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

January 3
January 3 is the 3rd day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. 362 days (363 during leap years) remain in the year after this day.
Events

- 1431 - Joan of Arc is handed over to the Bishop Pierre Cauchon.
- 1496 - Leonardo da Vinci unsuccessfully tests a flying machine
- 1521 - Pope Leo X excommunicates Martin Luther in the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem.
- 1749 - Benning Wentworth issues the first of the New Hampshire Grants, leading to the establishment of Vermont.
- 1777 - Battle of Princeton. American general George Washington defeats British general Charles Cornwallis.
- 1815 - Austria, Britain, and France form a secret defensive alliance treaty against Prussia and Russia.
- 1823 - Stephen F. Austin receives a grant of land in Texas from the government of Mexico
- 1833 - Britain seizes control of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.
- 1834 - The government of Mexico imprisons Stephen F. Austin in Mexico City
- 1840 - One of the Herald Sun of Melbourne, Australia's predecessor papers The Port Phillip Herald is founded by George Cavanaugh.
- 1852 - First Chinese arrive in Hawaii.
- 1861 - American Civil War: Delaware votes not to secede from the United States
- 1868 - The Japanese Meiji dynasty is restored and the Shogunate is abolished.
- 1870 - The Brooklyn Bridge begins construction.
- 1888 - The 91 cm refracting telescope at Lick Observatory is used for the first time. It was the largest telescope in the world at the time.
- 1899 - The first known use of the word automobile, in an editorial in the New York Times.
- 1920 - Curse of the Bambino: The Boston Red Sox sell Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees for a sum of $125,000 and a loan of more than $300,000.
- 1921 - Turkey makes peace with Armenia.
- 1925 - Benito Mussolini announces he is taking dictatorial powers over Italy.
- 1926 - General Theodorus Pángulos names himself dictator of Greece.
- 1938 - The March of Dimes is established by Franklin D. Roosevelt.
- 1947 - Proceedings of the U.S. Congress are televised for the first time.
- 1951 - Dragnet airs on television for the first time (NBC).
- 1957 - Hamilton Watch Company introduces the first electric watch.
- 1958 - The West Indies Federation is formed.
- 1959 - Alaska is admitted as the 49th U.S. state.
- 1961 - The United States severs diplomatic relations with Cuba.
- 1961 - The SL-1, a government-run reactor near Idaho Falls, Idaho leaks radiation, killing three workers at the installation. The radiation is contained.
- 1962 - Pope John XXIII excommunicates Fidel Castro.
- 1966 - The first Acid Test at the Fillmore, San Francisco, California.
- 1973 - Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) sells the New York Yankees for $12 million to a 12-person syndicate led by George Steinbrenner.
- 1987 - Aretha Franklin becomes the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
- 1990 - Former leader of Panama Manuel Noriega surrenders to American forces.
- 1991 - Hockey Hall of Famer Wayne Gretzky scores his 700th goal.
- 1993 - In Moscow, George H. W. Bush and Boris Yeltsin sign the second Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START).
- 1994 - An Aeroflot Tupolev TU-154 crashes and explodes after takeoff from Irkhutsk, Russia killing 125 including 1 on the ground
- 1997 - NBC's Today show host Bryant Gumbel signs off for the last time.
- 1999 - The Mars Polar Lander launched.
- 2000 - The last "Peanuts" comic strip is created by Charles Schulz.
- 2004 - Flight 604, a Boeing 737 owned by Flash Airlines, an Egyptian airliner, plunges into the Red Sea, killing all 148 aboard.
Births

