98 Fun Facts About J. R. R. Tolkien

In which city was J. R. R. Tolkien born in 1892?

Bloemfontein was where his father Arthur managed a bank branch; Arthur died there of rheumatic fever in 1896 while his wife and sons were visiting England, so the family settled near Birmingham.

What bit the infant Tolkien in the garden in South Africa?

As a toddler Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the family garden in South Africa; he later said he had no memory of it, though readers see the bite echoed in Shelob and the spiders of Mirkwood.

Tolkien's aunt Jane's farm gave its name to which place in his fiction?

Bag End was the local name of his aunt Jane Neave's farm at Dormston, Worcestershire, which Tolkien visited; he seems to have borrowed only the name, since the real Bag End is an old farmhouse that looks little like a hobbit-hole.

Which children's book did the young Tolkien dislike?

Treasure Island and The Pied Piper left the young Tolkien cold, and Alice merely amused him; what he loved were George MacDonald's fantasies and, above all, Andrew Lang's Fairy Books.

Tolkien's mother Mabel died in 1904 of what, when he was 12?

Mabel Tolkien died of acute diabetes in November 1904, aged 34, when insulin treatment was nearly two decades away; her family had cut off support after she became a Catholic in 1900.

Who became guardian of the orphaned Tolkien brothers?

Father Francis Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory became guardian under Mabel's will and topped up the boys' meagre inheritance from his family's sherry business; Tolkien said he 'first learned charity and forgiveness' from him.

Tolkien's first encounter with an invented language was Animalic, created by whom?

Animalic was invented by his cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon, built mostly from English animal names; Tolkien and Mary then made Nevbosh, and he went on to his own Naffarin.

What did the initials of Tolkien's semi-secret school group, the T.C.B.S., stand for?

T.C.B.S. stood for Tea Club and Barrovian Society, after the tea the boys brewed in the school library and later drank at Barrow's Stores; two of its core members were killed in 1916.

Tolkien said Bilbo's crossing of the Misty Mountains was based on his own 1911 hike where?

In summer 1911 Tolkien's party of 12 walked through the Swiss Alps from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen, Mürren and the Aletsch glacier; he said the Silberhorn became 'the Silvertine of my dreams'.

Where at Oxford did Tolkien study from 1911, graduating with first-class honours in 1915?

Tolkien went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in October 1911, started in Classics and switched in 1913 to English Language and Literature, taking first-class honours in 1915.

How did the teenage Tolkien and Edith Bratt amuse themselves in Birmingham teashops?

Throwing sugar lumps into passers-by's hats from a teashop balcony, the pair moved to the next table whenever the bowl was empty; both were orphans, and by summer 1909 they had decided they were in love.

When Tolkien proposed at 21, what had Edith already done?

Edith had got engaged to another man, George Field, believing Tolkien had forgotten her during the three years his guardian kept them apart; within a week she gave back Field's ring and accepted Tolkien.

What was Tolkien doing when he scribbled 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit'?

Marking exam papers, Tolkien found a page that a candidate had left blank and wrote the line on it on impulse; only afterwards did he set about finding out what a hobbit was.

Tolkien and Edith married in March 1916 at a Catholic church in which Midlands castle town?

They married on 22 March 1916 at St Mary Immaculate, the Catholic church in Warwick, where Edith had moved in 1913; Tolkien admired her for marrying a man with no job, little money and a war ahead.

Tolkien was commissioned in 1915 into which regiment?

The Lancashire Fusiliers made Tolkien signals officer of their 11th Battalion; he felt an affinity for his men from Lancashire's mining and mill towns, though army protocol barred officers from befriending other ranks.

How did Tolkien let Edith track his movements in France despite army censorship?

Army censors barred place names, so Tolkien worked out a code of dots in his letters that told Edith where he was; she followed his movements on a map of the Western Front.

Which illness sent Tolkien home from the Somme in November 1916?

Trench fever, spread by body lice, struck Tolkien on 27 October 1916 after his battalion's attack on Regina Trench; he was shipped to England on 8 November and never returned to the front.

Which T.C.B.S. member was killed leading his men on the first day of the Somme?

Rob Gilson was killed on 1 July 1916 leading his men; Geoffrey Bache Smith was fatally wounded by a shell later that year, so two of the four close friends were dead before 1916 was out.

While recovering in Staffordshire, Tolkien began writing what, starting with The Fall of Gondolin?

The Book of Lost Tales, begun with The Fall of Gondolin while he convalesced, was Tolkien's attempt at a mythology for England; he never finished it, but its stories grew into The Silmarillion.

