name	C. S. Lewis
birth name	Clive Staples Lewis
alt	Monochrome head-and-left-shoulder photo portrait of 50-year-old Lewis
birth date	November 29, 1898
birth place	Belfast, Ireland
death date	November 22, 1963
death place	Oxford, England
occupation	Novelist, scholar, broadcaster
nationality	British
genre	Fantasy, science fiction, Christian apologetics, children's literature
notableworks	''The Chronicles of Narnia'' ''Mere Christianity'' ''The Allegory of Love'' ''The Screwtape Letters'' The Space Trilogy ''Till We Have Faces''''Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life''
signature	CS Lewis Signature.svg }}

Clive Staples Lewis (29 November 1898 22 November 1963), commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a British novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Ireland. He is well known for his fictional work, especially ''The Screwtape Letters'', ''The Chronicles of Narnia'' and ''The Space Trilogy''.

Lewis was a close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien, and both authors were leading figures in the English faculty at Oxford University and in the informal Oxford literary group known as the "Inklings". According to his memoir ''Surprised by Joy'', Lewis had been baptised in the Church of Ireland (part of the Anglican Communion) at birth, but fell away from his faith during his adolescence. Owing to the influence of Tolkien and other friends, at the age of 32 Lewis returned to the Anglican Communion, becoming "a very ordinary layman of the Church of England". His faith had a profound effect on his work, and his wartime radio broadcasts on the subject of Christianity brought him wide acclaim.

In 1956 he married the American writer Joy Gresham, 17 years his junior, who died four years later of cancer at the age of 45. Lewis died three years after his wife, as the result of renal failure. His death came one week before his 65th birthday. Media coverage of his death was minimal, as he died on 22 November 1963 – the same day that U.S. President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and the same day another famous author, Aldous Huxley, died. Lewis's works have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold millions of copies. The books that make up ''The Chronicles of Narnia'' have sold the most and have been popularised on stage, TV, radio and cinema.

Biography

Childhood

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Ireland, on 29 November 1898. His father was Albert James Lewis (1863–1929), a solicitor whose father, Richard, had come to Ireland from Wales during the mid 19th century. His mother was Florence Augusta Lewis, née Hamilton (1862–1908), known as Flora, the daughter of a Church of Ireland (Anglican) priest. He had an elder brother, Warren Hamilton Lewis. At the age of four, shortly after his dog Jacksie was killed by a car, he announced that his name was now Jacksie. At first he would answer to no other name, but later accepted Jack, the name by which he was known to friends and family for the rest of his life. When he was seven, his family moved into "Little Lea", the family home of his childhood, in the Strandtown area of East Belfast.

As a boy, Lewis had a fascination with anthropomorphic animals, falling in love with Beatrix Potter's stories and often writing and illustrating his own animal stories. He and his brother Warnie together created the world of Boxen, inhabited and run by animals. Lewis loved to read, and as his father's house was filled with books, he felt that finding a book to read was as easy as walking into a field and "finding a new blade of grass."

Lewis was schooled by private tutors before being sent to the Wynyard School in Watford, Hertfordshire, in 1908, just after his mother's death from cancer. Lewis' brother had enrolled there three years previously. The school was closed not long afterwards due to a lack of pupils; the headmaster Robert "Oldie" Capron was soon after committed to a psychiatric hospital. Lewis then attended Campbell College in the east of Belfast about a mile from his home, but he left after a few months due to respiratory problems. He was then sent to the health-resort town of Malvern, Worcestershire, where he attended the preparatory school Cherbourg House, which Lewis calls "Chartres" in his autobiography. It was during this time that Lewis abandoned his childhood Christian faith and became an atheist, becoming interested in mythology and the occult. In September 1913, Lewis enrolled at Malvern College, where he remained until the following June. He found the school socially competitive. After leaving Malvern he studied privately with William T. Kirkpatrick, his father's old tutor and former headmaster of Lurgan College.

As a teenager, he was wonderstruck by the songs and legends of what he called ''Northernness'', the ancient literature of Scandinavia preserved in the Icelandic sagas. These legends intensified an inner longing he later called "joy". He also grew to love nature; its beauty reminded him of the stories of the North, and the stories of the North reminded him of the beauties of nature. His teenage writings moved away from the tales of Boxen, and he began using different art forms (epic poetry and opera) to try to capture his new-found interest in Norse mythology and the natural world. Studying with Kirkpatrick ("The Great Knock", as Lewis afterwards called him) instilled in him a love of Greek literature and mythology and sharpened his skills in debate and sound reasoning. In 1916, Lewis was awarded a scholarship at University College, Oxford.

"My Irish life"

Lewis experienced a certain cultural shock on first arriving in England: "No Englishman will be able to understand my first impressions of England", Lewis wrote in ''Surprised by Joy'', continuing, "The strange English accents with which I was surrounded seemed like the voices of demons. But what was worst was the English landscape ... I have made up the quarrel since; but at that moment I conceived a hatred for England which took many years to heal."

From boyhood Lewis immersed himself firstly in Norse and Greek and then in Irish mythology and literature and expressed an interest in the Irish language, though there is not much evidence that he laboured to learn it. He developed a particular fondness for W. B. Yeats, in part because of Yeats's use of Ireland's Celtic heritage in poetry. In a letter to a friend Lewis wrote, "I have here discovered an author exactly after my own heart, whom I am sure you would delight in, W. B. Yeats. He writes plays and poems of rare spirit and beauty about our old Irish mythology."

In 1921, Lewis met Yeats twice, since Yeats had moved to Oxford. Surprised to find his English peers indifferent to Yeats and the Celtic Revival movement, Lewis wrote: "I am often surprised to find how utterly ignored Yeats is among the men I have met: perhaps his appeal is purely Irish – if so, then thank the gods that I am Irish." Early in his career, Lewis considered sending his work to the major Dublin publishers, writing: "If I do ever send my stuff to a publisher, I think I shall try Maunsel, those Dublin people, and so tack myself definitely onto the Irish school."

Lewis occasionally expressed a somewhat tongue-in-cheek chauvinism toward the English. Describing an encounter with a fellow Irishman he wrote: "Like all Irish people who meet in England we ended by criticisms on the invincible flippancy and dulness of the Anglo-Saxon race. After all, there is no doubt, ami, that the Irish are the only people: with all their faults I would not gladly live or die among another folk." Throughout his life, he sought out the company of other Irish living in England and visited Northern Ireland regularly, even spending his honeymoon there in 1958 at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn. He called this "my Irish life."

Various critics have suggested that it was Lewis's dismay over sectarian conflict in his native Belfast that led him to eventually adopt such an ecumenical brand of Christianity. As one critic has said, Lewis "repeatedly extolled the virtues of all branches of the Christian faith, emphasising a need for unity among Christians around what the Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton called ‘Mere Christianity’, the core doctrinal beliefs that all denominations share." On the other hand, Paul Stevens of the University of Toronto has written that "Lewis's ''Mere Christianity'' masked many of the political prejudices of an old-fashioned Ulster Protestant, a native of middle-class Belfast for whom British withdrawal from Northern Ireland even in the 1950s and 1960s was unthinkable"

World War I

In 1917, Lewis left his studies to volunteer in the British Army. During World War I he was commissioned an officer in the Third Battalion, Somerset Light Infantry. Lewis arrived at the front line in the Somme Valley in France on his nineteenth birthday, and experienced trench warfare.

On 15 April 1918, Lewis was wounded and two of his colleagues were killed by an English shell falling short of its target. Lewis suffered from depression and homesickness during his convalescence. Upon his recovery in October, he was assigned to duty in Andover, England. He was discharged in December 1918, and soon returned to his studies. Lewis received a First in Honour Moderations (Greek and Latin Literature) in 1920, a First in Greats (Philosophy and Ancient History) in 1922, and a First in English in 1923.

