J.R.R. Tolkien

My Hero J.R.R. Tolkien

By Tom

¨The old that is strong does not wither.¨

WebTomSo you may be asking why I chose J.R.R. Tolkien as my hero. I liked the Hobbit and started reading the first Lord of The Rings a few weeks ago so I looked up if there were any books about J.R.R. Tolkien and I found a book called Who was J.R.R. Tolkien and it is a biography. It is 112 pages long and covers the period of 1892 to 1973 and was published by Houghton Mifflin on the 21 of July 2015. 

PortraitTomJ.R.R. Tolkien was born on January 3rd, 1892 although his parents were English he was born in South Africa because his father Arthur had come out to South Africa to work at a bank. J.R.R. Tolkien´s brother Hillary was born two years after Ronald. J.R.R. Tolkien's father stayed in South Africa to work but in 1895 his father came down with rheumatic fever and later died in 1896. In 1900 Ronald's mother Mabel Tolkien converted to Catholicism soon Ronald was old enough to attend King Edward school where his father had attended the school was in Birmingham so he had to take a train on his way he could see all the strange words on the boxcars such as Senghenydd a town in Wales and Nantyglo a village in Wales. He thought these words were even stranger than Latin, they were Welsh there at King Edward school he met a woman named Edith. His mother later died in 1904. At the age of 12, J.R.R. Tolkien was an orphan but in Mabel Tolkien's will, she wrote that she wanted the 10-year-old Hillary and the 12-year-old Tolkien to be sent to Father Francis Xavier Morgan who was a priest that used to be friends with Mabel Tolkien and there the priest took after J.R.R. Tolkien. The Priest said that Tolkien couldn't see Edith until he was 21 years old so he waited and waited and when that day finally came he sent a letter to Edith with a note asking her to marry him. But Edith was already seeing someone but Tolkien was going to the train platform and ran into Edith they had a conversation and eventually Tolkien convinced Edith to marry him. but then he was sent to the fight in The Battle of Somme in 1916 in world war I in the trenches he would write stories about middle earth. after the war in 1920, J.R.R. Tolkien became a professor at Leeds university 6 years later in 1926 he and his family moved to Oxford in 1937 he published the book The Hobbit which was very loved by the community and sold millions of copies and still sell to this day with over 100 million copies sold in the present day but the publisher Allen and Unwin wanted a sequel so J.R.R. Tolkien tried to write about a new Hobbit he named Bingo Bolger Baggins the more he wrote the more it sounded less like the Hobbit even the inklings the group that he and his friends created said it was too scary and too adult. Most people thought of fantasy and magic were for children but Ronald didn't agree in 1939 he wrote a lecture called fairy tales about the importance of fairy tales for everyone. Ronald decided to write his new story for adults. The main character became Bilbo's young cousin, Frodo Baggins. In 1942 the city of London was attacked and a bomb started a fire in a warehouse where Ronald's publisher held all the copies of The Hobbit they were all destroyed and it remained out of print until the end of the war the publisher had no new books to sell but by then The Hobbit had already sold so many copies that soon Ronald had already sold so many copies of The Hobbit that he could stop grading papers in the summer to earn extra money. Ronald was working on a new book series called The Lord of The Rings but it was so long that they had to break it up into three books The Fellowship of the Ring is the first one the second was is The two towers and the third book is The Return of The King. One of the owners of Allen and Unwin gave The Lord of The Rings Fellowship of The Ring to their son to read and they said that your company should publish this book so they asked Ronald if they could and he said yes. so then Allen and Unwin published The Fellowship of The Ring and a few years later the two towers and the fans were asking for the next book because the two towers ended with the main characters in a very bad predicament a few years later they published The Return of the King. He had the name Luthien [sic] engraved on Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973 from a bleeding ulcer and chest infection, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with "Beren" added to his name.

J.R.R. TolkienTomJ.R.R. Tolkien had many obstacles to overcome during his life. He enlisted in World War 1 and had to endure the deaths of most of his friends. He wanted to write fantasy Stories to give people something with joy instead of sadness and a few challenges that J.R.R. Tolkien endured at a very young age; his parents had died in 1947 a full warehouse filled with copies of his new book The Hobbit and wasn't printed again until the end of WWll.In Word War l Tolkien was suffering from trench fever, which is transmitted by lice and causes fever. His records detail he had “pyrexia of unknown origin” – headaches, rashes, eye inflammation, and leg pains. Tolkien stated that he had been influenced by his childhood experiences of the English countryside of Worcestershire and its urbanization by the growth of Birmingham, and his personal experience of fighting in the trenches of the First World War. Tolkien had studied languages for decades, which is why he was not only able to create so many fictional languages (also known as 'conlangs': constructed languages). Many writers have since aped Tolkien's linguistic efforts, for better or for worse.

Something that surprised me was that J.R.R. Tolkien was born in South Africa even though his parents were English. If I could meet my hero and I could ask three questions I would ask, What was your inspiration for The Hobbit, Why would most of the time smoke a pipe, Why didn't you publish The Silmarillion as a separate timeline? I would not like to be J.R.R. Tolkien's child cause I would think that he would be too busy writing books and other things. I liked the book I picked because it was just the right length of the book for me to read in a few school periods.it was a very good read and very interesting book and teach me things that I didn't know about J.R.R. Tolkien I didn't know that J.R.R. Tolkien was born in South Africa and I also didn't know that he was enlisted in World War 1. I don't think I could apply any lessons from J.R.R. Tolkien's life to my life currently but maybe later down the line I could. I think others may like this book if you are interested in J.R.R. Tolkien's books. I was very glad I chose this biography about J.R.R. Tolkien because it was very interesting. I think that I could look up to J.R.R. Tolkien as a role model because it seemed he was very smart in his time and also because it seems like his life was very interesting to learn about.