Was Tolkien the Greatest Fantasy Writer Ever?
On the anniversary of his death, join me in commemorating him with five of his best quotes on writing.
“The biggest adventure is what lies ahead.” — J. R. R. Tolkien
Forty-seven years ago, the world lost a great talent when the “father” of modern fantasy fiction died at his rooms in Merton College, Oxford.
J R R (John Ronald Reuel) Tolkien was an English writer, poet, philologist* and academic who is best known for his Middle Earth novels The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Born in South Africa to an English bank manager, Arthur Tolkien, and his wife, Mabel, Tolkien returned to England with his mother and brother, Hilary, at the age of three. Sadly, his father died of rheumatic fever before he could join them.
A keen student, Tolkien could read and write at the age of four and soon became an avid reader, a habit he never lost throughout his life. Tragedy struck the young Tolkien brothers again when his mother died from acute diabetes at the age of 34. Tolkien, then only 12, and his brother were placed into the care of their mother’s friend Father Francis Morgan.
Tolkien did well at school and eventually went to Exeter College, Oxford to initially study classics, but he changed it to English language and literature from which graduated in 1915 with first-class honours.
“The world is full enough of hurts and mischances without wars to multiply them.”
At the outbreak of First World War in 1914, Tolkien made the decision to finish his degree before signing up and joining other young men at the Front. He married his sweetheart Edith Mary Bratt in March 1916 and was shipped to France in June 1916 where he was assigned as a signals officer to the 11th (Service) Battalion, Lancashire Fusiliers.
He saw action and was at the Battle of the Somme (July 1 to November 18, 1916) where many of his friends and most of his battalion were killed. He was invalided back to Britain on November 8 that same year having contracted trench fever and spent the rest of the war, weak and emaciated, either in hospital or on garrison duties, too unfit for general service.
“Darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer.”
His first job after the war was working on the Oxford English dictionary, specifically on the history and etymology of Germanic beginning with the letter W. He eventually went on to take up a position as a Rawlinson & Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College in 1925 and then the Merton Professor of English Language & Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford from 1945 to 1959.
A close friend of C S Lewis (who wrote the Narnia books amongst others) and member of the literary discussion group The Inklings, Tolkien’s most famous books The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings came out in 1937 and 1954/55 respectively.
He died at the age of 81 at Merton College, Oxford of a bleeding ulcer and chest infection on September 2, 1973.
To commemorate this great writer’s life and death, I’m sharing with you some of his best quotes on writing.
1. “The story-maker proves a successful ‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed.” — from “On Fairy-Stories” (1939 essay)
2. “The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power.” — also from “On Fairy-Stories”
3. “The significance of a myth is not easily to be pinned on paper by analytical reasoning. It is at its best when it is presented by a poet who feels rather than makes explicit what his theme portends; who presents it incarnate in the world of history and geography, as our poet has done. Its defender is thus at a disadvantage: unless he is careful, and speaks in parables, he will kill what he is studying by vivisection, and he will be left with a formal or mechanical allegory, and what is more, probably with one that will not work. For myth is alive at once and in all its parts, and dies before it can be dissected.” — “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936)
4. “Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”
5. “Fantasy remains a human right: we make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”
*philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources