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Cuiviénen

Cuiviénen

In the fictional works of J. R. R. Tolkien, Cuiviénen is the land where the Quendi or Elves awoke. Its name (cuiviër+nen) means 'water of awakening,' and it is said to have been on the shore of a large gulf in the inland Sea of Helcar in the far east of Middle-earth. The Awakening of the Elves took place in very ancient times, during the Years of the Trees, and Cuiviénen is known to have been destroyed (perhaps by natural forces) since then. The first Sundering of the Elves took place when the Eldar departed from Cuiviénen to Valinor, leaving behind the Avari. It is unknown how long the Avari remained at Cuiviénen during the First Age, but it is certain that the Sea of Helcar ceased to exist after the War of Wrath, so "to Cuiviénen there is no returning". Category:Realms of Middle-earth

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:
  1. The Book of Lost Tales 1 (1983)
  2. The Book of Lost Tales 2 (1984)
  3. The Lays of Beleriand (1985)
  4. The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986)
  5. The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987)
  6. The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 1) (1988)
  7. The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 2) (1989)
  8. The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 3) (1990)
  9. Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings vol. 4, including an edition of The Notion Club Papers) (1992)
  10. Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion vol. 1) (1993)
  11. The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion vol. 2) (1994)
  12. 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]
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Sea of Helcar

In the fictional universe of Middle-earth by J. R. R. Tolkien, the Sea of Helkar (also spelt Helcar) was a great inland sea which existed during the First Age. In the beginning of Arda, the Valar created the Two Lamps. Due to Melkor's deceit these were destroyed, and where Helcar, the northern Lamp had stood a great inland sea was formed, which was named the Sea of Helkar after the tower on which the northern lamp had stood. The awakening of the Elves was at Cuiviénen, a gulf in the Sea of Helkar, and during the Great Journey they passed to the north of it through Wilderland on their way to Beleriand. After the War of Wrath at the end of the First Age, the Sea of Helkar was drained through the Great Gulf and disappeared. ---- Christopher Tolkien and others have speculated that the Sea of Rhûn might "...be identified with the Sea of Helkar, vastly shrunken" (The War of the Jewels, pg. 174). In The Atlas of Middle-earth, Karen Wynn Fonstad assumed that the lands of Mordor, Khand, and Rhûn lay where the Sea of Helcar had been, and that the Sea of Rhûn and Sea of Núrnen were its remnants. In The Peoples of Middle-earth there are references to the Sea of Rhûn existing in the First Age, but no indication as to whether it should be equated with the Sea of Helkar or not. Category:Middle-earth bodies of water

Middle Earth

Middle-earth is the name used for the inhabitable parts of J.R.R. Tolkien's fictional Arda (ancient Earth) where the (canonical) stories in his legendarium take place. "Middle-earth" is a literal translation of the Old English term middangeard, referring to this world, the habitable lands of men. Tolkien translated 'Middle Earth' as Endor (or sometimes Endóre) and Ennor in the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin, respectively. Mythologically, the north of Endor became the Eurasian land-mass after the primitive Earth was transformed into the round world of today. Middle-earth's setting is in a fictional period in Earth's own past. Tolkien insisted that Middle-earth is Earth in several of his letters, in one of them (no. 211) estimating the end of the Third Age to about 6,000 years before his own time. The action of the books is largely confined to the north-west of the Endor continent, implicitly corresponding to modern-day Europe. The history of Middle-earth is divided into several Ages: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings deal exclusively with events towards the end of the Third Age and conclude at the dawn of the Fourth Age, while The Silmarillion deals mainly with the First Age. The world (Arda) was originally flat but was made round near the end of the Second Age by Eru Ilúvatar, the Creator. Much of the knowledge of Middle-earth is based on writings that Tolkien did not finish for publication during his lifetime. In these cases, this article is based on the version of the Middle-earth legendarium that is considered canonical by most Tolkien fans, as discussed under Middle-earth canon.

The name

The term "Middle-earth" was not invented by Tolkien, rather it existed in Old English as middanġeard, in Middle English as midden-erd or middel-erd; in Old Norse it was called Midgard. It is English for what the Greeks called the οικουμένη (oikoumenē) or "the abiding place of men", the physical world as opposed to the unseen worlds (The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, 151). The word Mediterranean comes from two Latin stems, medi, middle, and terra, earth. Middangeard occurs half-a-dozen times in Beowulf, which Tolkien translated and on which he was arguably the world's foremost authority. (See also J. R. R. Tolkien for discussion of his inspirations and sources). See Midgard and Norse mythology for the older use. Tolkien was also inspired by this fragment: :Eala earendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended. :Hail Earendel, brightest of angels / above the middle-earth sent unto men. in the Crist poem of Cynewulf. The name earendel (which may mean the 'morning-star' but in some contexts was a name for Christ) was the inspiration for Tolkien's mariner Eärendil. The name was consciously used by Tolkien to place The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and related writings. Tolkien began to use the term "Middle-earth" in the early 1930s in place of the earlier terms "Great Lands", "Outer Lands", and "Hither Lands" to describe the same region in his stories. "Middle-earth" is specifically intended to describe the lands east of the Great Sea (Belegaer), thus excluding Aman, but including Harad and other mortal lands not visited in Tolkien's stories. Many people apply the name to the entirety of Tolkien's world or exclusively to the lands described in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. In ancient Germanic and Old Norse mythology, the universe was believed to consist of nine physical worlds joined together. The world of Men, the Middle-earth, lay in the centre of this universe. The lands of Elves, Gods, and Giants lay across an encircling sea. The land of the Dead lay beneath the Middle-earth. A rainbow bridge, Bifrost Bridge, extended from Middle-earth to Asgard across the sea. An outer sea encircled the seven other worlds (Vanaheim, Asgard, Alfheim, SvartAlfheim, Muspellheim, Nidavellir, and Jotunheim). In this conception, a "world" was more equivalent to a racial homeland than a physically separate world.

The world

Main article: Arda Arda Tolkien stated that the geography of Middle Earth was intended to align with that of our real Earth in several particulars. ([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Letters_of_J._R._R._Tolkien Letters] #294) Expanding upon this idea some suggest that [http://people.wiesbaden.netsurf.de/~lalaith/Tolkien/Grid.html if the map of Middle Earth is projected on our real Earth], and some of the most obvious climatological, botanical, and zoological similarities are aligned, the Hobbits' Shire might lie in the temperate climate of England, Gondor might lie in the Mediterranean Italy and Greece, Mordor in the arid Turkey and Middle East, South Gondor and Near Harad in the deserts of Northern Africa, Rhovanion in the forests of Germany and the steppes of Western and Southern Russia, and the Ice Bay of Forochel in the fjords of Norway. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are presented as Tolkien's retelling of events depicted in the Red Book of Westmarch, which was written by Bilbo Baggins, Frodo Baggins, and other Hobbits, and corrected and annotated by one or more Gondorian scholars. Like Shakespeare's King Lear or Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian stories, the tales occupy a historical period that could not have actually existed. Dates for the length of the year and the phases of the moon, along with descriptions of constellations, firmly fix the world as Earth, no longer than several thousand years ago. Years after publication, Tolkien 'postulated' in a letter that the action of the books takes place roughly 6,000 years ago, though he was not certain. Tolkien wrote extensively about the linguistics, mythology and history of the world, which provide back-story for these stories. Many of these writings were edited and published posthumously by his son Christopher. Notable among them is The Silmarillion, which provides a Bible-like creation story and description of the cosmology which includes Middle-earth. The Silmarillion is the primary source of information about Valinor, Númenor, and other lands. Also notable are Unfinished Tales and the multiple volumes of The History of Middle-earth, which includes many incomplete stories and essays as well as numerous drafts of Tolkien's Middle Earth mythology, from the earliest forms down through the last writings of his life.