- 106 BC - Cicero, Roman statesman and philosopher (d. 43 BC)
- AD 1196 - Emperor Tsuchimikado of Japan (d. 1231)
- 1710 - Richard Gridley, American Revolutionary soldier (d. 1796)
- 1719 - Francisco José Freire, Portuguese historian and philologist (d. 1773)
- 1722 - Fredric Hasselquist, Swedish naturalist (d. 1752)
- 1778 - Antoni Melchior Fijałkowski, Polish bishop (d. 1861)
- 1793 - Lucretia Mott, American women's rights activist and abolitionist (d. 1880)
- 1803 - Douglas William Jerrold, British playwright and satirist (d. 1857)
- 1840 - Father Damien, Belgian missionary in Hawaii (d. 1889)
- 1855 - Hubert Bland, English socialist (d. 1914)
- 1879 - Grace Coolidge, First Lady of the United States (d. 1957)
- 1883 - Clement Attlee, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1967)
- 1887 - August Macke, German painter (d. 1914)
- 1892 - J. R. R. Tolkien, British writer and philologist (d. 1973)
- 1894 - Pola Negri, Polish actress (d. 1987)
- 1894 - ZaSu Pitts, American actress (d. 1963)
- 1897 - Marion Davies, American actress (d. 1961)
- 1901 - Ngo Dinh Diem, President of South Vietnam (d. 1963)
- 1905 - Anna May Wong, American actress (d. 1961)
- 1907 - Ray Milland, Welsh actor (d. 1986)
- 1909 - Victor Borge, Danish entertainer and humorist (d. 2000)
- 1911 - John Sturges, American director (d. 1982)
- 1912 - Armand Lohikoski, Finnish director (d. 2005)
- 1916 - John Joseph Allen, Staten Island NY
- 1916 - Betty Furness, American actress and consumer activist (d. 1994)
- 1917 - Roger W. Straus, Jr., American publisher (d. 2004)
- 1920 - Renato Carosone, Italian musician and singer (d. 2001)
- 1924 - Nell Rankin, American soprano (d. 2005)
- 1924 - Hank Stram, American football coach and broadcaster
- 1926 - George Martin, English producer of The Beatles' records
- 1929 - Sergio Leone, Italian director (d. 1989)
- 1930 - Robert Loggia, American actor
- 1932 - Dabney Coleman, American actor
- 1932 - Coo Coo Marlin, American race car driver (d. 2005)
- 1936 - Georgina Spelvin, actress
- 1939 - Bobby Hull, Canadian hockey player
- 1941 - Van Dyke Parks, American musician, composer
- 1942 - John Thaw, British actor (d. 2002)
- 1945 - Stephen Stills, American singer, songwriter, and guitarist
- 1946 - John Paul Jones, English bassist (Led Zeppelin)
- 1946 - Victoria Principal, American actress
- 1956 - Mel Gibson, Australian actor and director
- 1957 - Bojan Križ, Slovenian skier
- 1960 - Joan Chen, Chinese actress
- 1969 - Michael Schumacher, German race car driver
- 1975 - Jason Marsden, American actor
- 1975 - Danica McKellar, American actress
- 1976 - Nicholas Gonzalez, American actor
- 1981 - Eli Manning, American football player
- 1989 - Alex D. Linz, American actor
Deaths

