“Once upon a time, a hobbit lived in a cave underground.”
There is probably not a fan of the fantasy literature genre who would not recognise this at first glance somewhat obscure and perhaps ridiculous account. Yet this simple sentence laid the foundations for a rich fantasy story that – almost a century after its creation – can boast millions of fans all over the world who carefully keep the indescribably colourful world of elves, dwarves and hobbits alive (immortal).
On 21 September 1937, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, was published by George Allen & Unwin. The first in a series of fantasy books, it was an immediate success and earned a nomination for the Carnegie Medal, still today the prestigious British prize for the best new children’s or young adult novel. The work has since become a classic of children’s literature and is now considered one of the most famous stories of all time, carefully crafted under the meticulous pen of the English writer and linguist J.R.R. Tolkien.
How is it possible that a rather simple story, originally conceived as a gift for the author’s four children, has formed the standard for all subsequent fantasy narratives?
And how much truth is there in her “childishness”?
In a duplina in South Africa
Bloemfontein, translated as the Fountain of Flowers, is now the seventh largest city in South Africa, with a population of around half a million. As the seat of the judicial branch of government, it is one of the most important cities in the country, alongside Cape Town, the legislative centre, and Pretoria, the administrative centre.
Probably best known to the general public as one of the host cities of the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it boasts the somewhat poetic name “The City of Roses”. Every year, the inhabitants organise a special festival to carefully celebrate the abundance of more than 15,000 colourful flowers that attract thousands of visitors. The event brings together all generations through socialising and fun, breathes life into the sometimes barren and desolate areas of the African Fountain, and ultimately immortalises love – the central symbolism of the rose.
But on 3 January 1892, Bloemfontein – then still part of the British Empire – was put on the world map by the birth of a banker’s son, who spent his formative years in the cradle of humanity.
John Ronald Reul Tolkien was born to Arthur Reuel Tolkien, the father of an East Prussian family of clockmakers who settled in London and Birmingham at the turn of the 17th and 18th centuries. He moved to South Africa with his chosen wife, Mabel Tolkien, née Suffield, in order to be promoted to the position of manager of a bank branch. His father’s employment enabled the family to live in dignity and on 17 February 1894 a second child was born, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, Ronald’s younger brother, with whom he and Ronald had a strong lifelong relationship.
Tolkien spent little time in Africa, and he himself later often claimed to have few memories of this more “exotic” chapter of his life. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning from this period a rather unpleasant encounter with a giant spider that crawled on Tolkien in the garden of the family estate. This bird spider, probably of the subspecies Harpactirinae, left a small unconscious mark on the boy. Although the experience did not remain in his memory in detail, it did inform his future writing and may have sprouted the first seed in the forest of an obscure literary mythos.
At the age of three, the children and their mother travelled to England to live with their grandparents and other relatives. Initially planned as a longer visit to allow the children to get to know their mother’s side of the family, with whom they would otherwise have little contact, it turned into a nightmare. Before he could join the family on the trip, Tolkien’s father Arthur contracted rheumatic fever, which in some cases leads to heart valves failing.
This left the family without any income, forcing the mother to move with her children to live with her parents in Kings Heath, a suburb in the south of Birmingham, England. Just a few months later, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole, then in the southern part of Worcestershire, which was later annexed to the aforementioned Birmingham.
Sarehole, in the heart of the Old Continent, thousands of kilometres from the City of Roses, Tolkien’s new home.
An immense love of nature and words
The distinct duality of industrial Birmingham and the idyllic, rural town of Sarehole became a constant in Tolkien’s new life. The disjuncture between the two extremes may have led to his later hatred of all things industrial, but at least in his younger years it provided him with countless opportunities to observe, admire and understand the natural and animal world in the sunny (and often cloudy) parts of the English countryside.
Mabel’s mother home-schooled her child. She insisted that they should be skilled in the written word and, perhaps surprisingly, in botany. Tolkien’s intimate knowledge of the plant kingdom finally instilled in him a great respect for nature, which he had previously enjoyed only as a keen observer.
Unlike the eight-legged garden visitor in Africa, the second seal in a succession of many that gradually formed the basis for his evolving mythology of writing, like small pebbles in a mosaic, was transformed by Tolkien’s conception of the unfolding landscapes of the surrounding countryside. He began to idealise them and to sketch them regularly; together with his countless illustrations of trees, they became a kind of synonym for education. But for all his inexhaustible creativity, his interest in botany paled in comparison with his true love – languages.
