J.R.R Tolkien
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It is the 16th of July, 1916, in the British trenches at the Battle of the Somme. As the sun sets, John Tolkien, known as Ronald, fires a round into no-man's land towards the German trenches. The fighting for the day is drawing to a close, and as the last few shells explode around him, he barely flinches. Though the noise is near deafening, he's been here for weeks now, and it's become a part of normal life.

As silence falls, he slumps against the trenches' wet and crumbling mud bank. Just meters away, on the expanse between him and the enemy, lie the bodies of his fallen friends. The metallic stench of blood blends with the ashy smoke that billows across the battleground. There is the sound of a commotion, and Ronald looks along the trench to see a German soldier being thrown to the ground. The soldier cowers as his British captors discuss what to do with him.

Glancing over, the man looks just as battered and war-weary as Ronald feels. His lips are cracked and bleeding, and he's panting, obviously desperate for water. Putting down his weapon, Ronald goes over. He takes the water canteen he carries on a strap across his body, unscrews the cap, and offers it, but the exhausted man shrinks back. Patiently, Ronald tries again. In careful, well-practiced German, he asks the captured man if he would like some water.

Bewildered but grateful, the prisoner nods and takes the canteen. He drinks deeply, eyes closed, then lets out a gasp of relief. Ronald half smiles and asks again in German how his pronunciation was. Still confused, the German hesitantly begins to offer a slight correction. Ronald is keen to improve his German and listens intently. He repeats every intonation the German makes, slowly winning the man's trust.

but now their conversation is interrupted by a British soldier who pulls the German abruptly to his feet. The prisoner glances back as he is marched off, the brief moment of unlikely friendship snatched away forever. Later that evening, Ronald is huddled with his comrades eating. As he scrapes the last of his stew from a tin plate, he hears another soldier coming along the trench, calling out names. Everyone looks up when he approaches. He's carrying a mailbag. Hopeful for some news from home, Ronald is pleased to hear his own name announced.

He's passed an envelope and quickly puts the plate aside and tears it open. Inside, there is a letter from his old schoolmate, Jeffrey. Beyond the initial pleasantries, four words instantly draw his attention, bringing news of their dear mutual friend, Robert Gilson. Ronald's shoulders slump. "Rob has been killed," the letter says. After the moment of distraction with the German, Ronald is struck back down by the reality of the Great War. But though he's heartbroken,

He will have no time to mourn. There are only a few hours before the grueling work of the night begins, collecting the bodies and making repairs. And tomorrow, another day of relentless bloodshed. Tolkien's memories of the Great War will stay with him for the duration of his life. The loss of two close schoolmates will deeply affect him. But his generosity towards the German prisoner is the kind of defiant act his fallen friends would have encouraged.

It also demonstrated his enduring passion for language, even in the most dire of circumstances. Although he doesn't know it yet, Tolkien's enthusiasm for linguistics and his bleak wartime experiences will become crucial to the best-selling Lord of the Rings trilogy. The themes of conflict, friendship, good and evil, and forgiveness will run deeply through his life's work.

But how did Tolkien rise from a humble Birmingham childhood to become one of the most respected literary figures of all time? What drove him to show such grace to his enemies, even after his closest friends were killed in battle? And why did it take so many years for his greatest works to see the light of day? I'm John Hopkins from Noisa. This is a short history of J.R.R. Tolkien.

John Ronald Rule Tolkien is born in Bloemfontein in what is now South Africa in 1892. His British parents, Arthur and Mabel Tolkien, had recently moved from England after Arthur was promoted by the bank he works for. Now he runs the company's Bloemfontein offices, where he earns a stable but modest living. When he's three years old, Ronald returns home to the UK to visit family with his mother and younger brother, Hilary. Arthur stays behind for work.

But before he can join the family, he dies of rheumatic fever. Without a father, the Tolkien family stay in the UK, settling near Mabel's parents in King's Heath, a working-class area of Birmingham. The family have little, but Mabel does her best for her sons. A year later, she moves her boys to the nearby village of Serhol,

With a greater access to nature, including the beautiful slopes and woodlands of the Clint Hills, Ronald's fondness for exploration and wilderness develops. Dr. Holly Ordway is a Tolkien scholar and award-winning author of the book, Tolkien's Modern Reading, Middle-Earth Beyond the Middle Ages. You know, those first early years, he has...

the ability to just run and play in a countryside setting, to go down to Serhal Mill, to play in the woods, to play in the fields. And he really gets a profound sense of the countryside from that. And it was tremendously formative on him. He loved the countryside. He called it, you know, a paradise. And it really became imprinted in his memory as

Countryside living blends well with the home education Mabel is delivering to her sons. By the age of four, Ronald can not only read English, but also starts to learn Latin. The first seeds for a lifelong passion have been sown.

Tolkien was fascinated by language from a very early age, just by language in itself. He had an early recollection as a boy of seeing the railway go by where they were living at the time and seeing coal trucks with Welsh names on them and just being enthralled by the names in this language that was new to him.

So he has an early attraction to it and he begins quite early on inventing languages. There's an early language called Annamalik that he made up with his cousins. He had another one called Nevbosh. The creation of his own sophisticated languages is an early sign of his aptitude for linguistics. Mabel soon introduces her son to great works of fiction, including the writings of the Scottish writer Andrew Lang.

These worlds of fairies, folklore, dragons, knights, and epic quests keep Ronald reading late into the evenings, with the Norse story of Sigrid and the dragon Fafnir becoming a particular obsession. When others around him might only just be learning to read, he is already combining his two loves by beginning to write his own stories.

Inspired by the countryside around him, rambles become epic quests, and real-life encounters with his neighbors become life-or-death escapes from monsters. It's a warm summer morning, and Ronald and Hilary are just finishing their breakfast of bread and jam. With the dishes cleared away, the two little boys pull on their shoes and head out the front door of their small brick home of No. 5 Gracewell Cottages. They follow the path

and soon they're out in the open countryside, following a stream through a meadow. Though the water takes them along a route the boys haven't walked before, Ronald knows it must lead somewhere. As they talk excitedly about what they might find, the boys soon find themselves entering a wood, and then suddenly they hear the rumble of an engine. They run towards the chugging noise ahead of them, racing through the trees until they reach a small clearing. Before them is an old brick building with a towering chimney. The sound is louder here,

and Ronald pulls Hilary along to see where it's coming from. They keep following the stream until they reach a fence standing over the water. Ronald is too small to see what is on the other side, so he sets about attempting to find a hole in the wooden panels to look through. Peering in with his face against the fence, he sees water tumbling down onto a water wheel, forcing it to turn before plunging into a pool below. He's engrossed, but Hilary pulls on his jacket, demanding to see.

Ronald lifts him up for a turn, watching the constant flow of water onto the wheel, before they decide to look for a way in. The boys manage to find an opening big enough to squeeze their small bodies through. Then they hurry over to see the wheel. Somewhere, unseen within the building, the steam engine assists its motion. And combined with the water power, it's an incredible machine. They giggle as it sprays them with water. But suddenly their fun is interrupted.

Now, an older boy approaches them at pace along the stream's path. Wearing overalls covered in white dust, he's mean-looking with piercing eyes and much bigger than the brothers. Behind him follows a burly man with a big black beard. The boy begins to shout, shooing the boys away from the water wheel. Ronald wastes no time. He grabs his brother's hand and runs back the way they came. Reaching the gap in the fence, they scramble through, then pick up the path. The noise of the wheel recedes and the shouts grow faint.

After a few minutes of desperate running, they pause to catch their breath. Leaning against a tree, Hillary still looks terrified and close to tears. Luckily, Ronald knows exactly the thing he needs. As they head more slowly for home, he tells his brother how the dust-covered boy was actually the White Ogre, a cruel beast that they will one day defeat on their quest to gain the Waterwheel.

His imagination blossoming, Ronald's stories continue to take their cues from the real-life surroundings of this bucolic childhood. But while he's inventing adventures and monsters, the real world is changing at home. Originally from a Protestant background, his mother, Mabel, feels herself called to Catholicism in her twenties. And in 1900, the family are received into the Catholic Church. But the decision causes a deep divide within her Protestant family.

This is in the context of early 20th century England. Catholicism was very much not socially or culturally accepted in the mainstream. And so to have gone from Anglicanism to becoming a member of the Catholic Church was really shocking to both sides of her family, her in-laws and her own family, who were staunch Protestants.

And they tried to pressure her to come back into the fold. This was, again, very culturally common to try and pressure any convert, come back, you know, renounce the Catholic faith, come back into the Anglican or the Protestant fold. And to that end, they cut off financial support. Mabel's decision leaves her and her young family in a precarious economic position.

