The Hobbit Literature Unit Introduction

Tolkien was horrified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki , referring to the scientists of the Manhattan Project as "these lunatic physicists" and " Babel -builders". During most of his own life conservationism was not yet on the political agenda, and Tolkien himself did not directly express conservationist views—except in some private letters, in which he tells about his fondness for forests and sadness at tree-felling.

In later years, a number of authors of biographies or literary analyses of Tolkien conclude that during his writing of The Lord of the Rings , Tolkien gained increased interest in the value of wild and untamed nature, and in protecting what wild nature was left in the industrialized world. Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his legendarium , beginning with The Book of Lost Tales , written while recuperating from illnesses contracted during The Battle of the Somme.

Tolkien wished to imitate Morris's prose and poetry romances, [] from which he took hints for the names of features such as the Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings [] and Mirkwood , [] along with some general aspects of approach. Edward Wyke-Smith 's The Marvellous Land of Snergs , with its "table-high" title characters, strongly influenced the incidents, themes, and depiction of Bilbo's race in The Hobbit. Tolkien also cited H. Rider Haggard 's novel She in a telephone interview: Critics have compared this device to the Testament of Isildur in The Lord of the Rings [] and to Tolkien's efforts to produce as an illustration a realistic page from the Book of Mazarbul.

Tolkien wrote of being impressed as a boy by S. Tolkien was inspired by early Germanic , especially Old English , literature, poetry , and mythology , which were his chosen and much-loved areas of expertise. These sources of inspiration included Old English literature such as Beowulf , Norse sagas such as the Volsunga saga and the Hervarar saga , [] the Poetic Edda , the Prose Edda , the Nibelungenlied , and numerous other culturally related works. Tolkien also acknowledged several non-Germanic influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas.

Book Review - The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Anderson , John Garth, and many other prominent Tolkien scholars believe that Tolkien also drew influence from a variety of Celtic Irish , Scottish and Welsh history and legends. Needless to say they are not Celtic! Neither are the tales. I do know Celtic things many in their original languages Irish and Welsh , and feel for them a certain distaste: They have bright colour, but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design. They are in fact "mad" as your reader says—but I don't believe I am.

Fimi pointed out that despite his dismissive remarks about "Celtic things" in that Tolkien was fluent in medieval Welsh though not modern Welsh and declared when delivering the first O'Donnell lectures at Oxford in about the influences of Celtic languages on the English language that "Welsh is beautiful". One of Tolkien's purposes when writing his Middle-earth books was to create what his biographer Humphrey Carpenter called a "mythology for England" with Carpenter citing in support Tolkien's letter to Milton Waldman complaining of the "poverty of my country: Chesterton engaging in a series of polemical essays with Yeats over the question of the superiority of Irish vs.

Catholic theology and imagery played a part in fashioning Tolkien's creative imagination, suffused as it was by his deeply religious spirit. The Lord of the Rings is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision. That is why I have not put in, or have cut out, practically all references to anything like "religion", to cults or practices, in the imaginary world. For the religious element is absorbed into the story and the symbolism. Kocher argues that Tolkien describes evil in the orthodox Christian way as the absence of good.

Kocher sees Tolkien's source as Thomas Aquinas , "whom it is reasonable to suppose that Tolkien, as a medievalist and a Catholic, knows well". Shippey contends that this Christian view of evil is most clearly stated by Boethius: He says Tolkien used the corollary that evil cannot create as the basis of Frodo 's remark, "the Shadow Stratford Caldecott also interpreted the Ring in theological terms: It appears to give freedom, but its true function is to enslave the wearer to the Fallen Angel. It corrodes the human will of the wearer, rendering him increasingly 'thin' and unreal; indeed, its gift of invisibility symbolizes this ability to destroy all natural human relationships and identity.

You could say the Ring is sin itself: As well as his fiction, Tolkien was also a leading author of academic literary criticism. His seminal lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English literature to this day. Beowulf is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings being adapted from the poem. The piece reveals many of the aspects of Beowulf which Tolkien found most inspiring, most prominently the role of monsters in literature, particularly that of the dragon which appears in the final third of the poem:.

As for the poem, one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host; and a man might well exchange for one good dragon what he would not sell for a wilderness. And dragons, real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare. In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. Other works included Mr.

The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for The Lord of the Rings , during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings , in particular his closest friend C.

Lewis , the author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien at first intended The Lord of the Rings to be a children's tale in the style of The Hobbit , but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of The Lord of the Rings. The Lord of the Rings became immensely popular in the s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking world: Moreover, printing costs were very high in s Britain, requiring The Lord of the Rings to be published in three volumes.

