John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wasn't just some dusty professor who liked trees. Honestly, he was a bit of a disruptor. People see the tweed jacket and the pipe and think "stuffy academic," but the author of the Lord of the Rings spent his nights inventing entire languages just for the fun of it. Imagine that. Most of us struggle to learn a second language for a vacation, yet he built dozens from scratch. He didn't write a book and then decide his characters needed a language; he built the languages first and realized they needed a world to live in. It’s completely backwards from how modern fantasy works.
He was obsessed.
When we talk about the author of the Lord of the Rings, we’re talking about a man who survived the trenches of the Somme. That's not just a biographical footnote. It’s the core of everything. He watched his friends die. He saw the "animal horror" of industrial warfare, and you can see that trauma bleeding into the Black Gate and the dead marshes. It wasn't just "escapism." Tolkien actually hated that word. Or rather, he defended it by saying the only person who hates the idea of escape is a jailer.
The Philology Behind the Phials and Fire
Most people don't realize that Tolkien's "real" job was being a world-class philologist at Oxford. He studied the history of words. He was the guy who could tell you exactly how a vowel shifted in the 14th century and why it mattered. This is why Middle-earth feels so "real" compared to other fantasy worlds. It has linguistic bones.
Take the name "Earendil." Tolkien found that word in an Old English poem called Crist by Cynewulf. The line was Eala Earendel engla beorhtast. It means "Hail Earendel, brightest of angels." He said he felt a "curious thrill" when he read it, like something was waking up inside him. That single word sparked the entire mythology. He didn't just make up "Elvish" names that sounded pretty. Every name has an etymology. Every mountain has a history in a language that actually functions.
It’s kind of wild when you think about the dedication.
He’d spend hours arguing with his friends, The Inklings, in a pub called the Eagle and Child. C.S. Lewis was his best friend, but they were also massive rivals. Lewis was the one who pushed Tolkien to actually finish the damn books. Without Lewis, the author of the Lord of the Rings might have just left his notes in a drawer to rot. But they weren't always nice to each other. When Lewis started writing The Chronicles of Narnia, Tolkien actually hated it. He thought the mythology was a mess—Santa Claus and talking fauns and Greek gods all mixed together? To a perfectionist like Tolkien, that was sloppy.
👉 See also: The Real Story Behind I Can Do Bad All by Myself: From Stage to Screen
Why He Hated Allegory (And Why You’re Probably Misinterpreting Him)
If you tell someone that the One Ring is a metaphor for the atomic bomb, you’re going to annoy Tolkien’s ghost. He explicitly stated in the foreword to the second edition that he "cordially disliked" allegory in all its forms. He preferred "applicability."
What’s the difference?
- Allegory is when the author says: "This equals that. The Ring is the Bomb. Sauron is Hitler."
- Applicability is when the reader says: "This feels like my experience with power and corruption."
Tolkien wanted his stories to be timeless, not a commentary on 1940s geopolitics. He started writing these stories long before the nuclear age anyway. He felt that once you lock a story into a specific historical metaphor, you kill it. You take away its magic. He wanted Middle-earth to feel like a lost English mythology, something that could have existed thousands of years ago. He was basically trying to "write" a history for a country he felt had lost its own myths during the Norman Conquest.
He was a bit of a Luddite, too. He hated internal combustion engines. He loved trees with a passion that bordered on the religious. When he writes about the Ents destroying Isengard, that’s not a subtle metaphor. That’s a man who was genuinely angry about the industrialization of the English countryside. He once called the car "the greatest evil of our age." I wonder what he’d think of TikTok.
The Messy Reality of Writing a Masterpiece
We think of the trilogy as this polished, inevitable thing. It wasn't. It was a nightmare to write. It took him 12 years.
He’d get stuck for months. At one point, he had no idea who Strider was. In his original notes, the character who became Aragorn was actually a hobbit wearing wooden shoes named "Trotter." Can you imagine? Trotter the Hobbit. It sounds like a bad fanfic. But that’s how the author of the Lord of the Rings worked—he discovered the story as he went. He would write himself into a corner, realize the geography didn't make sense, and then redraw the maps.
✨ Don't miss: Love Island UK Who Is Still Together: The Reality of Romance After the Villa
He was also a perfectionist about the moon phases.
