J R R Tolkien Documentary

J.R.R. Tolkien was the creator of Middle-Earth, an imaginary land inhabited by hobbits, elves, goblins, dwarves, and humans. He set out to provide, on a grand scale, a mythology for England, but his books have earned him an enormous worldwide following. Last year, enthusiastic readers in three separate polls voted his novel The Lord of the Rings the best book of the 20th century. His storytelling is, I think, unparalleled in this century. It is that that brings in the non-literary establishment. The literary establishment has never really been at all at ease with Tolkien, and still isn't. It only just goes to show the literary establishment is one thing, and people who read books are another. One of the most extraordinary stories in modern publishing began in a suburban house in Oxford in 1930. The actual beginning, though it's not really the beginning, but the actual flash point was I remember very clearly, I can still see the corner in my house in 20 Northmore Road where it happened, I got an enormous pile of exam papers there, and I remember picking up a paper and actually, if I nearly gave an extra mark for it, extra five marks, it was one page on this particular paper was left blank, glorious, nothing to read, so I scribbled on it, I can't think why, in a hole in the ground delivered a hobbit. Not a nasty dirty wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry bare sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on, it was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort. The Hobbit, published in 1937, is the biggest selling work of children's fiction ever written. Its diminutive heroes live in a part of Middle Earth known as the Shire. Hobbits are shy, elusive characters. They're described as being between three and four feet tall, and fond of food, and not too fond of adventures, unless they're really caught upon, and they seem to have resources which are beyond a lot of their more well-built neighbours. Fondness for the Shire. Have you a particular fondness for these comfortable, homely things of life that the Shire embodies? The, you know, home, and pipe, and fire, and bed, the homely virtues. Haven't you? Haven't you, Professor Tolley? Of course, yes. You have a particular fondness, don't you, for Hobbits? That's why I feel, I feel at home. I, look, the Shire is very like the kind of world in which I first became aware of things. Just at the age where imagination is opening up, suddenly find yourself in a quiet Warwickshire village. A particular love of what you might call central Midland, uh, English countryside, based on good waterstones, and elm trees, and small, quiet rivers and so on. And, of course, sort of rustic people about. Hobbits are just, well, rustic English people, made small in size because it reflects the, uh, general small reach of their imagination, but it's not the small reach of their courage or latent power. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was brought up in just such surroundings in the rural West Midlands, but it was not an entirely happy childhood. His father died when he was two, his mother when he was 14. The loss of his mother when he was still very, very young, was a most immense blow, not just because he lost her, and that was, you know, the only surviving parent, because it took him away from this classic English rural landscape, the small villages, the shops, the mills, you know, all the ingredients that went into what he eventually called the Shire in his own writing. The Hobbits of the Shire are an unobtrusive but very ancient people, more numerous formerly than they are today, for they love peace and quiet and good tilled earth. A well-ordered and well-farmed countryside was their favorite haunt. They do not and did not understand or like machines more complicated than a forge bellows, a water mill, or a hand loom, though they were skillful with tools. Ronald was sent to King Edward's School in Birmingham, where he developed a fascination for languages. He clearly had a sort of genetic disposition to be interested in words. You could say that for a lonely child, not an only child, there was a younger brother, but essentially a rather isolated child, isolated by the death of his parents, by being brought up in lodging houses with a Catholic priest, unmarried Catholic priest as a guardian, he was driven in on himself. There's no doubt about that, and words began to fascinate him. I first began seriously to invent languages about when I was 13 or 14. I've never stopped really. Languages have a flavor to me, I never understand people saying, for instance, it was awfully dry and dull, because a new language to me is just like a new wine or a new sweetpea or something. While still in his late teens, he met and fell in love with Edith Bratt, an orphan like himself, and three years his senior. They were married