Such distortions of Germanic mythology were denounced by J. R. R. Tolkien, e. g. in a 1941 letter where he speaks of Hitler's corruption of "... that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved and tried to present in its true light.

but with the outbreak of World War II, Nordic romanticism in Britain became too much associated with the enemy's ideology to remain palatable, to the point that J. R. R. Tolkien, an ardent Septentrionalist, in 1941 found himself moved to state that he had a " burning private grudge ... against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler " for " ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light.

Tolkien said that his stories grew out of his languages.

In " Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age " ( in The Silmarillion ) and " The Istari " ( in Unfinished Tales ), Tolkien fleshes out the background and the history briefly tabulated by date in Appendix B of The Lord of the Rings.

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

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

The notion that the Third Age lasted " about 3000 years " was first written down when Tolkien began to sketch out the history of Númenor and Westlands.

Tolkien was an admirer of heroism out of obedience and love but despised arrogance, pride and wilfulness.

The courage displayed by Samwise Gamgee on his journey with Frodo, his subjection to dangers and the preparedness to die out of loyalty for Frodo is the kind of spirit that was praised by Tolkien in a number of essays on the Old English poem " The Battle of Maldon ".

In The Lord of the Rings Tolkien writes that they breed slowly, for no more than a third of them are female, and not all marry ; also, female Dwarves look and sound ( and dress, if journeying — which is rare ) so alike to Dwarf-males that other folk cannot distinguish them, and thus others wrongly believe Dwarves grow out of stone.

But this is not borne out in any of the later genealogies that Tolkien left behind.

Because the Black Speech in general is an accursed language, and the Ring inscription in particular is a vile spell, Tolkien never drank out of it, and used it only as an ashtray.

" Inspired by such writers and artists as Robert E. Howard, H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Rice Burroughs, J. R. R Tolkien and Jack Kirby, Byron set out to create his own dark fantasy universe, with tales told through epic lyrics and music.

In 2003 the BBC carried out a UK survey entitled The Big Read in order to find the " nation's best-loved novel " of all time, with works by English novelists Tolkien, Austen, Pullman, Adams and Rowling making up the top five on the list.

Unlike The Silmarillion, for which the narrative fragments were modified to connect into a consistent and coherent work, the Unfinished Tales are presented as Tolkien left them, with little more than names changed ( the author having had a confusing habit of trying out different names for a character while writing a draft ).

Iron Crown branched out into the solo gaming books under the Tolkien Quest ( later called Middle-earth Quest ) and Sherlock Holmes Solo Mysteries book lines.

The Middle-earth Quest turn out to have violated ICE and Tolkien Enterprises ' contract with Tolkien's book publishing licensee George Allen & Unwin forcing ICE to recall and destroy the whole line of books.

Tolkien never worked out Westron to the same extent as Quenya and Sindarin or even Adûnaic.

) Christopher Tolkien conjectured that this inconsistency can be understood in terms of Aragorn's information being out of date, relating to Sauron's previously hidden identity.

In 2003 the BBC carried out a UK survey entitled The Big Read in order to find the " nation's best-loved novel " of all time, with works by English novelists Tolkien, Austen, Pullman, Adams and Rowling making up the top five on the list.

In writings by Tolkien, Tilion is said to have been in love with Arien, and because he sought her out the Moon was scarred by the sun's heat.

She replied saying that she was already engaged but subtly implied that she had become so out of a belief that Tolkien had forgotten her.

Tolkien did not especially work out a notable language for the Haradrim.

While Tolkien represents the Rohirrim, who developed out of the Éothéod, by Anglo-Saxon culture and language, their ancestors are given Gothic attributes.

" Tolkien began in fact to work out a genealogical table linking Galador with Imrahil, but he abandoned it after getting little farther than assigning dates to the mostly blank spaces in between.

The Children of Ilúvatar ( Elves and Men ) are described as existing as two parts: they have a " spirit " or " soul " called fëa, and a body or hröa which is made out of the matter of Arda ( erma ); for this reason hröar are Marred ( or, using another expression by Tolkien himself, contain a " Melkoringredient "), and this explains also why it was easier for Melkor and his servants to seduce Men rather than Elves, because mannish fëar have much less control of their hröar.

The view of J. R. R. Tolkien is that the poem retains a much too genuine memory of Anglo-Saxon paganism to have been composed more than a few generations after the completion of the Christianisation of England around AD 700.

The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien ( 1937 ) is seminal, predating the lecture On Fairy-Stories by the same author by a few years.

It was also an influence on J. R. R. Tolkien, who read it a few years before it was published in 1917.