Her commitment to her new faith results in the loss of the little financial support she'd been receiving from her family, which in turn puts a question mark over the boys' education. Mabel had plans to send the boys to the fee-paying King Edward's School near the center of Birmingham, the school attended by their late father. Here, she believes Ronald will excel in his love of language. But with financial pressure mounting, Ronald's life is about to be struck by tragedy.

Aged just 34, Mabel passes away. And so from her conversion to the time that she died, they became quite poor. And she was stressed by this, obviously stressed by the rejection of her family. And so this undoubtedly did not help her health because she suffered from, as they discovered, diabetes.

which at that time was untreatable. It was a frightening disease. They didn't really know what caused it. They didn't know how to treat it. There really was no effective treatment. Insulin wasn't discovered until some years later. In the absence of a supportive family network, Mabel's will places Ronald and Hillary in the guardianship of Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a Catholic priest from the Birmingham Oratory.

It is through Father Francis that Ronald finds forgiveness for the extended family that had abandoned him. Tolkien does end up having warm familial relations with both sides of his extended family. They remained Protestants, he remained a Catholic, but he was able to spend time with them, to go on family holidays. And I think that was a really important formative strand out of this tragic situation.

But it is in the priest that Ronald finds a father figure, and he's one who continues to encourage his academic pursuits. Through his guardians at the oratory, he's admitted to the school his mother chose for him, where he finds friends with similar interests, but also with different faiths.

The oratory fathers permitted him to go to King Edward's, which was a Church of England school, that he had friends there who were Anglicans and friends who were Methodists. It was not just an ecumenical, but an inter-religious environment, which was exceptional for the time, and something that Tolkien noted as being a good thing, that it helped him in his life. This experience of diversity sees the beginnings of some deep friendships.

He regularly meets three others: Rob Gilson, Jeffrey Bache Smith, and Chris Wiseman in the school library to discuss everything from religion to poetry. But when they're discovered brewing tea without permission, they move the group to the local Barrow Stores tea rooms.

Now, calling themselves the Tea Club and Barovian Society, or TCBS, what cements their connection is a shared determination to create beauty in the world. But what is most crucial to the teenage Ronald is the companionship, fellowship even, that the little club brings.

So we had these friends and they had a vision of using their gifts to help England, to help England to be healthier and purer and more wholesome and more beautiful and more good. And this is coming from their shared Christian faith and from their artistic vision. These are very idealistic teenagers, but they're also very gifted idealistic teenagers.

Now 16, a young man edging towards higher education, Tolkien has his sights set on one of the oldest and most respected institutions in the world, Oxford University. Until now he's been lodging with his aunt, but it's not a happy setting. So eventually Father Francis moves the Tolkien brothers to a room behind the oratory, and lodging in the room below is a young lady by the name of Edith Bratt.

Also an orphan, at 19, Edith is three years older than Tolkien and has already finished with school. A highly trained pianist, she intends to make a career from her passion and plays at the many parties held in their lodgings. Living in the same house and sharing their artistic enthusiasms, Edith and Tolkien soon become inseparable. But falling in love so young is not in Tolkien's plans or those set out for him by his guardian. As the relationship with Edith becomes a distraction from his education,

Father Francis steps in. They were both orphans, both at the same lodging house, but with one big difference, and that was that Edith was a Protestant. And

They become friends and then they fall in love. Okay, so far so good. But then Tolkien starts to be a little secretive about it. They start lying about the time they're spending together, kind of hiding that relationship. And at the same time, Tolkien also is not paying as much attention to his schoolwork as he should do. He fails his first scholarship examination to get into Oxford.

And since he doesn't have any money, he really needs to get the scholarship to get in. So with all these different things, Father Francis is quite understandably worried. He doesn't know anything about Edith. He doesn't know what's going on. So ultimately, he simply forbids Tolkien to see Edith or communicate with her at all until he's 21 and no longer under his guardianship.

With a heavy heart, Tolkien elects to obey Father Francis. Edith leaves Birmingham, and the pair end their fledgling romance. After winning a scholarship to Oxford's Exeter College in October 1911, he enrolls to read classics. Though still only nineteen, and far away from Father Francis, he chooses to stay true to his promise.

