Корни персонажей Д.Р.Р.Толкиена

Gymnasium №2

The roots of some Tolkien’s characters.

Tolkien’s view on some events from the Bible

and archaic history.

Name: Yanov Andrey

Teacher: Mordasova L.M.

Voronezh 2004

CONTENTS

I. Introduction 3

II. Body

1. J.R.R.Tolkien: A biographical sketch

a) Tolkien’s birth 4

b) Tolkien’s childhood in South Africa 4

c) Tolkien's childhood in England 4

d) Tolkien's childhood fears 4

e) Tolkien's education at home 5

f) Tolkien's childhood books 5

g) Tolkien in elementary school 6

h) Tolkien learns some philology 6

i) Tolkien's mother dies 6

j) Tolkien in high school 7

k) Tolkien in Oxford 7

l) Tolkien after World War II 9

m) Tolkien now 10

2. The roots of some Tolkien characters 11

3. Tolkiens view on some events from

The Bible and archaic history 15

III. Conclusion 19

IV. List of used literature 20

V. Appendix 21

Introduction

I have many hobbies and one of them is reading. I like to read. Books

liberalize us, and it is just very interesting. My favorite kinds of

literature are fantasy, science fiction, myths and historical books. But

when I saw the film “The Lord Of The Rings” for the first time, I liked it

very much. I realized that there was something unusual in it that attracted

me. One day someone told me, that this film is a screen version of the

book, written by Tolkien. Then I decided to read the book. And when I read

its last page, I realized, that the world, that was described there is very

close to me. That is how my keening of Tolkien’s works started. I’ve read

the whole “The Lord Of The Rings”, “The Silmarillion”, “The Hobbit Or There

And Back Again”, some Tolkien’s poems, such as “Namarie” (which means

“farewell” in the “Quenya Lambe” (The Elvish Language)), “Oh, queen beyond

the western sees…” and other works. Besides I’ve read “The Biography Of

J.R.R.Tolkien”, written by H. Carpenter and many works of different famous

critics devoted to Tolkien. While reading such literature, I understand and

realize very interesting ideas of Tolkien, his philosophy, and it is very

interesting to know, what things influenced the creation of his characters

and his own world that he developed in “The Silmarillion”. And in my work

I’m trying to show you just some of those things.

J.R.R.Tolkien: A biographical sketch

Tolkien's birth

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born to Mabel Suffield and Arthur Tolkien in

South Africa on January 3, 1892.

On February 17,1894, Mabel gave birth to Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien,

J.R.R's only brother.

When Ronald (J.R.R)'s health worsened in 1895, the Tolkiens (except for

Arthur, who had to stay in order to wrap up business) left to Southampton.

On February 15, 1896, Arthur Tolkien, in South Africa, died due to a severe

hemorrhage.

Tolkien's childhood in South Africa

". . . many months later, when Ronald was beginning to walk, he stumbled on

a tarantula. It bit him, and he ran in terror across the garden until the

nurse snatched him up and sucked out the poison . . . Nevertheless, in his

stories he writes more than once of monstrous spiders with venomous bites"

(Carpenter 14)

"During the first year of the boy's life Arthur Tolkien made a small grove

of cypresses, firs and cedars. Perhaps this had something to do with the

deep love of trees that wood that would develop in Ronald" (Carpenter 14)

Tolkien's childhood in England

Since his father (the sole source of money) was dead, J.R.R. and his family

went to live with the Suffields (his maternal grandparents).

In the summer of 1896, the Tolkiens moved out of Birmingham to the hamlet

of Sarehole (located in the English countryside).

Tolkien's childhood fears

"An old farmer who once chased Ronald for picking mushrooms was given the

nickname 'The Black Ogre' by the boys . . . they began to pick up something

of the local vocabulary, adopting dialect words into their own speech:

'chawl' for a cheek of pork, 'miskin' for dustbin, 'pickelet' for crumpet,

and 'gamgee' for cotton wool. (Carpenter 21)

Tolkien's education at home

"Mabel soon began to educate her sons, and they could have had no better

teacher - nor she an apter pupil than Ronald, who could read by the time he

was four and had soon learnt to write proficiently." (Carpenter 21).

". . . his favorite lessons were those that concerned languages. Early in

his Sarehole days, his mother introduced him to the rudiments of Latin, and

this delighted him. He was just as interested in the sounds of the words as

their meanings, and she began to realize that he had a special aptitude for

language. (Carpenter 22).

