John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE FRSL ( 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high-fantasy works: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature —or, more precisely, of high fantasy. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Forbes ranked him the 5th top-earning "dead celebrity" in 2009.
Links To Peel[]
Peel was a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien's work in the late 60's and remarked on his 08 May 1968 show that he would like to have Tolkien, then a cult figure among the hippies, as a regular guest on the programme, after he played "A Elbereth Gilthoniel", an "Elvish" (made up language) poem read by Tolkien himself, that was available on an LP of readings from, and musical settings (by Donald Swann) of, the writer's work, called "The Road Goes Ever On" (Swann's song cycle is side two of the LP - details here). He had previously mentioned the LP in his International Times column in the issue of 5 April 1968:
There is now a record which features the music and piano of Donald Swann, the singing of William Elvin and the reading of the blessed Professor himself. It's on Caedmon TC 1331 and I've not heard it yet, but I will, I will, and you will be told. It is called "Poems and Songs of Middle Earth" and includes"A Elbereth Gilthoniel" in Elvish. I think I would like to hear the songs sung by Mike Heron, Robin Williamson, Donovan or Marc Bolan (whose voice is elvish anyway).[1]
An off-air recording of a 1968 Pentangle session track from Top Gear has Peel saying "Thank you, nice Pentangle....may the hair on your toes never grow less", a greeting borrowed from the works of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. The "mystical scene magazine" Gandalf's Garden, to which Peel contributed in 1968-69, was named after Gandalf, the wizard who appears in both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
The Middle Earth club in London, where Peel was host DJ quite often in 1967-68, was named after the setting of much of J. R. R. Tolkien's legendarium. The term is equivalent to the term Midgard of Norse mythology, describing the human-inhabited world, i.e. the central continent of world of Tolkien's imagined mythological past. Tolkien's most widely read works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings take place entirely in Middle-earth, and Middle-earth has also become a short-hand to refer to the legendarium or its "fictional-universe". But Tolkien's works inspired many band names, song and album titles in the late 1960s, and Peel was aware that this trend had an absurd side. In International Times of 15 December 1967, he wrote:
"There is, predictably, a group called The Hobbits in America. Equally predictably, they look like a cross between the Four Seasons and the Used-Car-Salesman-Of-The-Year 1958. I must confess I have yet to hear their record, but I have forebodings."
Not surprisingly, this group never appeared in his playlists, but during the Top Gear era, many artists influenced by Tolkien did, including such Peel favourites as Tyrannosaurus Rex (whose percussionist Stephen Ross Porter was known as Steve Peregrin Took, having named himself after a hobbit in Lord of the Rings) and Led Zeppelin.[2] Yet when, in the 1970s and later decades, some progressive rock bands released concept albums filled with lengthy compositions inspired by Tolkien's epics, Peel paid little attention to them.
Peel did not seem to refer to Tolkien in his later years, when he spoke about his favourite writers. Perhaps he came to share the scepticism expressed by the science-fiction writer Michael Moorcock, who had lived in Notting Hill Gate during its heyday as home of the underground scene and had collaborated with Hawkwind. In his essay Epic Pooh Moorcock wrote:
"The Lord of the Rings is a pernicious confirmation of the values of a declining nation with a morally bankrupt class whose cowardly self-protection is primarily responsible for the problems England answered with the ruthless logic of Thatcherism. Humanity was derided and marginalised. Sentimentality became the acceptable substitute. So few people seem to be able to tell the difference."
In 1996 Peel presented a TV programme called Funk Me Up, Scotty, which reviewed the musical careers of the actors of Star Trek, including Leonard Nimoy, who recorded a song called 'Ballad Of Bilbo Baggins', which was broadcast on the show. Bilbo Baggins is the title character and protagonist of J. R. R. Tolkien's 1937 novel The Hobbit, as well as a supporting character in The Lord of the Rings. In Tolkien's narrative conceit, in which all the writings of Middle-earth are translations from the fictitious volume of The Red Book of Westmarch, Bilbo is the author of The Hobbit and translator of various "works from the elvish" (as mentioned in the end of The Return of the King).
Shows Played[]
Tolkien - A Hymn to Elbereth
- 1968
- 27 March 1968: A Elbereth Gilthoniel (LP - Poems And Songs Of Middle Earth) Caedmon
- 03 April 1968: The Mewlips (LP - Poems And Songs Of Middle Earth) Caedmon
- 17 April 1968: The Man In The Moon Came Down Too Soon (LP - Poems And Songs Of Middle Earth) Caedmon
- 08 May 1968: A Elbereth Gilthoniel (poem - "a very short recording") (LP: Poems And Songs of Middle Earth) Caedmon
- 15 May 1968: unknown (LP: Poems And Songs of Middle Earth) Caedmon JP - "our weekly benedict"