Tolkien was an extremely talented and caring student. By the age of four, he was reading books independently and soon after began to write on his own. His mother encouraged him to read and advised him on various literary genres, including the 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by the English writer and mathematician Lewis Carroll, which he found “bizarre but interesting”.
He quickly became quite proficient in Latin and Ancient Greek, the linguistic foundation of any intellectual at that time, and further honed his barely revived linguistic mastery by learning other ancient and modern languages, including Finnish and Gothic.
Mabel and her sister converted to Catholicism in 1900, a move that provoked strong disapproval in the Baptist family. As a result, they stopped supporting her financially, but this did not break her faith. She wanted to expose her sons to the more religious side of life, to the fundamental values of the Christian faith, in addition to a wide range of knowledge, and these – especially Ronald’s – have followed them throughout their lives and have left their third mark on the path of creation.
The year 1904 was again marked by tragedy. Mabel was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, for which there was no cure at the time. She died shortly after her diagnosis. Tolkien and his brother Hilary, aged 12 and 10, were left without both parents and in the care of their father, Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest from the nearby church where they were altar boys. Father Morgan respected his mother’s wishes and brought up the children in a Christian spirit.
After his mother’s death, Tolkien grew up in Edgbaston, a suburb of Birmingham, and attended King Edward’s School. There he made many friends and acquaintances, and for the first time in his life he had a more formal encounter with a very special field of linguistics – artificial languages.
The origins of languages, romance and war
Artificial or constructed language is deliberately created to facilitate communication between several groups of people who are overly constrained by the laws of their own languages. The most widespread language with such features today is Esperanto, which Tolkien learned around 1909. Before that, he had encountered the so-called Animalic language, an interesting creation of his cousins, during his schooling, but his interest in it quickly dried up.
It was quickly exchanged by his cousins and classmates for the Nebbosh language, and shortly afterwards Tolkien created Naffarin, which was inspired by Latin and Spanish. It is this language that is said to be the basis for his most famous language, Elvish, or one of its forms, Quenya.
Creating new languages quickly became Tolkien’s favourite hobby, but it was not the only area of linguistics in which he was active. With his classmates and very good friends – Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith and Christopher Wiseman – they created the T.C.B.S. (Tea Club and Barrovian Society), a semi-secret society basically dedicated to socialising on the basis of a shared affinity for tea and writing, especially poetry.
In 1911, Tolkien began studying Classical Languages at Oxford, but soon changed his mind and chose English Language and Literature. In the summer of that year, he went on holiday to Switzerland and, in the company of 11 other travellers, walked the mountain path between Interlaken and the village of Lauterbrunnen. The magnificent view of the snow-covered landscape became a new conceptual milestone on his way to creating his own fantasy world.
But the key inspiration for him was not to be found in the sun or the clouds that kept the countryside in the light or the shade of interest, nor in the exploration of flowers or the writing of new linguistic laws. The grandeur of the mountain undoubtedly captivated the twelve travellers, but his true fantasy was awakened some time before the view was recorded, leaving perhaps the last, but at the same time the greatest, creative imprint. For this time, instead of nature and words, a special muse entered Tolkien’s world.
The house address of 37 Duchess Road probably does not conjure up any associations when you read it. The house that stood on this site – now near Birmingham city centre – is described as gloomy and ghostly, decorated with dirty and unattractive lace that covered most of the furniture, most notably the curtains that stretched across all the windows. Although seemingly unattractive, it became Tolkien’s new home, as he and his brother moved there in their 16th and 14th spring, though of course still in the care of their father Morgan.
In 1908, Miss Faulkner, the serious and “unpleasant” matron of the boarding house where the brothers lived, took in a new member, Edith Mary Bratt, an orphan from Gloucester. She brought a sense of warmth and closeness to the gloomy house – she was a talented pianist and brightened up the dull days with her playing. Faulkner’s occasional grudges were a source of frustration, and she showed her stern and unyielding character by giving unusual advice. One day, she reportedly told Edith, a passionate theatre-goer, “to read books rather than talk to boys during the intervals of a play”.