Cosmology

Main article: Ainulindalë The supreme deity of Tolkien's universe is called Eru Ilúvatar. In the beginning, Ilúvatar created spirits named the Ainur and he taught them to make music. After the Ainur had become proficient in their skills, Ilúvatar commanded them to make a great music based on a theme of his own design. The most powerful Ainu, Melkor (later called Morgoth or "Dark Enemy" by the elves), Tolkien's equivalent of Satan, disrupted the theme, and in response Ilúvatar introduced new themes that enhanced the music beyond the comprehension of the Ainur. The movements of their song laid the seeds of much of the history of the as yet unmade universe and the people who were to dwell therein. Then Ilúvatar stopped the music and he revealed its meaning to the Ainur through a Vision. Moved by the Vision, many of the Ainur felt a compelling urge to experience its events directly. Ilúvatar therefore created Eä, the universe itself, and some of the Ainur went down into the universe to share in its experience. But upon arriving in Eä, the Ainur found it was shapeless because they had entered at the beginning of Time. The Ainur undertook great labours in these unnamed "ages of the stars", in which they shaped the universe and filled it with many things far beyond the reach of Men. In time, however, the Ainur formed Arda, the abiding place of the Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men. The fifteen most powerful Ainur are called the Valar, of whom Melkor was the most powerful, but Manwë was the leader. The Valar settled in Arda to watch over it and help prepare it for the awakening of the Children. Arda began as a single flat world, which the Valar gave light to through two immense lamps. Melkor destroyed the lamps and brought darkness to the world. The Valar retreated to the extreme western regions of Arda, where they created the Two Trees to give light to their new homeland. After many ages, the Valar imprisoned Melkor to punish and rehabilitate him, and to protect the awakening Children. But when Melkor was released on parole he poisoned the Two Trees. The Valar took the last two living fruit of the Two Trees and used them to create the Moon and Sun, which remained a part of Arda but were separate from Ambar (the world). Before the end of the Second Age, when the Men of Númenor rebelled against the Valar, Ilúvatar destroyed Númenor, separated Valinor from the rest of Arda, and formed new lands, making the world round. Only Endor remained of the original world, and Endor had now become Eurasia.

Geography

J.R.R. Tolkien never finalized the geography for the entire world associated with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. In The Shaping of Middle-earth, volume IV of The History of Middle-earth, Christopher Tolkien published several remarkable maps, of both the original flat earth and round world, which his father had created in the latter part of the 1930s. Karen Wynn Fonstad drew from these maps to develop detailed, but non-canonical, "whole world maps" reflecting a world consistent with the historical ages depicted in The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. Maps prepared by Christopher Tolkien and/or J.R.R. Tolkien for the world encompassing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were published as foldouts or illustrations in The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Early conceptions of the maps provided in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings were included in several volumes, including "The First Silmarillion Map" in The Shaping of Middle-earth, "The First Map of the Lord of the Rings" in The Treason of Isengard, "The Second Map (West)" and "The Second Map (East)" in The War of the Ring, and "The Second Map of Middle-earth west of the Blue Mountains" (also known as "The Second Silmarillion Map") in The War of the Jewels. Endor, the Quenya term for Middle-earth, was originally conceived of as conforming to a largely symmetrical scheme which was marred by Melkor. The symmetry was defined by two large sub-continents, one in the north and one in the south, with each of them boasting two long chains of mountains in the eastward and westward regions. The mountain chains were given names based on colours (White Mountains, Blue Mountains, Grey Mountains, and Red Mountains). The various conflicts with Melkor resulted in the shapes of the lands being distorted. Originally, there was a single inland body of water, in the midst of which was set the island of Almaren where the Valar lived. When Melkor destroyed the lamps of the Valar which gave light to the world, two vast seas were created, but Almaren and its lake were destroyed. The northern sea became the Sea of Helcar (Helkar). The lands west of the Blue Mountains became Beleriand (meaning, "the land of the Valar"). Melkor raised the Misty Mountains to impede the progress of the Vala Orome as he hunted Melkor's beasts during the period of darkness prior to the awakening of the Elves. The violent struggles during the War of Wrath between the Host of the Valar and the armies of Melkor at the end of the First Age brought about the destruction of Beleriand. It is also possible that during this time the inland sea of Helcar was drained. The world, not including associated celestial bodies, was identified by Tolkien as "Ambar" in several texts, but also identified as "Imbar", the Habitation, in later post-LoTR texts. From the time of the destruction of the two lamps until the time of the Downfall of Númenor, Ambar was supposed to be a "flat world", in that its habitable land-masses were all arranged on one side of the world. His sketches show a disk-like face for the world which looked up to the stars. A western continent, Aman, was the home of the Valar (and the Eldar). The middle lands, Endor, were called "Middle-earth" and the site of most of Tolkien's stories. The eastern continent was not inhabited. When Melkor poisoned the Two Trees of the Valar and fled from Aman back to Endor, the Valar created the Sun and the Moon, which were separate bodies (from Ambar) but still parts of Arda (the Realm of the Children of Ilúvatar). A few years after publishing The Lord of the Rings, in a note associated with the unique narrative story "Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth" (which is said to occur in Beleriand during the War of the Jewels), Tolkien equated Arda with the Solar System; because Arda by this point consisted of more than one heavenly body. According to the accounts in both The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, when Ar-Pharazôn invaded Aman to seize immortality from the Valar, they laid down their guardianship of the world and Ilúvatar intervened, destroying Númenor, removing Aman "from the circles of the world", and reshaping Ambar into the round world of today. Akallabêth says that the Númenóreans who survived the Downfall sailed as far west as they could in search of their ancient home, but their travels only brought them around the world back to their starting points. Hence, before the end of the Second Age, the transition from "flat Earth" to "round Earth" had been completed. The Endor continent became approximately equivalent to the Eurasian land-mass, but Tolkien's fictional geography does not provide any exact correlations between the narrative of The Lord of the Rings and Europe or near-by lands. It is therefore assumed that the reader understands the world underwent a subsequent undocumented transformation (which some people speculate Tolkien would have equated with the Biblical deluge) sometime after the end of the Third Age.