a few years later. When war broke out in 1914, Tolkien finished his degree in English at Oxford and took a commission in the Lancashire Fusiliers. The following year, he sailed for France and the Somme. In the hell of the trenches, his imaginative world began to take shape. When he was a very young man, during the First World War, he wrote a work called the Book of Lost Tales, and some parts of it he recorded were written in the trenches under fire. But there already, often in very early undeveloped forms, are the great stories, the great legends, which were an inspiration to him throughout his life. He returned to England, suffering from trench fever. Here he took up the work that was to occupy him for the rest of his life, the Silmarillion, a vast body of legend about Middle Earth, an imaginary world close to our own, but set in a mythical period in history. His passion for languages drew him to study philology, and he was elected professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford at the age of 33. His own scholarly interest was in Northern European languages particularly, and in the languages which were the precursors of English, in Middle English and Old English or Anglo-Saxon, he recognized the first time he saw it. Not that he had been told about it, but that somehow instinctively he already knew it or remembered it somehow. The world of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic, with its heroic battles and fabulous beasts, fired Tolkien's imagination. Many of its themes and characters found their way in In May 1926, Tolkien met C.S. Lewis. C.S. Lewis came here to Magdalen College as a young Don, of a very different sort from most Dons. He had an Ulster Protestant background, he fought in the First World War, but he was a very isolated figure, living with a woman old enough to be his mother, and not really with a circle of friends around him. And Tolkien was equally isolated. He'd come down to Oxford at about the same time, 1925, from Leeds, where he'd been teaching Anglo-Saxon. He was one of Oxford's youngest professors, but he needed friends, and the two gravitated towards each other because they had a common interest in what they called Northerness, the world of the Icelandic sagas, the linguistic side of it, the heroic side of it, and also of course Christianity. Lewis and Tolkien formed the Inklings, a group of male academics with an interest in writing and with a shared, if unfashionable, outlook on the world. Meetings were held in Lewis's rooms in Magdalen. They stood aside from the modern movement. They were known in Oxford as a very conservative group. For them, Christianity meant conservative values, a belief in story and its power rather than criticism, though Lewis was a very wide-ranging literary critic. But essentially they were a movement of resistance against the modern world. Tolkien read much of the early drafts of The Hobbit to the Inklings. Though the story was originally intended for the amusement of his children, elements from the mythology of Middle-earth began to creep in. The Hobbit relates the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, lured by the wizard Gandalf, into helping a band of dwarves recover their lost treasure. Tolkien drew on the northern literature he loved for the novel's gallery of rascally trolls, wise elves, and vicious goblins. The typescript came to the attention of publishers Allen and Dunwin. I was 10 years old at the time and my father gave me this single-spaced manuscript, typescript to read, which was not uncommon, though this was a rather long one. I read quite a lot of books for my father. It was quite a cheap way for him to get an opinion. What I wrote about The Hobbit was this. Bilbo Baggins was a hobbit who lived in his hobbit hole and never went for adventures. At last Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves persuaded him to go. He had a very exciting time fighting goblins and wargs. At last they got to the Lonely Mountain. Smaug the dragon, who guards it, is killed, and after a terrific battle with the goblins he returned home rich. It is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of five and nine. I was 10, you remember, a sort of superiority, but nonetheless it was good enough and my father believed me and the book was published and I got my one shilling, which was the standard fee. This is Bilbo Baggins's choir standing outside Bag End, which is kind of half underground home, a sprawling labyrinth of passages with round doors and round windows. I've dressed Bilbo to resemble a sort of an 18th century gentleman, which is the feeling that I get from the story, the waistcoat and the pipe, of course, and breeches. This is Bilbo's very safe world before Gandalf arrives and upsets everything by introducing this great adventure. We Baggins's were always thought to be very respectable hobbits. We