Tolkien had appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor , and he with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay , later a well-known fantasy author in his own right organized some of this material into a single coherent volume, published as The Silmarillion in It received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in In subsequent years — he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called The History of Middle-earth. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories.

There is not complete consistency between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit , the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their traditions into each other. He commented in , while editing The Hobbit for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the book because of the style of its prose. One of Tolkien's least-known short works is the children's storybook Mr. Bliss , published in It tells the story of Mr. Bliss and his first ride in his new motor-car. The story was inspired by Tolkien's own vehicular mishaps with his first car, purchased in The bears were based on toy bears owned by Tolkien's sons.

Tolkien was both author and illustrator of the book. He submitted it to his publishers as a balm to readers who were hungry for more from him after the success of The Hobbit. The lavish ink and coloured-pencil illustrations would have made production costs prohibitively expensive.

Tolkien agreed to redraw the pictures in a simpler style, but then found he did not have time to do so. The book was published in as a facsimile of Tolkien's difficult-to-read illustrated manuscript, with a typeset transcription on each facing page. It is a narrative poem composed in alliterative verse and is modelled after the Old Norse poetry of the Elder Edda. Christopher Tolkien supplied copious notes and commentary upon his father's work.

According to Christopher Tolkien, it is no longer possible to trace the exact date of the work's composition.

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On the basis of circumstantial evidence, he suggests that it dates from the s. In his foreword he wrote, "He scarcely ever to my knowledge referred to them. For my part, I cannot recall any conversation with him on the subject until very near the end of his life, when he spoke of them to me, and tried unsuccessfully to find them. Auden , Tolkien wrote,. Thank you for your wonderful effort in translating and reorganising The Song of the Sibyl. In return again I hope to send you, if I can lay my hands on it I hope it isn't lost , a thing I did many years ago when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry: The Fall of Arthur , published on 23 May , is a long narrative poem composed by Tolkien in the earlys.

It is alliterative , extending to almost 1, lines imitating the Old English Beowulf metre in Modern English. Though inspired by high medieval Arthurian fiction, the historical setting of the poem is during the Post-Roman Migration Period , both in form using Germanic verse and in content, showing Arthur as a British warlord fighting the Saxon invasion , while it avoids the high medieval aspects of the Arthurian cycle such as the Grail, and the courtly setting ; the poem begins with a British "counter-invasion" to the Saxon lands Arthur eastward in arms purposed.

A Translation and Commentary , published on 22 May , is a prose translation of the early medieval epic poem Beowulf from Old English to modern English. Translated by Tolkien from to , it was edited by his son Christopher. The translation is followed by over pages of commentary on the poem; this commentary was the basis of Tolkien's acclaimed lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics". The former is a fantasy piece on Beowulf's biographical background, while the latter is a poem on the Beowulf theme.

The Story of Kullervo , first published in Tolkien Studies in and reissued with additional material in , is a retelling of a 19th-century Finnish poem. It was written in while Tolkien was studying at Oxford. The story is one of three contained within The Silmarillion which Tolkien believed to warrant their own long-form narratives. The Fall of Gondolin is a tale of a beautiful, mysterious city destroyed by dark forces, which Tolkien called "the first real story" of Middle-earth , was published on 30 August [] as a standalone book, edited by Christopher Tolkien and illustrated by Alan Lee.

Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library. Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in graduated with Old Norse as his special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including walrus , over which he struggled mightily. Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his lecture English and Welsh , which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak.

Auden in , "I am a West-midlander by blood and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it. Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for constructing languages. The most developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin , the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's legendarium. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of esthetics and euphony , and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek.

Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish alongside dwarfs and dwarfish , which had been little used since the midth century and earlier.

In fact, according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been dwarrows or dwerrows. He also coined the term eucatastrophe , though it remains mainly used in connection with his own work. He was an accomplished artist, who learned to paint and draw as a child and continued to do so all his life.

He also produced pictures to accompany the stories told to his own children, including those later published in Mr Bliss and Roverandom , and sent them elaborately illustrated letters purporting to come from Father Christmas. Although he regarded himself as an amateur, the publisher used the author's own cover art, maps, and full-page illustrations for the early editions of The Hobbit.

Tolkien's Middle-earth:

Much of his artwork was collected and published in as a book: The book discusses the paintings, drawings, and sketches of J. Tolkien and in total includes reproductions of his art. In a letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien wrote about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which "[t]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama". She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings. However, Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving.