Peoples

Main article: List of Middle-earth peoples Middle-earth is home to several distinct intelligent species. First are the Ainur, angelic beings created by Ilúvatar. The Ainur sing for Ilúvatar, who creates Eä to give existence to their music in the cosmological myth called the Ainulindalë, or "Music of the Ainur". Some of the Ainur then enter Eä, and the greatest of these are called the Valar. Melkor (later called Morgoth), the chief personification of evil in Eä, is initially one of the Valar. The other Ainur who enter Eä are called the Maiar. In the First Age the most active Maia is Melian, wife of the Elven King Thingol; in the Third Age, during the War of the Ring, five of the Maiar have been embodied and sent to Endor to help the free peoples to overthrow Sauron. Those are the Istari (or Wise Ones) (called Wizards by Men), including Gandalf, Saruman, Radagast, Alatar and Pallando. There were also evil Maiar, called Umaiar, including the Balrogs and the second Dark Lord Sauron. Later come the Children of Ilúvatar: Elves and Men, intelligent beings created by Ilúvatar alone. The Silmarillion tells how Elves and Men awaken and spread through the world. The Dwarves are said to have been made by the Vala Aulë, who offered to destroy them when Ilúvatar confronted him. Ilúvatar forgives Aulë's transgression and adopts the Dwarves. Three tribes of Men who ally themselves with the Elves of Beleriand in the First Age are called the Edain. As a reward for their loyalty and suffering in the Wars of Beleriand, the descendants of the Edain are given the island of Númenor to be their home. But as described in the section on Middle-earth's history, Númenor is eventually destroyed and a remnant of the Númenóreans establish realms in the northern lands of Endor. Those who remained faithful to the Valar found the kingdoms of Arnor and Gondor. They are then known as the Dúnedain, whereas other Númenórean survivors, still devoted to evil but living far to the south, become known as the Black Númenóreans. Tolkien identified Hobbits as an offshoot of the race of Men. Although their origins and ancient history are not known, Tolkien implied that they settled in the Vales of Anduin early in the Third Age, but after a thousand years the Hobbits began migrating west over the Misty Mountains into Eriador. Eventually, many Hobbits settled in the Shire. After they are granted true life by Ilúvatar, the Dwarves' creator Aulë lays them to sleep in hidden mountain locations. Ilúvatar awakens the Dwarves only after the Elves have awakened. The Dwarves spread throughout northern Endor and eventually found seven kingdoms. Two of these kingdoms, Nogrod and Belegost, befriend the Elves of Beleriand against Morgoth in the First Age. But the greatest Dwarf kingdom is Khazad-dum, later known as Moria. The Ents, shepherds of the trees, are created by Ilúvatar at the Vala Yavanna's request to protect trees from the deprivations of Elves, Dwarves, and Men. Orcs and Trolls are evil creatures bred by Morgoth. They are not original creations but rather "mockeries" of the Children of Ilúvatar and Ents, since only Ilúvatar has the ability to give being to things. The detailed origins of Orcs and Trolls are unclear (Tolkien considered many possibilities and frequently changed his mind). It seems most likely that the Orcs were bred largely from corrupted Elves or Men or both. Late in the Third Age, the Uruks or Uruk-hai appear: a race of Orcs of great size and strength. (Some claim that by the end of the Third Age, the only Uruks properly called Uruk-hai are those serving Saruman.) And Saruman breeds Orcs and Men together to produce "Men-orcs" and "Orc-men"; at times, some of these are called "half-orcs" or "goblin-men". (There is no consensus as to whether Saruman's Uruk-hai were among these. The books contain no hint of the "pod grown" Uruk-hai portrayed in Peter Jackson's recent movie trilogy.) Seemingly sapient animals also appear, such as the Eagles, Huan the Great Hound from Valinor, and the Wargs. The Eagles are created by Ilúvatar along with the Ents, but in general these animals' origins and nature are unclear. Some of them might be Maiar in animal form, or perhaps even the offspring of Maiar and normal animals.