He obeyed Father Francis and he did not see her. He did not write to her. He kept his word. And I think it's particularly important to note that he kept his word even after he had gone to Oxford and he's a student at Exeter College. He's no longer living right near Father Francis. If he had wanted to, he could easily have disobeyed his guardian and his guardian would never have been the wiser. But he didn't.

But 18 months into his time at university, Tolkien turns 21. No longer under Father Francis' guardianship, he is his own man, and he wastes no time in exercising his freedom.

So it's such a romantic story. When he does turn 21, Tolkien, sort of on the stroke of midnight, he writes to Edith, professing his love. He wants to be reunited with her. He says he wants to marry her. How romantic. And he gets back a letter saying that Edith is actually engaged to another man. Within a week of finding out Edith has promised to marry someone else, Tolkien is on a train to Cheltenham where she lives. She is torn.

but he convinces her to break off her engagement and is thrilled when she accepts his proposal of marriage. By now it's January 1914. Within months the assassination of a distant aristocrat in central Europe will set off a chain of events that will change the world forever.

Of course, at that time, they didn't know it was the First World War. It was just this conflict. And then it became war. And everyone thought it would be over by Christmas. No one expected that it was going to become the absolute slaughter that it became.

So he had a lot of pressure to, you know, sign up right away. He didn't. And I think that was because he was trying to think about his future. He was, after all, engaged to be married. What would happen to Edith if, you know, he goes off to war straight away and he's killed? He's trying to finish his degree because that's the only way that he'll be able to earn a living. He has to have the ability to get a job after the war, which, after all, is supposedly going to be over by Christmas.

But the war is not over by Christmas. Far from it. By the middle of 1915, when he's taking his final exams, the pressure from his family to join up has intensified. And as soon as his degree is finished, he enlists. He is separated from Edith during his training. But once they're married in the spring of the next year, the couple lodge together nearby.

And then in 1916, he gets married and just about two months later, he is sent off to the front lines and he experiences the full trauma of the war. Now, this had been obviously looming before that because he had others of his friends, close friends who had gone to war ahead of him. So he knew that it was going to be pretty terrible.

On July 1, 1916, Tolkien finds himself in reserve as the Battle of the Somme begins. He will be waiting in the trenches while the first wave of British troops head over the top, hoping to break the stalemate in this historically deadly war and hasten victory for the Allies. The British troops scramble up ladders into No Man's Land, the uninhabited wasteland that stands between the trenches of the opposing armies. Believing the German lines to be near destroyed,

These unfortunate men find that they are not. Then the machine gun fire begins. It was a tremendous slaughter of men, you know, for every family had such great losses. And he was right there in the trenches and he saw it. He saw the horrors of the first mechanized war with, you know, machine guns and tanks and poison gas. This is a completely different kind of warfare than anything that had been before.

Two weeks later, on July 15, TCBS member Jeffrey "Bache" Smith writes to Tolkien with the tragic news of Rob Gilson, who was killed in another trench somewhere else on the front. Tolkien is grief-stricken by the news. "I do not feel a member of a complete body now," he writes in response. "I honestly feel that the TCBS has ended." Smith replies, "The TCBS is not finished and never will be."

Tolkien spends four months at the trenches before contracting trench fever. Though it's rarely fatal, the lice-transmitted illness brings with it a high temperature, headaches, but also a ticket home. Taken to hospital, Tolkien's condition only worsens, and by early November he's been transported back to Birmingham, where he's reunited with Edith. But the relief is short-lived.

A week before Christmas, Tolkien learns that Geoffrey, who had written to him about Robb's death, has also fallen in the relentless war. Shortly before his death, this friend had sent him a letter. "May you say the things I have tried to say," he wrote. "Long after I am not there to say them, if such be my lot." These words, urging Tolkien to fulfill his potential and keep hold of his integrity, stay with him.

But it's his religious faith that helps him cope with the wretched experience of the Great War and the loss of those close to him. Many of his era did abandon their faith in the face of the horrors of the war. But Tolkien didn't. And I think it partly had to do with the fact that

having lost his father and his mother already, he had come to grips with suffering. He knew that just because you believed in God didn't mean that things are going to be easy for you or that you wouldn't ever have loss or pain. He had already worked through that and he was able then to recognize what he was seeing was the abuse of free will.

