Tolkien family

The Tolkien family is an English family of German descent whose best-known member is J. R. R. Tolkien, Oxford academic and author of the fantasy books The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

Etymology

According to Polish linguist Ryszard Derdziński the Tolkien name is of Low Prussian origin and probably means "son/descendant of Tolk", with Tolk meaning interpreter or negotiator and originating as a nickname. Another theory is that it is derived from the village of Tolkynen in East Prussia. J. R. R. Tolkien suggested the name was derived from the German adjective tollkühn, meaning foolhardy. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. R. R. Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of recent refugees from East Prussia who fled the Red Army invasion. J. R. R. Tolkien's own knowledge of the family history was limited to its 18th-century German origin, according to Derdziński in part because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father."

Family origins

The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town Kreuzburg near Königsberg, where the Tolkien name is attested since the 16th century. The verified paternal line of J. R. R. Tolkien starts with Michel Tolkien, born around 1620 in Kreuzburg. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg. His son Christian Tolkien moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien and Johann Benjamin Tolkien emigrated to London in the 1770s, and became the ancestors of the English family. The family first appears in English records in 1777. In 1792 John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell took over the Erdley Norton manufacture in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. Their German nephew Daniel Gottlieb Bergmann also joined them in London. Johann Benjamin Tolkien, who died in London in 1819, was the 2nd great-grandfather of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Notable members

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE was an English philologist, writer and professor at the University of Oxford. He was a devout Catholic.
Much of Tolkien's published fiction is a connected body of tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth in particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our own world. Tolkien applied the word legendarium to the totality of these writings. Most of the "legendarium" was edited and posthumously published by his son Christopher.
While Tolkien was preceded by other fantasy authors, his enduringly popular and successful works have had a remarkable influence on the genre. Thus he has been popularly identified as the "father of modern fantasy literature", or to be precise, high fantasy. L. Sprague de Camp and others consider him the father of modern fantasy together with sword and sorcery author Robert E. Howard.

Arthur Tolkien

Arthur Reuel Tolkien, the father of author J. R. R. Tolkien, was born in Handsworth, Staffordshire, England. He was the eldest child of John Benjamin Tolkien and Mary Jane Stow, who had married on 16 February 1856 in All Saints Parish Church, Birmingham, Warwickshire, England.
Arthur's father had previously been married to Jane Holmwood, with whom he had four children: Emily, Louisa, John Benjamin, and Jane. His father had been a piano teacher and tuner, as well as a music seller, but he had gone bankrupt in 1877, when he was described as "John Benjamin Tolkien, of High-street, Birmingham, in the county of Warwick, Pianoforte and Music Seller".
Arthur did not follow his father into the traditional Tolkien trade in pianos, which many of his London cousins also followed; instead he became a bank clerk and ended up moving to Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where he became manager of the Bloemfontein branch of the Bank of Africa. A furniture shop now occupies the Bradlow's Building on the site where the bank once stood, on the corner of West Burger and Maitland Streets.
Arthur was later joined by his fiancée, Mabel Suffield. They were married on 16 April 1891 at the St. George's Cathedral, Cape Town, Cape Colony. Two children: John Ronald Reuel and Hilary Arthur Reuel followed, and the family lived next door to the bank.
Mabel Tolkien felt the English climate would be better for the boys' health and returned to England with them in 1895. Arthur remained in South Africa, where he died of severe haemorrhage following rheumatic fever, on 15 February 1896, before he had the opportunity to join his family in England. He is buried in President Brand Cemetery, on the corner of Church and Rhodes Avenues, Bloemfontein.

