John Ronald Ruel Tolkien - Genius or Madness
Effi Dimitriou, Persuasive English Essay, 25.10.2003
John Ronald Ruel Tolkien Genius Or Madness
I have read a lot of novels in my life, varying from romances to thrillers. Some have been disappointing, others grabbed my attention from their first to their last sentence, and again others have made me wish I was part of them. You will know what I´m talking about if you like reading yourself, but sometimes there are exceptions. Sometimes there is one book out of a million that everyone has to read at least once in their lifetime. The authors of these books are geniuses. Whether they have an extraordinary way of depicting their imagination, or whether their imagination itself is extraordinary, these people have to be admired and their works read.
John Ronald Ruel Tolkien embodies both types of authors in his works such as The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien´s genius is easily proven when using his famous and well known trilogy The Lord of the Rings, and it´s history The Silmarillion, as evidence.
Tolkien was a professor of English and taught at Oxford University, England, for many years, which is conveyed to us in the expressive language he uses in all his works. His trilogy The Lord Of The Rings begins at first like any other novel written by any other author:
When Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
But as we continue to read on we realize the extend and greatness of this literary work by seeing Tolkiens use of detailed and descriptive vivid words such as ´queer´, ´unscathed´; or phrases like ´the flowing streams of time´ or ´the darkness of her evil will´. Tolkien uses this vivid language not only to describe situations, relationships and dialogues, but also in depicting landscapes which he loved writing of most and which appear frequently. You find the portrayal of countries, woods, fields, lakes and rivers throughout all his literary works.
Instead of just describing a valley with a high hill at it´s center as a large plain that stretched for hundreds of kilometres, covered in low grass, with a hill at it´s center that overlooked the horizon, as the majority of authors do, Tolkien depicts the capital of Rohan in a very detailed and more poetic-like way:
Before them stood the mountains of the South: white-tipped and streaked with black. The grass-lands rolled against the hills that clustered at their feet, and flowed up into many valleys still dim and dark, untouched by the light of dawn, winding their way into the heart of the great mountains. Immediately before the travellers the widest of these glens opened like a long gulf among the hills. Far inward they glimpsed a tumbled mountain-mass with one tall peak, at the mouth of the vale there stood like a sentinel a lonely height. About its feet there flowed as a thread of silver, the stream that issued from the dale; upon its brow they caught, still far away, a glint in the rising sun, a glimmer of gold.
You can also count Tolkien as a great poet even though no comprised books of his poems are published. They are part of his novels, but in the books he has made them into songs that are recited or sung by his characters. Let alone in The Lord Of The Rings there are 30, such as the Song of Beren and Lúthien which consist of 9 verses itself:
The leaves were long, the grass was green,
The hemlock-umbels tall and fair,
And in the glade a light was seen
Of stars in shadow shimmering.
Tinúviel was dancing there
To music of a pipe unseen,
And light of stars was in her hair,
And in her raiment glimmering
The majority of modern authors make up a lot of worlds which are either very similar to ours or completely different, but these worlds only exist in as much detail as needed for the story that takes place within them. Then, after completing this certain novel these authors go onto a different journey and start all over again, imagining different worlds as far as they are relevant for them. Tolkien on the other hand created a whole individual world from it´s creation,
In the beginning Eru, the One, who in Elvish tongue is named Ilúvatar, made the Ainur of his thought; and they made a great Music before him. In this Music the World was begun; for Ilúvatar made visible the song of the Ainur, and they beheld it as a light in the darkness;
to it´s fading,
and there is Arwen´s green grave, until the world is changed, and all the days of her life are utterly forgotten by men that come after, and elanor and niphredil bloom no more east of the Sea. Here ends this tale, as it has come to us from the south; and with the passing of Evenstar no more is said in this book of the days of old.
Tolkien worked on this world anytime he wasnt teaching, and continued this for his whole lifetime and was able to create it with so much detail and history as we read in chapters of our own history books today: Of the Beginning of Days, Of the Coming of the Elves
, Of Men, Of the Ruin of Doriath, Of the Third Age, etc.
To these proofs of Tolkiens genius we can add the fact that he, unlike any other author of novels, created several languages such as the Elivish languages Quenya and Sindarin, Dwarvish, Entish, the Black Speech and Westron. The most elaborate languages created by Tolkien are the Elivsh languages Quenya and Sindarin. For both of them Tolkien set their grammar, pronunciation and written language ready for us to speak and write them in sentences such as this:
Ai. Esseamin Effi Dimitriou. Ve essero? /
Hello. My name is Effi Dimitriou. What is your name?
It is quiet unusual for a teacher, who also is an author, to still find time to create a language as complicated as Elvish. Tolkien uses them quiet a lot, and as you can see in the motion picture they use it even more in their dialogues, and all this just because Tolkien has worked and perfected them so thoroughly.
All of these characteristics of Tolkiens use of prose, vivid words and words unknown to the vast majority of the worlds population make all of his works worth reading. A lot of people will increase their vocabulary, drown in the imaginative world of being and/or take away a lot of important principles such as friendship, steadfastness, and courage in situations where they think they cant get out of. The best book to start it with is Tolkiens most famous work The Lord Of The Rings, and as the Sunday Times has once noted: ´The English-speaking world is divided into those who have read The Lord Of The Rings and those who are going to read it.´