Edith's dance in a hemlock glade at Roos, Yorkshire, inspired which tale?

Beren and Lúthien: Tolkien wrote after Edith's death that the tale began with her dancing in that glade, and their shared headstone names her Lúthien and him Beren.

Tolkien's first civilian job after the war was working on which letter of the Oxford English Dictionary?

W: Tolkien's entries ran from waggle to warlock, and he struggled mightily over walrus; he later said he 'learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life'.

Which northern English university appointed Tolkien its Reader in English Language in 1920?

Leeds made Tolkien Reader in English Language in 1920 and a professor four years later; to amuse his students there he wrote songs, several of them in long-dead languages, to traditional English tunes.

Tolkien returned to Oxford in 1925 as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of what?

Anglo-Saxon: Tolkien won the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair at 33, chosen over Kenneth Sisam, who had once taught him, and held it for twenty years, during which he wrote The Hobbit.

Which 1936 Tolkien lecture became a turning point in scholarship on an Old English poem?

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, his 1936 Gollancz Memorial Lecture to the British Academy, argued the monsters were central to the poem's art; his own prose Beowulf translation, finished in 1926, appeared only in 2014.

In 1939 Tolkien was earmarked for what wartime role?

Codebreaker at the Government Code and Cypher School: Tolkien was among the academics hand-picked for a course at its London headquarters in March 1939, but in the end he never joined.

Which publisher asked Tolkien for a sequel to The Hobbit?

Allen & Unwin wanted more about hobbits; The Lord of the Rings took Tolkien twelve years, and after a dispute he offered it to a rival firm, Collins, before Allen & Unwin published it in 1954–55.

Tolkien wrote his children illustrated letters as whom?

Father Christmas wrote to John, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla each December from 1920 to 1943, with news of the trouble-prone North Polar Bear; the letters were published in 1976.

Who nominated Tolkien for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961?

C. S. Lewis, his friend and fellow Inkling, put Tolkien forward, but the Nobel jury judged that his prose 'has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality'; the 1961 prize went to Ivo Andrić.

In retirement Tolkien left Oxford for which seaside resort, where Edith thrived and he pined for his friends?

Bournemouth gave Edith the society she enjoyed and put distance between Tolkien and his fans, but he missed the Inklings; after she died in 1971 he moved back to Oxford.

Which book of the Bible did Tolkien translate for The Jerusalem Bible (1966)?

He had been assigned much more but other commitments left him time only for Jonah and some criticism of colleagues' work.

What honour did Tolkien receive at Buckingham Palace in March 1972?

CBE, Commander of the Order of the British Empire: the honour was announced on New Year's Day 1972, barely a month after Edith died, so Tolkien went to the Palace that March without her.

In which Oxford cemetery are Tolkien and his wife Edith buried?

Wolvercote Cemetery has a Catholic section, where the Tolkiens share a single grave; for the readers who come looking, the way to it is signposted from the entrance.

What does the second R in J. R. R. Tolkien stand for?

Reuel was also his father Arthur's middle name, and Tolkien handed it on to all four of his own children; family and friends, though, simply called him Ronald.

Tolkien described his political leanings as tending 'more and more to' what?

Anarchy, philosophically understood, 'meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs', Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher in 1943; elsewhere he explained that he was 'not a democrat'.

As a devout Catholic, which side did Tolkien support in the Spanish Civil War?

The Nationalists: Tolkien was a staunch anti-communist who admired the poet Roy Campbell as a defender of the Catholic faith in Spain, and he put a friend's hostility to Franco down to 'Red propaganda'.

Which language's grammar book 'quite intoxicated' Tolkien at Oxford and fed the sounds of his Elvish tongue Quenya?

Finnish: Tolkien said finding its grammar was 'like discovering a complete wine-cellar filled with bottles of an amazing wine', and he rebuilt his private language on its sounds, on what he called a Latin basis.

Which future fantasy novelist helped Christopher Tolkien shape The Silmarillion for its 1977 publication?

Guy Gavriel Kay, a young Canadian, worked with Christopher Tolkien in 1974-75 assembling The Silmarillion from his father's drafts; Kay went on to write The Fionavar Tapestry and Tigana.

To which American institution did Tolkien sell the manuscripts of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings?

Marquette University in Milwaukee bought the manuscripts in Tolkien's lifetime, so the drafts of his two famous books sit in Wisconsin, while his estate later gave the Silmarillion papers to Oxford's Bodleian Library.

Which Hollywood studio bought the film rights to The Lord of the Rings from Tolkien himself?

