That uncertainty was indivisible from his Catholic faith in the Fall of Man - the belief that history is a story of decline, not progress. Once he had lost her, there was no security, and his natural optimism was balanced by deep uncertainty.” “Her death made him a pessimist or rather, it made him capable of violent shifts of emotion. In his biography of the author, Humphrey Carpenter underscored her passing as a turning point in Tolkien’s personality. In addition to offering all that a loving mother could, Mabel Tolkien was her son’s first teacher, introducing him to the study of plants and languages before he was 7. Tolkien blamed this rejection for her early death from undiagnosed diabetes when he was 12, describing her as “a martyr who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith.” His mother’s family disowned her for converting to Catholicism, leaving her to support her two children alone despite her uneven health.

When Tolkien was 3, his father died while the family was, essentially, thousands of miles away on vacation, leaving them destitute in England. Imagine the trials of a Dickensian orphan, then drop a senseless global war, a pandemic, and economic depression on top of it, and you’d have an approximate biography of Tolkien’s early life. Tolkien, a pessimist in a cohort of pessimists, lived throughout his life. More than that, it’s a dictum: Hope doesn’t just keep us going in hard times - it gets us out of them. Stripped down to its basic themes, The Lord of the Rings is a guide to keeping hope in the face of hopelessness. The story’s thousands of pages endured in the minds of readers for half a century before Philippa Boyens, Peter Jackson, and Fran Walsh’s painstakingly adapted smash-hit film trilogy brought it to moviegoers. He lived to see the Great Depression and a second devastating global war before he put the final touches on The Lord of the Rings, a sword and sorcery epic where hard-fought victories turn on the smallest choices. He was an orphan married to another orphan, father to an infant son born in, as he would write in 1941, “the starvation-year of 1917 when the end of the war seemed as far off as it does now.” In the plague year of 1918, the author was 26, with a recurring illness keeping him in and out of the exact place the virus was at its hottest: army hospitals. It is a quirk of history that we didn’t lose J.R.R. So each Wednesday throughout the year, we'll go there and back again, examining how and why the films have endured as modern classics. 2021 marks The Lord of the Rings movies' 20th anniversary - and we couldn't imagine exploring the trilogy with just one piece.

Tolkien lord of the rings