It’s interesting, and more than a bit depressing, to wonder how many great writers were taken by war before their time. When J.R.R. Tolkien (born 123 years ago on January 3, 1892) left his wife of less than three months for the Western Front during World War I in 1916, he seemed to assume he would be among them. He later wrote "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then ... it was like a death."

We can all be thankful that events turned out otherwise. While his battalion prepared for the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien caught a case of trench fever (carried by lice) and was returned to England. The ensuing battle nearly wiped out his unit. In the years to come, Tolkien would forcefully invoke his experience in the First World War to denounce interpreters who saw parallels to the Second in his work, insisting that he knew too much of war to see it as appropriate grist for escapist fantasy: “[I]t seems now often forgotten that to be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than to be involved in 1939 and the following years. By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.”

So if war wasn’t the inspiration for the famed scribe of Middle-Earth -- the creator of Frodo and Gandalf and the rest of the inhabitants of the richly-imagined and deeply-thought “Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” novels -- what was? There are clues in his youth. He inherited a great love of botany from his mother Mabel, which shows up in his detailed descriptions of Middle-Earth’s flora. His mother converted to Catholicism when he was about 8, then died four years later from diabetes. He described her as a “martyr,” and seemed to internalize much of her religion, in its love for tradition, ceremony, and its own mythology. (His own “Silmarillion” is a riff on the Judeo-Christian Creation story, and he shared a close friendship with “Narnia” author C.S. Lewis, with whom he quarreled over the use of religion in fiction while sharing a deep Christian faith.)

But most of all, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien seems to have been powered by a love of languages, and this above all might be the key to understanding the stories he bequeathed the world. This seems to have been the ongoing passion of his life, stretching from childhood (his mother taught him Latin, French, and German) and extending into his career as a professor and writer. He cultivated more than 20 tongues, spanning both Europe’s geography and history. He created numerous languages of his own, and put many of them to work in his Middle-Earth stories. Note the order there. The languages came first…then the stories. He later said he would have preferred to write all of his stories in his Elvish tongues, but was limited to “only as much ‘language’ … as I thought would be stomached by readers.”

Tolkien believed that language and mythology were inseparable, and insisted that a tongue was only as important as the stories that grew up around it. To prove the point, he created some of the most memorable stories the world has ever known, but only after crafting languages that informed the culture and beliefs of the fictional peoples who told them. He died in 1973, aged 81. “The Hobbit” (1937) and especially “The Lord of the Rings” (published 1954-1955) had brought him fame, but he was ambivalent about the books’ popularity, accompanied as it was by offers to turn them into movies and other projects that didn’t take the nuances of his world as seriously as he did.

I don’t know a proper Elvish toast, but if you happen to speak English, the Tolkien Society suggests a simple toast, in the tradition of the hobbits, on the author’s birthday (today would have been his twelvety-third). Simply lift your glass, whatever it might contain, and toast “The Professor!” As Tolkien knew, language can be multifaceted, poetic, and complex...and at times, it can be exceedingly simple.

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