United Artists bought the rights in the late 1960s but never made the film, shelving John Boorman's live-action plan, and sold them on in 1976 to the producer Saul Zaentz.

Who directed the rotoscoped 1978 animated film of The Lord of the Rings?

Ralph Bakshi directed the 1978 rotoscoped The Lord of the Rings, which stopped midway through The Two Towers; Rankin/Bass had made an animated Hobbit in 1977 and covered the ending in their 1980 The Return of the King.

What did the BBC's 2003 Big Read poll name The Lord of the Rings?

The UK's best-loved novel: after a year-long public vote, The Lord of the Rings beat Pride and Prejudice to first place in December 2003, the year Peter Jackson's film trilogy reached its end.

Which artist included Tolkien in his 2012 reworking of the Sgt. Pepper cover?

Blake designed the original 1967 Beatles sleeve.

Which book by Joseph Wright, later his Oxford tutor, thrilled Tolkien as a schoolboy?

As a schoolboy Tolkien acquired Joseph Wright's Primer of the Gothic Language and fell in love with Gothic; at Oxford Wright became his tutor in comparative philology, and Tolkien later taught Gothic and Old Icelandic himself.

Tolkien's early poem The Lonely Isle was inspired by what?

The Lonely Isle, addressed to England seen from the sea, was inspired by Tolkien's troopship crossing to Calais in June 1916, on his way to the Somme.

Which Oxford pub was the Inklings' regular Tuesday meeting place?

The Eagle and Child, known as the Bird and Baby, lent the Inklings its back parlour, the Rabbit Room; when a 1962 refit opened the room to the bar, they moved across St Giles' to the Lamb and Flag.

Which posthumous 1980 collection was assembled from Tolkien's more fragmentary writings?

Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth prints the stories as Tolkien left them, with Christopher's commentary; its sales surprised the publisher and opened the way for the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth.

Whose illustrations for Farmer Giles of Ham so delighted Tolkien?

Pauline Baynes drew Farmer Giles of Ham in 1949; Tolkien said friends joked that her pictures 'reduced my text to a commentary on the drawings', and she went on to illustrate the Narnia books.

Tolkien's 1925 Sir Gawain edition was co-produced with which fellow scholar?

E. V. Gordon co-edited Sir Gawain and the Green Knight with Tolkien while they were colleagues, and the pair also founded a Viking Club for students, devoted to reading Old Norse sagas and drinking beer.

Which band was proposed to play the hobbits in a 1960s musical film of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?

The Beatles were pitched as the hobbits by the head of their own film company, Denis O'Dell, who flew to India with the books in his suitcase to win them over.

Which Star Trek actor recorded The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, a 1967 novelty song retelling Tolkien's The Hobbit?

Leonard Nimoy mimed the song on a 1967 television variety show, wearing his Spock haircut and flanked by dancers in pointed plastic ears.

Tolkien said he created the Ents out of schoolboy disappointment with the marching wood in which Shakespeare play?

Macbeth brings Birnam Wood to Dunsinane only as soldiers carrying cut branches, which the young reader thought a cheat, so he later wrote trees that really do march to war.

Which European royal sent Tolkien her Lord of the Rings drawings, later published under the pen-name Ingahild Grathmer?

Margrethe II of Denmark posted her drawings to the author, who was struck by how closely they resembled his own style; redrawn by Eric Fraser, they later illustrated a Danish edition.

In Tolkien's The Hobbit, Bullroarer Took is said to have invented which game by knocking a goblin king's head off?

Golf began, the story jokes, when the severed head sailed a hundred yards through the air and dropped down a rabbit-hole; the goblin king's name was Golfimbul.

Before agreeing to print Tolkien's The Hobbit, the publisher paid which reviewer a shilling for a report on it?

His ten-year-old son Rayner earned a shilling for every manuscript he reported on, and his favourable verdict on the hobbit's adventure settled the decision to publish.

Which merry character in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings began life as a Dutch doll owned by his children?

Tom Bombadil reached print in a 1934 magazine poem, two decades before the novel, alongside his wife Goldberry, Old Man Willow and the barrow-wight.

On which moon are mountains officially named after peaks in Tolkien's Middle-earth, among them Mount Doom?

Titan follows a naming rule set by astronomers: mountains on Saturn's largest moon take their names from ones in the legendarium, hence Doom Mons, Erebor Mons and the Misty Montes.

Which role-playing game renamed its hobbits 'halflings' after a copyright threat from the holders of Tolkien's rights?

Dungeons & Dragons changed two more names under the same threat: its tree-like ents became 'treants' and its fiery balrogs became 'balors'.

Tolkien rejected the idea that the One Ring was an allegory of which weapon of the Second World War?