Jane Moore

While being trained for the army Lewis shared a room with another cadet, Edward Courtnay Francis "Paddy" Moore (1898–1918). Maureen Moore, Paddy's sister, said that the two made a mutual pact that if either died during the war, the survivor would take care of both their families. Paddy was killed in action in 1918 and Lewis kept his promise. Paddy had earlier introduced Lewis to his mother, Jane King Moore, and a friendship quickly sprang up between Lewis, who was eighteen when they met, and Jane, who was forty-five. The friendship with Mrs. Moore was particularly important to Lewis while he was recovering from his wounds in hospital, as his father did not visit Lewis.

Lewis lived with and cared for Mrs. Moore until she was hospitalised in the late 1940s. He routinely introduced her as his "mother", and referred to her as such in letters. Lewis, whose own mother had died when he was a child and whose father was distant, demanding and eccentric, developed a deeply affectionate friendship with Mrs. Moore.

Speculation regarding their relationship re-surfaced with the publication of A. N. Wilson's biography of Lewis. Wilson (who had never met Lewis) attempted to make a case for their having been lovers for a time. Wilson's biography was not the first to address the question of Lewis's relationship with Mrs. Moore. George Sayer, who knew Lewis for 29 years, sought to shed light on the relationship during the period of 14 years prior to Lewis's conversion to Christianity, in his biography ''Jack: A Life of C. S. Lewis'', in which he wrote:

Were they lovers? Owen Barfield, who knew Jack well in the 1920s, once said that he thought the likelihood was "fifty-fifty." Although she was twenty-six years older than Jack, she was still a handsome woman, and he was certainly infatuated with her. But it seems very odd, if they were lovers, that he would call her "mother." We know, too, that they did not share the same bedroom. It seems most likely that he was bound to her by the promise he had given to Paddy and that his promise was reinforced by his love for her as his second mother.

Later Sayer changed his mind. In the introduction to the 1997 edition of his biography of Lewis he wrote:

I have had to alter my opinion of Lewis's relationship with Mrs. Moore. In chapter eight of this book I wrote that I was uncertain about whether they were lovers. Now after conversations with Mrs. Moore's daughter, Maureen, and a consideration of the way in which their bedrooms were arranged at The Kilns, I am quite certain that they were.

Lewis spoke well of Mrs. Moore throughout his life, saying to his friend George Sayer, "She was generous and taught me to be generous, too."

In December 1917 Lewis wrote in a letter to his childhood friend Arthur Greeves that Jane and Greeves were "the two people who matter most to me in the world."

In 1930, Lewis and his brother Warnie moved, with Mrs. Moore and her daughter Maureen, into "The Kilns", a house in the district of Headington Quarry on the outskirts of Oxford (now part of the suburb of Risinghurst). They all contributed financially to the purchase of the house, which passed to Maureen, then Dame Maureen Dunbar, Btss., when Warren died in 1973.

Mrs. Moore suffered from dementia in her later years and was eventually moved into a nursing home, where she died in 1951. Lewis visited her every day in this home until her death.

Conversion to Christianity

Lewis was raised in a church-going family in the Church of Ireland. He became an atheist at 15, though he later described his young self as being paradoxically "very angry with God for not existing".

His early separation from Christianity began when he started to view his religion as a chore and as a duty; around this time, he also gained an interest in the occult, as his studies expanded to include such topics. Lewis quoted Lucretius (''De rerum natura'', 5.198–9) as having one of the strongest arguments for atheism:

:''Nequaquam nobis divinitus esse paratam'' :''Naturam rerum; tanta stat praedita culpa''

:"Had God designed the world, it would not be :A world so frail and faulty as we see."

Lewis's interest in the works of George MacDonald was part of what turned him from atheism. This can be seen particularly well through this passage in Lewis's ''The Great Divorce'', chapter nine, when the semi-autobiographical main character meets MacDonald in Heaven:

...I tried, trembling, to tell this man all that his writings had done for me. I tried to tell how a certain frosty afternoon at Leatherhead Station when I had first bought a copy of ''Phantastes'' (being then about sixteen years old) had been to me what the first sight of Beatrice had been to Dante: ''Here begins the new life''. I started to confess how long that Life had delayed in the region of imagination merely: how slowly and reluctantly I had come to admit that his Christendom had more than an accidental connexion with it, how hard I had tried not to see the true name of the quality which first met me in his books is Holiness.