And so we have Tolkien's understanding that war is because of human sin, human evil, human choices. And so he's able to get through the war with, I think, his faith in that sense deepened. With his faith intact and the words of his fallen friends firmly etched into his mind, Tolkien resolves to keep his promise. In early 1917, while in an army barracks on the home front, he begins to write a story on the back of a sheet of marching music.

Titled "The Fall of Gondolin", it is the first story set in Tolkien's fictional universe, which he calls Middle-earth. It tells of a hidden city and its destruction at the hands of an evil god, Morgoth. There is comfort in this creativity, but the greatest source of support in this period of recovery is his wife.

though his lost friends, being reunited with Edith lifts his spirits. And in November 1917, they welcome their first child, John, into the world. After the Great War draws to a close in November 1918, Tolkien finds employment at the Oxford Dictionary, before heading for a job at Leeds University's English Language Department.

Though he has little time to pursue his fiction, it's not long before his academic writing career flourishes through a modern rendering of the medieval tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The family continues to grow with two more sons born by 1924. The Tolkien's third child, Christopher, is named after the only other surviving member of the TCBS. When he can, Tolkien continues to work on his Middle-earth stories, for which his three boys form an eager audience.

But the writing takes a backseat to his academic career, and in 1925 an opportunity to return to Oxford arises when the professorship of Anglo-Saxon becomes vacant. Tolkien applies and fends off stiff competition to land the prestigious job at the tender age of 33. With his family, he leaves Yorkshire and heads to Oxford, ready for a new chapter. But with the loss of Geoffrey and Rob, friendship has been missing in Tolkien's life.

So it's not a moment too soon when, during a staff meeting in May 1926, a new member of the English department swaggers in. A few years younger than Tolkien, the Irishman introduces himself as Jack, but to the rest of the world, he is C.S. Lewis, the man who will come to author The Chronicles of Narnia.

When he meets C.S. Lewis, Lewis at that point is an atheist with a bit of an anti-Catholic tinge. So you wouldn't have thought necessarily that they would become friends, but they did. And they become very good friends, and he becomes part of this Inklings group, this dynamic group of friends who got together to read their works and comment on them and encourage each other and enjoy time together.

The informal literary group that the men form fills the gap in Tolkien's social life. Calling themselves the Inklings, they offer feedback on one another's work, and Tolkien begins to share his Middle-earth myths. In his professional capacity, he enjoys working on a translation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf. A daughter arrives in 1929, expanding Tolkien's young home audience to four.

But while he continues to read his stories to his children, he doesn't yet feel the work is ready to be received by the wider world. A self-described perfectionist, he's still working on the lore and world-building of Middle-earth. It is a lifelong vocation, full of languages, maps, and a deep history. And he'd rather not publish at all than publish before it is ready. And it's not just the writing he's working on.

A skilled artist, he paints countless scenes from the stories, alongside drawing maps, emblems, and producing endless pages of calligraphy in his own languages. Then one day, in early 1930, while marking examination papers, a sentence springs into his mind. Quickly, before it slips away, he flips through an answer booklet to where the student has left a blank page and jots it down. In a hole in the ground, he writes, There lived a hobbit.

The word "hobbit" is of Tolkien's invention. He doesn't know what it means yet, but he knows it feels right. Soon, the story is taking shape. By 1935, Tolkien is a world-renowned philologist at the very peak of his field. But his work set in Middle-earth is still not quite right, even after five years of writing. Between his academic responsibilities and his four children, he simply doesn't have the time to complete his work to his own high standards.

For a while, he abandons the Hobbit project altogether. However, he is about to experience a level of fame that will propel him and his epic stories into the limelight. Though it's been ten years since he completed his translation of Beowulf, in 1936 Tolkien delivers a lecture that changes the common perspective on the epic poem. In the story, the eponymous hero saves the Danes by defeating the monster Grendel, as well as his mother and a dragon.

He really shot to fame in his academic career with his lecture, Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics. Now today, it's easy to take for granted that Beowulf is one of those classics. It's on reading lists and things. But when Tolkien did this lecture in the 30s,

Beowulf was really treated as sort of an antiquarian thing. It was used as an example of where words came from in Old English, but nobody was really looking at it as a poem, as a story. And that's what Tolkien does. He says, basically, Beowulf is a great story. We have this warrior Beowulf, he defeats Grendel, he defeats the dragon. It's a good story.