"His mother taught him a great deal of botany, and he responded to this and

soon became very knowledgeable. But again he was more interested in the

shape and feel of a plant than in its botanical details. This was

especially true of trees. And though he liked drawing trees he liked most

of all to be with trees. He would climb them, lean against them, even talk

to them." (Carpenter 22)

Tolkien's childhood books

"He was amused by Alice in Wonderland, though he had no desire to have

adventures like Alice. He did not enjoy Treasure Island, nor the stories of

Hans Anderson, nor The Pied Piper. But he liked Red Indian stories and

longed to shoot with a bow and arrow. He was even more pleased by the

'Curdie' books of George Macdonald, which were set in a remote kingdom

where misshapen and malevolent goblins lurked beneath the mountains. The

Arthurian legends also excited him. But most of all he found delight in the

Fairy Books of Andrew Lang, especially the Red Fairy Book, for tucked away

in its closing pages was the best story he had ever read. This was the tale

of Sigurd who slew the dragon Fafnir: a strange and powerful tale set in

the nameless North." (Carpenter 22)

Tolkien's first experience with grammer

"'I desired dragons with a profound desire,', he said long afterwards. . .

. When he was about seven he began to compose his own story about a dragon.

'I remember nothing about it except a philological fact,' he recalled. 'My

mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not

say 'a green great dragon', but had to say 'a great green dragon'. I

wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly

significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many

years, and was taken up with language.'" (Carpenter 24)

Tolkien in elementary school

In September of 1900, J.R.R. Tolkien entered into King Edward's School.

In order to prevent Ronald from walking several miles between the

countryside home and school, the Tolkiens moved from Sarehole to

Birmingham.

Due to school conflicts, Ronald Tolkien was transferred to King Phillip's

Academy for a short period.

Tolkien learns some philology

". . . he especially remembered 'the bitter disappointment and disgust from

schooldays with the shabby use made in Shakespeare of the coming of 'Great

Birnam Wood to high Dunisiane hill'; 'I longed to devise a setting by which

the trees might really march to war" (Carpenter 28)

"By inclination, his form-master Brewerton was a medievalist . . . if a boy

employed the term 'manure' Brewerton would roar out: 'Manure? Call it muck!

Say it three times! Muck, muck muck!'. He encouraged his students to read

Chaucer, and he recited the Canterbury Tales to them in the original Middle

English. To Ronald Tolkien's ears, this was a revelation, and he determined

to learn more about the history of the language." (Carpenter 28)

Tolkien's mother dies

"The New Year [1904] did not begin well. Ronald and Hilary were confined to

bed with measles followed by whooping-cough, and in Hilary's case by

pneumonia. The addition strain of nursing them proved too much for their

mother, and as she feard it proved 'impossible to go on'. By April 1904 she

was in hospital, and her condition was diagnosed as diabetes." (Carpenter

29)

"At the beginning of November 1904, she sank into a diabetic coma, and six

days later, on November 14, she died." (Carpenter 30)

". . . Perhaps his mother's death also had a cementing effect on his study

of languages. It was she, after all, who had been his first teacher and who

had encouraged him to take an interest in words. Now that she was gone he

would pursue that path relentlessly. And certainly the loss of his mother

had a profound effect on his personality. It made him into a pessimist . .

. Nothing was safe. Nothing would last. No battle would be won for ever."

(Carpenter 31)

Related to philosophy of THE LORD OF THE RINGS: Middle-Earth is never, ever

free from evil. The Simillirion states that Middle-Earth is destroyed and

all live in Valinor (quasi Middle-Earth) after the death of Morgroth (by

Turin, son of Thor).

Tolkien lives with his mother's aunt-in-law (in urban Edgbaston) along with

his brother Hillary.