Languages

Main article: Languages of Middle-earth Tolkien devised two main Elven languages which would later become known to us as Quenya, spoken by the Vanyar, Noldor, and some Teleri, and Sindarin, spoken by the Elves who stayed in Beleriand (see below). These languages were related, and a Common Eldarin form ancestral to them both is postulated. Other languages of the world include
- Adûnaic – spoken by the Númenóreans
- Black Speech – devised by Sauron for his slaves to speak
- Khuzdûl – spoken by the Dwarves
- Rohirric – spoken by the Rohirrim – represented in the Lord of the Rings by Old English
- Westron – the 'Common Speech' – represented by English
- Valarin – the language of the Ainur.

History of Middle-earth

Main article: History of Arda The history of Middle-earth is divided into three time periods, known as the Years of the Lamps, Years of the Trees and Years of the Sun. The Years of the Lamps began shortly after the Valar finished their labours in shaping Arda. The Valar created two lamps to illuminate the world, and the Vala Aulë forged great towers, one in the furthest north, and another in the deepest south. The Valar lived in the middle, at the island of Almaren. Melkor's destruction of the two Lamps marked the end of the Years of the Lamps. Melkor Then Yavanna made the Two Trees named Telperion and Laurelin in the land of Aman. The Trees illuminated Aman, leaving the rest of Arda in darkness, illuminated only by the stars. At the start of the First Age the Elves awoke beside Lake Cuiviénen in the east of Endor, and were soon approached by the Valar. Many of the Elves were persuaded to undertake the Great Journey westwards towards Aman, but not all of them completed the journey (see Sundering of the Elves). The Valar had imprisoned Melkor but he appeared to repent and was released on parole. He sowed great discord among the Elves and stirred up rivalry between the Elven princes Fëanor and Fingolfin. He then slew their father, king Finwë and stole the Silmarils, three gems crafted by Fëanor that contained light of the Two Trees, from his vault, and destroyed the Trees themselves. Fëanor persuaded most of his people, the Noldor, to leave Aman in pursuit of Melkor to Beleriand, cursing him with the name Morgoth. Fëanor led the first of two groups of Noldor. The larger group was led by Fingolfin. The Noldor stopped at the Teleri's port-city, Alqualondë, but the Teleri refused to give them ships to get to Middle-earth. The first Kinslaying thus ensued, Fëanor and many of his followers attacked the Teleri and stole their ships. Fëanor's host sailed on the stolen ships, leaving Fingolfin's behind to cross over to Middle-earth through the deadly Helcaraxë (or Grinding Ice) in the far north. Subsequently Fëanor was slain, but most of his sons survived and founded realms, as did Fingolfin and his heirs. Helcaraxë The Years of the Sun began when the Valar made the Sun and it rose over the world, Imbar. After several great battles, a Long Peace ensued for four hundred years, during which time the first Men entered Beleriand by crossing over the Blue Mountains. When Morgoth broke the siege of Angband, one by one the Elven kingdoms fell, even the hidden city of Gondolin. The only measurable success achieved by Elves and Men came when Beren of the Edain and Luthien, daughter of Thingol and Melian, retrieved a Silmaril from the crown of Morgoth. Afterward, Beren and Luthien died, and were restored to life by the Valar with the understanding that Luthien was to become mortal and Beren should never be seen by Men again. Thingol quarrelled with the Dwarves of Nogrod and they slew him, stealing the Silmaril. With the help of Ents, Beren waylaid the Dwarves and recovered the Silmaril, which he gave to Luthien. Soon afterwards, both Beren and Luthien died again. The Silmaril was given to their son Dior Half-Elven, who had restored the Kingdom of Doriath. The sons of Fëanor demanded that Dior surrender the Silmaril to them, and he refused. The Fëanorians destroyed Doriath and killed Dior in the second Kinslaying, but Dior's young daughter Elwing escaped with the jewel. Three sons of Fëanor – Celegorm, Curufin, and Caranthir – died trying to retake the jewel. By the end of the age, all that remained of the free Elves and Men