The atomic bomb was a parallel he left to readers: a story, he argued, can be applied to events such as the war without having been written as an allegory of them.

In Tolkien's The Hobbit, which dragon seized the Dwarf kingdom of Erebor and sleeps on its hoard of gold?

Smaug knew his hoard to the ounce: when Bilbo crept in and stole a single golden cup as the dragon slept, he noticed the loss the moment he woke.

Which metal in Tolkien's Middle-earth resembles silver but is stronger and lighter than steel?

Mithril was mined in Moria, where it was once worth ten times its weight in gold; after the Dwarves fled, it became priceless.

Tolkien took the surname of which hobbit in The Lord of the Rings from a local word for cotton wool?

Sam Gamgee owes his name to Gamgee Tissue, a surgical dressing invented by a 19th-century surgeon; fittingly, the character goes on to marry Rosie Cotton.

Which hero of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings began in early drafts as a hobbit in wooden shoes nicknamed Trotter?

Aragorn's forerunner was nicknamed for the clatter of his wooden shoes, and the author hesitated for a long time over who 'Trotter' really was, even toying with making him Bilbo.

Which rock band's 1969 song Ramble On borrows Gollum and Mordor from Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?

Led Zeppelin's singer Robert Plant wrote pastoral fantasies inspired both by the novel and by the landscape of England's Black Country.

Which actor in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films had once met Tolkien in person?

Christopher Lee had met the author just once, and on screen he played the treacherous wizard Saruman.

Which company paid close to $250 million in 2017 for television rights to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings?

Amazon won rights that had also been offered to Netflix and HBO, then committed to five seasons of The Rings of Power at a cost of at least a billion dollars.

Which extinct human species, found on an Indonesian island in 2003, was nicknamed after Tolkien's hobbits?

Homo floresiensis stood only about 1.1 metres tall, and some of its discoverers even proposed the scientific name H. hobbitus.

What three given names lie behind the initials of the author J. R. R. Tolkien?

John Ronald Reuel was simply Ronald to his family, and the rare third name, shared with his father Arthur, was handed down to every one of his children.

Which film studio's style did Tolkien so dislike that he refused to let it adapt his books?

Disney films struck him as a glaring example of bad style, and in 1965 he wrote that neither he nor his publishers would give the studio permission to film his work.

Which line of work took Tolkien's English father, Arthur, to southern Africa, where the future author was born?

Banking promised quicker promotion abroad, and Arthur rose to manage a branch; he died of rheumatic fever while his wife and two small sons were on a visit to England.

Tolkien's widowed mother Mabel was cut off by her family in 1900 after taking which step?

Converting to Catholicism outraged her Baptist relatives, who stopped all help; her son came to regard her as a martyr for the faith he kept all his life.

In which Worcestershire village, with a watermill he explored as a boy, did Tolkien live from 1896?

Sarehole, where the family lived a few hundred yards from the mill, is one of the places on which he partly based the Shire.

Which subject did Tolkien first read as an Oxford undergraduate before changing course to English in 1913?

Classics brought him only a second-class result at the halfway stage of the course, though with a top mark in philology, and that disappointment prompted the switch.

What specialist job did Tolkien hold in his battalion during the Battle of the Somme in 1916?

Signals officer was the post he was given in June 1916, weeks before he joined his battalion near Amiens; the unit was almost wiped out after he was sent home ill.

Tolkien held his second Oxford professorship, from 1945 until he retired, as a fellow of which college?

Merton gave him the chair of English Language and Literature, and after he was widowed the college found him convenient rooms near the High Street.

Tolkien founded an Oxford club called the Coalbiters to read aloud the medieval sagas of which island?

Iceland's sagas were read in the original language, with members translating as they went; the club's name is a word for cronies who sit so close to the fire that they seem to bite the coals.

Tolkien gave his own recurring nightmare to Faramir in The Lord of the Rings; what did it show engulfing the land?

A great wave towering over green fields was a dream that kept returning to him; he called it his Atlantis complex, and it shaped his tale of a drowned island kingdom.

Edith Bratt, whom Tolkien met in a boarding house at 16, had been expected to follow which career?

Concert pianist, or at the very least piano teacher, was the plan after she left school; she went on playing until arthritis forced her to give it up.

On what did Tolkien jot down the opening sentence of The Hobbit when it came to him out of nowhere?

A blank exam page turned up while he was marking School Certificate papers in the early 1930s, and on a sudden impulse he wrote the sentence that begins the book.

Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings as one novel; why was it first published in three volumes?

