Study Guide to The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
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Study Guide to The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Intelligent Education

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Study Guide to The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien

Intelligent Education

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A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for JRR Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, the first of one of the most well-known series in the world—Lord of the Rings Trilogy. As an epic novel of the mid twentieth century, Tolkien used elements of Nordic folk, Christianity, and realism to create the Middle-earth world. Moreover, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy was written in long-hand, revised, and then the whole work was rewritten backwards due to the first-time authors lack of funds and showing the author’s skill as a writer and scholar. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Tokien’s classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons it has stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&As The Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including
essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

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Year
2020
ISBN
9781645422976
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INTRODUCTION TO J. R. R. TOLKIEN
J. R. R. Tolkien’s massive literary labor of producing The Lord of the Rings evidences his dogged persistence in creating a twentieth-century masterpiece despite his demanding responsibilities as a tutor at Oxford. Elves, dwarves, hobbits, and other supernatural creatures move through a chronicle which is unique in modern literature. The trilogy owes an enormous debt to the Nordic sagas, lays and eddas, containing a wealth of the ancient lore of Northern Europeans. The Lord of the Rings is quintessentially a Nordic myth.
The story takes place in the Third Age of Middle Earth, a Tolkien term for a fantasy period of time in ancient days when men mingled with other creatures of different species and even intermarried. Tolkien has created an area with its own particular geography, a history all its own, detailed genealogies, ballads, elaborately drawn maps, and intriguing myths. In addition, he has invented several different languages, obviously the legacies of ancient Welsh and Anglo-Saxon. Even extraordinary fantastic flowers and trees dot the landscape of Tolkien’s world.
While nowhere in the work does the author intrude subjectively - in fact, he insists he is merely reporting from the chronicle in the Red Book of Westmarch - the world that Tolkien creates is Tolkien himself. A profound scholar of Scandinavian and Middle English with a special bent toward linguistics, philology, and etymology, the author has come up with his own myth couched appropriately in tongues of his own creation. Readers everywhere, especially young people, immerse themselves gladly in the fascinating Third Age of Middle Earth where heroes once again stride across the horizon, filling a present-day cultural gap. Tolkien has achieved tremendous popularity as a spinner of tall tales about heroic ventures. But there is more to this author than that. He uses his trilogy as a vehicle to convey his beliefs about Life and Death and Good and Evil. Tolkien’s creations and his own world are inseparable, the art being so closely interwoven with his own career and life work. Both the man and the work are indeed distinctive in the contemporary world.
TOLKIEN’S EARLY LIFE
Family Background and Influence
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien distinguished himself from most of his fellow Englishmen by being born in Bloemfontain, South Africa, in 1892. Located in the open, grassy country in high veld, the capital city of the Orange Free State, with its clearaired, invigorating climate, spreads over the hills in a naturally beautiful setting which justifies the meaning of its name, “fountain of flowers.” Tolkien’s love for idyllic, pastoral scenes must surely have generated from his birthplace.
His mother had held the unusual position of missionary to the women of the Sultan of Zanzibar, an island which lies only a shallow channel away from Africa’s East Coast. She had many extraordinary adventures to relate from her missionary work. Her maiden name was Mabel Suffield. Tolkien’s father, the son of a well-entrenched British family, was pursuing his career as a bank merchant when his first child was born. Though the child Tolkien was physically weak, he was strong in his Saxon heritage which he later loved and learned in depth. Bloemfontain, in the last decade of the nineteenth century before the battles, concentration camps, and other atrocities of the present century, paralleled the peaceful colony which the hobbits contentedly inhabited before the threat of doom overshadowed their rural haven.
