Hope and courage – qualities that allowed the Hobbits to reach Mount Doom – this year also became the official slogan of Tolkien’s Reading Day.
For fans of The Lord of the Rings , March 25 is known as the fall of the Black Tower. It was the definitive end to the war ravaging Middle-earth and the final victory over the forces of Sauron. This is why the British The Tolkien Society has made the 5th day of spring the International Tolkien Reading Day. This date was not used by the author by accident – as an extremely religious man, he wanted to refer to the Catholic holiday of the Annunciation. It is to Tolkien that fantasy fans owe such a wide popularization of the genre, which today is one of the most important in literature, and modern writers base their literary worlds on what the author of The Lord of the Rings created .
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, and died on September 2, 1973. From the beginning of his youth he showed signs of extraordinary intelligence, absorbing languages, which he eventually learned over 30, and was also interested in extraordinary literature. Although his life did not follow the simplest possible path, his self-denial allowed him to enter philology at Exeter College, Oxford, where he devoted himself most to learning the Welsh language. His passion for linguistic science unfortunately had a negative impact on the rest of his academic career. He neglected subjects he was not interested in, which resulted in lowered final grades. What he devoted himself to, however, inspired him for later literary work. He based the speech of the elves on the Finnish language he had learned during his studies. It has become an inherent part of culture as the language of Quenya. All his work is inspired by legends, myths and ancient literature that he has learned over the years.
It is not known exactly when he started working on The Hobbit , but it is assumed that Tolkien started writing in the early 1930s, when he wrote the famous sentence In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit while evaluating the work of one of his students . Since then, the number of chapters has increased, and the author has read the story during the Inkling club meetings. Interestingly, at one point he stopped writing Bilbo Baggins’ story and simply told his children its ending. In 1937, however , the entire Hobbit was published by the Allen & Unwin publisher, which soon asked the author to write a continuation of the story.
The writer sent many texts to publishers, including sketches of the Silimalirion , and stories such as Mr. Flash , Rudy Jil and his dog , and Łazikanty, but all his proposals were rejected with the comment that people want to read about the Hobbits. So Tolkien, forced by the publishing house, started working on a completely new work, which at the beginning was supposed to be a children’s novel, just like The Hobbit . The author changed his concept in 1938, deciding that it would be a story intended for more mature readers and gave it its final title – The Lord of the Rings .