He slowly re-embraced Christianity, influenced by arguments with his Oxford colleague and friend J. R. R. Tolkien, whom he seems to have met for the first time on 11 May 1926, and by the book ''The Everlasting Man'' by G. K. Chesterton. He fought greatly up to the moment of his conversion, noting that he was brought into Christianity like a prodigal, "kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance to escape." He described his last struggle in ''Surprised by Joy'':

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England.

After his conversion to theism in 1929, Lewis converted to Christianity in 1931, following a long discussion and late-night walk with his close friends Tolkien and Hugo Dyson. He records making a specific commitment to Christian belief while on his way to the zoo with his brother. He became a member of the Church of England – somewhat to the disappointment of Tolkien, who had hoped that he would convert to Roman Catholicism.

Lewis was a committed Anglican who upheld a largely orthodox Anglican theology, though in his apologetic writings, he made an effort to avoid espousing any one denomination. In his later writings, some believe that he proposed ideas such as purification of venial sins after death in purgatory (''The Great Divorce'' and ''Letters to Malcolm'') and mortal sin (''The Screwtape Letters''), which are generally considered to be Roman Catholic teachings, although they are also widely held in Anglicanism (particularly in high church Anglo-Catholic circles). Regardless, Lewis considered himself an entirely orthodox Anglican to the end of his life, reflecting that he had initially attended church only to receive communion and had been repelled by the hymns and the poor quality of the sermons. He later came to consider himself honoured by worshipping with men of faith who came in shabby clothes and work boots and who sang all the verses to all the hymns.

Joy Gresham

In Lewis's later life, he corresponded with and later met Joy Davidman Gresham, an American writer of Jewish background, a former Communist, and a convert from atheism to Christianity. She was separated from her alcoholic and abusive husband, the novelist William L. Gresham, and came to England with her two sons, David and Douglas. Lewis at first regarded her as an agreeable intellectual companion and personal friend, and it was at least overtly on this level that he agreed to enter into a civil marriage contract with her so that she could continue to live in the UK. Lewis's brother Warnie wrote: "For Jack the attraction was at first undoubtedly intellectual. Joy was the only woman whom he had met... who had a brain which matched his own in suppleness, in width of interest, and in analytical grasp, and above all in humour and a sense of fun" . However, after complaining of a painful hip, she was diagnosed with terminal bone cancer, and the relationship developed to the point that they sought a Christian marriage. Since she was divorced, this was not straightforward in the Church of England at the time, but a friend, the Rev. Peter Bide, performed the ceremony at her hospital bed in March 1957.

Gresham's cancer soon went into a brief remission, and the couple lived as a family (together with Warren Lewis) until her eventual relapse and death in 1960. The year she died, the couple took a brief holiday in Greece and the Aegean in 1960; Lewis was fond of walking but not of travel, and this marked his only crossing of the English Channel after 1918. Lewis's book ''A Grief Observed'' describes his experience of bereavement in such a raw and personal fashion that Lewis originally released it under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk to keep readers from associating the book with him. Ironically, many friends recommended the book to Lewis as a method for dealing with his own grief. His authorship was made public after his death by Faber's, with the permission of the executors.

Lewis continued to raise Gresham's two sons after her death. While Douglas Gresham is, like Lewis and his mother, a Christian, David Gresham turned to the faith into which his mother had been born and became Orthodox Jewish in his beliefs. His mother's writings had featured the Jews, particularly one "shohet" (ritual slaughterer), in an unsympathetic manner. David informed Lewis that he was going to become a ritual slaughterer in order to present this type of Jewish religious functionary to the world in a more favourable light. In a 2005 interview, Douglas Gresham acknowledged he and his brother were not close, but he did say they are in email contact. Douglas remains involved in the affairs of the Lewis estate.