never said or done anything unexpected until I, Bilbo Baggins, had something of an adventure. One morning I was standing at the front door after breakfast when along came an old man with a staff. He had a tall pointed hat, a long red cloak, a silver scarf over which his long white beard hung down below his waist, and immense black boots. Good morning, I said. I'm looking for someone to share in an adventure that I'm arranging. Amusing for me and profitable for you, very likely, if you ever get over it. Bilbo starts off in the beginning of The Hobbit as a very quiet, respectable hobbit, and by the end he's a weathered adventurer. Most people would have been content with writing about the first two chapters. There are so many ideas in it. I mean, we go from the coziness of the doors turning up for the tea party and Gandalf the Wizard, and it's all kind of Johnny Children's Tea Party stuff, in next to no time we're in the company of Icelandic trolls in a wood and, you know, everybody's under sentence of death. They escape from that back into the coziness again at Rivendell, the last homely house. Tolkien always goes from kind of light to dark to dark to light. He's very good at contrasting that. And then they're crossing the Misty Mountains and snatched by goblins and drawn down into the depths of the stuff. And then this masterstroke is Gollum, a strange, slimy, sibilant creature who lives at the roots of the mountains and who is blind and feels his way around everybody as well as everything. Very sexual stuff. And Bilbo is wrapped in a dark corner with this. What is he? I'm Mr Bilbo Baggins and I lost the wizard and I lost the dwarves and I've lost the way and I don't care as long as I can get out somehow. It likes riddles, perhaps it does, does it? Yes, it must have a competition with this precious. If it asks and we doesn't answer, we does what it wants. We shows it the way out, yes. And if we ask and it doesn't answer, we eats it. From Gollum, Bilbo steals a magic ring which makes the wearer invisible. With the aid of the ring and his own native cunning, Bilbo outwits the dragon guarding the horde and helps the dwarves steal the treasure. The Hobbit was warmly, though not ecstatically, reviewed on publication. It has since sold over 36 million copies all over the world. The Hobbit is a classic children's book but it was written much later than true golden age books, 1937 with one war gone and another one looming and there's something quite different in it. It's not in the end a classic Jack the Giant Killer story because what happens to Bilbo Baggins, he doesn't kill the dragon, he's actually thumped on the head in the battle, he blacks out, he's not there when the real crisis happens, much like Tolkien getting trench fever in World War I and coming back from the front. And more to the point, when the dwarves have got the dragon out of the way, there's a terrible greedy scramble for the treasure. This is cynicism, this is the modern world, this is somebody writing who knows perfectly well how flawed humanity is. So in that sense, the book is a bridge between the cosy Edwardian world of the riverbank, where the worst thing you could have is weasels, stoats and ferrets pecking at the edges of your property, to a much more cynical, much more worldly-wise, modern kind of writing. He's a very visual writer. I find the landscapes he describes very, very rich and there's a wonderful variety of elves and dwarves and goblins. It's a very rich field to illustrate in. The landscape of the Shire I've modelled quite closely on my own locality near to Dartmoor and Devon. It's a certain type of unchanged English landscape which is very gentle, very rolling hills and green pastures and woods. While Middle-earth combined the landscape of northern legend with the rural scenes of his youth, where Tolkien chose to make his home could not have been more different. Tolkien lived a suburban life and for many people that must have appeared a very uneventful, dull sort of existence. But in fact, from the point of view of being a spectator at and a party to one of the great events of the 20th century, which was suburbanisation, the creeping spread of towns and cities out into the countryside, it was an ideal vantage point. And clearly for him it was amazingly influential in determining the shape of his imagination. One of the central experiences of suburbanisation is that sense of loss. How do you respond to loss or a yearning for what's gone? I think anyway, and I think this is what Tolkien did, you reinvent the world that you've lost, but you invest it with much greater significance. With the Hobbit out of the way, Tolkien returned to inventing the lost world of Middle-earth, the world of the Silmarillion. Yet extraordinarily, the basis for this world was not characters or stories, but the imaginary languages he had been working