The Inklings, continued

The third inkling was the most influent one in the genre of fantasy: JRR Tolkien. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien were born by english parents in Southafrica the third of January 1892 and he died the 2nd of September in England 1973. By the age of four his father died and the family returned to England, and never left that country again. He was very interested in languages, specially those that were spoken in Northerner Europe, and he used to make up languages of his own. He became a professor in Anglo-Saxon and later a professor of English.

"The Hobbit, or There and Back Again" (1937) was the first fantasynovel and was the result of long, creative work. He begun working on the myths and the language in the secondary world around the year 1914.
1955 came "Lord of the Rings" , which is one book, but out of fear of marketing a "fairy tale" with over 1000 pages, the publishers split it into three books.
Tolkien had now devoted 40 years to build the world in which his novels took place, the geography, history, creatures, language and mythology. Many of those things that Tolkien created are just briefly mentioned, or not included at all in the novels. He is surely unique by all this work, no other author has put that amount of time to create a fictional world. The type of world Tolkien created would become a sort of "default" world, that other authors would use. The story is about how a group of characters founds The Fellowship of the Ring, and sets out on a quest. Frodo (one of the main characters) has a ring that can destroy evil if the ring itself is destroyed. They have to travel through the world Middle-Earth to Mount Doom in Mordor where the ring was created, and where it shall be destroyed. If they fail the evil lord Sauron will forever rule Middle-Earth.

During the first five years, about 25000 books of the trilogy was sold. Tolkien didnīt believe that paperback was the proper format for "real" literature, and was strongly against his trilogy being released in that format. He had unfortunatly forgotten to protect his books by copyright in the US, and a publisher used this to release the trilogy in paperback without Tolkiens admission. Tolkien had no other choice than signing a contract with another publisher, and changed the text so much so he could get copyright and release the new version in paperback. The trilogy was very popular and was seen as the decades cultnovel, and it was at this time that people noticed the fantasygenre. Old classics by ER Eddison and Mervyn Peake was released in paperback and since they sold very well the publishers had the guts to publish new authors that wrote fantasy.

- Types of Fantasy

Books at Amazon.co.uk (England):
The Hobbit
Lord of the Rings

Books at Amazon.com (USA):
The Hobbit and the Complete Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring, the Two Towers, the Return of the King/Boxed Set

http://hem.passagen.se/gumby/
Calle Åsman [emsworth [at] gmx [dot] net]