But human bonds – like piano keys – are unwavering in their unpredictability; for Tolkien and Edith had a spark, and their mutual affection was more than evident to all the residents and visitors of the lace-filled house.
The lovers frequented the town’s teahouses, debated for hours and endlessly enjoyed their teenage mischief. Their favourite tearoom had a small balcony with tables on which were sugar pots. They would jokingly scatter them at random passers-by, laughing with delight at their surprise. It was more than obvious that more than just friendship had blossomed between them. Like two orphans who had been forcibly deprived of parental love, they found new love in each other and officially became a couple in the summer of 1909. But their youthful romance quickly hit a snag.
At the end of that year, Father Morgan found out about their infatuation and – convinced that the relationship was interfering with his ward’s schooling and commitments – banned Tolkien from seeing his chosen one until he was 21. Tolkien strongly opposed the decision, but had to accept it. The visits to the tearoom faded into oblivion and Edith moved to the neighbouring town of Cheltenham in the meantime.
On the eve of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote her a letter, declaring his love for her and asking for her hand in marriage. But by this time Edith – thinking Tolkien had forgotten her – had become engaged to another man. A week after the letter was sent, the lovers met at Cheltenham railway station and confessed their feelings, but Edith returned her wedding ring the same day and broke off the engagement.
The couple married on 22 March 1916, a year after Tolkien had completed his studies and military training. After a week’s holiday in Clevedon in the south of England, the two former teenage lovers could finally begin their life together. But on 22 June 1916, Tolkien received a telegram that shattered the euphoria of love – he had to report to Folkestone because he had been conscripted into the British army, two years after the start of one of the greatest conflicts in human history.
He recalled his departure for the army in one of his later writings: ‘The younger lieutenants are being killed one by one, a dozen a minute. To be forced to separate from my wife … was as if death had befallen me.”
Knowing that they might never see each other again and that correspondence through letters is often censored for security reasons, they created a special way of communicating. Code dots allowed Edith to keep a close eye on his whereabouts and, as a result, to pray to God every day that the knock at the front door would not be the announcement of her husband’s death.
Using dots and a map, she followed the Battle of the River Somme in France, arguably one of the biggest battles of the First World War, which cost more than a million military lives.
In October 1916, Tolkien (fortunately) contracted the Rovno fever, which was transmitted by thousands of lice that the soldiers had to deal with due to poor hygiene conditions and lack of proper sanitation. On 8 November, unable to fight or to help in the army camp, he was brought back to England by ship with the rest of the sick, which saved him from a probably inevitable death – most of his battalion did not survive the battle. Many of Tolkien’s friends from his youth were among the casualties of the bloody conflict – Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith of the T.C.B.S. were forever blinded in the attack on the Beaumont-Hamel Commune.
Tolkien continued to do auxiliary military work until the end of the war due to the effects of his illness, and was officially relieved of all military duties on 16 July 1919. The period of convalescence was the perfect opportunity for him to begin writing and creating the mythological world he saw as an England without war and the ills of human indiscretion.
The Seals of Imagination thus heralded the beginning of something unprecedented in the literature of the time, and at the same time pointed Tolkien towards his new mission in the world of academia.
At the crossroads of academia and fantasy
The Great War shuffled the political balance of power and caused great material damage to the economy and to everyday life, but gradually (but temporarily) it started to return to the way things were. The respite from the new, much greater darkness that descended on Europe and the world a decade and a half later brought back facets of human life that had been forgotten in the blood-drenched trenches of war. Science, art and literature once again joined hands to accompany people in their (un)violent pursuits.
Tolkien, now the youngest professor of English at the University of Leeds in England, published his Dictionary of Medieval English in 1920 and proved to be a remarkable translator of texts centuries old. The University was thus enriched by the translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a chivalric novel for which the Professor joined forces with the Canadian philologist E.V. Gordon and which became the standard for all subsequent academic interventions in medieval translation studies.
He kept his love of Middle and Old English alive with several well-known translations; the allegorical nature of Pearl and the strong lyricism of Sir Orfeo encouraged his greatest translation success, Beowulf.
Known today as one of the greatest works of Old English literature, this epic poem of 3182 verses tells the story of the eponymous Scandinavian warrior who confronts the monster Grendel and his unnamed mother. Despite its fame, the epic continues to stir ghosts among academics a thousand years after its creation, as they cannot agree on its authorship, exact time of composition and symbolism.
