Happy Birthday, Ronnie!

Today is the Birthday of our dearest (or at least, my dearest) J.R.R. Tolkien! Happy 117th Birthday! (it really is too bad it wasn't his 111th...)

On January 3rd in 1892, a little boy was born to Arthur Reuel Tolkien and Mabel (nee Suffield) Tolkien, who they named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, known mostly in his childhood as Ronald (hence the Ronnie of the title). Arthur Tolkien died when his son was three, leaving his family without an income. Mabel Tolkien took her sons and moved in with her parents, John and Edith Jane Suffield.

Mabel herself tutored her sons, and Ronald was taught very early the rudiments of Latin and could read by the age of four, and wrote fluently soon afterward. His favorite lessons, tellingly, were those concerning languages.

Mabel Tolkien was received into the Catholic Church, along with her sons, in 1900, despite protests from her Baptist family (who then ceased all financial support). Four years later she died of acute complications of diabetes, and left her sons in the care of a priest-friend.

J.R.R Tolkien fought in World War I, and lost many of his good friends in this same war. By 1918 all but one of his dearest friends had died. Weakened after a long fight, he was deemed unfit for service and returned to England, where his wife Edith had just born their first son, John Francis Reuel Tolkien.

Later he would become a Philologist at Merton College, Oxford, and the works we now know him best by were begun on one day when, upon finding a student's paper that was blank, he wrote simply, "In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."

During his career, he learned Middle-English, Old English, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh and Medieval Welsh, and reportedly knew Danish, Dutch, Lombardic, Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Middle Dutch, Middle German (both high and low), Old High German, Old Slavonic and Lithuanian as well.

When exactly he began writing his fairy-stories, as he called them, is not precisely known, but it is imagined he was anywhere from seven to ten when he began.

Among his most beautiful quotes was this, written to his son.

"Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste -or foretaste- of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires."

A man of unbelievable eloquence, he was able to put into words the truths that, being seemingly more deceptive than lies, make and form the very foundation of our world. These truths, which he knew so well, he placed in everything he did; not so much as obvious facts, but more like a thread is woven all throughout a cloth. Perhaps it is not immediately obvious, yet it is there. Similarly, the very cloth of his worlds is woven all throughout with the truths that make our own world what it is, and these truths are more precious than anything else this world has to offer. Then, as he himself suggested, fairy-stories are indeed a reflection of the world in which we live, and from these many reflections in mirrors dark and clear, we may learn and take to heart the lessons contained therein.

Requiem Aeternam, J.R.R Tolkien.