"His feelings towards the rural landscape, already sharp from the earlier

severance that had taken him from Sarehole, now become emotionally charged

with personal bereavement. This love for the memory of the countryside of

his youth was later to become a central part of his writing, and it was

intimately bound up with his love for the memory of his mother." (Carpenter

32-3)

Tolkien in high school

"Headmaster Gilson also encouraged his pupils to make a detailed study of

classical linguistics. This was entirely in keeping with Tolkien's

inclinations; and, partly as a result in the general principles of

language" (Carpenter 34)

"It was one thing to know Latin, Greek, French, and German; it was another

to understand why they were what they were. Tolkien had started to look for

the bones, the elements that were common to them all: he had begun, in

fact, to study philology, the science of words." (Carpenter 34)

Tolkien studies all languages (Studies Chaucer, Beowulf, Old Norse, Gothic)

"He continued his search for the 'bones' behind all these languages,

rummaging in the school library and exploring the remoter shelves of

Cornish's bookshop down the road. Eventually he began to find - and to

scrape enough money to buy - German books on philology that were 'dry-as-

dust' but which could provide the answers to his questions. Philology: 'the

love of words'. For that was what motivated him. It was not an arid

interest in the scientific principles of language; it was a deep love for

the look and sound of words, springing from the days when his mother had

given him his first Latin lessons . . . And as a result of this love of

words, he had started to invent his own words" (Carpenter 35) Tolkien

begins to (at age 14) to create his own languages, namely 'Nevbosh', a

language filled with Gothic and Norse words.

1908 - Tolkien falls in love with Edith Bratt

1911 - Tolkien starts the Tea Club and goes to Switzerland

Tolkien in Oxford

In 1911 Tolkien entered Exeter College of Oxford. There he started writing

(poem 'Wood-sunshine'), modeled after several different authors.

"In 'Wood-sunshine' there is a distinct resemblance to an episode in the

first part of Thompson's 'Sister Songs' where the poet sees first a single

elf and then a swarm of woodland sprites in the glade; when he moves, they

vanish . . ." (Carpenter 48)

"Being taught by Joe Wright, Tolkien managed to find books of medieval

Welsh, and he began to read the language that had fascinated him since he

saw a few words of it on coal-trucks. He was not disappointed; indeed he

was confirmed in all his expectations of beauty. Beauty: that was what

pleased him in Welsh; the appearance and sound of the words almost

irrespective of their meaning. He once said: 'Most English-speaking people,

for instance, will admit that cellar door is 'beautiful', especially if

disassociated from its sense (and its spelling). More beautiful than, say

sky, and far more beautiful than beautiful'." (Carpenter 56-7)

Tolkien starts advanced languages (new): "He abandoned neo-Gothic and began

to create a private language that was heavily influenced by Finnish. This

was the language that would eventually emerge in his stories as 'Quenya' or

High-elven. That would not happen for many years; yet already a seed of

what was to come was germinating in his mind" (Carpenter 59)

1913 - Tolkien graduates from three-year program with second-class honors

and proceeds to study philology in graduate school.

At the same period Tolkien reads Cynewulf - "'I felt a curious thrill,' he

wrote long afterwards, 'as if something had stirred in me, half wakened

from sleep. There was something very remote and strange and beautiful

behind those words, if I could grasp it, far beyond ancient English'."

(Carpenter 64) Tolkien reads the Vцluspa - "The most remarkable of all

Germanic-mythological poems, it dates from the very end of Norse

heathendom, when Christianity was taking the place of the old gods; yet it

imparts a sense of living myth, a feeling of awe and mystery, in its

representation of a pagan cosmos. It had a profound appeal to Tolkien's

imagination" (Carpenter 65) Tolkien sees Edith again (he was previously

banned to see him by Father Francis, his guardian)

Tolkien reads Morris (NOTE: Mirkwood is the name of the great Necromancer's

forest in The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy) "Written partly in

prose and partly in verse, [Morris's book] centers on a House or family-

tribe that dwells by a great river in a clearing of the forest named

Mirkwood, a name taken from ancient Germanic geography and legend. Many

elements in the story seem to have impressed Tolkien. It's style is highly

idiosyncratic, heavily laden with archaisms and poetic inversions in an

attempt to recreate the aura of ancient legend. Clearly Tolkien took not of

this, and it would seem that he also appreciated another facet of the

writing: Morris' aptitude, despite the vagueness of time and place in which

the story is set, for describing with great precision the details of his

imagined landscape. Tolkien himself was to follow Morris' example in later

year." [Carpenter 70]

In the same year Tolkien visits Cornwall [NOTE: This is the location for

the Sea in The Hobbit and LOTR] " 'Nothing I could say . . . could describe

it to you. The sun beats down on you and a huge Atlantic swell smashes and

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