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C. L. Wrenn

C. L. Wrenn

Charles Leslie Wrenn was a British scholar. He became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon in the University of Oxford in 1945, the successor in the chair to J. R. R. Tolkien. Wrenn, CL

University of Oxford

The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford, England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. The university traces its roots back to at least the end of the 11th century, although the exact date of foundation remains unclear. According to legend, after riots between scholars and townsfolk broke out in 1209, some of the academics at Oxford fled north-east to the town of Cambridge, where the University of Cambridge was founded. The two universities have since had a long history of competition with each other, and are widely seen as the most prestigious universities in the United Kingdom (see Oxbridge rivalry). Oxford has recently topped two university-ranking league tables produced by British newspapers: it came first according to The Guardian and, for the fourth consecutive year, in The Times table. Although widely contested (as with most league tables) on the basis of their ranking criteria, recent international tables produced by Shanghai Jiao Tong University rated Oxford tenth[http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.htm] in the world. Oxford is a member of the Russell Group of research-led British universities, the Coimbra Group (a network of leading European universities), the LERU (League of European Research Universities), and is also a core member of the Europaeum.

History

Europaeum The date of the University's foundation is unknown, and indeed it may not have been a single event, but there is evidence of teaching there as early as 1096. When Henry II of England forbade English students to study at the University of Paris in 1167, Oxford began to grow very quickly. The foundation of the first halls of residence, which later became colleges, dates from this period. Rioting in 1209 led many scholars to leave Oxford for other parts of the country, leading to the establishment of a university in Cambridge. On June 20 1214, a charter of liberties was granted to the University by Nicholas de Romanis, the papal legate, which authorised the appointment of a chancellor of the University. Riots between townsmen and scholars ("town and gown") were common until the St Scholastica Day riot in 1355 led to the king confirming the supremacy of the University over the town. In 1555 - 6 the Protestant Oxford Martyrs, Latimer, Ridley and Cranmer were burned at Oxford. The University's status was formally confirmed by an Act for the Incorporation of Both Universities in 1571, in which the University's formal title is given as The Chancellor, Masters and Scholars of the University of Oxford. In 1603 the University granted the right to appoint two Members of Parliament, a right which lasted until the abolition of university constituencies in 1949. The comprehensive set of statutes, known as the Laudian Code, was drawn up by Archbishop William Laud in 1636 and ratified by Charles I. The University supported the king during the English Civil War, and was the site of his court and parliament, but clashed with his grandson, the Roman Catholic James II, who was later overthrown in the Glorious Revolution. In the 1830s the University was the site of the Oxford Movement in the Church of England. A Royal Commission to reform the University was appointed in 1850 and its proposals, accepted by Parliament, revolutionised the medieval workings of the University, until then still governed by the code of 1636. Later royal commissions were appointed in 1872 and 1919. In 1871 the Universities Tests Act opened the University to Dissenters and Roman Catholics. The first women's halls were established in 1878, and women were admitted to degrees in 1920.

Organisation

Oxford is a collegiate university, consisting of the University's central facilities, such as departments and faculties, libraries and science facilities, and 39 colleges and 7 Permanent Private Halls (PPHs). All teaching staff and degree students must belong to one of the colleges (or PPHs). These colleges are not only houses of residence, but have substantial responsibility for the teaching of undergraduates and postgraduates. Some colleges only accept postgraduate students. Only one of the colleges, St Hilda's, remains single-sex, accepting only women (though several of the religious PPHs are male-only). Oxford's collegiate system springs from the fact that the University came into existence through the gradual agglomeration of independent institutions in the city of Oxford. : See also: Colleges of Oxford University, and a list of Cambridge sister colleges. Image:brasnose.JPG
Brasenose College in the 1670s As well as the collegiate level of organisation, the University is subdivided into departments on a subject basis, much like most other universities. Departments take a major role in graduate education and an increasing role in undergraduate education, providing lectures and classes and organising examinations. Departments are also a centre of research, funded by outside bodies including major research councils; while colleges have an interest in research, few are subject-specialized in organisa

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973) is best known as the author of The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings. He worked as reader and professor in English language at Leeds from 1920 to 1925, as professor of Anglo-Saxon language at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and of English language and literature, also at Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was a strongly committed Catholic. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis', and a member of the Inklings, a literary discussion group to which both Lewis and Owen Barfield belonged. In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's published fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumous books about what he called a legendarium, a fictional mythology of the remote past of Earth, called Arda, and Middle-earth (from middangeard, the lands inhabitable by Men) in particular. Most of these posthumously published works were compiled from Tolkien's notes by his son Christopher Reuel Tolkien. The enduring popularity and influence of Tolkien's works have established him as the "father of the modern high fantasy genre". Tolkien's other published fiction includes adaptations of stories originally told to his children and not directly related to the legendarium.

