Tolkien and his fans
Who was the real creator of Middle-earth and Arda - John Ronald Ruel Tolkien? A crazy sound professor who has been rewriting his works for years, or a real genius with an unimaginable imagination who has invented a world in which "a green sun would be appropriate" …
Goblins, elves, hobbits, conspiracies, magic … Salvation of the universe and eternal love. Many have watched the recently acclaimed epic film "The Lord of the Rings" directed by Peter Jackson, and some of you have probably read the novels of John RR Tolkien. I think that there is hardly a person who has not heard about this phenomenon in the world of fantasy and who does not suspect anything about the ring of omnipotence, about little hobbits, about good wizards and elves, about cruel orcs and Nazgul.
Fans of Tolkien's work know by name all the heroes, their ancestry, culture, the whole story described in his books. The Oxford professor of philology has created a whole world, plunging into which, the reader finds new connections, follows the history of entire fictional states and peoples.
Crazy professor
Who was actually the creator of Middle-earth and Arda - John Ronald Ruel Tolkien? A crazy sound professor who has been rewriting his works for years, honing and bringing them to perfection, or a real genius with an unimaginable imagination, who has invented a world in which "the green sun would be appropriate"? I am inclined towards the second option, realizing that you need to have remarkable development of sound and visual vectors to create such masterpieces. Despite the fact that before Tolkien many authors wrote in the fantasy genre, he is deservedly considered the "father of high fantasy" in modern literature.
The place described by J. R. R. Tolkien in his works does not leave anyone indifferent! In his books, there is a whole world where more than a dozen peoples live, and each has its own history, culture, religion, behavioral characteristics, unique traditions and legends, its own languages and dialects with thoughtful phonetics, spelling and spelling rules.
Fantasy, capable of creating a separate universe, a cult world for many generations of readers, cannot exist without visual imagination. Tolkien, as a real spectator, from an early age loved to paint landscapes. His mother developed his artistic taste, instilled a love for botany. She was a deeply religious, educated woman who spoke several languages, and had a great influence on the development of J. R. R. Tolkien as a child. Before her death, she entrusted the upbringing of children to her father, Francis Morgan, a strong and extraordinary personality. It was Francis Morgan who shaped Tolkien's interest in philology.
The boy early showed linguistic talent - he and several of his friends came up with a secret system of symbols for communication with each other. This passion for constructing new languages stayed with him for life. In elementary school, John knew more than seven languages, but the mere study of them soon bored him, and he began to develop his own - "elvish". Quenya is the speech of the high elves, on the basis of which Sindarin appeared, which has become a common dialect for all other elves. Later, the professor develops dialects for other peoples inhabiting Middle-earth - gnomes, orcs, people, and Ents.
John Tolkien had a special relationship with the perception of spoken words, and he composed new languages guided by "the beauty of sound." He himself said: “No one believes me when I say that my long book is an attempt to create a world in which the language corresponding to my personal aesthetics could be natural. Nevertheless, it is true."
At the age of 24, John got married, his marriage lasted 56 years. As a real anal man for whom family is of great value, Tolkien did everything to ensure that his life together with his wife was long and happy. Until his last days he was faithful to his wife, dedicated poetry to her and created her images in novels.
Love as the highest emotional value, in a sense perfect in sight and sound, the same as in Tolkien's life, was present in his works. He revealed the theme of eternal love, passing all barriers, war, lies, immortality. Examples of this are stories about Beren and Lúthien, about Aragorn and Arwen.
Tolkien wrote: “You say there is hope. I think you are right, and Love will win where the army is defeated. And if Love is powerless, it means that nothing will win. But why live then?"
A perfectionist, which is also a hallmark of people with an anal vector, Tolkien wrote slowly, rewriting individual chapters of The Lord of the Rings by hand from draft to clean copy several times, systematizing and perfecting his novel. Working on it for 12 years, John created the literary world and myth in such a way that he himself would seem interesting and attractive to him.
Tolkien has repeatedly refuted the version of critics about the presence of philosophical motives in his work, answering them that he wrote exclusively for his own pleasure. However, it is impossible not to notice the thematic thread that has passed through all of his works - the issues of life and death, about the meaning of human existence and other topics that excite the sound people:
“However, I can note that if this story tells about something, it is not about power. The desire for power is only a motive and motivating force. The book deals mainly with Death and Immortality and the paths to escape: about cyclic longevity and accumulation of memories."
“The death of people is real. The time comes, and they leave the World, therefore their name here is Guests, Wanderers. Death is their destined destiny, Death is the Gift of the Creator, which even immortals will envy over time. But Melkor succeeded here too, forcing him to fear Death, obscuring its true essence."
As a World War I veteran, Tolkien indignantly responded to those who claimed to have found parallels to World War II in his work:
“In order to fully experience the severity of the darkness of war, you need to be under it personally, but over the years it is increasingly forgotten that being captured by a war as a teenager in 1914 is no less terrible than in 1939 and subsequent years. In 1918, almost all of my close friends were dead."
Tolkienists. Tolkien fans
Simultaneously with the first edition of the trilogy in the mid-60s of the 20th century, the first fans of the writer's work appeared. With the spread of books outside England, the number of admirers became more and more, the phenomenon gradually acquired a mass character. Over time, it has grown into a separate subculture. Tolkienists are primarily sound-visual people.
Now there is a huge amount of information about Tolkien's novels - Tolkienists from all over the world collect, systematize any information regarding his work. There are special books, dictionaries, textbooks, sites for the study of Elvish languages with pronunciation rules and phonetics invented by the writer.
Some sound people, in an attempt to escape from reality, believe that the world described in Tolkien's books actually existed. They seek confirmation of this and live according to this statement. There are known curious cases during the census in Russia, when "elves" or "hobbits" were included in the column "nationality".
Tolkienists love to organize role-playing games based on the events described in the books. They call themselves by the names of Tolkien's characters, representatives of the magical peoples living on the pages of the book - elves, gnomes, hobbits, orcs, goblins. Or they come up with new ones, guided by the languages created by the writer.
There is an unspoken opinion all over the world that a fanatical attitude towards fantasy is a way of escape from the real world, that these young people are tired of the values of the "welfare society", of the world of excessive rationalism and pragmatism, trying to live in the unreal world of a fairy tale.
Admirers of Tolkien's work, like any other fantasy literature, are primarily people with sound and visual vectors. Possessing a rich imagination and high intellect themselves, they prefer the appropriate books: science fiction, philosophy, psychology.
People with a sound vector have abstract thinking, capable of understanding very abstract categories such as eternity and infinity, physical and metaphysical, the meaning of life and their purpose in this world. Studying such literature, they perceive it as an allegory, finding a veiled meaning in fictional plots. Reading the lines, they try to find this meaning there, in the invented world.
Plunging more and more into the fantastic world of books, the sound engineer delves into his thoughts, into himself, fencing off more and more from the real world. Therefore, they say about many fans of science fiction: "I have lost the sense of reality." The search for any sound engineer at a certain age goes through fiction, but some linger and remain forever in the fantasy world, swallowing one book after another.
Even in the last century, filling the desires of a sound engineer with fantastic and philosophical literature was acceptable. Today, all the beauty of the worlds of great writers remains in the past. The most that she is capable of is to develop in the right direction the thoughts and feelings of the little sound person and the spectator. But staying in this for life means marking time and looking for meaning where there is none. Therefore, we can safely say: forward from the fictional world to the real world, full of meaning!
