure from a dragon, who was sleeping on it. But "The Lord of the Rings" was infinitely more grown up. In it, Bilbo's heir Frodo joined another expedition to break the grip of the Dark Lord of Mordor. This could be accomplished only by taking his ring accidentally picked up by Bilbo, and destroying it in the gloomy and dangerous land where it was forged, under the very eye of the Dark Lord.

The hobbits' long quest, wrote Edwin Muir in The Observer, "is a heroic conception. Tolkien's imagination rises to it though his style now and then fails him," a remark calculated to plant in innumerable minds a little of the savagery of Shelob, Tolkien's giant spider. Tolkien's style, an amalgam of Celtic bard and Fowler's "Modern English Usage," never ebbs. His people go deeper and deeper into situations from which paths stretch out of sight into ancestries and legends. Yet often they speak as if only mildly perplexed. In the midst of awful privation in "The Hobbit," Gandalf the wizard says, "This won't do." Besides, an author who can create and sustain and make us revere a race of people resembling trees could never be failed by his style. These are the ents, the oldest people in the world. Sometimes they resemble a conclave of professors, and the most brilliant touch of all is that they have a sense of humor to match their age and knowledge.

Tolkien says: "My stories seem to germinate like a snowflake around a piece of dust," but he is tired by his work on the sequel to "The Lord of the Rings," an even more sober story of a much-earlier Middle-earth called "The Silmarillion," in which there are no hobbits. People are constantly writing to Tolkien's publishers, George Allen and Unwin in London and Houghton Mifflin in Boston (often in the Elvish language Tolkien devised), to ask about the delay.

"Exhausting! God help us, yes. Most of the time I'm fighting against the natural inertia of the lazy human being. The same old university don who warned me about being useful around the house once said, 'It's not only interruptions, my boy; it's the fear of interruptions,'" (His wife, Edith Mary, isn't in good health and Tolkien does a lot of housework.)

Tolkien has a three-bedroom, rectory-looking house in the Oxford suburb of Headington, with a back garden fence he built himself. Cars parking near the soccer ground force him to keep the garage gates locked. The study in the garage is filled with books and the smell of distinguished dust. It also contains a new tin clock and a very, very old, buff-colored portmanteau. "Portmanteau?" (It is scarcely visible under some newspapers.) "Oh, that. It was given to me by my guardian, who was half-Spaniard. It isn't there for anything at all except that inside it are all the things I've been going to answer for so many years, I've forgotten what they are." Tacked onto Tolkien's window ledge is a map of Middle-earth, showing the routes of the two hobbit expeditions, and a list of Tolkien's engagements, written in blue-black ink. A powder horn hangs over the door.

Tolkien wasn't a hearty child. At the age of 3 he was brought home from Bloemfontein, South Africa, his birthplace, and brought up at Sarehole, near Birmingham. Until he won a scholarship to grammar school his mother taught him. He is particularly attached to the powder horn; it reminds him of being "borrowed" by an African named Isaac, who wanted to show a white baby off in his kraal. "It was typical native psychology but it upset everyone very much, of course. I know he called his son Isaac after himself, Mister Tolkien after my father and Victor-ha! ha!-after Queen Victoria.

"I was nearly bitten by a snake and I was stung by a tarantula, I believe. In my garden. All I can remember is a very hot day, long, dead grass and running. I don't even remember screaming. I remember being rather horrified at seeing the Archdeacon eat mealies [Indian corn] in the proper fashion." ...Tolkien stuck his fingers in his mouth.

"Quite by accident, I have a very vivid child's view, which was the result of being taken away from one country and put in another hemisphere-the place where I belonged but which was totally novel and strange. After the barren, arid heat a Christmas tree. But no, it was not an unhappy childhood. It was full of tragedies but it didn't tot up to an unhappy childhood."

Sarehole has long since been eaten by buildings, but it was rather beautiful then. Tolkien was a shy little boy but friendly with the village children and he knew an old lady without teeth, who ran a candy stall. He modeled his hobbits on the Sarehole people, which means they must have been gentle amblers, not really fond of adventures but very fond of their food. Tolkien himself likes plain meals and beer; "none of that cuisine mystique." Beer, cheese, butter and pastry; the occasional glass of Burgundy.

"Hobbits," Tolkien says, "have what you might call universal morals. I should say they are examples of natural philosophy and natural religion." They are certainly capable of extraordinary bravery and humaneness; living in burrows, their creator declares, doesn't amount to anything like an animal kink.