- 722 - Empress Gemmei of Japan (b. 661)
- 1322 - King Philip V of France (b. 1293)
- 1437 - Catherine of Valois, queen of Henry VI of England (b. 1401)
- 1543 - Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo, Portuguese explorer (b. 1499)
- 1641 - Jeremiah Horrocks, English astronomer
- 1656 - Mathieu Molé, French statesman (b. 1584)
- 1670 - George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, English soldier (b. 1608)
- 1690 - Hillel ben Naphtali Zevi, Lithuanian rabbi (b. 1615)
- 1779 - Claude Bourgelat, French veterinary surgeon (b. 1712)
- 1785 - Baldassare Galuppi, Italian composer (b. 1706)
- 1795 - Josiah Wedgwood, English potter (b. 1730)
- 1826 - Louis Gabriel Suchet, French marshal (b. 1770)
- 1875 - Pierre Larousse, French editor and encyclopedist (b. 1817)
- 1923 - Jaroslav Hasek, Czech novelist (b. 1883)
- 1927 - Carle David Tolmé Runge, German physicist (b. 1856)
- 1933 - Jack Pickford, Canadian actor (b. 1896)
- 1945 - Edgar Cayce, American psychic (b. 1877)
- 1946 - William Joyce, American Nazi propagandist (executed) (b. 1906)
- 1950 - Emil Jannings, Swiss actor (b. 1884)
- 1956 - Alexander Gretchaninov, Russian composer (b. 1864)
- 1963 - Jack Carson, Canadian actor (b. 1910)
- 1967 - Mary Garden, Scottish soprano (b. 1874)
- 1967 - Jack Ruby, American killer of Lee Harvey Oswald (b. 1911)
- 1979 - Conrad Hilton, American hotelier (b. 1887)
- 1980 - Joy Adamson, Czech conservationist and author (b. 1910)
- 1981 - Princess Alice of Albany (b. 1883)
- 1988 - Rose Ausländer, German poet (b. 1901)
- 1992 - Dame Judith Anderson, Australian actress (b. 1897)
- 2001 - José Greco, Italian-born flamenco dancer (b. 1918)
- 2002 - Esquivel, Mexican band leader and composer (b. 1918)
- 2002 - Freddy Heineken, Dutch beer executive (b. 1923)
- 2003 - Sid Gillman, American football coach (b. 1911)
- 2004 - Leon Wagner, baseball player (b. 1934)
- 2005 - Koo Chen-fu, Chinese negotiator (b. 1917)
- 2005 - JN Dixit, Indian government official (b. 1936)
- 2005 - Will Eisner, American comic book artist (b. 1917)
Holidays and observances

- Feast day of St Genevieve
- Roman Empire - Festival in honour of Pax
- The ninth day and tenth night of Christmas in Western Christianity
- In astronomy the best date to view the Quadrantids meteor shower.
- In astronomy the approximate date of Earth's perihelion.
External links

- [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/3 BBC: On This Day] ---- January 2 - January 4 - December 3 - February 3 — listing of all days ko:1월 3일 ja:1月3日 simple:January 3 th:3 มกราคม

September 2

September 2 is the 245th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (246th in leap years). There are 120 days remaining.

