The man who became a god

Not only because he created an entire universe (albeit with extensive help from other mythologies) but because he created perhaps the most beloved and revered such universe in literary history.

Tolkien became a man in perhaps the worst single moment in history to do so, around 1914, at the dawning of World War I.

“In those days chaps joined up, or were scorned publicly,” he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher later in life. “It was a nasty cleft to be in for a young man with too much imagination and little physical courage”.

He was a junior officer at the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest of the war. Catching trench fever, he was shipped back to England just days before nearly every young man in his battalion was killed during an attack. Talk about a Hobbit’s luck.

He wrote The Hobbit in the 1930s, after which it became so tremendously popular that public urging convinced him to write more about the quaint little people who live under the hills.

“In spite of the darkness of the next five years [World War II] I found that the story could not now wholly be abandoned and I plodded on, mostly by night,” he recalled in a foreword to the Fellowship of the Ring, wherein he also details how more and more as he continued advancing the story, he felt more and more strongly that he needed to retro-march, towards what he called “the Elder Days,” referring to the tales which would become The Silmarillion.

Tolkien created parts of the Middle-Earth universe in different batches in different parts of his life, often jumping around. Paintings, maps, and calligraphy from the languages he invented were sometimes made years before or after his novel’s publication, and other times they were done alongside the words which the book contains to describe what he was illustrating.

The maps are also typical of the man. Growing outward from theaters of action in the books, sometimes to such richness as they had to be joined to other sheets of cartography paper with brown packing tape. WaL

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