Illness and death

In early June 1961, Lewis began experiencing medical problems and was diagnosed with inflammation of the kidneys which resulted in blood poisoning. His illness caused him to miss the autumn term at Cambridge, though his health gradually began improving in 1962 and he returned that April. Lewis's health continued to improve, and according to his friend George Sayer, Lewis was fully himself by the spring of 1963. However, on 15 July 1963 he fell ill and was admitted to hospital. The next day at 5:00 pm, Lewis suffered a heart attack and lapsed into a coma, unexpectedly awaking the following day at 2:00 pm. After he was discharged from the hospital, Lewis returned to the Kilns, though he was too ill to return to work. As a result, he resigned from his post at Cambridge in August. Lewis's condition continued to decline, and in mid-November he was diagnosed with end-stage renal failure. On 22 November 1963 Lewis collapsed in his bedroom at 5:30 pm and died a few minutes later, exactly one week before his 65th birthday. He is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington, Oxford . Almost 10 years later, his brother Warren Hamilton "Warnie" Lewis, who died on 9 April 1973, was buried next to him.

Media coverage of his death was almost completely overshadowed by news of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which occurred on the same day, as did the death of Aldous Huxley, author of ''Brave New World''. This coincidence was the inspiration for Peter Kreeft's book ''Between Heaven and Hell: A Dialog Somewhere Beyond Death with John F. Kennedy, C. S. Lewis, & Aldous Huxley'' .

C. S. Lewis is commemorated on 22 November in the church calendar of the Episcopal Church.

Career

Scholar

thumb|right|Magdalen College, Oxford Lewis began his academic career as an undergraduate student at Oxford, where he won a triple first, the highest honours in three areas of study. Lewis then taught as a fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, for nearly thirty years, from 1925 to 1954, and later was the first Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Using this position, he argued that there was no such thing as an English Renaissance. Much of his scholarly work concentrated on the later Middle Ages, especially its use of allegory. His ''The Allegory of Love'' (1936) helped reinvigorate the serious study of late medieval narratives like the ''Roman de la Rose''. Lewis wrote several prefaces to old works of literature and poetry, like Layamon's ''Brut''. His book "A Preface to ''Paradise Lost''" is still one of the most valuable criticisms of that work. His last academic work, ''The Discarded Image: An Introduction to Medieval and Renaissance Literature'' (1964), is a summary of the medieval world view, the "discarded image" of the cosmos in his title.

thumb|left|upright|The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford where the Inklings met on Tuesday mornings in 1939Lewis was a prolific writer, and his circle of literary friends became an informal discussion society known as the "Inklings", including J. R. R. Tolkien, Nevill Coghill, Lord David Cecil, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and his brother Warren Lewis. At least one scholar points to December 1929 as the Inklings' beginning date. Lewis's friendship with Coghill and Tolkien grew during their time as members of the Kolbítar, an Old Norse reading group Tolkien founded and which ended around the time of the inception of the Inklings. At Oxford he was the tutor of, among many other undergraduates, poet John Betjeman, critic Kenneth Tynan, mystic Bede Griffiths, and Sufi scholar Martin Lings. Curiously, the religious and conservative Betjeman detested Lewis, whereas the anti-Establishment Tynan retained a life-long admiration for him .

Of Tolkien, Lewis writes in ''Surprised by Joy'':

When I began teaching for the English Faculty, I made two other friends, both Christians (these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who were later to give me much help in getting over the last stile. They were H.V.V. Dyson ... and J.R.R. Tolkien. Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.

Novelist

In addition to his scholarly work, Lewis wrote a number of popular novels, including his science fiction The Space Trilogy and his fantasy fiction Narnian books, most dealing implicitly with Christian themes such as sin, humanity's fall from grace, and redemption.