in Beleriand was a settlement at the mouth of the River Sirion. Among them was Eärendil, who married Elwing. But the Fëanorians again demanded the Silmaril be returned to them, and after their demand was rejected they resolved to take the jewel by force, leading to the third Kinslaying. Eärendil and Elwing took the Silmaril across the Great Sea, to beg the Valar for pardon and aid. The Valar responded. Melkor was captured, most of his works were destroyed, and he was banished beyond the confines of the world into the Door of Night. The Silmarils were recovered at a terrible cost, as Beleriand itself was broken and began to sink under the sea. Feanor's remaining sons Maedhros and Maglor were ordered to return to Valinor. They proceeded to steal the Simarils from the victorious Valar. But the power of the Simarils was too great for them to hold. Each of the brothers met their fate, one falling into the chasm of fire and the other throwing the jewel into the sea. Thus began the Second Age. The Edain were given the island of Númenor toward the west of the Great Sea as their home, while many Elves were welcomed into the West. The Númenóreans became great seafarers, but also became increasingly jealous of the Elves for their immortality. But after a few centuries, Sauron, Morgoth's chief servant, began to organize evil creatures in the eastern lands. He persuaded Elven smiths in Eregion to create Rings of Power, and secretly forged the One Ring to control the other rings. But the Elves became aware of Sauron's plan as soon as he put the One Ring on his hand, and they removed their own Rings before he could master their wills. the One Ring The last Númenórean king Ar-Pharazôn, by the strength of his army, humbled even Sauron and brought him to Númenor as a hostage. But with the help of the One Ring, Sauron deceived Ar-Pharazôn and convinced the king to invade Aman, promising immortality for all those who set foot on the Undying Lands. Amandil, chief of those still faithful to the Valar, tried to sail west to seek their aid. His son Elendil and grandsons Isildur and Anárion prepared to flee east to Middle-earth. When the King's forces landed on Aman, the Valar called for Ilúvatar to intervene. The world was changed, and Aman was removed from Imbar. From that time onward, Men could no longer find Aman, but Elves seeking passage in specially hallowed ships received the grace of using the Straight Road, which led from Middle-earth's seas to the seas of Aman. Númenor was utterly destroyed, and with it the fair body of Sauron, but his spirit endured and fled back to Middle-Earth. Elendil and his sons escaped to Endor and founded the realms of Gondor and Arnor. Sauron soon rose again, but the Elves allied with the Men to form the Last Alliance and defeated him. His One Ring was taken from him by Isildur, but not destroyed. The Third Age saw the rise in power of the realms of Arnor and Gondor, and their decline. By the time of The Lord of the Rings, Sauron had recovered much of his former strength, and was seeking the One Ring. He discovered that it was in the possession of a Hobbit and sent out the nine Ringwraiths to retrieve it. The Ring-bearer, Frodo Baggins, travelled to Rivendell, where it was decided that the Ring had to be destroyed in the only way possible: casting it into the fires of Mount Doom. Frodo set out on the quest with eight companions—the Fellowship of the Ring. At the last moment he failed, but with the intervention of the creature Gollum—who was saved by the pity of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins—the Ring was nevertheless destroyed. Frodo with his companion Sam Gamgee were hailed as heroes. Sauron was destroyed forever and his spirit dissipated. The end of the Third Age marked the end of the dominion of the Elves and the beginning of the dominion of Men. As the Fourth Age began, many of the Elves who had lingered in Middle-earth left for Valinor, never to return; those who remained behind would "fade" and diminish. The Dwarves eventually dwindled away as well. The Dwarves eventually returned in large numbers and resettled Moria. Peace was restored between Gondor and the lands to the south and east. Eventually, the tales of the earlier Ages became legends, the truth behind them forgotten.