Events

- 44 BC - Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declares her son co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion.
- 44 BC - The first of Cicero’s Philippics (oratorical attacks) on Mark Antony. He will make 14 of them over the next several months.
- 31 BC - Roman Civil War: Battle of Actium - Off the western coast of Greece, forces of Octavian defeat troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra.
- 1649 - The Italian city of Castro is completely destroyed by the forces of Pope Innocent X, ending the Wars of Castro.
- 1666 - The Great Fire of London breaks out and burns for three days, destroying 10,000 buildings including St. Paul's Cathedral.
- 1752 - The United Kingdom adopts the Gregorian Calendar, nearly two centuries later than most of Western Europe.
- 1789 - The United States Department of the Treasury is founded.
- 1792 - During what became known as the September Massacres of the French Revolution, rampaging mobs slaughter three Roman Catholic Church bishops and more than two hundred priests.
- 1807 - British Navy bombards Copenhagen with fire bombs and phosphorus rockets to prevent Denmark from surrendering its fleet to Napoleon.
- 1833 - Oberlin College is founded by John Shipherd and Philo P. Stewart.
- 1862 - American Civil War: President Abraham Lincoln reluctantly restores Union General George McClellan to full command after General John Pope's disastrous defeat at the Battle of Second Bull Run.
- 1862- First federal tax on tobacco
- 1864 - American Civil War: Union forces enter Atlanta, Georgia a day after the Confederate defenders flee the city.
- 1867 - Mutsuhito, the Meiji Emperor of Japan marries Ichijo Masako. The Empress consort is thereafter known as Lady Haruko.
- 1870 - Franco-Prussian War: Battle of Sedan - Prussian forces take French Emperor Napoleon III and 100,000 of his soldiers prisoner.
- 1885 - In Rock Springs, Wyoming, 150 white miners attack their Chinese fellow workers, killing 28, wounding 15, and forcing several hundred more out of town.
- 1898 - Battle of Omdurman - British and Egyptian troops defeat Sudanese tribesmen and establishing British dominance in the Sudan.
- 1901 - Vice President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt utters the famous phrase, "Speak softly and carry a big stick" at the Minnesota State Fair.
- 1935 - Labor Day Hurricane of 1935: A large hurricane hits the Florida Keys killing 423.
- 1939 - Following the invasion of Poland, Freie Stadt Danzig Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) is annexed to Nazi Germany.
- 1944 - Holocaust: Diarist Anne Frank and her family are placed on the last transport train from Westerbork to Auschwitz, arriving three days later.
- 1945 - World War II ends: The final official surrender of Japan is accepted aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.
- 1945 - Vietnam declares its independence, forming the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam).
- 1946 - Ayn Rand began writing Atlas Shrugged.
- 1963 - CBS Evening News becomes U.S. network television's first half-hour weeknight news broadcast, when the show is lengthened from 15 to 30 minutes.
- 1967 - The microstate Principality of Sealand unilaterally declares its independence.
- 1969 - The first automatic teller machine in the United States is installed in Rockville Center, New York.
- 1984 - Seven Die + Fifteen wounded in a clash between rival bikie gangs the Bandidos + the Comancheros @ the Millpera Tavern Millpera, Sydney.
- 1987 - In Moscow, the trial begins of 19-year-old pilot Mathias Rust, who flew his Cessna aircraft into Red Square in May 1987.
- 1990 - Transnistria declares its independence from Moldova; however, Moldova does not recognize it.
- 1991 - The United States recognizes the independence of the Baltic states: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
- 1995 - The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame opens in Cleveland, Ohio.
- 1998 - In Canada, pilots for Air Canada launch the first strike in company's history.
- 1998 - Swissair Flight 111 crashes near Peggys Cove, Nova Scotia. All 229 people on board are killed.
- 1998 - The UN's International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda finds Jean-Paul Akayesu, the former mayor of a small town in Rwanda, guilty of nine counts of genocide.
- 2002 - World Heavyweight Championship reintroduced to WWE televison.
- 2005 - The Kingdom of Lovely is declared in Leicester Square, London, by King Danny I of Lovely.

Births

- 1243 - Gilbert de Clare, 7th Earl of Hertford, English politician (d. 1295)
- 1548 - Vincenzo Scamozzi, Italian architect (d. 1616)
- 1675 - William Somervile, English poet (d. 1742)
- 1805 - Esteban Echeverría, Argentine writer (d. 1851)
- 1810 - William Seymour Tyler, American educator and historian
- 1830 - William P. Frye, American politician
- 1838 - Liliuokalani of Hawaii, Queen of Hawaii (d. 1917)
- 1850 - Albert Spalding, baseball player and sporting goods manufacturer (d. 1915)
- 1850 - Woldemar Voigt, German physicist (d. 1919)
- 1853 - Wilhelm Ostwald, German chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1932)
- 1854 - Hans Jæger, Norwegian writer and political activist (d. 1910)
- 1862 - Franjo Krežma, Croatian violinist (d. 1881)
- 1877 - Frederick Soddy, British chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1956)
- 1879 - An Jung-geun, assassin of the Japanese politician Ito Hirobumi (d. 1910)
- 1884 - Dr. Frank C. Laubach, Christian missionary (d. 1970)
- 1917 - Cleveland Amory, author (d. 1998)
- 1923 - Rene Thom, French mathematician (d. 2002)
- 1924 - Daniel arap Moi, President of Kenya
- 1929 - Hal Ashby, American film director (d. 1988)
- 1936 - Andrew Grove, American computer chip manufacturer
- 1938 - Clarence Felder, American actor
- 1941 - David Bale, South African-born activist (d. 2003)
- 1944 - Al Matthews, American actor (d. 2002)
- 1948 - Terry Bradshaw, American football player
- 1948 - Christa McAuliffe, American schoolteacher and astronaut (d. 1986)
- 1950 - Rosanna DeSoto, American actress
- 1951 - Mark Harmon, American actor
- 1952 - Jimmy Connors, American tennis player
- 1953 - John Zorn, American musician
- 1960 - Sue Foley, American writer
- 1961 - Eric Dickerson, American football player
- 1961 - Carlos Valderrama, Colombian footballer
- 1964 - Keanu Reeves, American actor
- 1965 - Lennox Lewis, Canadian-British boxer
- 1966 - Salma Hayek, Mexican actress
- 1969 - Cedric "K-Ci" Hailey, American singer
- 1971 - Tommy Maddox, American football player
- 1972 - Sergei Zholtok, Latvian hockey player
- 1976 - Phil Lipscomb, American bassist (Taproot)
- 1982 - Joey Barton, English footballer