Biography

The Tolkien family

As far as is known, most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had its roots in Saxony (Germany), but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly and intensely English (not British)" (Letters, 165). The surname Tolkien is anglicised from Tollkiehn (i.e. German tollkühn, "foolhardy", the etymological English translation would be dull-keen, a literal translation of oxymoron). The character of Professor Rashbold in The Notion Club Papers is a pun on the name.

Childhood

Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State), South Africa, to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, née Suffield (1870–1904). Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on February 17, 1894. When he was three, Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of a severe brain haemorrhage before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Birmingham, England. Soon after in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent Hills and Lickey Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books along with other Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his fiction. Alvechurch Mabel tutored her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awoke in her son the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees. But his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early. He could read by the age of four, and could write fluently soon afterwards. He attended King Edward's School, Birmingham and, while a student there, helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace. He later attended St Phillip's School and Exeter College, Oxford. His mother converted to Roman Catholicism in 1900, despite vehement protests by her Baptist family. She died of diabetes in 1904, when Tolkien was twelve, at Fern Cottage, Rednal, which they were then renting. For the rest of his life, Tolkien felt that she had become a martyr for her faith; this had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs. Tolkien's devout faith was significant in the conversion of C. S. Lewis to Anglicanism. During his subsequent orphanhood he was brought up by Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery has a large and world-renowned collection of works and had put it on free public display from around 1908. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery

Youth

Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith Mary Bratt, three years his senior, at the age of sixteen. Father Francis forbade him from meeting, talking, or even corresponding with her until he was twenty-one. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter. In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called "the T.C.B.S.", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness of drinking Tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, illegally, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch, and in December 1914, they held a "Council" in London, at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry. In the summer of 1911, Tolkien went on holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter (Letters, no. 306), noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of twelve hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembers his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams"). They went across the Kleine Scheidegg on to Grindelwald and across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass and through the upper Valais to Brig, and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt. Zermatt (from Carpenter's Biography)]] On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien telephoned Edith and asked her to be his bride, and she converted to Catholicism for him. They were engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married in Warwick, England, on March 22, 1916. With his childhood love of landscape, he visited Cornwall in 1914 and he was said to be deeply impressed by the singular Cornish coastline and sea. After graduating from the University of Oxford (Exeter College, Oxford) with a first-class degree in English language in 1915, Tolkien joined the British Army effort in World War I and served as a second lieutenant in the eleventh battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. His battalion was moved to France in 1916, where Tolkien served as a communications officer during the Battle of the Somme, until he came down with trench fever on October 27, and was moved back to England on November 8. Many of his fellow servicemen, as well as many of his closest friends, were killed in the war. During his recovery in a cottage in Great Haywood, Staffordshire, England, he began to work on what he called The Book of Lost Tales, beginning with The Fall of Gondolin. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps, and was promoted to lieutenant. When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, one day he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a thick grove of hemlock. This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as his Lúthien.

Oxford

Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary (among others, he initiated the entries wasp and walrus). In 1920 he took up a post as Reader in English language at the University of Leeds, and in 1924 was made a professor there, but in 1925 he returned to Oxford as a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College. Tolkien and Edith had four children: John Francis Reuel (November 17, 1917), Michael Hilary Reuel (October 1920–1984), Christopher John Reuel (1924) and Priscilla Anne Reuel (1929). Tolkien assisted Sir Mortimer Wheeler in the unearthing of a Roman Asclepieion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928. During his time at Pembroke, Tolkien wrote the The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings. Of Tolkien's academic publications, the 1936 lecture "Beowulf: the monsters and the critics" had a lasting influence on Beowulf research. In 1945, he moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien completed the The Lord of the Rings in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches. During the 1950s, Tolkien spent many of his long academic holidays at the home of his son John Francis in Stoke-on-Trent. Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialisation, which he considered a devouring of the English countryside. For most of his adult life he eschewed automobiles, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude is perceptible from some parts of his work, such as the forced industrialisation of The Shire in The Lord of the Rings. industrialisation, next to one of his favourite trees (a Pinus nigra) in the Botanic Garden, Oxford.]] W.H. Auden was a frequent correspondent and long-time friend of Tolkien's, initiated by Auden's fascination with The Lord of the Rings: Auden was among the most prominent early critics to praise the work. Tolkien wrote in a 1971 letter, "I am [...] very deeply in Auden's debt in recent years. His support of me and interest in my work has been one of my chief encouragements. He gave me very good reviews, notices and letters from the beginning when it was by no means a popular thing to do. He was, in fact, sneered at for it." (Letters, no. 327).