Books

Works by Tolkien


- 1937 The Hobbit
  - The Hobbit Bilbo Baggins joins a company of Dwarves and the Wizard Gandalf in a quest to reclaim an old Dwarvish kingdom from the dragon Smaug.
- 1954 The Fellowship of the Ring, part 1 of The Lord of the Rings
  - Bilbo's cousin and heir Frodo Baggins sets out on a quest to rid Middle-earth of the One Ring, joined by the Fellowship of the Ring.
- 1954 The Two Towers, part 2 of The Lord of the Rings
  - The Fellowship is split apart: while Frodo and his servant Sam continue their quest, Aragorn, Gimli and Legolas fight to rescue the hobbits Peregrin Took (Pippin) and Meriadoc Brandybuck (Merry) from Orcs and to save the Kingdom of Rohan.
- 1955 The Return of the King, part 3 of The Lord of the Rings
  - Frodo and Sam reach Mordor, while Aragorn arrives in Gondor and reclaims his heritage.
- 1962 The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book
  - An assortment of poems, only loosely related to The Lord of the Rings
- 1967 The Road Goes Ever On
  - A song cycle with the composer Donald Swann (long out of print but reprinted in 2002) Tolkien died in 1973. All further works were edited by Christopher Tolkien. Only The Silmarillion portrays itself as a finished work — the others are collections of notes and draft versions.
- 1977 The Silmarillion
  - The history of the Elder Days, before the Lord of the Rings, including the Downfall of Númenor
- 1980 Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
  - Stories and essays related to the Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings, but many were never completed. The History of Middle-earth series:
- 1983 The Book of Lost Tales 1
- 1984 The Book of Lost Tales 2
  - The earliest versions of the mythology, from start to finish
- 1985 The Lays of Beleriand
  - Two long poems (the Lay of Leithian about Beren and Lúthien, and the Túrin saga)
- 1986 The Shaping of Middle-earth
  - Start of rewriting the mythology from the beginning
- 1987 The Lost Road and Other Writings
  - Introduction of Numenor to the mythology and continuation of rewriting
- 1988 The Return of the Shadow (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.1)
- 1989 The Treason of Isengard (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.2)
- 1990 The War of the Ring (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.3)
- 1992 Sauron Defeated (The History of The Lord of the Rings v.4)
  - The development of the Lord of the Rings, from 'The Hobbit 2' to what would become more a sequel for 'The Silmarillion'. Sauron Defeated also includes another version of the Numenor connection
- 1993 Morgoth's Ring (The Later Silmarillion, part one)
- 1994 The War of the Jewels (The Later Silmarillion, part two)
  - Post Lord of the Rings efforts to revise the mythology for publication. Includes the controversial 'Myths Transformed' section, which documents how Tolkien's thoughts changed radically in the last years of his life.
- 1996 The Peoples of Middle-earth
  - Source material for the appendices in The Lord of the Rings and some more late writings related to The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings.
- 2002 History of Middle-earth: Index
  - This book has completely integrated all of the indices from the previous twelve volumes into one large index.

Works by others

A small selection of the dozens of books about Tolkien and his worlds:
- 1978 The Complete Guide to Middle-earth (ISBN 0345449762, Robert Foster, generally recognised as the best reference book on The Lord of the Rings. This guide does not include information from Unfinished Tales or the History of Middle-earth series, which leads to some errors by our choice of "canon" above.)
- 2004 The Annotated Hobbit, Douglas Anderson, a comprehensive study of the publication history of The Hobbit.
- 1981 The Atlas of Middle-earth (Karen Wynn Fonstad – an atlas of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and The Unfinished Tales; revised 1991)
- 1981 Journeys of Frodo (Barbara Strachey – an atlas of The Lord of the Rings)
- 1983 The Road to Middle-earth (Tom Shippey – literary analysis of Tolkien's stories from the perspective of a fellow philologist; last revised 2003)
- 2002 The Complete Tolkien Companion (ISBN 0330411659, J. E. A. Tyler – a reference, covers The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and Unfinished Tales; substantially improved over the two earlier editions.)