Deaths

- 421 - Constantius III, Roman Emperor
- 1031 - Saint Emeric of Hungary
- 1274 - Prince Munetaka, Japanese shogun (b. 1242)
- 1397 - Francesco Landini, Italian composer
- 1540 - Lebna Dengel, Emperor of Ethiopia (b. 1501)
- 1680 - Per Brahe (the younger), Swedish soldier and statesman (b. 1602)
- 1688 - Robert Viner, Lord Mayor of London (b. 1631)
- 1690 - Philipp Wilhelm, Elector Palatine (b. 1615)
- 1764 - Nathaniel Bliss, English Astronomer Royal (b. 1700)
- 1765 - Henry Bouquet, Swiss-born British army officer (b. 1719)
- 1768 - Antoine Deparcieux, French mathematician (b. 1703)
- 1790 - Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim, German historian and theologian (b. 1701)
- 1813 - Jean Victor Marie Moreau, French general (mortally wounded in battle) (b. 1763)
- 1820 - Jiaqing, Emperor of China (b. 1760)
- 1832 - Franz Xaver, Baron Von Zach, Austrian astronomer (b. 1854)
- 1834 - Thomas Telford, Scottish civil engineer (b. 1757)
- 1865 - William Rowan Hamilton, Irish mathematician (b. 1805)
- 1872 - Nicolai Grundtvig, Danish writer and philosopher (b. 1783)
- 1898 - Wilford Woodruff, president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (b. 1807)
- 1910 - Henri Rousseau, French painter (b. 1844)
- 1921 - Henry Austin Dobson, English poet (b. 1840)
- 1921 - Anthony Francis Lucas Croatian-born oil exploration pioneer (b.1855)
- 1934 - Alcide Nunez, American musician (b. 1884)
- 1937 - Pierre de Coubertin, French founder of the modern Olympic Games (b. 1863)
- 1948 - Sylvanus Morley, U.S. archaeologist and spy (b. 1883)
- 1953 - Jonathan Mayhew Wainwright IV, U.S. general (b. 1883)
- 1964 - Alvin York, most decorated American soldier of World War I (b. 1887)
- 1969 - Ho Chi Minh, Vietnamese president and prime minister (b. 1890)
- 1981 - Andrija Maurovic, Croatian illustrator (b.1901)
- 1973 - Carl Dudley, American movie director (b. 1910)
- 1973 - J. R. R. Tolkien, British writer (b. 1892)
- 1976 - Stanisław Grochowiak, Polish poet and dramatist (b. 1934)
- 1985 - Abe Lenstra, Dutch footballer (b. 1920)
- 1991 - Alfonso García Robles, Mexican diplomat and politician, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (b. 1911)
- 1992 - Barbara McClintock, American geneticist, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine (b. 1902)
- 1997 - Rudolph Bing, Austrian-born opera manager (b. 1902)
- 1998 - Allen Drury, American author (b. 1918)
- 2000 - Elvera Sanchez, Puerto Rican dancer (d. 1905)
- 2000 - Curt Siodmak, German-born author (b. 1907)
- 2001 - Christiaan Barnard, South African heart surgeon (b. 1922)
- 2001 - Troy Donahue, American actor (b. 1936)
- 2002 - Dick Reynolds, Australian footballer and coach (b. 1915)
- 2004 - Joan Oró, Catalan scientist (b. 1923)
- 2005 - Bob Denver, American actor (b. 1935)