Tolkien himself recalled little of his own life in Bloemfontain. Only two incidents clung to his mind. On one occasion a black native kidnapped the very small boy to show him off to his fellow tribesman in his kraal as a white child. Despite the fright of his parents, no scars from the unnerving episode marked the boy. The other event Tolkien was able to recall featured a snake which appeared in the garden of the Tolkien home, somehow conjuring up images of the first serpent in the Garden of Eden. The child managed to escape a snake bite but he was stung by a tarantula as he was running through the tall, dried grass on a sizzling, sunny day.
Ill health concluded Tolkien’s early years in Africa. His mother took him to England when he was four, leaving the senior Tolkien behind. The son never saw his father again because the bank merchant died prematurely a year later in 1896. This loss indelibly marked the frail boy’s childhood. The shadow of sorrow no doubt increased his natural reserve and pensiveness though he did not resort to creating his own world until he was an adult.
Even as a child Tolkien found languages fascinating and set out on his way to develop several of his own. His pleasure-filled if unusual occupation with inventing languages came to an abrupt halt as his mother grew concerned over her son’s extraordinary interest.
Tolkien’s England
In England the Tolkiens lived in a village, Sarehole, near Birmingham in Warwickshire, a middle county as far as possible from the sea. This haven-like home, so far inland, was sheltered from the dangers of the waters which have always plagued England. However, highly developed industry in the Birmingham area threatened the pastoral beauty of nearby Avon which Shakespeare had loved and praised in his works.
Tolkien’s transplantation to another world brought sharp contrasts - the heat of Africa as opposed to the damp fog of Warwickshire. As an old man the author recalled his childhood as full of tragedies - his father’s death, his own frailty, and his move from his birthplace to an alien country where he paradoxically belonged. A brother who later became an apple farmer provided companionship for Tolkien though principally he led the life of a loner. His mother’s tales at lonely times fostered his love for romance and philology. His mother had become a teacher, enabling the family to live not unpleasantly in genteel poverty in the days before World War I rained the initial attacks of doom on the British Empire.
Catholicism
The family conversion to the Catholic Church occurred when Tolkien was quite young, probably around the time of his father’s death. Orthodox religion had a strongly discernible impact on him as a boy. Perhaps the sorrows he encountered before reaching adulthood inclined him to depend on his religious faith. The death of his mother in 1910 brought yet another grief to the eighteen-year-old Tolkien. He remained close to his church all his life.
Education
Tolkien shortly followed the British educational tradition. He entered King Edward’s Grammar School as a competent day student able to make his way on scholarship. His guardian, Francis Xavier Morgan, was serving as a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. The half-Spanish surrogate father enriched Tolkien’s spiritual life, instilling into the young man a practice of Catholicism which would never leave him. John Henry, Cardinal Newman, had founded the Birmingham Oratory. In Tolkien’s time as a student there, the school was lagging into deep decline, pervaded by an atmosphere of rejection of Catholics.
Nevertheless, King Edward’s School paved the way for a scholarship at Oxford. Tolkien entered Exeter College, Oxford, as an exhibitioner in 1911 and passed Classical Moderations in 1913, having laid the foundations for his later scholarly absorptions. Tolkien was graduated at the age of twenty-three in 1915. The adult world he moved into was at war. In this respect Tolkien, no different from others of his generation, answered the call to the colors.
A love affair and subsequent marriage softened the brunt of war. The object of Tolkien’s affections was Edith Bratt. Her guardians frowned on Tolkien as a prospective husband, objecting to his Catholicism and his unstable future. But, like many wartime lovers, the young couple married despite objections. Their long life together attested to their devotion.
WAR YEARS AND AFTERMATH
Military Service
Tolkien, the young bridegroom and recent graduate, assumed a sacrificial role in World War I as an infantry soldier in the Lancasshire Fusiliers where mortality rates soared. His well-known remark at the war’s end indicated that he had only one friend left when hostilities concluded, a sorrowful burden to the heart of one who treasured friendships but found them elusive.
Tolkien himself was wounded in the trenches of the Western front around Bapaume in the Franco-English deadlock with the Germans. A protracted stay in a British hospital bed, regaining his health, brought forth the burgeoning of Tolkien’s life-long commitment to language. Lying in thought for long days and nights of recovery, Tolkien resolved to learn language with all its ramifications of the roots of words and their derivations. His convalescence undoubtedly distilled his war experiences into firm memories which have emerged later in his trilogy - for example, the deep comradeships which flourished in acutely dangerous circumstances. It is likely that at this time Tolkien’s mind began to spin out The Silmarillion and the “Ball of Gondolin.” While World War I proved an uncomfortable ordeal, it also served as the experience from which Tolkien chose what he would become and what kind of a life he would lead.