We should treat it as a poem, as a literary work. And that may seem to us obvious, but if it seems obvious, it's because of Tolkien. He showed that to the scholarly world and they said, oh, right, okay. Tolkien's lecture demonstrates the power of epic tales to the academic world. He shows that they're not just tools for understanding the history of a language, but are also ways of asking deeper questions.

This new reading of the classic text alerts his fellow academics and the wider literary world to Tolkien's talents. And it is not long before his own story of The Hobbit reaches the public sphere nearly a decade after writing the first sentence. But it happens by sheer accident. With the manuscript having been circulated among a few friends and former students, it finds its way into the hands of a publisher in 1936 who is immediately struck by its appeal.

Tolkien is asked to prepare it for publication and agrees. But the process is not straightforward. The complexity of The Hobbit, with its maps, languages, and worlds, plus the inclusion of his own perfectionism, slow down the publishing. It is, after all, an amalgamation of decades of experiences. Truly, a life's work. But Tolkien isn't going to let the chance get away from him, and labors away tirelessly to perfect it.

With the protagonist Bilbo Baggins at its center, the story follows his quest alongside wizard Gandalf and 13 dwarves to recover treasure and the dwarves' home from the evil dragon Smaug. Finally, in September 1937, The Hobbit is released in the United Kingdom. The reviews are glowing, and by Christmas The Hobbit has sold out. The effect is the same in America.

Stanley Unwin, chairman of the publisher Allen & Unwin, writes to Tolkien to tell him that a sequel will be needed, and quickly. Tolkien is keen to show the full range of his work. Not just the stories, but the languages, the cultures, and the lands. He has collated the whole patchwork into a Middle-earth history called the Silmarillion. But Stanley wants more from Bilbo and the Hobbits.

so Tolkien heads back to the drawing board to create another epic Hobbit tale. What he wants is to find middle ground for Middle-earth. Though he appreciates the publisher's enthusiasm for the beloved Hobbits, he's eager to develop a more mythological narrative that delves into Middle-earth's extensive history. But in 1939, as soon as a story that ticks both boxes begins to form in his fictional world, the real world outside is plunged into darkness.

Just 21 years after the first global conflict ended, the world is at war again. Tolkien, too old now to enlist, is determined to do what he can to fight the scourge of Nazism. He is a member of the Home Guard and shelters evacuees from London. But it's his son, Michael, who faces the greatest danger. He takes part in the Battle of Britain as an anti-aircraft gunner and is awarded the George Cross for his efforts.

Michael goes on to fight in France and Spain, but is injured during a night drill after colliding with an army vehicle and is discharged from duty. As he recovers in a Worcester hospital, his father writes to him, sharing his new ideas for the sequel to The Hobbit to keep his son occupied. But it's not until nine years after the Second World War has ended that readers finally get their next taste of Tolkien.

The first installment of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Fellowship of the Ring, is published in July 1954. It is a full 17 years since the Hobbit first captured the world's imagination, and it is friendship, one of the cornerstones of Tolkien's life, that he has to thank for its completion.

Tolkien directly attributes the finishing of The Lord of the Rings to C.S. Lewis because he'd been working on it for so long, and Tolkien was really terrible about finishing things. And he said that if it were not for C.S. Lewis's ceaseless encouragement, he would never have finished it. So really, we have Lewis and that friendship to thank for the fact that we have The Lord of the Rings finished, published, polished. Thank you, C.S. Lewis.

The story follows Frodo Baggins and his eight companions, who cross Middle-earth to destroy the powerful One Ring from the clutches of the evil Lord Sauron. Themes of fellowship, friendship, love, and endurance are central, mirroring the importance of these things in Tolkien's own life. Though the wars are not the direct inspiration, the author's experiences in the trenches enable him to find the epic narrative he had been looking for.

We've got the scene of the dead marshes with the dead men underneath the waters and the whole blasted landscape of Mordor. That is very much evocative of what he would have seen in the trenches.

If you think about it, Frodo, in a sense, has a kind of post-traumatic stress. He's never fully healed after the effects of the wound in his shoulder from the blade. He's just so wrecked by the experience of carrying the ring that even after the quest is resolved, he has to say this is one of the most saddest and most powerful lines in a lot of the rings. He says to Sam, yes, the Shire has been saved, but not for me.