''The Pilgrim's Regress''

His first novel after becoming a Christian was ''The Pilgrim's Regress,'' which depicted his experience with Christianity in the style of John Bunyan's ''The Pilgrim's Progress''. The book was poorly received by critics at the time, although D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of Lewis's contemporaries at Oxford, gave him much-valued encouragement. Asked by Lloyd-Jones when he would write another book, Lewis replied, "When I understand the meaning of prayer."

"Space Trilogy" novels

His "Space Trilogy" or "Ransom Trilogy" novels (also called the "Cosmic Trilogy") dealt with what Lewis saw as the de-humanising trends in contemporary science fiction. The first book, ''Out of the Silent Planet'', was apparently written following a conversation with his friend J. R. R. Tolkien about these trends; Lewis agreed to write a "space travel" story and Tolkien a "time travel" one. Tolkien's story, "The Lost Road", a tale connecting his Middle-earth mythology and the modern world, was never completed. Lewis's main character of Ransom is based in part on Tolkien, a fact that Tolkien himself alludes to in his ''Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien''. The second novel, ''Perelandra'', depicts a new Garden of Eden on the planet Venus, a new Adam and Eve, and a new "serpent figure" to tempt them. The story can be seen as a hypothesis of what could have happened if the terrestrial Eve had resisted the serpent's temptation and avoided the Fall of Man. The last novel in the Trilogy, ''That Hideous Strength'', further develops the theme of nihilistic science threatening traditional human values embodied in Arthurian legend (and making reference to Tolkien's fictional universe of Middle-earth).

Many of the ideas in the Trilogy, particularly the opposition to de-humanization in the third volume, are presented more formally in Lewis’ ''The Abolition of Man'', based on his series of lectures at Durham University in 1943. Lewis stayed in Durham, where he was overwhelmed by the cathedral. ''That Hideous Strength'' is in fact set in the environs of 'Edgestow' university, a small English university like Durham, though Lewis disclaims any other resemblance between the two.

Walter Hooper, Lewis's literary executor, discovered a fragment of another science-fiction novel by Lewis, ''The Dark Tower'', but it is unfinished; it is not clear whether the book was intended as part of the same series of novels. The manuscript was eventually published in 1977, though Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog doubts its authenticity.

''The Chronicles of Narnia''

''The Chronicles of Narnia'' is a series of seven fantasy novels for children and is considered a classic of children's literature. Written between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, the series is Lewis's most popular work, having sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages . It has been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage and cinema.

The books contain Christian ideas intended to be easily accessible to young readers. In addition to Christian themes, Lewis also borrows characters from Greek and Roman mythology as well as traditional British and Irish fairy tales.

Other works

Lewis wrote a number of works on Heaven and Hell. One of these, ''The Great Divorce'', is a short novella in which a few residents of Hell take a bus ride to Heaven, where they are met by people who dwell there. The proposition is that they can stay (in which case they can call the place where they had come from "Purgatory", instead of "Hell"); but many find it not to their taste. The title is a reference to William Blake's ''The Marriage of Heaven and Hell'', a concept that Lewis found a "disastrous error" . This work deliberately echoes two other more famous works with a similar theme: the ''Divine Comedy'' of Dante Alighieri, and Bunyan's ''The Pilgrim's Progress''. Another short work, ''The Screwtape Letters'', consists of suave letters of advice from a senior demon, Screwtape, to his nephew Wormwood, on the best ways to tempt a particular human and secure his damnation. Lewis's last novel was ''Till We Have Faces'', which he thought of as his most mature and masterly work of fiction but which was never a popular success. It is a retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche from the unusual perspective of Psyche's sister. It is deeply concerned with religious ideas, but the setting is entirely pagan, and the connections with specific Christian beliefs are left implicit.

Before Lewis's conversion to Christianity, he published two books: ''Spirits in Bondage'', a collection of poems, and ''Dymer'', a single narrative poem. Both were published under the pen name Clive Hamilton. Other narrative poems have since been published posthumously, including: ''Launcelot'', ''The Nameless Isle'', and ''The Queen of Drum''.

He also wrote The Four Loves, which rhetorically explains four loves including friendship, eros, affection, and charity or caritas.