Adaptations

Films

In letter #202 to Christopher Tolkien, J. R. R. Tolkien set out his policy regarding film adaptations of his works: "Art or Cash". He sold the film rights for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in 1969 after being faced with a sudden tax bill. They are currently in the hands of Tolkien Enterprises, which has no relation to the Tolkien Estate, which retains film rights to The Silmarillion and other works. The first adaptation to be shown was The Hobbit in 1977, made by Rankin-Bass studios. This was initially shown on United States television. The following year (1978), a movie entitled The Lord of the Rings was released, produced and directed by Ralph Bakshi; it was an adaptation of the first half of the story, using rotoscope animation. Although relatively faithful to the story, it was neither a commercial nor a critical success. In 1980, Rankin-Bass produced a TV special covering roughly the last half of The Lord of the Rings, called The Return of the King. However, this did not follow on directly from the end of the Bakshi film. Plans for a live-action version would wait until the late 1990s to be realised. These were directed by Peter Jackson and funded by New Line Cinema with backing from the New Zealand government and banking system.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) The films were a huge box office and critical success and together won seventeen Oscars (at least one in each applicable category for a fictional, English language, live-action feature film, except in the acting categories). However, in adapting the works to film, changes in the storyline and characters offended some fans of the books.

Games

The works of Tolkien have been a major influence on role-playing games along with others such as Robert E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, H. P. Lovecraft, and Michael Moorcock. Although the most famous game to be inspired partially by the setting was Dungeons & Dragons, there have been two specifically Middle-earth based and licensed games. These are the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game from Decipher Inc. and the Middle Earth Role Play game (MERP) from Iron Crown Enterprises. A Middle Earth play-by-mail game was originally run by Flying Buffalo and is now produced by Middle Earth Games; this game was inducted into the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts & Design's Hall of Fame in 1997. Simulations Publications created three war games based on Tolkien's work. War of the Ring covered most of the events in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Gondor focused on the battle of Pelennor Fields, and Sauron covered the Second Age battle before the gates of Mordor. A war game based on the Lord of the Rings movies is currently being produced by Games Workshop. A board game also called War of the Ring is currently published by Fantasy Flight Games. The computer game Angband is a free roguelike D&D-style game that features many characters from Tolkien's works. The most complete list of Tolkien-inspired computer games can be found at http://www.lysator.liu.se/tolkien-games/ EA Games has released games for the gaming consoles and the PC platform. These include The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Battle for Middle Earth, and The Third Age. Vivendi released The Fellowship of the Ring while Sierra created The War of the Ring, both games that proved highly unsuccessful. Apart from this game, many commercial computer games have been released. Some of these derived their rights from the Estate, such as The Hobbit — others from the movie and merchandising rights.

External links


- [http://www.glyphweb.com/arda/default.htm Encyclopedia of Arda] – a large online source for the names from Tolkien's works. Many of the entries are incomplete, as it is constantly being updated, and some are incorrect. It has been used as a source.
- [http://www.lotrlibrary.com/ Lord of the Rings Library] – another online source for Middle Earth facts.
- [http://www.uib.no/People/hnohf Ardalambion] – This is a great site for anyone who wants to delve into the languages of Middle-earth. Recommended for anyone who wants to learn Quenya.
- [http://tolkien.slimy.com/ The Tolkien Meta-FAQ] – Summaries of common discussions about Tolkien and Middle-earth, from basic questions to expert debates.
- [http://www.merp.com/essays/MichaelMartinez/ Michael Martinez Tolkien Essays] – A large collection of essays on Tolkien and Middle-earth.
- [http://www.thetolkienwiki.org/ The Tolkien Wiki] – The first wikiweb dedicated to the literary works of J. R. R. Tolkien. Contains a compendium, book-descriptions, essays, FAQ, etc.
- [http://fan.theonering.net/ The One Ring.net] – A site with multiple examples of Tolkien Fanart, Fanwriting, and a little bit of facts.
- [http://www.lordoftherings.net/ The Lord of the Rings official movie site] – the official movie website. It contains information on the movie and the books.
- [http://www.tednasmith.com/tolkien.html Ted Nasmith – Tolkien Illustrations] – The website of Tolkien illustrator Ted Nasmith, which includes galleries of illustrations for several books.
- [http://tolkiengateway.net/ Tolkien Gateway] – Tolkien site with tons of information on the books, movies, music, games, languages, etc.
- [http://www.tuckborough.net/ An Encyclopedia of Middle Earth in the Third Age] Category:Fictional continents Category:Origins award winners ko:가운데땅 ja:中つ国 (トールキン)

Awakening of the Elves

In the fiction of J. R. R. Tolkien, the Awakening of the Elves is an event which took place long before the beginning of the F