Retirement and old age

During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien increasingly turned into a figure of public attention and literary fame. The sale of his books was so profitable that Tolkien regretted he had not taken early retirement. While at first he wrote enthusiastic answers to reader inquiries, he became more and more suspicious of emerging Tolkien fandom, especially among the hippy movement in the USA. Already in 1944, he made a somewhat sarcastic comment about a fan letter by a twelve-year-old American reader (It's nice to find that little American boys do really still say 'Gee Whiz'., Letters no. 87). In a 1972 letter he deplores having become a cult-figure, but admits that :even the nose of a very modest idol (younger than Chu-Bu and not much older than Sheemish) [idols in a story by Lord Dunsany] cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense! (Letters, no. 336). Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth at the south coast. Tolkien was awarded a CBE by Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace on March 28, 1972. 1972 Edith Tolkien died on November 29 1971, at the age of eighty-two, and Tolkien had the name Lúthien engraved on the stone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on September 2 1973, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name, so that the engraving now reads: Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973 Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid 2675 Tolkien. Tolkien Way in Stoke-On-Trent is named after J.R.R.'s son Father John Francis Tolkien, who used to be the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains.

Writing

Stoke-On-Trent Beginning with The Book of Lost Tales, written while recuperating from illness during World War I, Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium. The two most prominent stories, the tales of Beren and Lúthien and that of Túrin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in The Lays of Beleriand). Tolkien wrote a brief summary of the mythology these poems were intended to represent, and that summary eventually evolved into The Silmarillion, an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series The History of Middle-Earth. From around 1936, he began to extend this framework to include the tale of The Fall of Númenor, which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis. Tolkien was strongly influenced by Anglo-Saxon literature, Germanic and Norse mythologies, Finnish folklore, the Bible, and Greek mythology. The works most often cited as sources for Tolkien's stories include Beowulf, the Kalevala, the Poetic Edda, the Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga. Tolkien himself acknowledged Homer, Oedipus, and the Kalevala as influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. His borrowings also came from numerous Middle English works and poems. In addition to his mythological compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as The Father Christmas Letters). Other stories included Mr. Bliss, Roverandom, and Smith of Wootton Major. Roverandom and Smith of Wootton Major, like The Hobbit, borrowed ideas from his legendarium. Tolkien never expected his fictional stories to become popular, but he was persuaded by a former student to publish a book he had written for his own children called The Hobbit in 1937. However, the book attracted adult readers as well, and it became popular enough for the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to ask Tolkien to work on a sequel. Even though he felt uninspired on the topic, this request prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic three-volume novel The Lord of the Rings (published 1954–55). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for Lord of the Rings, during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend C. S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set against the background of The Silmarillion, but in a time long after it. Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings as a children's tale like The Hobbit, but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to The Hobbit, it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in The Silmarillion and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien continued to work on the history of Middle-earth until his death. His son Christopher, with some assistance from fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay, organised some of this material into one volume, published as The Silmarillion in 1977. In 1980 Christopher Tolkien followed this with a collection of more fragmentary material under the title Unfinished Tales, and in subsequent years he published a massive amount of background material on the creation of Middle-earth in the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth. All these posthumous works contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress, and Tolkien only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not even complete consistency to be found between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, the two most closely related works, because Tolkien was never able to fully integrate all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the entire book. The library of Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, preserves many of Tolkien's original manuscripts, notes and letters; other original material survives at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Marquette has the manuscripts and proofs of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, and other manuscripts, including Farmer Giles of Ham, while the Bodleian holds the Silmarillion papers and Tolkien's academic work. The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the twentieth century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, The Lord of the Rings was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, The Lord of the Rings was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the ninety-second "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted thirty-fifth in a list of the Greatest South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited just to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK’s "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found The Lord of the Rings (Der Herr der Ringe) to be their favourite work of literature.