"People still love thatched houses; they pretend it's because they're cool in summer and warm in winter, and they'll even pay a bit of extra insurance. We found German trenches which were often very habitable indeed except that, when we reached them, they faced the wrong way about. And have you been to England's oldest pub, the Trip to Jerusalem? It is carved out of the solid rock of Nottingham Castle. I went to Nottingham once for a conference. I fear we went to the Trip to Jerusalem and let the conference get on with itself."

Hobbits aren't small; nor are any of Tolkien's people. He says warmly: "I don't like small creatures. Hobbits are three to four feet in height. You can see people walking around like that. If there was anything I detested it was all that Drayton stuff; hideous. All that hiding in cowslips, Shakespeare took it up because it was fashionable but it didn't invite his imagination at all. He produced some nice, funny names like Cobweb, Peaseblossom and so on; and some poetic stuff about Titania, but he never takes the slightest notice of her. She makes love to a donkey."

"The Hobbit" wasn't written for children, and it certainly wasn't done just for the amusement of Tolkien's three sons and one daughter, as is generally reported. "That's all sob stuff. No, of course, I didn't. If you're a youngish man and you don't want to be made fun of, you say you're writing for children. At any rate, children are your immediate audience and you write or tell them stories, for which they are mildly grateful: long rambling stories at bedtime.

"'The Hobbit' was written in what I should now regard as bad style, as if one were talking to children. There's nothing my children loathed more. They taught me a lesson. Anything that in any way marked out 'The Hobbit' as for children instead of just for people, they disliked-instinctively. I did too, now that I think about it. All this 'I won't tell you any more, you think about it' stuff. Oh no, they loathe it; it's awful.

"Children aren't a class. They are merely human beings at different stages of maturity. All of them have a human intelligence which even at its lowest is a pretty wonderful thing, and the entire world in front of them. It remains to be seen if they rise above that." Tolkien has a grandson who is becoming a demon chess-player. The sound of children skylarking in the road doesn't disturb him, but he dislikes it when they fight or hurt themselves.

Tolkien says his mother gave him his love of philology and romance; and his first stories were gathering in his mind when he was an undergraduate at Exeter College, Oxford. When war came, however, he didn't write in the trenches as some chroniclers insist. "That's all spoof. You might scribble something on the back of an envelope and shove it in your back pocket, but that's all. You couldn't write. This [his study] would be an enormous dugout. You'd be crouching down among the flies and filth."

His close friend, the late C. S. Lewis ("a very busy official and teacher" to whom Tolkien test-read a great deal), wrote once that the darker side of "The Lord of the Rings" was very much like the First World War. He gave examples: the sinister quiet of a battlefront when everything is prepared; the quick and vivid friendships of the hobbit journeys and the unexpected delight when they find a cache of tobacco. No, Tolkien says; there is no parallel between the hundreds of thousands of goblins in their beaked helmets and the gray masses of Germans in their spiked ones. Goblins die in their thousands. This, he agrees, makes them seem like an enemy in a war of trenches. "But as I say somewhere, even the goblins weren't evil to begin with. They were corrupted. I've never had those sort of feelings about the Germans. I'm very anti that kind of thing."

Students produce lots of allegories. They suggest that the Dark Lord's ring represents the Bomb, and the goblins, the Russians. Or, more cheekily, that Treebeard, the tall treelike being, "his eyes filled with age and long, slow, steady thinking," is Tolkien himself. In a rather portly note to his publishers, he replied: "It is not about anything but itself. (Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political.") But he will agree that the Shire, the agreeable hobbit country, is like the West Midlands he remembers: "It provides a fairly goof living with moderately good husbandry and is tucked away from all the centers of disturbance; it comes to be regarded as divinely protected, though people there didn't realize it at the time. That's rather how England used to be, isn't it?

Except for five years at Leeds University, where he was Professor of English Language from 1924 to 1929, Tolkien spent the rest of his life in Oxford. He write his earliest stories and verse there, and was often seen riding a rather old bicycle. Another don was mildly surprised one day, after Tolkien began to receive royalties from his books, to see him in a Daimler. Nowadays, a hired car sometimes goes shopping for him. He gets up at 8:30 in the morning and goes to bed at 2 A.M. How does he spend his days? Tolkien has a small, exploding laugh. "Working like hell. A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen."

