Born in South Africa in January 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was orphaned in childhood and brought up in near-poverty. In the decades since his death in September 1973, millions have read THE HOBBIT, THE LORD OF THE RINGS, and THE SILMARILLION and become fascinated about the very private man behind the books. It is a mistaken thing to do anyway, either useless (when applied to the stupid) or pernicious (when inflicted on the gifted).’ But when he wrote The Hobbit he was still suffering from what he later called ‘the contemporary delusions about “fairy-stories” and children’ – delusions that not long afterwards he made a conscious decision to renounce.The authorized biography of the creator of Middle-earth. ‘I am not interested in the “child” as such, modern or otherwise, and certainly have no intention of meeting him/her half way, or a quarter of the way. ‘Never mind about the young!’ he once wrote. He later removed many of these, but some remain in the published text – to his regret, for he came to dislike them, and even to believe that any deliberate talking down to children is a great mistake in a story. Indeed he did this too consciously and deliberately at times in the first draft, which contains a large number of ‘asides’ to juvenile readers, remarks such as ‘Now you know quite enough to go on with’ and ‘As we shall see in the end’. Despite the fact that it had been drawn into his mythology, Tolkien did not allow it to become overwhelmingly serious or even adult in tone, but stuck to his original intention of amusing his own and perhaps other people’s children. Out myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbor, while materialistic 'progress' leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of evil.” Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming a 'sub-creator' and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. We have come from God (continued Tolkien), and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. And just as speech is invention about objects and ideas, so myth is invention about truth. By so naming things and describing them you are only inventing your own terms about them.
You call a star a star, and say it is just a ball of matter moving on a mathematical course. But it was not a 'tree' until someone gave it that name. “You call a tree a tree, he said, and you think nothing more of the word.
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