Languages

See also Languages of Middle-earth. Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialised in Greek philology in college, and in 1915 graduated with Old Icelandic as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918. In 1920, he went to Leeds as Reader in English Language, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged 33, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club". Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and he entertained notions of an inherited taste of language, which he termed the "native tongue" as opposed to "cradle tongue" in his 1955 lecture English and Welsh, which is crucial to his understanding of race and language. He considered west-midland Middle English his own "native tongue", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955 (Letters, no. 163), "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)". Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for the construction of artificial languages. The best developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which are at the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonæsthetic" considerations. It was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish and Greek (Letters, no. 144). A notable addition came in late 1945 with Numenorean, a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis myth, which by The Notion Club Papers ties directly into his ideas about inheritability of language, and via the "Second Age" and the Earendil myth was grounded in the legendarium, thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th-century "real primary world" with the mythical past of his Middle-earth. Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages. In 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture A Secret Vice, "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c &c are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends" (Letters, no. 180). The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's spellings dwarves and elvish (instead of dwarfs and elfish). Other terms he has coined, like legendarium and eucatastrophe, are mainly used in connection with Tolkien's work.

Works inspired by Tolkien

In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman (Letters, no. 131), Tolkien writes about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which :The cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama. The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham) and Donald Swann (who set the music to The Road Goes Ever On). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to the Lord of the Rings in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity to the style of his own drawings. But Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving. In 1946 (Letters, no. 107), he rejects suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of the Hobbit as "too Disnified", :Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of. He was sceptical of the emerging fandom in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of the Lord of the Rings (Letters, no. 144): :Thank you for sending me the projected 'blurbs', which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it. And in 1958, in an irritated reaction to a proposed movie adaptation of the Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman (Letters, no. 207) he writes, :I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about. He went on to criticise the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). But Tolkien was in principle open to the idea of a movie adaptation. He sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1968, while, guided by scepticism towards future productions, he forbade that Disney should ever be involved (Letters, no. 13): :It might be advisable […] to let the Americans do what seems good to them – as long as it was possible […] to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing). United Artists never made a film, though at least John Boorman was planning a film in the early seventies. It would have been a live-action film, which apparently would have been much more to Tolkien's liking than an animated film. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie adaptation (an animated rotoscoping film) of The Lord of the Rings appeared only after Tolkien's death (in 1978, directed by Ralph Bakshi). This first adaptation, however, only contained the first half of the story that is The Lord of the Rings. In 1977 an animated TV production of The Hobbit was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980 they produced an animated film titled The Return of the King, which covered some of the portion of The Lord of the Rings that Bakshi was unable to complete. In 2001–3 The Lord of the Rings was filmed in full and as a live-action film as a trilogy of films by Peter Jackson.

Bibliography

Fiction and poetry

See also Poems by J. R. R. Tolkien.
- 1936 Songs for the Philologists, with E.V. Gordon et al.
- 1937 The Hobbit or There and Back Again, ISBN 0-618-00221-9 (HM).
- 1945 Leaf by Niggle (short story)
- 1945 The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun, published in Welsh Review
- 1949 Farmer Giles of Ham (medieval fable)
- 1953 The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son published with the essay Ofermod
- The Lord of the Rings
- 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring: being the first part of The Lord of the Rings, ISBN 0-618-00222-7 (HM).
- 1954 The Two Towers: being the second part of The Lord of the Rings, ISBN 0-618-00223-5 (HM).
- 1955 The Return of the King: being the third part of The Lord of the Rings, ISBN 0-618-00224-3 (HM).
- 1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book
- 1967 The Road Goes Ever On, with Donald Swann
- 1964 Tree and Leaf (On Fairy-Stories and Leaf by Niggle in book form)
- 1966 The Tolkien Reader (The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorthelm's Son, On Fairy Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham' and The Adventures of Tom Bombadil)
- 1966 Tolkien on Tolkien (autobiographical)
- 1967 Smith of Wootton Major
Academic works