To limit financial risk: typesetting was costly and sales were expected to be modest, so the gamble was spread over a year, and a one-volume edition had to wait until 1968.

Tolkien thought The Return of the King gave away the plot; which title did he prefer for that volume?

The War of the Ring was his own name for Book Five, with The End of the Third Age for Book Six, when he proposed titles for all six books in 1953.

Tolkien rewrote which chapter of The Hobbit so that Gollum no longer willingly bet his ring on a game?

Riddles in the Dark was revised for the 1951 edition to fit the sequel: Gollum became more aggressive and distraught at losing the ring, where once he and Bilbo had parted amicably.

In the yearly letters Tolkien wrote to his children as Father Christmas, which animal helper keeps causing mishaps?

A polar bear, who has two cubs called Paksu and Valkotukka, is forever landing in trouble; in the 1933 letter he is set upon by a band of goblins.

Tolkien wrote a children's story to console his son Michael after the boy lost what on a beach?

A toy dog made of lead vanished among shingle of its own size and colour, so Roverandom sends a real dog, turned into a toy by a wizard, to the Moon and under the sea.

In Tolkien's short story Leaf by Niggle, the perfectionist hero Niggle devotes his life to which art?

Painting one vast canvas of a tree, leaf by perfect leaf, consumes Niggle; the story grew partly from its author's worry that he would never finish The Lord of the Rings.

Which word did Tolkien coin in his essay On Fairy-Stories for the sudden happy turn that saves a story's heroes?

Eucatastrophe bolts the Greek prefix for 'good' onto 'catastrophe', the scholars' traditional word for the unravelling of a drama's plot.

Which doomed hero's story is told in The Children of Húrin, the Tolkien tale published as a novel in 2007?

Túrin Turambar's tragedy was begun in the late 1910s and revised for decades but never finished; the author's son edited the manuscripts into one continuous narrative.

Which American publisher issued an unauthorised paperback of Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings in 1965?

Ace Books believed the American copyright had lapsed; after an authorised rival edition urged readers to shun it, the firm agreed to pay royalties and let its version go out of print.

Which poet, once a student at Tolkien's Oxford lectures, hailed The Lord of the Rings as a masterpiece?

W. H. Auden reviewed the final volume in 1956 and argued that in places the story outdid Milton's Paradise Lost.

Tolkien based the sounds and some grammar of his Elvish language Sindarin on which living language?

Welsh lent Sindarin its consonant mutations as well as its sound; its inventor felt a Celtic flavour suited the kind of legends told about the people who spoke it.

Which flowing script, credited in Tolkien's legendarium to the Elf Fëanor, spells out the inscription on the One Ring?

Tengwar letters can carry many languages: the Ring's inscription uses them for the Black Speech of Mordor, though they were devised to write Elvish tongues.

Tolkien built Khuzdul, the closely guarded tongue of his Dwarves, on which family of real-world languages?

Semitic languages, chiefly Hebrew, gave Khuzdul its word roots built on three consonants.

Tolkien took Gandalf and nearly all the dwarf names in The Hobbit from a poem in which medieval language?

Old Norse verse supplied them, and in an early draft the name Gandalf belonged to the chief dwarf, later Thorin, while the wizard was called Bladorthin.

Which book of old legends so gripped the student Tolkien that he began retelling its tragedy of Kullervo?

The Kalevala, Finland's national epic, inspired a prose story he wrote as an undergraduate in 1914 and 1915, and he later named it as a source for The Silmarillion.

In Tolkien's early drafts of The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit hero later renamed Frodo went by which name?

Bingo began as Bilbo's son in the third draft of the opening chapter, and in the next draft he carried the double-barrelled surname Bolger-Baggins.

Tolkien linked which bleak landscape in The Lord of the Rings to what he saw at the Battle of the Somme?

The Dead Marshes show the fallen of battles long ago lying in their murky pools, and a mesmerised Frodo tries to reach down and touch the faces.

In Tolkien's legendarium, the fallen Vala Melkor is given which name after he steals the Silmarils?

Morgoth corrupted a lesser spirit who became his highest-ranking lieutenant and, in time, his successor as the great enemy of Middle-earth: Sauron.

By what title is Tolkien's 1931 lecture on his private hobby of inventing languages known?

A Secret Vice was first given to a literary society at an Oxford college, and it ended with samples of his own verse in Elvish.

Tolkien Reading Day falls on 25 March each year to mark which event in The Lord of the Rings?

The fall of Barad-dûr, the fortress that collapses once the Ring is destroyed, gave the date; a newspaper columnist in Syracuse, New York, proposed the day, launched in 2003.