In , he rejected suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of The Hobbit as "too Disnified Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of". Tolkien was sceptical of the emerging Tolkien fandom in the United States, and in he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of The Lord of the Rings:.

Thank you for sending me the projected "blurbs", which I return. The Americans are not as a rule at all amenable to criticism or correction; but I think their effort is so poor that I feel constrained to make some effort to improve it. He had dismissed dramatic representations of fantasy in his essay " On Fairy-Stories ", first presented in In human art Fantasy is a thing best left to words, to true literature. Drama is naturally hostile to Fantasy. Fantasy, even of the simplest kind, hardly ever succeeds in Drama, when that is presented as it should be, visibly and audibly acted.

Tolkien scholar James Dunning coined the word Tollywood , a portmanteau derived from "Tolkien Hollywood", to describe attempts to create a cinematographic adaptation of the stories in Tolkien's legendarium aimed at generating good box office results, rather than at fidelity to the idea of the original. I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation and on occasion the resentment of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about.

Tolkien went on to criticize the script scene by scene "yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings". He was not implacably opposed to the idea of a dramatic adaptation, however, and sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings to United Artists in United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early s. In , the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises , a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings was released in as an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S.

It covered only the first half of the story of The Lord of the Rings. The series was successful, performing extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars. From to , Warner Bros. The Battle of the Five Armies , in December On 13 November , it was announced that Amazon had acquired the global television rights to The Lord of the Rings. The series will not be a direct adaptation of the books, but will instead introduce new stories that are set before The Fellowship of the Ring. Tolkien and the characters and places from his works have become the namesake of various things around the World.

These include street names, mountains, companies, species of animals and plants as well as other notable objects. By convention, certain classes of features on Saturn's moon Titan are named after elements from Middle-earth. Tolkien—most notably, the Millstream Way and Moseley Bog.

In the Dutch town of Geldrop , near Eindhoven , the streets of an entire new neighbourhood are named after Tolkien himself "Laan van Tolkien" and some of the best-known characters from his books.


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In the Silicon Valley towns of Saratoga and San Jose in California, there are two housing developments with street names drawn from Tolkien's works. About a dozen Tolkien-derived street names also appear scattered throughout the town of Lake Forest, California. In the field of taxonomy, over 80 taxa genera and species have been given scientific names honouring, or deriving from, characters or other fictional elements from The Lord of the Rings , The Hobbit , and other works set in Middle-earth.

Various elves , dwarves , and other creatures that appear in his writings as well as Tolkien himself have been honoured in the names of several species, including the amphipod Leucothoe tolkieni , and the wasp Shireplitis tolkieni. In , the extinct hominid Homo floresiensis was described, and quickly earned the nickname "hobbit" due to its small size. There are seven blue plaques in England that commemorate places associated with Tolkien: One of the Birmingham plaques commemorates the inspiration provided by Sarehole Mill, near which he lived between the ages of four and eight, while two mark childhood homes up to the time he left to attend Oxford University and the other marks a hotel he stayed at before leaving for France during World War I.

In , Tolkien was among the British cultural icons selected by artist Sir Peter Blake to appear in a new version of his most famous artwork—the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album cover—to celebrate the British cultural figures of his life that he most admires. Unlike other authors of the genre, Tolkien never favoured signing his works. Owing to his popularity, handsigned copies of his letters or of the first editions of his individual writings have however achieved high values at auctions, and forged autographs may occur on the market.

Collectibles also include non-fiction books with hand-written annotations from Tolkien's private library. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For other uses with the name Tolkien, see Tolkien disambiguation. The Monsters and the Critics. Languages constructed by J.

Lesson Plans for Secondary School Educators

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. Works inspired by J. List of things named after J. Tolkien and his works. Sarehole Mill 's blue plaque. Unwin Hyman, [25 August] Carpenter, Humphrey; Tolkien, Christopher, eds. The Letters of J. Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. Howard , and E. Father of Modern Fantasy Literature". Archived from the original on 20 June Retrieved 2 March Sixth edition, , page The Encyclopedia of Fantasy. Archived from the original on 25 April Retrieved 17 April Archived from the original on 5 December Archived from the original on 10 May Retrieved 9 January My Heritage UK Ltd.

Der Spiegel in German. Archived from the original on 27 April Both the spider incident and the visit to a kraal are covered here. At 9 Ashfield Road, King's Heath. Archived from the original on 3 March Retrieved 12 March Tolkien Archived 29 April at the Wayback Machine. Retrieved 27 April Tolkien Archived 18 May at the Wayback Machine. Updated 7 January Retrieved 28 April Archived from the original on 22 November Archived from the original on 24 December I Am in Fact a Hobbit: An Introduction to the Life and Works of J.