- 1922 A Middle English Vocabulary
- 1924 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (with E. V. Gordon)
- 1925 Some Contributions to Middle-English Lexicography
- 1925 The Devil's Coach Horses
- 1929 Ancrene Wisse and Hali Meiohad
- 1932 The Name 'Nodens' (in: Report on the Excavation of the Prehistoric, Roman, and Post-Roman Site in Lydney Park, Gloucestershire.)
- 1932/1935 Sigelwara Land parts I and II
- 1934 The Reeve's Tale (rediscovery of dialect humour, introducing the Hengwrt manuscript into textual criticism of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales)
- 1936 Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics (lecture on Beowulf criticism)
- 1939 On Fairy-Stories (Tolkien's philosophy on fantasy, given as the 1939 Andrew Lang lecture)
- 1944 Sir Orfeo (an edition of the medieval poem)
- 1947 On Fairy-Stories (essay, very central for understanding Tolkien's views on fastasy)
- 1953 Ofermod, published with the poem The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth, Beorhthelm's Son
- 1953 Middle English "Losenger"
- 1962 Ancrene Wisse: The English Text of the Ancrene Riwle
- 1963 English and Welsh
- 1966 Jerusalem Bible (contributing translator and lexicographer)
Posthumous publications
See Tolkien research for essays and text fragments by Tolkien published in academic publications and forums.
- 1975 Translations of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl (poem) and Sir Orfeo
- 1976 The Father Christmas Letters
- 1977 The Silmarillion ISBN 0-618-12698-8 (HM).
- 1979 Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien
- 1980 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth ISBN 0-618-15405-1 (HM).
- 1980 Poems and Stories (a compilation of The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son, On Fairy-Stories, Leaf by Niggle, Farmer Giles of Ham and Smith of Wootton Major)
- 1981 The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (eds. Christopher Tolkien and Humphrey Carpenter)
- 1981 The Old English Exodus Text
- 1982 Finn and Hengest: The Fragment and the Episode
- 1982 Mr. Bliss
- 1983 The Monsters and the Critics (an essay collection)
- Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics (1936)
- On Translating Beowulf (1940)
- On Fairy-Stories (1947)
- A Secret Vice (1930)
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- English and Welsh (1955)
- 1983–1996 The History of Middle-Earth:

The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 1) (1988)
The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 2) (1989)
The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 3) (1990)
Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 4, including an edition of The Notion Club Papers) (1992)
Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)
The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)
The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996)

- Index (2002)
- 1995 J. R. R. Tolkien: Artist and Illustrator (a compilation of Tolkien's art)
- 1998 Roverandom
- 2002 Beowulf and the Critics ed. Michael D.C. Drout (Beowulf: the monsters and the critics together with editions of two drafts of the longer essay from which it was condensed.
Audio recordings

- 1967 Poems and Songs of Middle-Earth, Caedmon TC 1231
- 1975 JRR Tolkien Reads and Sings his The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings, Caedmon TC 1477, TC 1478 (based on an August, 1952 recording by George Sayer)
References

- Biography:
- Letters:
- HoME: Tolkien, Christopher (ed.) (12 volumes, 1996-2002), The History of Middle-earth
Notes
# As described by Christopher Tolkien in Hervarar Saga ok Heidreks Konung (Oxford University, Trinity College). B. Litt. thesis. 1953/4. [Year uncertain], The Battle of the Goths and the Huns, in: Saga-Book (University College, London, for the Viking Society for Northern Research) 14, part 3 (1955-6) [http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/bibl4.html]
Further reading
A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:
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See also