He's not able to be healed in this life. And I think that reflects very much Tolkien's understanding that the traumas of war do not just go away because you put your uniform away. By 1955, the third and final installment of the trilogy, The Return of the King, is released to great acclaim. Reviews speak of a masterpiece from the mind of a genius. Epic, powerful, and honest, Tolkien's great work is finally complete.

But it is more than just a novel with maps, languages, and great battles. The Lord of the Rings addresses some of humanity's greatest questions. Tolkien said of The Lord of the Rings that it is a fundamentally religious and Catholic work. But then he goes on to say that...

He has therefore not put in any overt references to religion. And I think that puzzling statement is really helpful for understanding the way that he addresses these deeper questions. Because he goes on in that same passage to say that all of the religious element is in the story and the symbolism. It's deep. It's implicit.

And that's, I think, how we can see these questions of good and evil and redemption working out through the narrative and the characters of The Lord of the Rings. It is not an allegory of the Gospels. It's not an allegory of anything. He's very clear. It's a story. It is about itself. But it is imbued with...

what he genuinely believed. I mean, he's very clear that in his conception of Middle Earth, the god of Middle Earth is the same god that he worshipped. He says there's one god and it's the same god. So everything that he believed about good and evil is woven into the reality of Middle Earth. A cult figure who is recognized wherever he goes, he now retires to Bournemouth on England's south coast.

It's a difficult decision for Tolkien, whose life is in Oxford. But Edith has supported his academic and literary career with passion for decades, and it's time to put her needs first. Of all Tolkien's relationships, his connection with his wife is the most enduring and the most important. But Edith often feels at odds with the academic world Tolkien had found so much success in, and didn't ever find the same kind of social connections her husband enjoyed. In both Oxford and Leeds, she struggled with loneliness,

But now she has a new lease of life, reveling in the seaside community and regularly hosting events at her home. Tolkien misses Oxford, but he owes Edith this after her years of sacrifice. So it is an enduring love between the two of them. Not easy. It wasn't ever an easy marriage, but he was committed to it. He loved his wife and they made it work. And

We see an echo of that as well in Middle-earth because the story of Beren and Lúthien in the Silmarillion is in fact an echo, a deliberate echo of their relationship. And interestingly, in this story, Beren and Lúthien save each other. Lúthien is quite the active figure. She rescues Beren at one point and...

He says that this is the two of them. He is Baron and she is Luthien. They didn't call each other that in their life, but he knew that was how he saw it. And indeed, their gravestone in Wolvercott Cemetery has the names Baron and Luthien inscribed on it underneath their respective names. After Edith's death in October 1971, Tolkien returns to Oxford. He lives out his final days in the comfort of the city he loves, in rooms provided by the university.

In the last year of his life, he is awarded both an honorary doctorate from Oxford University and a CBE for his contribution to literature. He finally passes away in 1973 at the age of 81. Though he doesn't live to witness the enormous success his novels achieve on the big and small screens, his legacy had already been firmly established during his lifetime.

Both The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are among the best-selling books in history, with over 100 million copies of each sold. Almost 100 years after the first Middle-earth story emerged from the bookshops of Britain, their influence and popularity show no sign of abating. The books aside, countless millions have found themselves immersed in the movie adaptations of Tolkien's work, with The Lord of the Rings series grossing almost $3 billion.

Tolkien clubs and societies can be found all around the world, even groups dedicated to the learning and advancement of his languages like Elvish. J.R.R. Tolkien will be remembered as a father of modern fantasy, thanks to his unforgettable fictional world populated with orcs, dwarves, and elves, as well as men. But though it's his pure imagination that brought these stories to life, it is his portrayal of the universal experiences of fellowship, bravery,

and struggle against the odds that secures them in his readers' hearts.

He was very open to people applying the images of the Lord of the Rings to come to terms with things that matter to them. So there's a great deal of applicability. We think about the forces of Sauron, the forces of Saruman. We have these massive forces that are shaping our lives and they seem all powerful. And what can I possibly do in the face of this massive force?

Well, Tolkien says quite a lot. You can strive to do what's good. You can be a good friend. You can step up to do what Frodo did and say, I will take the ring, although I do not know the way. What a powerful message, I think, of hope for us. And so that's what I would say is his legacy, that legacy of hope that what we do actually matters. Hi, listeners. We'll be taking a short break over the festive season.

Short History Of will be back in a new year with brand new weekly episodes. Happy holidays.

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