He actually went back and recalculated the dates in the book to make sure the moon would have been in the correct phase for the characters' travels. If Frodo looked up and saw a crescent moon, Tolkien made sure that, based on the internal calendar, it was actually a crescent moon. That level of detail is why the book stays with people. You can feel the weight of the world. It’s not thin. It’s dense and heavy and smells like damp earth and old parchment.
The Problem With "The Hobbit"
The success of The Hobbit actually caused him a lot of stress. His publishers, Allen & Unwin, wanted "more about hobbits." Tolkien wanted to give them The Silmarillion—a dark, dense, depressing collection of myths about the fall of angels and the creation of the world. The publishers were basically like, "Uh, no thanks, can we have more Bilbo?"
So he started a "New Hobbit." That’s what he called it for years. But the story grew "in the telling." It got darker. It got bigger. It stopped being a children’s book and became an epic. By the time he finished, he had a manuscript that was so long no one wanted to publish it because paper was expensive after World War II. They had to split it into three volumes just to minimize the financial risk. Tolkien didn't even want it to be a "trilogy." He saw it as one book.
The Man Behind the Myth
Tolkien was a devout Catholic. This is the part people often skip over because they want the "magic," but his faith is the engine under the hood. He described the Lord of the Rings as a "fundamentally religious and Catholic work."
There are no churches in Middle-earth. No priests. No formal religion. But the concepts of grace, pity, and providence are everywhere. Think about Gollum. Frodo doesn't kill him because of "pity." And in the end, it’s that act of mercy that saves the world, because Frodo actually fails at the Cracks of Doom. He claims the Ring. It’s only because Gollum is there—saved by pity—that the Ring is destroyed.
🔗 Read more: Gwendoline Butler Dead in a Row: Why This 1957 Mystery Still Packs a Punch
That’s a very specific theological point. It’s the idea that even our failures and our enemies can be used for good.
He was also a man of deep contradictions. He was a quintessential Englishman who loved his "shire," yet he was born in South Africa. He was a professor of the highest order who spent his time making up silly songs about trolls. He was a veteran who hated war but wrote the most famous battle scenes in literature.
How to Actually "Read" Tolkien Today
If you want to understand the author of the Lord of the Rings, you have to stop looking at the movies for a second. I love the Peter Jackson films, but they’re action movies. Tolkien’s books are travelogues and historical records. To get the real experience, you have to slow down.
Read the appendices.
Seriously. Most people skip them, but that's where the real "meat" is. That's where you find the story of Arwen and Aragorn (which is much more tragic in the books) and the timeline of the kings. It’s where the world-building becomes a 3D reality.
Actionable Steps for the Aspiring Tolkienist:
- Read the Letters: If you want to know what he really thought, get a copy of The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. He explains everything from the nature of the Orcs to his frustration with his kids. It’s the most honest look at his brain you’ll ever get.
- Listen to the Names: When you see a name like Lothlórien, try to say it out loud. Feel the phonetics. He chose those sounds because they felt "Elvish" to him based on his love for Finnish and Welsh.
- Visit the "Inklings" Sites: If you’re ever in Oxford, go to the Eagle and Child (though it’s been closed for renovations/sale lately, the history is in the walls). Walk through Addison’s Walk at Magdalen College. That’s where he and Lewis had the famous conversation that convinced Lewis to become a Christian.
- Ignore the "Rip-offs": Don't judge Tolkien by the "Tolkienesque" books that came after him. Most modern fantasy takes the tropes (elves, dwarves, dark lords) but leaves out the soul (philology, melancholy, and deep history).
Tolkien didn't write to start a genre. He wrote because he was obsessed with the way words can create worlds. He was a man out of time, looking backward to find a way to move forward. He wasn't trying to be the "father of fantasy." He was just a man who loved his wife, Edith (his "Lúthien"), and wanted to tell a story about how the smallest person can change the course of the future. That’s a lesson that hits just as hard in 2026 as it did in 1954.
The most important thing to remember is that he didn't view Middle-earth as a "fake" place. He viewed it as a recovered one. When you read his work, you aren't just reading a story; you're participating in a sub-creation. He believed that because we are made in the image of a Creator, we have a duty to create. And boy, did he ever create.