The paintings are believed by some to have influenced the young J. R. R. Tolkien, then growing up in Birmingham.

As Tolkien did not add any further information on the text the reader who was given it believed the poem to be an attempt to retell the prose version, which he thought to be a Celtic tale.

Houghton Mifflin, Tolkien ’ s American hardcover publisher, had neglected to protect the work in the United States.

Tolkien had authorized a paperback edition of The Hobbit in 1961, though that edition was never made available outside the U. K.

" Another joke puts a question concerning the definition of blunderbuss to " the four wise clerks of Oxenford " ( a reference to Chaucer's Clerk ; Tolkien had worked for Henry Bradley, one of the four main editors of the Oxford English Dictionary ):

Tolkien departed from this ; his work was nominally part of the history of our own world, but did not have the close linkage to history or contemporary times that his precursors had.

Tolkien: Master of Middle-earth ," which describes the impact Tolkien's writings had on him, is featured in the following titles:

Chance compares the development and growth of Bilbo against other characters to the concepts of just kingship versus sinful kingship derived from the Ancrene Wisse ( which Tolkien had written on in 1929 ) and a Christian understanding of Beowulf.

In many ways the Smaug episode reflects and references the dragon of Beowulf, and Tolkien uses the episode to put into practice some of the ground-breaking literary theories he had developed about the Anglo-Saxon poem and its early medieval portrayal of the dragon as having bestial intelligence.

Many of the thematic and stylistic differences arose because Tolkien wrote The Hobbit as a story for children, and The Lord of the Rings for the same audience, who had subsequently grown up since its publication.

Tolkien later assigned this name to an ancient king who had ordered some spears from the dwarves.

At the time he was cast, McKellen had never read any of Tolkien's works, but he quickly developed his knowledge of The Lord of the Rings and based his accent on Tolkien.

Language invention had always been tightly connected to the mythology that Tolkien developed, as he found that a language could not be complete without the history of the people who spoke it, just as these people could never be fully realistic if imagined only through the English language and as speaking English.

A natural consequence of this was that these " new " constructed languages had to be worked out by Tolkien in some details.

Tolkien writes that Smaug's rage was the kind which " is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy lose something they have long had but never before used or wanted.

A reader once asked Tolkien whether the name Gondor had been inspired by the ancient Ethiopian citadel of Gondar.

Tolkien replied that he was unaware of having heard the word before, and that the root Ond went back to an account he had read as a child mentioning ond (" stone ") as one of only two words known of the pre-Celtic languages of Britain.

By the time Tolkien began rewriting " The Council of Elrond " a year later, he had developed a story that Aragorn's ancestors were in past Kings in Boromir's hometown.

The appendices to The Lord of the Rings were brought to a finished state in 1953 – 54, but a decade later, during preparations for the release of the Second Edition, Tolkien elaborated the events that had led to the Kin-strife and introduced the regency of Rómendacil II.

Tolkien claimed to be genuinely surprised when, in March 1956, he received a letter from one Sam Gamgee, who had heard that his name was in The Lord of the Rings but had not read the book.

The physical appearance of the valley of Rivendell may be based upon the Lauterbrunnental in Switzerland, where J. R. R. Tolkien had hiked in 1911.

When writing The Lord of the Rings Tolkien continued many of the themes he had set up in The Hobbit.

Tolkien says both " the Nine the nazgûl keep " and that Sauron had gathered the Nine to himself, though in the latter case his meaning may be metaphorical.

An early version of Appendix B (" The Tale of Years ") had him leading Dwarves from the ruin of Beleriand to found Khazad-dûm at the beginning of the Second Age ; but Tolkien abandoned that line.

There is, however, no authorial indication that Tolkien had a real-world metal in mind.

The Cirth (; " Runes ") are the letters of a semi-artificial script which was invented by J. R. R. Tolkien for the constructed languages he devised and used in his works.

* Elvish Linguistic Fellowship, an organization that studies the invented languages of J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien was compulsive in his writing, his revision, his desire for perfection in form and in the " reality " of his invented world, its languages, its chronologies, its existence.

Tolkien also explores the motif of jewels that inspire intense greed that corrupts those who covet them in the Silmarillion, and there are connections between the words " Arkenstone " and " Silmaril " in Tolkien's invented etymologies.

Tolkien sometimes changed the " meaning " of an Elvish word, but he almost never disregarded it once invented, and he kept on refining its meaning, and countlessly forged new synonyms.

Tolkien invented two subfamilies ( subgroups ) of the Elvish languages.

Tolkien came to regret his ad hoc use of Old Norse name, referring to a " rabble of eddaic-named dwarves, ... invented in an idle hour " in 1937.

Notably, Tolkien claimed that this was not his first effort in invented languages.

Although the Elvish languages Sindarin and Quenya are the most famous and the most developed of the languages that Tolkien invented for his Secondary World, they are by no means the only ones.

Tolkien not only invented many languages but also scripts.

Clearly, Tolkien knew when firearms were invented, but he deliberately set out to write a lighthearted fantasy tale disregarding any consideration of historical accuracy.

Along with a few words in Khuzdul, Tolkien also developed runes of his own invention ( the Cirth ), said to have been invented by Elves and later adopted by the Dwarves.

For Black Speech, as for all the languages invented by Tolkien, we must distinguish two timelines of evolution:

The Elvish form Nírnaeth Arnoediad ( pronounced ; in this case the digraph oe denotes a rounded variant of the sound, more or less like German ' ö ') comes from Sindarin, one of the languages invented by Tolkien, and translates to Tears Uncountable: nîn means ' tear ( s )', in compound nírnaeth ' tears of woe '; prefix ar-bears the sense of ' beyond ' and the root nod-means ' count ', with o umlauted to œ by the following i. J. R. R. Tolkien often omitted the accent over the first vowel ( due to haste or neglect ), and this spelling was introduced into the published Silmarillion by Christopher Tolkien ; in editorial text within later writings, as The War of the Jewels, he used the accented form.

These were invented, according to Tolkien, by the Elf Rúmil.

The Annals of Aman is a text written by J. R. R. Tolkien that serves as a chronology of fictional events taking place in his invented world of Middle-earth.

The supposed original was invented ( by back formation ) by J. R. R. Tolkien.

In his fictional works, Tolkien invented not only origin myths, creation myths and an epic poetry cycle, but also fictive linguistics, geology and geography.

The term " Elfconners " has subsequently been used by critics ( and formerly and in passing by one member ), at least in quotation marks, to refer to the group of editors appointed by Christopher Tolkien and granted access by him to unpublished wriitngs by J. R. R. Tolkien on his invented languages, although some members have rejected the term both as a misnomer and as intentionally derogatory, and the group prefers the both accurate and neutral term " the Editorial Team ".

Christopher Tolkien, as the holder of the copyrights of his father's works, in 1992 invited Christopher Gilson, Carl F. Hostetter, Arden R. Smith and Patrick H. Wynne to undertake a project to analyse, edit and publish material written by Tolkien concerning his invented languages and alphabets.