Archived from the original on 15 February In Drout, Michael D. Scholarship and Critical Assessment. Tolkien besichtigt das Oberwallis". Valais Wallis Digital in German. Retrieved 27 February Citing Letters , no. Royal Mail Group plc commemorative postage stamp pack. Preface to the Second Edition. Battle of the Somme. Retrieved 25 November Imperial War Museum Collection Search. J R R Tolkien". Archived from the original on 8 March The London Gazette Supplement.

Archived from the original on 31 January Retrieved 13 March The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the OED. Tolkien Architect of Middle Earth. Archived from the original on 11 May Retrieved 22 August Tolkien's Double Worlds and Creative Process: For the etymology, see Nodens Etymology. Tolkien's 'Beowulf ' ". Archived from the original on 30 May Retrieved 2 June Tolkien and the Critics". Archived from the original on 21 April Finn and Hengest , the discussion of Eotena , passim. Archived from the original on 9 May Retrieved 18 May Tolkien Companion and Guide. Archived from the original on 22 September Retrieved 17 September Archived from the original on 11 January The Oxford Illustrated History of the Bible , Retrieved 20 April The New York Times.

Archived from the original on 11 April The Authorized Biography", page Archived from the original on 27 September Literary Heritage, West Midlands. Archived from the original on 28 July Retrieved 20 November — via Google Books. Tolkien, linguist, scholar and author of 'The Lord of the Rings', died today in Bournemouth. He was 81 years old. Retrieved 4 April Retrieved 1 December Addison, Texas; Leadership University. Updated 13 July Lewis was brought up in the Church of Ireland. Finding God in The Hobbit. Tolkien and His Literary Resonances: Archived PDF from the original on 3 October Ents, Elves, and Eriador: The Environmental Vision of J.


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University of Kentucky Press. Burke's Sublime in a popular romance".

54 best The Hobbit Unit Study images on Pinterest | Hobbit, The Hobbit and Middle Earth

Retrieved 2 December The Making Of Tolkien's Mythology. Kent State University Press. The Truth of Imagination: Some Uncollected Reviews and Essays. The World of the Rings: Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien. In Clark, George; Timmons, Daniel. Archived from the original on 22 December Lobdell The World of the Rings: Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien , p. Language, Religion, and Adventure in Tolkien , pp.

Retrieved 16 May Tolkien" Archived 4 January at the Wayback Machine. Updated 20 October Archived from the original on 16 March Archived from the original on 21 August Retrieved 30 August The Fiction of J. The Road to Middle-earth. Archived from the original on 26 April Retrieved 27 March Archived from the original on 19 October Archived from the original on 16 January Archived from the original on 13 February The Sydney Morning Herald.

Archived from the original on 17 August A Descriptive Bibliography , London: Archived from the original on 9 July Retrieved 17 May Michael Martinez Tolkien Essays. Archived from the original on 17 June Archived from the original on 15 April Retrieved 8 June A Translation and Commentary". Archived from the original on 5 September Retrieved 5 September Archived from the original on 2 December Archived from the original on 9 December Retrieved 13 April Archived from the original on 2 November Lewis manuscript Archived 2 June at the Wayback Machine.


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The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary. Architect of Middle Earth. Tolkien Companion and Guide: Reader's Guide , London, HarperCollins , p. Retrieved 7 March Denmark's monarch for a modern age". Archived from the original on 27 February Tree and Leaf , London: Archived from the original on 26 August Retrieved 15 August Retrieved 18 June Archived from the original on 6 November Retrieved 20 December Archived from the original on 15 December Retrieved 18 December Archived from the original on 9 November Course Overview Welcome to Tolkien's Middle-earth, a collection of curriculum resources for secondary school educators who want to help students explore the literary phenomenon that is J.

These resources are grouped into nine thematic units focused on Tolkien's two most famous works: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Each unit was designed to last one week, but we have included additional materials for teachers who wish to explore certain themes in depth. With a slight change in emphasis, these resources can be adapted to existing courses in fantasy literature, British literature, mythology, and European history. The Lord of the Rings is arguably the greatest work of imaginative literature ever created by a single author.

In formulating the following behavioral objectives, we tried to keep Tolkien's artistic achievement always in mind. As the course progresses, the student should be able to: To help you and your students meet these objectives, we have furnished each unit with eight elements: In each case, the first several topics and projects connect most directly to the learning goals.

The remaining ideas partake more of enrichment, but feel free to mix and match these materials to fit your specific curriculum needs.