The Sheila Variations

Hi,

In brief some answers...
1. Tolkien was a linguist (philologist?) specializing in medeival languages (Old English et). I believe he published a translation of Beowulf among other things.

2. Tolkien, in his own words, detested allegory, and always denied such intentions in the LOTR.

3. The impetus to write LOTR - well that's complicated but I'm sure folks will fill in gaps and correct me...

Tolkien began writing what would become The Silmarillion while recovering in hospitals from service in the trenches. He worked on it all his life, though it was published only posthumously. IIRC, he had invested a couple of languages and felt they needed histories/stories to go along with them.

The success of The Hobbit resulted in a request for anothr book about hobbits - which in the writing become LOTR - a very different book from The Hobbit. Tolkien rooted LOTR in the vaster mythology he had been creating all his life (i.e. The Silmarillion) and LOTR is full of references to stories from that work (such as Gondolin, Numenor, Beren and Luthien).

I have also read that Tolkien was inspired by 'the northern thing' - various Icelandic and Viking sagas; also that he felt England lacked such stories of it's own and so set out to create them.

Sorry for the jumble - but I'm sure other folks will provide more. ;-)

Icelandic/viking sagas, yes, but what he specifically set out to create, at least beyond a setting in which to place and explain his fictitious languages, was "a mythology for England," something he felt that the Norman Conquest had essentially destroyed, which is I half-jokingly said he felt it was all downhill after 1066.

The Silmarillion was really his life's work, not published until after his death because he was such a fanatical perfectionist and just couldn't stop revising it for nearly sixty years: the first parts of it appear as early as 1915, and he died in 1973. If you haven't read it, you should, as it throws so much more light on LOTR.

Tolkien created two languages in great depth: Quenya, the old tongue of the Noldor, the "deep elves" of whom Galadriel and Elrond are surviving examples, and Sindarin, the language of the Elves who never went west from Middle-Earth to Valinor and which even the Noldor speak as their common language by the Third Age events in LOTR. Quenya sounds a bit like Finnish and Sindarin a bit like Welsh: those were Tolkien's two favorite "real world" languages. He also created bits and pieces of many other languages: Eldarin, the root of all the Elvish languages; Vanyarin, the language of the high elves who are all in Valinor; Adunaic, the language of the Men of Numenor (the Edain); the Black Speech of Mordor; and Khuzdul, the language of the Dwarves. Those are the ones that come to mind, anyway, although I'm sure there are others, and of course, Westron, the "common speech" is represented by modern English while the language of the Rohirrim is represented by Anglo-Saxon.

If you're looking for background on Tolkien, Sheila, I'd recommend Humphrey Carpenter's authorized biography, as well as the more recent J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century by Tom Shippey, the man who succeeded him as the Merton Professor of English Language at Oxford.

Dan is right, in the preface to "Fellowship" (which I just started reading yesterday) written in the 60s, Tolkein specified that his work was in no way allegorical.

But I don't think it's a stretch to say that such a momentous event like the Second World War wouldn't have any influence on a writer who lived through it.