Priscilla Reuel Tolkien

Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien was a British literary preservationist and the youngest child of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Life

Priscilla Tolkien was born on 18 June 1929, to J. R. R. Tolkien and his wife, Edith Tolkien, being their youngest child and only daughter.
J. R. R. Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young.
When Priscilla was 14, she helped her father by typing out some early chapters of The Lord of the Rings. The name of Frodo Baggins in the fourth draft of The Lord of the Rings was Bingo Bolger-Baggins, which was derived from a family of toy bears owned by Priscilla. She completed her B.A. degree in English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in 1951.
In July–August 1955, she accompanied her father on a two-week holiday in Italy. After that, she started living in Oxford away from her parents' house but still saw them frequently and started working as a probation officer in the city. She was also a social worker.
Priscilla Tolkien died on 28 February 2022, unmarried, at the age of 92. She was the last living child of J. R. R. Tolkien.

Tolkien legacy

Tolkien wrote his last letter to Priscilla in August 1973. She was, until her death, the honorary vice-president of the Tolkien Society. She wrote an article titled "My Father the Artist" in December 1976 for Amon Hen, the bulletin of the Tolkien Society. After her eldest brother, John, returned to Oxford in 1987, the siblings began identifying and cataloging the large collection of family photographs. In 1992, she and John published the book The Tolkien Family Album, containing pictures of the Tolkien family, to celebrate the 100th birth anniversary of their father. The same year she unveiled a plaque at the Anglican Cathedral of St. Andrew and St. Michael commemorating the hundredth anniversary of her father's birth at Bloemfontein, then in the Orange Free State. She launched the special Tolkien edition Royal Mail stamps commemorating her father's works in February 2004. In 2012, she, along with a coalition of British publishers, sued Warner Brothers for US$80 million in her capacity as a trustee of The Tolkien Trust, accusing them of exploiting Middle-earth characters to promote online gambling.