After 1920, Tolkien set himself the task of attempting a new translation of this complex set of alliterations, which would, in the translator’s vision, take the reader into the very temple of King Hrothgar – both into the warmth of his hall and among the stormy winter winds that echo in the ominous footsteps of the deformed antagonist.
He completed the work in 1926 and presented to the academic public of the time a new way of understanding Beowulf, based on a poetic-artistic perspective rather than on bare content and historical consistency. His contributions had a profound impact on the understanding and interpretation of the poem and, as a result, revived the conceptual basis for similar poetic analyses presented to students as a challenge to their own linguistic development.
Thus, he often began his lectures with a loud slamming of the door and a delicate silence that inspired a sense of awe among all present. After a while, knowing that he had the full attention of his audience, he began to recite the opening verses of Beowulf, in the Old English original, of course. Decades after his graduation, W. H. Auden, an Anglo-American poet and student of Tolkien, wrote a letter to his former professor thanking him for the unforgettable experience, as his interpretation was “like listening to Gandalf”, the wizard of his professor’s works.
He returned to Oxford a year before the translation was completed, in 1925, a decade after completing his honours degree. He became a lecturer in Old English or Anglo-Saxon at St John’s College.
Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon is the official title of this distinguished post at St John’s College. In its more than 200-year history, the Chair has awarded Master Linguist status to 21 (deceased) academics who specialised in the field of Anglo-Saxon language, literature and culture.
Known as the Rawlinsonian Professorship of Anglo-Saxon until 1916, it has had a strong affiliation with one of Oxford’s founding colleges, Pembroke College, since its beginnings. It was there that Tolkien produced three of his four (arguably) most famous works in more than 20 years of teaching: The Hobbit or There and Back Again and the first two parts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Combined with the remarkable knowledge of linguistics that he has gathered over decades of research and study into a linguistic corpus consisting of knowledge of dozens of modern and ancient languages and a dozen of his own constructed languages, he has created a so-called Middle World, embedded in a fantasy mythology, today most often simply referred to as Tolkien’s Mythology or Tolkien’s Legendarium.
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Following the paths of (children’s) imagination
The origins of fantasy literature go back a long way in human history. The inescapable urge to create and conjure the impossible arose from the simple desire to understand the outside world and to seek refuge beyond the confines of the human mind.
The original sources of fantasy were, of course, oral and handed down from generation to generation, but the first recognisable written form in the European context is to be found in the works of ancient Greek and Roman writers, most notably in the epic poems of Homer and Virgil and the mythical tales of Apuleius.
The events and the characters were strongly rooted in the beliefs of ancient man at the time, and the rapid development of European myths was accompanied by writing in other cultural spaces; probably the best preserved example of this type is the Arabic tales in the collection A Thousand and One Nights.
Over time, literature has followed the flow of social and technical developments, and the cultural outlines of Renaissance and humanist thought brought Boccaccio’s Decameron and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream into the world of the written word, both of which were crucial for the further development of fantasy writing.
The expansion of books after Guttenberg’s invention of printing in 1440 was unimaginable for the time. Thus, in the centuries that followed, the Enlightenment and the Romantic periods saw the development of a colourful literary world, (over)full of love and the impossible. The peak of fantasy fiction before the First World War, however, can probably reasonably be attributed to the authors of the Victorian era.
The British Empire made great economic and cultural progress under the scepter of Queen Victoria (who reigned from 1837 to 1901). World-famous authors – Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde and Charles Dodgson (already mentioned by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll) – deepened the conception of fantasy stories at that time, but despite a sharp rise in interest among the general public, they did not achieve particular sales results in the market.
Sometime in the early 1930s, critics began to take an interest in this often-overlooked literary genre – then somewhat pejoratively referred to simply as “the fairy tale” – and considered it “perhaps worthy of equal treatment with other more serious genres”. The year 1937 erased all doubts about the lack of equivalence.
Tolkien and Edith had three sons, John, Michael and Christopher, and a daughter, Priscilla, who is their only surviving child. Tolkien was very attached to them and, like his mother, raised them in the spirit of reading, languages and training the imagination. The children responded well to his lessons, seeing in him not just a father figure but a joyful storyteller. Between 1920 and 1943, he created for them an illustrated collection of letters entitled The Father Christmas Letters, in which he tells children about the adventures of Father Christmas and his helpers.
Careful literary analysis in later years has shown that some elements of the letters are directly related to the Middle World, which Tolkien first presented in a serious way in the story of Bilbo Bisagin and the Company of the Thirteen Dwarves. The honour of rescuing the fallen kingdom of Erebor from the clutches of the dragon Smaug thrilled the children almost every evening they spent together as a family.
Yet, surprisingly, his children were not the main reason why Bilbo’s journey, which Tolkien had originally set in his famous rejoinder in 1932, came to life in the form of a novel.
In the grip of the Ring of Mogota
At the end of 1932, the manuscript of the book found its way into the hands of Susan Dagnall, then an employee of George Allen & Unwin, through Tolkien’s student Elaine Griffiths. She gave it to her colleague and publishing founder Stanley Unwin to read, who – in what was already something of a chain reaction – showed it to his son Rayner.
Little did the 10-year-old boy know that he would spend most of his life as one of the directors of his father’s company. Nor did he probably have any idea that his positive reaction to Bilbo’s discovery of the unusual ring would persuade an experienced but as yet unknown professor to publish the story as a novel.
The response to the book’s publication has been very good, both among readers and critics. Tolkien was almost immediately asked by the publishers to continue the story, but political events in Europe at the time again interfered with the development of literature.
In January 1939, the Foreign Office became interested in Tolkien’s linguistic abilities. Because of his knowledge of most European languages and his acute precision, they wanted to employ him as a cryptographer to help in an imminent emergency. Tolkien agreed and began training in London in March. In October of that year, he was informed by the Ministry that the cryptography team would not require his services.
An interesting recording was made at this time, which highlights the phonetic spelling /kiːn/ or “keen”. Scholars of Tolkien’s life do not believe that this is a special code intended for transcription, but merely the correct pronunciation of the last syllable of his surname, which has often been mispronounced by readers and scholars alike.
After the end of the Second World War in 1945, Tolkien became Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College, also at Oxford, where he remained until his retirement in 1959. While pursuing the last part of his academic mission, he completed his (second) most famous work, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in 1948, thus fulfilling the (greedy) wishes of the publishing house when it was published in 1954.
The story of the famous hobbit Bilbo was thus placed in a much wider context; the rich and (over)detailed adventure of friendship, loyalty and the struggle of good against evil was originally conceived in two major parts, but after an agreement with the publisher Tolkien rearranged the structure into six books, two in a single volume, which together form a “trilogy” of high fantasy under three titles: the Fellowship of the Ring, the Tower and the King’s Return.
Each title focuses on a different part of the journey of Bilbo’s “nephew” Frodo, who, in the company of eight friends – Gandalf the wizard, Legolas the elf, Gimli the dwarf, Boromir the captain, Aragorn the future king of men, and the hobbits Samoglaw, Peregrin and Meriadoc – sets out to destroy the Ring of Mogoth, which his creator, the dark lord Sauron, wants to use to rule Middle-earth.
Like its predecessor, the trilogy was originally conceived as a children’s story, but gradually evolved into a much darker and war-torn tale at the very heart of Tolkien’s mythology. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings were later joined by The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales, encyclopaedic narratives of the history of Middle-earth, and The Fall of Gondolin, The Children of Hurin and Beren and Luthien. All of these were published after the writer’s death, edited by his son Christopher, who from an early age kept a watchful eye over his father’s ideas.
The rich expansion of mythical history, most prominently immortalised through the finding and destruction of the Ring, was not written essentially for the sake of storytelling. Tolkien, perhaps somewhat ridiculously, simply needed a concrete setting for his constructed languages. Believing that they would not survive in their own being, or that their construction would be completely forgotten over time – every philologist’s worst nightmare – he immortalised the dozens of languages he created through the adventures of hobbits, men, elves, dwarves, wizards, orcs, goblins and other mythological creatures.
Based on his writings, there are only two languages sufficiently complete to be considered “finished” today, namely Quenya, which he started as a teenager, and Sindarin (both of which can be learnt online).
