27 Facts About Edith Tolkien

Edith Mary Tolkien was an Englishwoman known as the wife of the academic, philologist, poet, and novelist JR R Tolkien.

Edith Tolkien served as the inspiration for his fictional Middle-earth characters Luthien Tinuviel and Arwen Undomiel.

Edith Tolkien was always deeply conscious of having been conceived out of wedlock and never told her own children the name of their grandfather.

Edith Tolkien was brought up in Handsworth, a suburb of Birmingham, by her mother and her cousin, Jenny Grove.

Frances Bratt died when her daughter was 14 and Edith Tolkien was sent to the Dresden House boarding school in Evesham.

Edith Tolkien was delighted to have, in Edith, a pianist to accompany the soloists.

In later years, Edith Tolkien told her children that her life at 37 Duchess Road was "rather restricted".

Once, Edith Tolkien, who "had a lifelong enjoyment of the theatre", announced that she was going to a matinee at the Theatre Royal.

Edith Tolkien grudgingly obeyed this instruction to the letter while Father Morgan's guardianship lasted.

Edith Tolkien lived in relative comfort in the Jessop's spacious house and was waited upon by servants.

Edith Tolkien played the organ at her local Church of England parish, which she later blamed for her subsequent lifetime of back problems.

Edith Tolkien joined the Primrose League and attended local Conservative Party meetings.

Edith Tolkien dominated his wife, who in turn begged Edith not to cross him.

Edith Tolkien said she would often work out her frustrations on the piano, playing something powerful and stirring, such as a Schubert Impromptu or a Beethoven Sonata.

However, on the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote a letter to Edith, which contained a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him.

Edith Tolkien replied saying that she had recently become engaged to her friend Molly's brother, Warwickshire farmer George Field, but implied that she had done so only because she felt, "on the shelf", and believed that Tolkien had forgotten her.

That day, Edith returned her ring and announced her engagement to Tolkien instead.

Also following her engagement, Edith announced that she was converting to Roman Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence.

Edith Tolkien was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the Lancashire Fusiliers, transferring to the 11th Battalion, part of the 25th Division, with the British Expeditionary Force.

Edith Tolkien kept a large map of France on the wall and could gauge fairly well where Ronald was at any time.

In part, these feelings were due to Ronald's rigid, almost medieval, insistence upon frequent confession; and Edith Tolkien had always hated confessing her sins to a priest.

Nor could he discuss her feelings with her in a rational manner, certainly not with the lucidity he demonstrated in his theological arguments with author Lewis: to Edith Tolkien he presented only his emotional attachment to religion, of which she had little understanding.

Edith Tolkien did most of the talking and it was not at all literary.

Edith Tolkien's husband was relaxed and happy with this domesticity.

Edith Tolkien died on 29 November 1971 in Bournemouth at the age of 82, and was buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.

Edith Tolkien was buried with her when he died 21 months later.

Shortly after Edith's death, Tolkien wrote the following in a letter to their son Christopher.