Graduate Work
At school Tolkien had already developed a keen liking for history, botany, grammar, and the study of words with a special eye to linguistics, that brand of language study which recognizes inherent meaning in sounds. It is not surprising that in 1919 Tolkien received another scholarship and was awarded Master of Arts and the Diploma of Comparative Philology. Then, for two years, he served as an assistant on the Oxford English Dictionary, that set of tomes delving into the essence of the English language itself. In revising the dictionary, Tolkien worked closely with words, tracing the beginnings, the original uses, and the transitions incurred in time.
Professorial Years
In 1921, with a young family already started, Tolkien began the years of teaching at which he became a recognized master. His academic career started at the University of Leeds in 1921 where he was Reader in the English Language. In 1922 he published A Middle English Vocabulary. He became Professor of English Language in a short four years as he entered his thirties. The position in England carries great prestige since each department generally has only one professor, the chairman. A call from Oxford promptly followed on the heels of the professorship.
In 1925 Tolkien became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, and that same year an outstanding version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which he had edited with E. V. Gordon appeared. In 1926 he won a fellowship at Pembroke College, a post he was to hold until 1945. So, from 1925 to 1945 he thrived amid the tradition-laden halls of Oxford, functioning effectively in the male society of the college system with constant tutorial duties, companionship with the students in dining together, joking, gossiping and, in general, enjoying a unique type of comradeship.
Progress in Academia
“Chaucer as a Philologist,” which Tolkien presented in 1934 to the Philological Society, marked an academic milestone. He studied as a Leverthulme Research Fellow for two years from 1934 to 1936. In 1936 he matriculated at Exeter College from which he earned a Master of Arts to be awarded in 1944. 1936 was a high-water mark in Tolkien’s professorial years. He delivered an address, “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” which brought new life to the ancient Anglo-Saxon epic, girding the saga of heroes and dragons with a refreshing appreciation of the re-creation of another world as real as the everyday world of only men. Tolkien had already learned the force of mythology as a tool for viewing reality.
His approach to the monsters in Beowulf, Grendel and Grendel’s mother, forecast Tolkien’s own use of monsters as the personification of evil. These dragons, mythic enlargements of the biblical serpent in Eden, represent the enemy of God and man alike. In the age-old struggle man can never hope to win but he can emerge as a hero endowed with courage and free will. Tolkien immediately established himself as an eminent scholar.
Role of Professor
Great popularity flowed into the Professor’s life. He enchanted his students by reading Beowulf aloud, the light from the window shining on his fair hair and his dark, flowing academic gown. Though the students did not know the language of the ancient Anglo-Saxons, Tolkien’s ability to transmit the bloody encounters, the hazards and perils of their forebears made their spines tingle as they sat fascinated, crowded in lecture rooms. Wispy-haired, a little taller than average, the Professor became a familiar figure, his coat and cardigan slightly rumpled. He frequently bicycled about campus.
Professorial duties claimed an enormous chunk of time. Life as a tutor in Oxford’s college system followed a daily routine of getting up about seven, having tea, attending the college chapel, breakfasting, and then answering notes and letters. From nine to ten the professor wrote. Most Oxford dons wrote in longhand and very little revision was necessary to make the first draft ready for printing.
Four hours of tutoring followed before lunch. Students produced weekly essays of about 3,000 words - sometimes more - to be read in tutorial sessions preceding the instruction bouts over omissions and/or corrections. Afternoons remained free for the tutors until five o’clock when additional tutoring took place. Likely as not students would show up for several more hours after dinner. Indeed a busy routine! Yet Tolkien, with his tight schedule and a family to rear, frequently graded papers for other universities. One day a week free brought respite from the extremely structured routine. Despite the demands of his professorial life, Tolkien, the working teacher, managed to maintain an extraordinary degree of creativity, as his published works indicate.
As a professor Tolkien was not without flaws. Ruffling through notes and speaking in a rapid monotone characterized some of his lectures. But once a point of interest occurred to him in a lecture, he became invigorated, brightening and expand...

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