on since he was a boy. Tolkien said about his own work, the invention of languages is the foundation. The stories were made to provide a world for the languages rather than the reverse. Now this is a really astonishing statement and people have actually been very reluctant to believe him. They've assumed that he was joking or something, but we know he started off inventing the languages. We know that he has the Elvish greeting, may a star shine on the hour of our meeting. He wanted to find a world in which characters were likely to say that kind of thing. All I'm doing now is to try and write in Elvish. My writing is very inferior to the Elvish. Their standard greeting when meeting, a star shines upon our meeting. I've made a mistake, never mind. And that stands for Elen Sila Rumen Omenti Elvo. I wouldn't mind other people knowing it and enjoying it, but I didn't really want to make it like some people who've been equally inventive in language. I just want to make cults and have people all speaking it together. I don't desire to go and have our opponents talking Elvish to chat. When you know Elvish, there are all sorts of linguistic puns, linguistic jokes that only people who can, for example, read Elvish, or know the etymology of a particular word, can really appreciate all the ramifications. One of the titles that Aragorn uses in his letter to Samwise is hir im bær anoi, which means lord of western lands. And obviously anoi means western, but it's lands bær in the plural. Yes, because the singular is bær. If he wanted a new word within one of these languages, he didn't simply select a few syllables that attracted him, he worked out what that word would actually be. And he works out, as it were, the sound changes that will, fictionally, will have passed over them in the course of time, as they do in all languages. Though born of the languages he invented, the stories eventually took over. But where the Hobbit was recognizably a novel, the Silmarillion was an epic, and read like one. It is told among the wise that the first war began before Arda was full-shaped, and there yet there was anything that grew or walked upon earth, and for long Melkor had the upper hand. The work was huge, not only in scale, but in ambition. Its aim was to provide England with an epic mythology of its own, from creation to the so-called third age, complete with royal bloodlines and scholarly footnotes. Tolkien wanted to create an epic for England, or a mythology for England, because he knew we'd had one, but we'd lost it. We lost it, perhaps primarily because of the Norman Conquest, where you get an alien people coming in, imposing their own language, their social structures, and their literary structures on the country, and at that point, the traditional, old, native tradition of literature goes underground, and eventually dies out. Well, Tolkien felt he knew what it had been like, and he knew we'd lost it, and he was going to recreate something which had been there originally, the true tradition of England. A spirit of great strength and hardihood came to the aid of the Vanar, hearing in the far heaven that there was battle in the little kingdom. The Sumerian is a kind of old testament, if you like. It begins with creation, and it includes all kinds of stories about, you know, supernatural, magical, and heroic goings-on, and it comes to a conclusion with the Lord of the Rings, which is the New Testament, which has got a Christ-like hero, Frodo Baggins, who has to save the world. And like the Old Testament, Sumerian could have gone on forever, and most of the stories in it, there are different versions written at different times, just as in the Bible, you know, we've got different texts describing the same sort of events. It was a self-perpetuating process. But the process was about to be interrupted. When The Hobbit had turned out to be a success, my father wrote to Tartine, as a good publisher should, to suggest that he wrote a sequel, because very few single books made their way, and a sequel seemed called for. 16th December, 1937. Dear Mr. Unwin, what more can hobbits do? They can be comic, but their comedy is suburban, unless it is set against things more elemental. Then he changed his mind a bit, and said he'd try, and he started writing, in 1937, a sequel to The Hobbit. For the sequel, Tolkien developed the idea of the magic ring, with which Bilbo had been left at the end of The Hobbit. But now, the ring was to be a symbol of something both darker, and more seductive. One ring to rule them all, and ring to find them. One ring to bring them all, and in the darkness, bind them in the land of Mordor, where the shadows are. Like, it's got the power of all the, like, wizards, of the big wizard, and like, as soon as you put it on, like, you're invisible. I like that. But then you can't get away from it, in the end. So, um, once you've