Holidays and observances

also see September 2 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)
- RC Saints - Saint Sophia
- Mauritius - Ganesh Chaturthi
- Transnistria - Independence day, note Transnistria is not an internationally recognized independent state
- Sedan Day (Sedantag) - traditional national German holiday (see Sedan, France) that commemorates Prussia's victory over France in 1870, making the German Empire a reality.
- Vietnam - Independence Day (from France, 1945)

External links

- [http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/september/2 BBC: On This Day] ----- September 1 - September 3 - August 2 - October 2 - more historical anniversaries ko:9월 2일 ms:2 September ja:9月2日 simple:September 2 th:2 กันยายน

The Hobbit

:For other uses, see Hobbit (disambiguation). The Hobbit is a fantasy novel written by J.R.R. Tolkien originally as a children's story in the tradition of the fairy tale. It was first published on September 21, 1937, and is now seen as a prelude to Tolkien's more monumental work The Lord of the Rings (published in 1954 and 1955.) The story, subtitled "There and Back Again", follows the adventures of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins as he travels across the lands of Middle-earth with a band of Dwarves and a wizard named Gandalf on a quest to restore a dwarven kingdom and a great treasure stolen by the dragon, Smaug.

The novel

Tolkien recollects in a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden (Letters, no. 163) that, in the late 1920s, when he was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, The Hobbit began when he was marking School Certificate papers, on the back of one of which he wrote the words "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit". He did not go any further than that at the time, although in the following years he drew up Thror's map, outlining the geography of the tale. The tale itself he wrote in the early 1930s, and it was eventually published because he lent it to the Reverend Mother of Cherwell Edge when she was sick with the flu; while the Reverend Mother was in possession of the manuscript, it was seen by the 10-year old son of Sir Stanley Unwin, Rayner Unwin, who wrote such an enthusiastic review of the book that it was published by Allen & Unwin. Tolkien introduced or mentioned characters and places that figured prominently in his legendarium, specifically Elrond and Gondolin, along with elements from Germanic legend. But the decision that the events of The Hobbit could belong to the same universe as The Silmarillion was made only after successful publication, when the publisher asked for a sequel. Accordingly, The Hobbit serves both as an introduction to Middle-Earth and as a link between earlier and later events described in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, respectively. It has been suggested that The Hobbit can be read as a Bildungsroman in which Bilbo matures from an initially insular, superficial, and rather ineffectual person to one who is versatile, brave, self-sufficient, and relied-upon by others when they are in need of assistance. Some have compared his development to the theories of Joseph Campbell on myth and, in particular, the journey of the epic hero. However, Tolkien himself probably did not intend the book to be read in this way. In the foreword to The Lord of the Rings he writes, "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." He further claimed that The Lord of the Rings is "neither allegorical nor topical", and it seems safe to assume that The Hobbit was written with the same caveats. The judgement of Bilbo as "superficial" and "ineffectual" seems harsh since he was, according to Tolkien, rather typical of hobbits in general. allegory Although a fairytale, the novel is both complex and sophisticated: it contains many names and words derived from Norse mythology, and central plot elements from the Beowulf epic, it makes use of Anglo-Saxon runes, information on calendars and moon phases, and detailed geographical descriptions that fit well with the accompanying maps. Near the end, the tale takes on epic proportions.

Synopsis

Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, is smoking in his porchway one day when Gandalf the Wizard visits him. After a lengthy discussion, during which Bilbo uses the phrase "Good Morning" several times, in several different ways, Bilbo, finding himself flustered, invites Gandalf to tea, and goes back inside his hobbit hole with a final "Good Morning". Gandalf scratches a secret mark on Bilbo's front door, which translated means 'Burglar wants a good job, plenty of excitement and reasonable reward'. Thirteen Dwarves (Thorin Oakenshield,