In 2009, a partial draft of Language and Human Nature, which Lewis had begun co-writing with J.R.R. Tolkien, but which was never completed, was discovered.

Christian apologist

In addition to his career as an English professor and an author of fiction, Lewis is regarded by many as one of the most influential Christian apologists of his time; ''Mere Christianity'' was voted best book of the twentieth century by ''Christianity Today'' in 2000. Due to Lewis's approach to religious belief as a sceptic, and his following conversion, he has been called "The Apostle to the Skeptics."

Lewis was very interested in presenting a reasonable case for Christianity. ''Mere Christianity'', ''The Problem of Pain'', and ''Miracles'' were all concerned, to one degree or another, with refuting popular objections to Christianity, such as "How could a good God allow pain to exist in the world?". He also became known as a popular lecturer and broadcaster, and some of his writing (including much of ''Mere Christianity'') originated as scripts for radio talks or lectures.

According to George Sayer, a loss in a 1948 debate with Elizabeth Anscombe, also a Christian, led Lewis to reevaluate his role as an apologist, and his future works concentrated on devotional literature and children's books. Anscombe, however, had a completely different recollection of the debate's outcome and its emotional effect on Lewis. Victor Reppert also disputes Sayer, listing some of Lewis's post-1948 apologetic publications, including the second and revised edition of his ''Miracles'' in 1960, in which Lewis addressed Anscombe's criticism. Noteworthy too is Roger Teichman's suggestion in ''The Philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe'' that the intellectual impact of Anscombe's paper on Lewis's philosophical self-confidence should not be overrated: "... it seems unlikely that he felt as irretrievably crushed as some of his acquaintances have made out; the episode is probably an inflated legend, in the same category as the affair of Wittgenstein's poker. Certainly Anscombe herself believed that Lewis' argument, though flawed, was getting at something very important; she thought that this came out more in the improved version of it that Lewis presented in a subsequent edition of ''Miracles'' – though that version also had 'much to criticise in it'."

Lewis also wrote an autobiography titled ''Surprised by Joy'', which places special emphasis on his own conversion. (It was written before he met his wife, Joy Gresham; the title of the book came from the first line of a poem by William Wordsworth.) His essays and public speeches on Christian belief, many of which were collected in ''God in the Dock'' and ''The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses'', remain popular today.

His most famous works, the ''Chronicles of Narnia'', contain many strong Christian messages and are often considered allegory. Lewis, an expert on the subject of allegory, maintained that the books were not allegory, and preferred to call the Christian aspects of them "suppositional". As Lewis wrote in a letter to a Mrs. Hook in December 1958:

If Aslan represented the immaterial Deity in the same way in which Giant Despair [a character in ''The Pilgrim's Progress''] represents despair, he would be an allegorical figure. In reality however he is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He actually has done in ours?' This is not allegory at all.

"Trilemma"

In a much-cited passage from ''Mere Christianity'', Lewis challenged the view that Jesus, although a great moral teacher, was not God. He argued that Jesus made several implicit claims to divinity, which would logically exclude this:

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic – on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

This argument, which Lewis did not invent but developed and popularised, is sometimes referred to as "Lewis's trilemma". It has been used by the Christian apologist Josh McDowell in his book ''More Than a Carpenter'' . Although widely repeated in Christian apologetic literature, it has been largely ignored by professional theologians and biblical scholars and is regarded by some as logically unsound and an example of false dilemma.

Lewis's Christian apologetics, and this argument in particular, have been criticised. Philosopher John Beversluis described Lewis's arguments as "textually careless and theologically unreliable". Pluralist theologian, John Hick argues that New Testament scholarship today does not support the view that Jesus claimed to be God. The Anglican bishop, N. T. Wright, who, unlike Hicks, does believe in Jesus' divinity, comments that Lewis' approach to Jesus' identity, by ignoring his Jewish background, "doesn't work as history, and it backfires dangerously when historical critics question his reading of the gospels."