got the ring, you like, fall in love with it, and it's just attached to you, and you're desperate to get away from it, but desperate to not get, not lose it, as well. Where The Hobbit had been a hunt for treasure, its sequel was to be a quest for something far nobler and more dangerous. The sequel to The Hobbit is now flowing along, and getting quite out of hand. Like my own children, it is rather older, and it is no bedtime story. The Lord of the Rings tells the story of an epic struggle between the forces of good, who wish to destroy the dangerous power of the ring, and the forces of evil, who wish to use it to subjugate Middle-earth. Led by the Dark Lord, a grotesque collection of mythical creatures try to capture it. From the Black Riders, to the Orcs, the verminous infantry of the Dark Power, to the Balrog, who drags the saintly wizard Gandalf into the abyss. Before Tolkien, there was myth and legend, and a few tame beasts. You know, George and the Dragon, uh, Pegasus, a unicorn, fairies, but they were not creatures that you can make a game out of. They weren't in any way threatening. You could only make cutesy, cutesy games, if you want to do that at all. Then suddenly comes Tolkien. You've got this world of intense gloom, and danger, and doom. All these disgusting creatures that he created out of his imagination. Orcs with their green lumpy skin, and foul breath, and slogged spiked teeth, pointed ears, very threatening, down horrible dungeons. And, you know, he was obviously inspirational to games like Dungeons and Dragons, and to my game books, and to my computer games, because he made a sea, a much darker, stronger, richly imagined world of fantasy that had never been done before. Pitted against Tolkien's fearsome creations in The Lord of the Rings is a band of hobbits led by Bilbo's nephew Frodo. Their mission, to travel to Mordor to destroy the ring by throwing it in the volcano. The closer they get to Mordor, to the realm of the more colossal, and dark, and huge, and forbidding the towers, and fortresses, and dungeons, and really set against the diminutive size of the heroes, as they're whittled down to just the two of them, just Frodo and Sam, making their way across this vast landscape towards this huge volcano. It just makes the odds against them so vast. He's got a lot of friends to help him, so it's not really just him, but he's just got a big, he's got a strong will. He knows what he wants. But Tolkien's story kept on growing, and would seemingly never be finished. I'm afraid I've made a great mistake in making my sequel too long and complicated, and too slow in coming out. It is a curse having the epic temperament in an overcrowded age devoted to snappy bits. I wrote to my father, who was on a Far Eastern tour, saying, I think it's a work of genius. I think it's going to lose us a thousand pounds. And my father wrote one of those marvellous letters to prove he's right whichever way it goes, which said, if you believe this to be a work of genius, then you may lose a thousand pounds. And so it was a decision made, we made a contract, and we published. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, appeared in 1954, with the next two in the course of the following year. Reviews were mixed. While W. H. Auden was enchanted, fellow poet Edwin Muir was unimpressed. All the characters, except a few old men who are apt to be wizards, are boys masquerading as adult heroes. The hobbits or halflings are ordinary boys. The fully human heroes have reached the fifth form, but hardly one of them knows anything about women, except by hearsay. Critics like Muir detected the spirit of the Inklings in Middle Earth. They were very masculine, they were pipe smoking, they were country walks. This came from their school background, they'd all had male friends, they'd always lived in a male culture, and it wasn't homosexual, but you know, there's a faint tinge of something stronger than just friendship. There was deep, deep affection. The Tolkien-Lewis bond was very, very strong, and that's reflected in Tolkien's own writings, where there are women, but they're princesses, they're sort of goddesses, they're distant virginal figures, rather than flesh and blood women with whom you have an actual relationship. But The Lord of the Rings sold steadily, much to the relief of We began not to think of losing a thousand pounds, but perhaps of making a thousand, but it was on this sort of scale. I am indeed surprised at the reception of The Ring, and immensely pleased, but I don't think I've started any tide. He could not have been more wrong. In the mid-60s, a pirate edition of The Lord of the Rings appeared in America. The ensuing row brought unexpected publicity, and sales rocketed. Suddenly, Tolkien was a cult. That moment in our history, which very much coincided with the popularity of The Lord of the Rings, was a