The sarati, described in Parma Eldalamberon 13, a script developed by J. R. R. Tolkien in the late 1910s, anticipates many features of the tengwar, especially the vowel representation by diacritics ( which is found in many tengwar varieties ), different tengwar shapes and a few correspondences between sound features and letter shape features ( though inconsistent ).

A few fanzines were dedicated to the subject, like Tyalie Tyelellieva published by Lisa Star, and Quettar, the Bulletin of the Linguistic Fellowship of The Tolkien Society, published by Julian C. Bradfield.

Except in the matter of language, Tolkien described few characteristic features of Gondor culture.

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.

She is one of a few instances, along with Tom Bombadil and the Cats of Queen Berúthiel, where Tolkien does not provide a clear background for an element of his fiction.

Although Tolkien created very few original words in Adûnaic, mostly names, the language serves his concept of a lingua franca for Middle-earth, a shared language for many different people.

He was one of the few authors before Tolkien to use consistent internal geographies and histories to enrich his world.

The word Gongs is also used on a few occasions and it appears both distinct from Orcs, and as a sub-type of Orc, Christopher Tolkien remarks that Gongs are " evil beings obscurely related to Orcs ".

Only a few actual Rohirric words are given by Tolkien: kûd-dûkan, an old word meaning " hole-dweller " which led to kuduk, the name the Hobbits had for themselves.

In 1936 J. R. R. Tolkien submitted The Hobbit for publication, and Unwin paid his ten-year-old son Rayner Unwin a few pence to write a report on the manuscript.

In addition, he was also a friend of J. R. R. Tolkien and was one of the few people to read The Silmarillion in Tolkien's lifetime in 1957.

Tolkien suggests that fairy stories allow the reader to review his own world from the " perspective " of a different world.

Tolkien believed he had invented the word " hobbit " when he began writing The Hobbit ( it was revealed years after his death that the word predated Tolkien's usage, though with a different meaning ).

Next element to be introduced was the " Land of Seven Streams "; Tolkien was hesitant for some time about its relation to other places, writing at different times that it was located north or south of Black Mountains, within the Land of Ond or separate from it.

Tolkien gave the same forest many different names:

Depending on the choice of conversion factors ( among many that Tolkien used at different times ), this translates to a period anywhere from 4, 902 to 65, 390 solar years.

Tolkien wrote of two different origins for the people of Bree.

Tolkien describes the language as being created by Sauron as an artificial language to be the sole language of all the servants of Mordor, thereby replacing the many different varieties of Orkish and other languages used by his servants.

In his last writings about Middle-earth Tolkien substituted the Prophecy of the Last Battle ( Dagor Dagorath ) by another prophecy made by Andreth, probably about a different " Last Battle ", the War of Wrath ( the end of the Elder Days ).

The topmost course of the tower revolved slowly, showing a different leering head with each turn, and the marble walls of Minas Morgul shone not with reflected moonlight, but with a pale, frightening light of its own which Tolkien described as " a corpse-light " that " illuminated nothing ".

J. R. R. Tolkien in his 1955 lecture " English and Welsh " distinguishes the " native tongue " from the " cradle tongue ," the latter being the language one happens to learn during early childhood, while one's true " native tongue " may be different, possibly determined by an inherited linguistic taste, and may later in life be discovered by a strong emotional affinity to a specific dialect ( Tolkien personally confessed to such an affinity to the Middle English of the West Midlands in particular ).

Nevertheless, a different conception may be present in a yet later essay on the origin of the Ents which, according to Christopher Tolkien, is likely to derive from 1963 and was included into the published Silmarillion.

Tolkien used several different terms for types of trolls, though there seems to have been some overlap in meanings ;

However, the scene was dramatised, in a similar style but with different actors, in a later series of Tolkien radio adaptations by Sibley entitled The Adventures of Tom Bombadil ( a title otherwise only loosely connected with the book of the same name ).

The works of J. R. R. Tolkien have generated a body of academic research, studying different facets such as

For instance, J. R. R. Tolkien, responding to the Anglo-Saxon academic debate on escapism in the 1930s, wrote in his essay " On Fairy-Stories " that escapism had an element of emancipation in its attempt to figure a different reality.

Although there are words that can be recognized by consulting the appendices of The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales and The Lost Road, the sentence structure and spellings marks this form as different from the Quenya Tolkien decided on.

McKiernan has subsequently developed stories in the series that followed along a story line different from those that plausibly could have been taken by Tolkien.

Tolkien also discusses phonaesthetics, citing Greek, Finnish, and Welsh as examples of " languages which have a very characteristic and in their different ways beautiful word-form ".

* The Tolkien Reader, a similar collection, containing a slightly different ( but overlapping ) assortment of material.