John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
More familiarly known to the world as J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of The Lord of the Rings is more often called Ronald in this biography. The book begins with a three-year-old Ronald running for escape from his nurse through an African desert into the fangs of a tarantula. This episode, it is quite strongly implied, will eventually inspire the giant spider called Shelob in his later writing.
Such is the structure of the book, which takes biographical episodes from the life of Tolkien and applies them to the creation of his groundbreaking literary epic. The young Tolkien is presented as a child drawn to the outdoors who finds friends among the trees and sees mill workers as ogres. He delights in stealing mushrooms, losing himself in stories, and rebelling against everything he can.
Tolkien loses both parents while still relatively young. He marries early, becomes a professor viewed as something of an oddity, and devotes spectacular amounts of time to inventing entire languages and cultures for the various characters that will inhabit his novel. Most of his life from the late 1930s to nearly 1950 is devoted to varying degrees to the process of composing The Lord of the Rings as an unexpected follow-up to his already wildly successful “children’s novel” The Hobbit.
Edith Bratt Tolkien
Following his mother’s death, Ronald and his younger brother Hilary are accepted into a boarding school for orphans. Another resident living on the floor below is Edith Bratt. Pretty and slender, her dreams of becoming a concert pianist died along with her mother. She and Tolkien develop a close bond that blossoms into a forbidden love: she is not only an “older woman” (all three years) but also a Protestant. Tolkien’s guardian, Father Francis, views Edith as a distinctly unfit match for his fellow Catholics.
One too many secret meetings result in Father Francis laying down a brutal mandate: cut off all contact with Edith for three years or face a withdrawal of all support. Edith takes a position playing piano for a church and learning to play the organ. That three-year deadline coincided with Tolkien turning twenty-one.
Just before that birthday arrives, Edith receives a letter in which he expresses his love and professes his intention to marry. Unfortunately, by this time Edith has assumed that his lack of contact is proof he has forgotten her and as a result, she is already engaged to another man. Of course, she goes on to not only marry Ronald but remain his wife and inspiration for some of his legendary female characters until her death at age 82.
Christopher Tolkien
Christopher was the third of Ronald and Edith’s four children. As Tolkien responds to his publisher’s request for a sequel due to the blockbuster sales of The Hobbit, Christopher is diagnosed with a serious heart problem. The father takes over from the author as he prefers spending his nights watching over his son’s sleep to working up an uninspiring tale about a hobbit named Bingo.
Eventually, Christopher’s health improves, his diagnosis is changed, and the possibility of his imminent loss no longer consumes the father and Tolkien becomes a fully committed author again. Toward the end of World War II, Christopher underwent training to become a pilot. By 1973, Tolkien was himself nearing death and executed legal orders to officially place Christopher in charge of his last great unpublished and uncompleted work, The Silmarillion.
Eventually, the project would become so consuming that Christopher would resign his position as a university instructor, move to France, and dedicate himself to getting his father’s work published. Begun even before The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion remained uncompleted by J.R.R. Tolkien during his lifetime. Christopher Tolkien, along with significant assistance from fantasy writer Guy Gavriel Kay—whose name is notably absent from this text—finally published the book in 1977.