Mabel Tolkien

Mabel Tolkien was the mother of J. R. R. Tolkien. Her parents, John Suffield and Emily Jane Sparrow, lived in Stirling Road, Birmingham and owned a shop in the city centre. The Suffield family had a business in a building called Lamb House since 1812. From 1812 William Suffield ran a book and stationery shop there; Tolkien's great-grandfather, also John Suffield, was there from 1826 with a drapery and hosiery business.
Her husband Arthur Tolkien's death in South Africa in 1896 left her and their two young sons without a source of income. At first, they lived with her parents in Birmingham, then moved to Sarehole, then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham.
Mabel tutored her two sons, and J. R. R. was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany, and she awakened in her son the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. But his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early. She also taught him how to write, and her ornate script influenced her son's handwriting in his later life.
Mabel Tolkien converted to Catholicism in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family who then stopped all financial assistance to her. She died of acute complications of diabetes in 1904 at about 34 years of age, after having been diagnosed with diabetes earlier that year. At that time, there was no treatment for Type 1 diabetes – insulin was not discovered until two decades later. Tolkien was twelve, and they were living at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which they were then renting. For the rest of his life Tolkien felt that she had become a martyr for her faith, which had a profound effect on his own Catholic beliefs.

Edith Tolkien

Edith Mary Tolkien, born Bratt was the wife of J. R. R. Tolkien. She served as the inspiration for his fictional character Lúthien Tinúviel, an Elven princess and the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar.
Bratt first met Tolkien in 1908, when they lived in the same boarding house. Both were orphans. The two fell in love, despite Bratt being Tolkien's senior by three years. Before the end of 1909 the relationship became known to Tolkien's guardian, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who forbade Tolkien to see Bratt until he was 21. With one exception, Tolkien obeyed this instruction to the letter while Father Morgan's guardianship lasted. They were married in 1916.
The couple are buried side by side in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford; below the names on their grave are the names Beren and Lúthien: in Tolkien's legendarium, Lúthien and the Man Beren were lovers separated for a time by Lúthien's father King Thingol.

Hilary Tolkien

Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, the younger brother of J. R. R. Tolkien, was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. The climate did not suit the young J. R. R. Tolkien and his mother took both her sons to visit her parents in Kings Heath in Birmingham. When her husband died in 1896 she decided to stay back in England with her sons. They moved to Sarehole, a village then outside Birmingham, in 1896. As a child, J. R. R. Tolkien used to tell stories to his younger brother Hilary, making ogres out of the adult people in the village. Ronald nicknamed the flour-coated miller's son in the nearby Sarehole Mill The White Ogre. A farmer who used to terrorise children intruding on his land was nicknamed as the Black Ogre. He once chased Ronald for plucking mushrooms from his farm. Hilary wrote the stories, letters and reminiscences of past times in a notebook during his twilight years. The contents of the notebook were published as a book titled Black & White Ogre Country: The Lost Tales of Hilary Tolkien in 2009. In 1902, the family moved to 26 Oliver Road in Edgbaston, Birmingham and later they both joined St. Philip's School in Birmingham. However, they soon left the school and their mother started teaching them at home. In 1904, both brothers contracted measles and whooping cough. Owing to the poor condition of their house on Oliver Road, Hilary also contracted pneumonia.
When their mother became ill with diabetes, Ronald was sent to live with his aunt Jane's fiancé and future husband Edwin Neave. Hilary was sent to stay with his maternal grandparents, the Suffields. After the death of their mother they were raised by Fr Francis Morgan. Hilary later passed an entrance examination and joined King Edward's School in 1905, where his elder brother also studied. Hilary left school in 1910 and later helped his aunt Jane Neave run Phoenix Farm in the village of Gedling in Nottinghamshire. Hilary, his brother, aunt Jane and members of the Brookes-Smith family made a trip to Switzerland in the summer of 1911. In late September 1914, J. R. R. Tolkien stayed with his aunt and brother at the farm for a few days. In 1914 during World War I, Hilary enlisted in the British Army with the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as a bugler and was wounded in 1916. After his military service, Hilary returned to Gedling and, in 1922, bought an orchard and market garden near Evesham, ancestral town of his mother's family. In 1923, J. R. R. Tolkien, along with his wife and children, went to stay with Hilary for a while. A few months before his death, he visited Hilary in Evesham. Hilary married Magdalen Matthews in 1928. They had three sons. The first, Gabriel, was born in 1931, the second, Julian, in 1935, and the third, Paul, in 1938.