time when we were feeling, I think, surprisingly insecure about our own world and our own lives. In the 60s, not just the war, but the whole sense that things were not what we were, that things were not what they seemed, that protest was a way to make yourself heard as a little person, very much coincided with the whole ethos of The Lord of the Rings, which is about little people, ordinary people, who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances and manage to do extraordinary things. I don't live in America. Surely they should tell me. I should like to ask them some questions of how such things arise. I observe, in general, that North America has always been much more easily kindled than England or indeed any country in Europe. The Society was founded in 1969. It was founded by Vera Chapman, who was worried that so many people were looking at the hippie side of Tolkien. Not Tolkien's own hippie side, but the fact that hippies and other people were adopting him for himself and reinterpreting his works in their way. A lot of us did use Tolkien as a guide, almost, on the journey through life, and acid trips were very similar to the journey that's told in the story of The Lord of the Rings. It's a journey into the inner psyche. There are the cracks of doom, which we've all seen on acid trip, especially when the wallpaper's peeling. And consequently, the club Middle Earth actually had a similar feel to it with the black walls and everything, and a lot of people took their acid down there because they felt they were in another world that would take them to other places. The Beatles announced their intention to star in a film of The Lord of the Rings. Like many others, they recognized themselves in it. John was supposed to be Gollum, you know, this wicked, mischievous, malevolent creature which suited John's dark side and his nature. And it turned out that Paul would have been Frodo, you know, this sort of hobbit which goes on these big adventures. And Ringo was to be Sam Ganji, his faithful servant, you know, his ever faithful manservant and that. And of course, George Harrison was to be Gandalf, the wizard. And of course, at the time, this suited their personalities ideally. But by the time they had found a director, the film rights had been sold. Tolkien himself was uneasy at his sudden fame. Now his children had left home, he and Edith moved into a smaller house on the edge of Oxford. He was confused by the extraordinary reaction that he got, particularly from America, but increasingly from England as well. It wasn't what he wanted or expected, or that he conceived his book as arising. When he began to get telephone calls in the middle of the night from America, from people who didn't know there was a time difference in any way, were fairly high on drugs, asking him ridiculous questions in the middle of the night, or when people came and trampled on his roses in his house in Sandfield Road to take photographs of him eating breakfast through the window, he began to feel irritated, infringed upon. He hated it, basically. But the status of the book was now assured. Despite Tolkien's protests, many read it as a parable of modern times. There is a temptation to read into the book a kind of allegory of the H-Bomb. What is said somewhere in the book is that the One Ring is a power so enormous that even if the good man were to use it against the bad, it would corrupt the good man. But that is a thing which other people who have arrived, have abused, other people who write that the One Ring of the H-Bomb was invented. Also, I may say that I began building the stories in which the Dark Lord, when I was an undergraduate, were already in an advanced stage during the First War, the H-Bomb hadn't been heard of. The modern world meant for him essentially the machine. Men have taken the solution of power represented by the machine. The Ring is the ultimate machine because it was made for coercion, made by Sauron to coerce. And that is why the only solution to the problem of the Ring, as the wise at Rivendell saw, was its destruction. And then at last there came a rumble, rising to a deafening crash and roar. The earth shook, the plain heaved and cracked, and the mountain reeled. Fire belched from its riven summit. The quest is achieved, said Frodo, and now all is over. You really come down to any large story, interest people, can hold them attention for a considerable time, or make the stories practically always a human story, it's practically always about one thing, aren't there? Death. Inevitably death. Unlike many other writers big in the 60s, Tolkien has not sunk into obscurity. His mythic vision has inspired a very different generation of readers. What you find in in Tolkien is this sense of nature, the wilderness, being an area invested with mystery and magic. The landscapes, they come alive. There's a sense of