In asking how my thoughts have changed since the beginning of this class, I feel a bit caught off-guard. I hadn’t particularly taken notice of things, and I have scantly written them down in regards to my own personal thoughts on the matter: I have had a respect for Tolkien brought into me by the previous class that I had taken, but in retrospect, I feel that there has been one area of change. I relate more to Tolkien, I feel, than I have before.
This came mostly from reading Carpenter’s Biography, specifically with Tolkien’s early childhood and the start of his creations. As he says, Tolkien was “supposed to be working on an Oxford scholarship, but it was hard to concentrate on classical texts when one half of his mind was occupied with language-inventing and the other with Edith” (Carpenter 44). His trials and tribulations in school, alongside his tendency to wander off into his own mind reminded me of myself at a similar age. I too was, and still am, distracted by the matters of my creativity and then by matters of my heart.
At Oxford, Tolkien began to do “very little work and [...] was getting into lazy habits” (Carpenter 55). I have to admit that there is also this in me, I faced it in High School and I am beginning to face it again as I approach the end of my Bachelor’s Degree. It comes not from a malicious place, or even a lack of interest in the subjects, I like Tolkien find it “too easy to stay in bed in mornings, particularly after sitting up late talking to friends...” (Carpenter 55).
But the glimmer of hope comes for him in the form that we study Tolkien, that he did write and he did become something greater than just a lazy kid in college. In this, I find hope for myself and my desires to write and have a creation as rich and as deep as Tolkien’s Middle-earth.
I have spent the last many years actually (which is a terrifying thought to consider, now taking inventory of what I have done with that time) creating a world in the same soul as Tolkien. I find myself at what I hope to be a crossroad that Tolkien faced as a young man as well, of the uncertainty of life. There is someone I care about deeply too who I cannot be with, just as Tolkien was with Edith, and there is an invention of mine that has begun to take root but that I have yet to express. It’s terrifying at this moment, and Tolkien experienced it all at Oxford.
I might be projecting a bit onto him, but this class has done that to me. I consider Tolkien not just the “Oxford Don” that he is described as, as he is imagined, smoking his pipe and working on his world (Carpenter 5) , but also as the scared young kid in college who can’t see the end point of anything he desires in the world, but keeps trying.
In many other ways, my respect and opinion of Tolkien hasn’t changed much; being exposed to more influences has in turn influenced me more, but I already had a great respect for his work and wide breadth of knowledge.
I just want to be like Tolkien, with a massive, breathing, living world that exists in some tangible way. This class has helped me see the path that it might take, the difficult and dark road that must be travelled to reach that point; especially in its formative steps.
Works Cited
Carpenter, Humphrey. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977