Based on Greek, Finnish and Welsh grammar and phonetics, these languages are typical of Tolkien’s approach to language creation, based on aesthetics and artistry. Thus, so-called phonoaesthetics, which deals with the vocal ‘beauty’ of words, has become established in linguistics.
The immense beauty and variety of the language, which bursts forth in every corner of the writer’s imagination, once again left readers stunned. Critics have not been equally impressed this time, probably because of the over-detailed description of trivia and the slow pace of the denouement, but the Lord of the Rings – like The Hobbit, of course, and all the sequels to the Middle-earth tales – has been the subject of a great deal of analysis and discussion.
The rural beauty of the Hobbit landscape of Shayer, Bilbo’s journey to (and on) the snowy mountain, Frodo’s encounter with the giant arachnid Shelob, the incredibly detailed descriptions of forests and plants, the feelings of helplessness and despair at the very heart of warfare, and finally the priceless loyalty that inspires hope through love, faith and perseverance, thus complete the mythical circle of the oft-mentioned seals of the imagination. They have made Tolkien one of the most recognisable and successful authors of the 20th century.
But fame and visibility often come at a price. After the trilogy’s publication, the Tolkien couple had more and more admirers, they were bombarded with questions and wanted to know more about the personal side of the writer they had over-idealised. For lack of privacy, they removed their telephone number from the phone book and moved to the coastal town of Bournemouth, which suited the writer’s wife very well – she felt free and joyful in the company of the infinite blue.
Tolkien was not overly enthusiastic about his new home, as he missed the socialising and discussions with other academics, especially in a literary club called Inklings, founded by professors of literature. Nevertheless, the financially carefree life suited the couple well, as their husband’s retirement brought them many opportunities to socialise and have tea together.
This beloved habit, which could easily be said to still be part of the glamour – just a simple scene of two young lovers decorating the faces and headgear of passers-by with sugar more than half a century ago – was with them until the end of their journey together.
Tolkien said goodbye to his muse on 29 November 1971. Edith died at the age of 82 and was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.
The Immortal Father of High Fantasy
Tolkien was deeply affected by his wife’s death. The loneliness caused him to move back to Oxford, where Merton College offered him a place to live. Despite the expectation that he would live many more years like his ancestors – for there was much unexplored in his own journey through the creative paths of the Middle World – he fell unexpectedly ill and died on 2 September 1973.
He was buried in the same place as his wife and their tombstones were carved with the names Lúthien and Beren, the names of fantasy characters from the writer’s mythos. Lúthien, the beautiful elf, sacrificed her immortality for Beren, a mere mortal, in the belief that true love is the only thing that leads to true immortality.
The authenticity of what is written and the meaning of the engraved names are, of course, subject to interpretation, but it is undoubtedly possible to affirm that immortality – though often exploited as an idea due to human selfishness and wastefulness – is not entirely unattainable.
J.R.R. Tolkien opened the door to all things imaginative in his life’s journey. His consistency in creation has influenced practically everyone who has entered the endless legendarium. His colleague C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia stories, nominated him for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971.
Tolkien was a great advocate of the preservation of linguistic culture, of the coherence (not domination!) of different languages. Unfortunately, this principle is often overlooked today. With more than 150 million works sold and translated into more than 40 languages, Tolkien’s Legendarium is today at the very top of the commercial success charts. His fantasy world has been further brought closer by film adaptations, which have together won more than 500 different awards, and by a large number of videogames and merchandise.
Tolkien’s worldview is probably a bit controversial for modern people. The excessive hostility to industrialisation and modernisation, and the sometimes overly conservative approach to certain linguistic norms as a way of life in general, would probably shatter the illusions that many readers (or viewers) of Tolkien’s works surround themselves with. Among other things, his son Christopher, before his death in 2018, publicly announced on several occasions that more modern adaptations of his father’s works “would not be in line with his wishes”.
Yet the basic message of the master linguist remains intact – the importance of fundamental human values such as love, loyalty and attachment to one’s fellow man and to nature is reflected in the unwavering perseverance that pushes the boundaries in the struggle between good and evil, which begins with the everyday actions of the little man. These preserve our humanity and allow for further (fantasy) development, while at the same time ensuring that the stories that truly mark us and which, with their own light, drive away the pressing veil of darkness, become immortal themselves.