- The Hobbit, Lord of the Rings
- Middle-earth
- Works inspired by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Inklings
- Tolkien research
- Tolkien fandom
External links
For story-internal references, see the links sections on Middle-earth and Lord of the Rings. Biographical:
- [http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/biography.html Tolkien Biography] (The Tolkien Society)
- [http://www.chem.ox.ac.uk/oxfordtour/tolkientour/index.html J. R. R. Tolkien's Oxford – 360º Photographic Tour]
- [http://www.birmingham.gov.uk/tolkien Tolkien in Birmingham]
- [http://www.virtualbrum.co.uk/tolkien.htm Tolkien Trail – In Birmingham]
- [http://www.nordals.hi.is/Apps/WebObjects/HI.woa/wa/dp?detail=1004508&name=nordals_en_greinar_og_erindi Tolkien and Iceland: the Philology of Envy. Tom Shippey's lecture at the University of Iceland]. Last accessed 17 October 2005. Bibliographical:
- [http://www.tolkienbooks.net/ An Illustrated Tolkien Bibliography]
- [http://www.lotrlibrary.com/ The Lord of the Rings Fanatics Library] Tolkienian Information
- [http://www.tolkienlibrary.com/ The Tolkien Library] Tolkien literature essays, reviews, articles
- [http://archive.salon.com/audio/2000/10/05/tolkien_elvish/ 1952 Audio recording of Tolkien reciting a poem in Quenya]
- [http://donh.best.vwh.net/Languages/tolkien1.html A Philologist on Esperanto] by J. R. R. Tolkien Databases/Directories:
- [http://onering.virbius.com/ One Ring: The Complete Guide to Tolkien Online]
- [http://www.xenite.org/talk/tolkien.html J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth Articles and Links] (xenite.org)
- [http://tolkien.slimy.com/ The Tolkien Meta-FAQ] (slimy.com)
- [http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/ The Tolkien Wiki Community]
- [http://tolkiengateway.net Tolkien Gateway] Information on Tolkien, the books, the movies, the music, the languages, etc Societies:
- [http://www.tolkiensociety.org/tolkien/ The Tolkien Society] Derivative art (see also main article):
- [http://www.tolkien-music.com/ Music inspired by Tolkien]
- [http://www.henneth-annun.net/ Stories inspired by Tolkien]
- Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien, J. R. R. Category:Inventors of writing systems ko:존 로널드 류엘 톨킨 ja:J・R・R・トールキン simple:J. R. R. Tolkien th:เจ. อาร์. อาร์. โทลคีน

Category:British academics

Some of the sub-categories may include people who did not hold an academic post, especially individuals from the 19th century and earlier. British Academics Academics Academics

Aliens versus Predator 2

Aliens versus Predator is a series of video games released for computers.

Introduction

To date (Winter 2004) there have been two Aliens versus Predator games released for the PC and Mac. Both have been published by Sierra, but have different developers, Rebellion for the original (AvP (1999)) and Monolith for its sequel (AvP2 (2001)). Rebellion released the source code to the first game in 2001, which made an unofficial port to Linux possible. The games themselves are both first person shooters (FPS), but differ from most other FPS in that the player can choose the perspective to play from : Alien, Predator or Human (Colonial Marine or Corporate). These different perspectives afford distinct capabilities and weapons. In the most conventional case, playing as a human is the most similar to other FPS, and players are able to access a wide array of weaponry (mostly that from the films). As a Predator, players make use of Predator weapons such as the Plasmacaster, Disc and Wristblades. Predators are also somewhat more athletic than humans, can make use of a cloaking device to stalk prey, and have a range of different vision modes to aid them in hunting the other species. Playing as an Alien is the most significantly different perspective. Players are able to range freely over any surface regardless of its inclination. This allows wall-walking and completely novel means of attack. As an Alien, however, weaponry is restricted to claws, tail and jaws (for the infamous head-bite), though these themselves reward the player with a fairly unusual experience in FPS combat. In the single player mode, both games present a conventional series of levels to progress through. However, because of the differing abilities of the three species, the levels themselves are not always conventional in structure - Alien levels, for instance, often involve climbing through convoluted buildings. In AvP, the levels are loosely structured, with progression sometimes a little arbitrary (e.g. Predator players find themselves, for a single level only, on the prison planet Fury 161 from the film Alien³). In AvP2, the storyline is considerably more developed and much tighter, with each level following sensibly on from the last. The three plotlines interleave with each other, making it impossible to learn the entire story without playing all three campaigns to conclusion. And, at one point in AvP2, the three strands (Alien, Predator and human) are brought together at a particular location. One particularly notable extension in AvP2 is that Alien players begin the game as a facehugger, then develop into a chestburster before finally reaching adulthood as a drone. In both games, the storylines put the player in situations familiar to those who have seen the films. In 2002 an expansion pack, Primal Hunt, was released to extend AvP2 (developed by Third Law Entertainment). The pack included several new weapons (dual pistols and sentry guns for human players; energy flechette for Predator players), new indigenous wildlife and new multiplayer maps. Its single player campaign also tied up several loose ends in the story of AvP2 (including the identity and nature of the artifact sought by the corporates in AvP2). However, factors such as the shortness of the single player campaign, and the sometimes clumsy nature of the pack's additions (for instance the near-cartoon extra wildlife), limited its appeal.

Plot Summaries

Aliens versus Predator (AvP)

In the first game, the three single-player missions (Alien, Marine and Predator) are completely independent and never interconnect. However, the game includes bonus levels that allow each species access to portions of the missions of the other species. To allow the more three dimensional Alien levels to be played, Marine and Predator players are supplied respectively with a jetpack and grappling hook for these bonus missions.

Alien

In the opening cutscene, Marines are in the process of securing a stone temple of unknown origin. An Alien drone (presumably you) wreaks havoc upon them.
- Temple: The Alien begins in the upper levels of the temple mentioned above. Marines have secured the lower levels of this temple, including your colony's hive. You must make your way to the hive, sealing off the strange energies that feed the temple and disrupting on-site research labs as you go.
- Escape: You must leave the hive and enter an adjacent human facility. As the Marines repeatedly fail to contain or kill you, they issue a general evacuation order, and you must hitch a ride on a departing spacecraft (which happens to be carrying alien eggs).
- Ferarco: You find yourself aboard the Ferarco, a space freighter with a (well-armed) crew complement of fifty. The ship's interior is loosely based on that of the Nostromo from the movie Alien. The galley, the hypersleep vault, the landing-strut chamber, the observation bubble on the lowest deck, and the computer interface room should all be familiar to fans of the Alien series. After you destroy the interior of the computer interface room, the ship initiates a self-destruct procedure and you have a short amount of time to reach the escape shuttle (again from Alien).
- Gateway: The shuttle reaches Gateway Station in Earth orbit. Gateway was featured in the sequel to Alien, Aliens, although this time, fans won't find any familiar territory. Sensors detect a contaminant (you), and the airlock where the escape shuttle docked opens and you are nearly sucked into the vacuum of space. After escaping, you must make your way through the infrastructure of the station (mainly ventilation ducts), causing a minor power failure along the way. The Marines are here, and they're more heavily armed than they were last time.
- Earthbound: You have reached Gateway's docking tower. Again moving through the ventilation system for the most part, you must reach a ship scheduled to depart for Earth. Near the end of the level, two Predators make an appearance on Gateway; you must kill them to proceed to Earth. The end cutscene shows the Alien curled up inside a shuttlecraft with Earth, its destination, in view through a porthole.

Marine

The opening cutscene shows a facehugger attached to your character's face. However, as the facility alarms go off, your character sits bolt upright in bed and realises that this was just a nightmare.
- Derelict: The Marine's game takes place ten years after the events of Aliens. The Company has built a research facility around the derelict ship which was the source of the original alien infestation, and Marines like you are stationed there in case anything goes wrong. Needless to say, everything goes wrong. You're the last person to evacuate, and you must leave your quarters and make your way through the research facility to the derelict ship itself. After taking a lift down to the pilot's chamber (another familiar area from Alien), you reach the colony supporting the research facility.
- Colony: Once you take an elevator up to the surface, all that separates you from the comparative safety of a heavily-armored APC is the main gate. Unfortunately for you, it won't open. You've got to restore power, then hunt down an engineer's security card, which will allow you to escape. You find the card in a medlab reminiscent of the medlab in Aliens; in fact, all the corridors and structures are modeled in the same style as the colony buildings in Aliens. You get what you came for, open the gate, and run across open terrain toward the APC with Aliens hounding you all the way.
- Invasion: The APC brings you to an atmosphere-processing facility (a place featured in Aliens, although the interior in the game doesn't really resemble the movie sets). The Company won't let you leave unless you manually shut down five cooling valves to cause the facility's reactor to overheat (and, presumably, wipe out the Alien hive). You run around and turn the valves, then make your way to a landing pad where you are picked up by a dropship.
- Orbital: The dropship brings you to Odobenus Station in geosynchronous orbit above the planet. Somehow, Aliens have gotten loose here too. To make matters worse, Predators have taken an interest in the station as well. They destroy the dropship which brought you to the station, then forcibly board. You kill or dodge them and the many aliens in your path, making your way through crew quarters and a hydroponic lab. Along the way, you must also contend with an experimental security system consisting of "xenoborgs", Alien drones which have been converted to slow-moving but nearly indestructible cyborgs equipped with powerful lasers. You reach an escape pod which brings you to the Tyrargo.
- Tyrargo: The Tyrargo is a "Costenoga"-class ship (possibly a typo; the Sulaco, from Aliens, is said to be a "Conestoga"-class ship). Not surprisingly, it too has become infested with Aliens. You make your way through the very dimly-lit ship, passing familiar banks of cryotubes, hangars, and a mess hall (complete with a combat knife embedded in the table—a reference to Bishop's "knife trick"). After successfully killing an intruding Predator, the Company betrays you, informing you that you've been "most useful" and leaving you to die. However, after you kill a predalien hybrid, your commanding officer opens a door for you for a short period of time, allowing you to escape. You encounter praetorians, members of an intermediate caste of aliens between drones (which you've been fighting the whole time) and the queen. You take a service elevator down to the bowels of the ship, reaching the dropship hangar.
- Hangar: The dropship hangar is a large, open space, resembling a larger and better-lit version of the hangars you've seen in the previous level. Whatever weapons you had before are gone, leaving you with only a pulse rifle. Unfortunately, you face off against a queen alien in this room, and your rifle isn't going to do you a lot of good on its own. You must take advantage of the room itself to kill the queen, crawling under floor grating (like Newt in Aliens) and ultimately blasting the queen out loading airlock (again, like in Aliens). As the queen is sucked into space, you retreat into a sealed cubbyhole and watch. In the ending cutscene, the Marine watches as the queen is sucked out of the ship ... but he fails to notice the alien drone that has dropped behind him ...

Predator

The Predator's mission is not as coherent as the other species' missions, and takes the player through levels on three separate planets. In the opening cutscene, an unwary Marine fails to notice the predator's laser sight moving up his back ... and he is shot from behind with a bolt of plasma.
- Waterfall: The game begins with you stalking Marines outside a military facility with the designation "Area 52" (compare this to Area 51). A Predator ship has been recovered and its occupant captured; your goal is to retrieve them. To this end, you stalk through several security checkpoints outside the base, finally reaching the entrance just past a waterfall.
- Area 52: In the second level, you are inside Area 52 and must fight your way deeper inside. Along the way, you need to retrieve a keycard. At the end of the level, you find your ship.
- Vaults: You retrieve two new weapons from your ship—your smart disk (which appeared in Predator 2) and a plasma pistol. You must destroy a series of computer banks to proceed further—but in doing so, you release the Aliens being held in the facility. The human occupants are quickly overrun and, as you progress, you find the labs where aliens were being held, studied, and dissected. You also find evidence that your comrade was taken here. In the deepest part of the lab, you find that the humans have experimentally infected your fellow Predator with an Alien—creating a Predalien hybrid. Upon releasing and killing the Predalien, you unintentionally trigger the facility's self-destruct system, giving you only a minute to reach your ship and escape.
- Fury 161: You travel to Fiorina "Fury" 161, the prison world featured in Alien³. For unspecified reasons, there's an alien infestation on the planet and the Marines are trying to clean it up. You pass through the lead-smelting facility and through some familiar scenes from the movie, including the morgue, the EEV crash-site, and the main hall. Finally, you reach the outside, and your ship arrives, allowing you to escape.
- Caverns: Your ship takes you to a Marine-controlled Alien habitat. You fight your way through the human defenses, including xenoborgs and sentry guns, until you reach the Alien hive. After fighting a pair of praetorians deep in the hive, a rock floor collapses beneath you.
- Battle: The last level is a single room—the queen's chamber. You have disabled your powered weapons "to preserve your honor", leaving you with only your wristblades and your speargun. Unlike the Marine's pulse rifle, your speargun is sufficient for this task, though you will expend most of your ammunition in the process. In the ending cutscene, the Predator notices a lone facehugger sneaking up on it, and blasts it with the shoulder cannon.

Secrets & Extras

A number of features in the original game were 'hidden' - either by design as part of the game or as unlockable extras for dedicated players. The game's difficulty level tended to make these extras somewhat difficult to view, although the means of unlocking them are displayed as part of the end mission brief in each case. It is also possible to download and use custom game profiles which have all the cheats/extras already unlocked. Notable unlockable extras include -
- Supergore mode - over 10x the amount of blood (or acid) emitted from wounds
- Pigsticker mode - The predator's speargun fires 10x as many bolts per shot
- John Woo Mode - the game dynamically slows down depending on what's going on Notable secrets include -
- Xenoborg shutdown switch - The most lethal enemy in the game, the Xenoborg, has a bright red L.E.D. on its head. A single shot to this L.E.D. will shut the 'borg down for good. It is trivial to run up to the 'borg and deactivate it while it is powering itself up.

Screenshots

The following are images from the original Aliens versus Predator.