the whole landscape, forests and hills, having a personality of their own. There stood a single stone, standing tall under the sun above, and at this hour casting no shadow. It was shapeless and yet significant, like a landmark or a guarding finger, or more like a warning. They felt as if a trap was closing about them. That sense of the numinous and sense of the awesome in nature is very central to Tolkien, and it explains much of also the 20th century's attitudes to nature, I think. The Lord of the Rings is a sort of epic of the Greenland. The camp was set up in direct opposition to the Bull's Green Link Road, hacking through ancient forests. You have your elves and your dwarves here, and you've got your dwarves into the tunnels. Bit dwarvish behaviour, I reckon. You've got your elves in the trees, you know. You've got your hobbits screwing around. I'm into the Ents at the moment, because the Ents are like slow awakening beings who've been woken up by the destruction that's happening to them and around them. We are tree herds, we old Ents. Few enough of us are left now. Sheep get like shepherd, and shepherds like sheep, it is said. But it's quicker and closer with trees and Ents, and they walk down the ages together. Some of my kin look just like trees now, and they need something great to rouse them, and they speak only in whispers. But some of my trees are limb-live, and many can talk to me. They represent the slow, natural, deep forces of nature, and they rise up and smash Isengard, which is the stone citadel of Saruman, and I'm quite identified with those characters. Here, especially, it's all about raising the spirit of the land, and the trees, quiet and slow, but who knows what energy's in there. This is the garage of the last house that Tolkien lived in in Oxford, and he took this space over as an extra study. I came here in 1967 to meet him, and the place had become a kind of living Middle Earth. He was still writing his books in here. Along the wall here, there were maps of Middle Earth, Frodo's journey from the Shire across to Mordor. Over here, there were files stacked along the floor, on rickety bookcases and so on. There was a big table in the middle covered with papers, and, of course, it was Tolkien himself who was talking absolutely at top speed about what was in his mind at the moment. He was still laboring at the Silmarillion 50 years after beginning it. Some people who knew him well have said that he didn't really want to finish the Silmarillion, suggesting even that, at some level, he felt that to finish the Silmarillion would be finishing his life. I personally don't think that at all. I don't think there's any real evidence for it. I think he deeply wanted to finish it, but could. Too large. Too large a task. Too tired. J.R.R. Tolkien died on the 2nd of September 1973. He was buried next to his wife in the Catholic section of the Corporation Cemetery in Oxford. Every year, members of the Tolkien Society sing a lament from the Lord of the Rings in Elvish. Lauri Elan parla si smurdi ne. Ignaru not in arve ramar aldaron. Ignar velin ceiul marranier mioromardilis e miruvorevandu ne pellavardot elumar. Nullu enia sentinti larri eleni, o mario airetari lirinen, si mani iulanen in quanto va. Beren and Lúthien were the hero and heroine of the first story he ever wrote as part of his Middle Earth cycle. It's a love story and he always identified it with himself and his wife Edith. He saw them as the real Beren and Lúthien. So in this suburban setting, on this ordinary grave, there is nonetheless just one allusion to the fact that this man under the ground there was the creator of the most imaginative work in modern literature. Ar sindar noriello caita mornie, i falmalina rimbe med, ar misieuntupa calacilio mirio ialle, i vanuan arvo meldo. Four years after his death, the Silmarillion, edited by his son Christopher, finally appeared in print. This was followed by 12 volumes of unpublished material, known collectively as The History of Middle Earth. The final volume came out last year. He said he wanted to create a mythology for England. I don't think he did exactly that, but I think he rediscovered kinds of narratives of the power of the saga and of the adventure story which had been lost from 20th century English fiction. It's extraordinary to think that these books which began life as stories he told to his own children have proved so full of meaning for so many different kinds of people, and they will undoubtedly prove to be key books when we look back at the 20th century. The third age was my age. I was the enemy of Sauron, and my work is finished. The burden must lie now upon you and your kindred, and the power of the three rings also is ended, and all the lands that you see and those that lie round about them shall be the dwellings of men. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule.