Palacký University in Olomouc Philosophical

After the War

When the war ended in November 1918 Tolkien and his family moved to Oxford. There he participated in creating the Oxford English Dictionary for two years and in his spare time he continued working on his Lost Tales. He also publicly read “The Fall of Gondolin” for the first time, it was for the members of Exeter College Essay Club. The audience received it well, among them Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future “Inklings”. In the summer of 1920 he applied for a teaching job at the University of Leeds and to his surprise he succeeded.

Tolkien had spent five years teaching in Leeds and during this period of his life his two younger sons – Michael Hillary Reuel and Christopher Reuel – were born. He almost finished his Book of Lost Tales but he continued to rewrite it over and over again, never fully satisfied with it. He also cooperated with his colleague Eric V. Gordon on the new edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – one suitable for university students. Then at the beginning of 1925 he successfully applied for a professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.

6. Oxford

His growing family moved to Oxford and they had stayed there for twenty one years. Those were good years. The Tolkiens were finally enjoying calm family life, living in the same house for more than a few years, going for family vacations, being “normal”. The youngest member of the family came to this world in 1929, a daughter named Priscilla Mary Reuel. Tolkien loved telling stories to his children, relaxing in their garden and he was also drawing and painting. His professional life was similarly satisfying, he “fitted extremely well into the largely male world of teaching, research, the comradely exchange of ideas and occasional publication“.⁹ In 1926 he established a grouping named “The Inklings” meant for the Oxford

⁸ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edit. Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1995), No. 340, 463.
⁹ “Biography – Who was Tolkien?.“
professors mainly, to discuss their common interests and their works. As well as the aforementioned Coghill and Dyson, Owen Barfield and Charles Williams also belonged to the group and above all C. S. Lewis, who later became one of Tolkien’s closest friends.
These tranquil times however saw the creation of Tolkien’s masterpieces – The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings. According to Tolkien himself this all started on one standard day while he was marking some papers – he took one of them and wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”. He did not know what a hobbit was and why it lived in a hole, but he was determined to find out. And he did and created an adventurous story about Bilbo Baggins. He used to read parts of it to his children and they loved it. Interestingly at first he did not mention it to be a story happening in his mythological universe full of elves which he was writing about in The Silmarillion. But some parts of this universe began to appear here and there and he realized Bilbo’s adventures were happening in the Middle Earth as well. In 1936 an unfinished typescript came into the hands of an employee of The Allen & Unwin publishing firm and they wanted it. Tolkien completed the book in 1936 and it came out in September 1937. The first edition was sold out before Christmas and its great success lead Stanley Unwin – the chairman of the firm – to ask Tolkien for more “Middle Earth material”.
This encouraged Tolkien to make some of his Silmarillion stories into a more presentable state and he sent them to Unwin together with some of his older children stories. His reader however thought this had almost no commercial potential and that some new “hobbit story” would be a much better choice. Tolkien was frustrated by their reaction to his beloved mythological world, but in his letter to the publisher he agreed that “it is plain that quite apart from [Silmarillion], a sequel or successor to The Hobbit is called for“.¹⁰
Three days later he started his work on another story about hobbits, but was not really sure about what he wanted to write about. During his writing process he changed almost everything - from the main protagonist to the names, to the overall atmosphere of the book. He went from writing the “hobbit sequel” to something more similar to Silmarillion, but that was not what bothered his publishers, it was his slow working pace. They wanted to publish “the new hobbit” a few years after





¹⁰ John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, The Letters, No. 19, 32.
The Hobbit, but Tolkien was still postponing the writing. World War II had come and gone, this time without such a significant impact on his family and friends and surprisingly it was not the main reason the writing took him so much time. It was his perfectionism. He reworked, rewrote and revised the book over and over again and even when he finally finished it in 1949 he was not fully satisfied with it. It took him twelve years to do it.
The first part of the book came out in 1954 mostly because Tolkien thought it would be better to cooperate with another publishing firm – Collins. The main reason for this was Tolkien’s desire to publish the (still unfinished) Silmarillion and Allen & Unwin already refused. This seemed like the perfect moment to do this, to present The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings as two parts of a one story. After three years of complicated negotiating with Collins Tolkien realized something is better than nothing and came back to Allen & Unwin – to publish at least The Lord of the Rings. It took Tolkien another two years to collect all his notes and (with the help of his son Christopher) remake the needed maps of Middle Earth.
It was selling well, much better than the author or the publishers expected. But it was nothing too extraordinary until the pirated paperback version came out in the USA in 1965 and started a cult. American university students loved many aspects of Tolkien’s story and even established the “American Tolkien Society” club. On one hand there were academic works concerning the story – on the other hand so called “hobbit picnics” in costumes. Americans were flying over the ocean to see their favorite professor and ask for a signature. The popularity of Tolkien’s books increased in the UK as well thanks to this. Tolkien was getting so many presents he had no place to put them anymore and so many letters he was no longer able to answer them all.
Speaking of his professional life, he retired in 1959 after almost forty years of teaching. He was sixty seven years old and he felt he had the right to rest. He needed more time to spend with his wife and to finish his beloved Silmarillion. In 1968 they moved from Oxford to Bournemouth to enjoy the rest of their lives near the sea. Three years later Edith died – Beren lost his Lúthien. After this he could not imagine staying in Bournemouth and went back to Oxford, where he lived in rooms provided by Merton College. He died on the 2^nd of September 1973. He never finished The Silmarillion, but his son Christopher managed to edit it himself and it
was published in 1977, followed by Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth
in 1980 – a selection of incomplete writings. He was “the father of modern fantasy”.

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