He says he's no storyteller, but all the same, Tolkien would rather enjoy making a recording of his work, doing all the different voices; rustic ones for the hobbits and a horrid, high, hissing one for Gollum, the creature who slithers after them, trying to win back the Dark Lord's ring for himself. The B.B.C. has dramatized Tolkien with a cast including Tom Forrest of "The Archers." Tolkien says: "I've a very strong visual imagination, but it's not so strong in other points. I doubt if many authors visualize very closely faces and voices. If you write a long story like 'The Lord of the Rings,' you've got to write it twice over and you end up writing it backwards, of course. People will occur. One waits to see what's coming next. I knew there was going to be some trouble with treelike creatures at one point or another.

"A lot of the criticism of the verses shows a complete failure to understand the fact that they are all dramatic verses: they were conceived as the kind of things people would say under the circumstances." Tolkien's books run with poetry; tinkling poems, harsh and gloomy ones, they can be extremely affable or extremely primitive. Donald Swann has put six of them to music (he says "The Lord of the Rings" got into his blood and he now reads it every spring). One of the songs is actually sung in Elvish. Tolkien sent instructions to the singer on how to sound the words, stressing that he must roll his r's.

Swann first presented the songs to Tolkien at a private party last March in Merton College to celebrate his golden wedding. Afterwards, Tolkien bowed and said, "The words are unworthy of the music."

If it had been left to him, he would have written all his books in Elvish. "The invention of language is the foundation," he says. "The stories were made rather to provide a world for the language rather than the reverse. To me a name comes first and the story follows. But, of course, such a work as 'The Lord of the Rings' has been edited and only as much language has been left in as I thought would be stomached by the readers. I now find that many would have liked much more." In America, especially, Tolkien words are creeping into everyday usage; for example, mathom, meaning an article one saves but doesn't use. A senior girl at the Bronx High School of Science says: "I wrote my notes in Elvish. Even now, I doodle in Elvish. It's my means of expression."

What does Tolkien think of that? Does he like Americans? "I don't like anyone very much in that sense. I'm against generalizations." One persists. Does he like Americans? "Art moves them and they don't know what they've been moved by and they get quite drunk on it," Tolkien says. "Many young Americans are involved in the stories in a way that I am not.

"But they do use this sometimes as a means against some abomination. There was one campus, I forget which, where the council of the university pulled down a very pleasant little grove of trees to make way for what they called a 'Culture Center' out of some sort of concrete blocks. The students were outraged. They wrote 'another bit of Mordor' on it."

England has not such a spreading, reveling Tolkien cult. There are middle-aged graduates who were transfixed (as the poet, W.H. Auden, was) by the beautiful way the professor could read from a dusty work like "Beowulf," and there are the smart children interested by slightly difficult styles. In England, Tolkien is a leisurely word-of-mouth craze.

But, at the Berkeley campus bookstore Fred Cody, the manager, said: "This is more than a campus craze; it's like a drug dream." In the U.S. hobbits have quite replaced Salinger and Golding as "in" reading. Tolkien seems to promote a mild kind of intellectual hooliganism. But his supporters argue (overwhelmingly) that, on the contrary, it does everyone good to stay in the Tolkien world, where things are still green; there is hope for people and pleasantness. At Ballantine Books, the paperback company which publishes Tolkien at $1.50 per copy, an editor thought that "young people today are interested in power and they are interesting in working out the conflict of good and evil. Here it is worked out for them."

If that sounds overly simple and sententious, consider the point C. S. Lewis once made, asking why Tolkien should have chosen to point morals in such extravagant fantasy:

"Because, I take it... the real life of men is of that mystical and heroic quality... The imagined beings have their inside on the outside; they are visible souls. And Man as a whole, Man pitted against the Universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?"

That is one quality with a powerful appeal to students. There is another. Tolkien's writings allow thousands into the finest and most select kind of college tutorial; they demand that attention be paid. J. I. M. Stewart, another Oxford don storyteller-he writes detective stories as Michael Innes-puts the thing perfectly in his memory of Tolkien as an orator. "He could turn a lecture room into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting listening guests."

Philip Norman is on the staff of The Sunday Times, London.

Tolkien Read-Alikes at the Sherborn Library

Lloyd Alexander - The Chronicles of Prydain

Terry Brooks - The First Shannara Trilogy 

Tad Williams - Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn 

David Eddings - The Elenium

Robert Jordan - The Wheel of Time Series

J. V. Jones - The Book of Words