Lewis used a similar argument in ''The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe'', when Digory Kirke advises the young heroes that their sister's claims of a magical world must logically be taken as either lies, madness, or truth. and "On the Pains of Animals."

Legacy

Lewis continues to attract a wide readership. In 2008, ''The Times'' ranked him eleventh on their list of "the 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Readers of his fiction are often unaware of what Lewis considered the Christian themes of his works. His Christian apologetics are read and quoted by members of many Christian denominations .

Lewis has been the subject of several biographies, a few of which were written by some of his close friends, such as Roger Lancelyn Green and George Sayer. In 1985 the screenplay ''Shadowlands'' by William Nicholson, dramatising Lewis's life and relationship with Joy Davidman Gresham, was aired on British TV (starring Joss Ackland as Lewis and Claire Bloom as Joy). In 1989 this was staged as a theatre play (starring Nigel Hawthorne) and in 1993 ''Shadowlands'' became a feature film, starring Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy. In 2005, a one hour made for TV movie entitled ''C. S. Lewis: Beyond Narnia'' (starring Anton Rodgers) provided a general synopsis of Lewis's life.

Many books have been inspired by Lewis, including ''A Severe Mercy'' by his correspondent and friend Sheldon Vanauken. ''The Chronicles of Narnia'' have been particularly influential. Modern children's literature such as Daniel Handler's ''A Series of Unfortunate Events'', Eoin Colfer's ''Artemis Fowl'', Philip Pullman's ''His Dark Materials'', and J. K. Rowling's ''Harry Potter'' have been more or less influenced by Lewis's series . Pullman, an atheist and so fierce a critic of Lewis's work as to be dubbed "the anti-Lewis", considers him a negative influence and has accused Lewis of featuring religious propaganda, misogyny, racism and emotional sadism in his books. Authors of adult fantasy literature such as Tim Powers have also testified to being influenced by Lewis's work.

Most of Lewis’ posthumous work has been edited by his literary executor, Walter Hooper. An independent Lewis scholar, the late Kathryn Lindskoog, argued that Hooper's scholarship is not reliable and that he has made false statements and attributed forged works to Lewis . C. S. Lewis's stepson, Douglas Gresham, denies the forgery claims, saying that "The whole controversy thing was engineered for very personal reasons... Her fanciful theories have been pretty thoroughly discredited." .

A bronze statue of Lewis's character Digory, from ''The Magician's Nephew'', stands in Belfast's Holywood Arches in front of the Holywood Road Library .

Lewis was strongly opposed to the creation of live-action versions of his works. His major concern was that the anthropomorphic animal characters "when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare".

Several C. S. Lewis Societies exist around the world, including one which was founded in Oxford in 1982 to discuss papers on the life and works of Lewis and the other Inklings, and generally appreciate all things Lewisian. His name is also used by a variety of Christian organisations, often with a concern for maintaining conservative Christian values in education or literary studies.

The 2005 film adaptation of ''The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe'' was based on the first instalment of the Narnia series. Film adaptations have been made of two other books he wrote: ''Prince Caspian'' (released on 16 May 2008) and ''The Voyage of the Dawn Treader'' (released on 2 December 2010). A film adaptation of ''The Great Divorce'' is slated for release in 2011.

Lewis is featured as a main character in the Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica series by James A. Owen.

See also

Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College (Illinois) – has the world's largest collection of Lewis's works and works about him.

Bibliography

Secondary works

John Beversluis, ''C. S. Lewis and the Search for Rational Religion''. Eerdmans, 1985. ISBN 0-8028-0046-7

Ronald W. Bresland, ''The Backward Glance: C.S. Lewis and Ireland''. Institute of Irish Studies at Queen's University of Belfast, 1999.

Humphrey Carpenter, ''The Inklings: C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and their friends''. George Allen & Unwin, 1978. ISBN 0-04-809011-5

Joe R. Christopher & Joan K. Ostling, ''C. S. Lewis: An Annotated Checklist of Writings about him and his Works''. Kent State University Press, n.d. (1972). ISBN 0-87338-138-6

David Clare, "C.S. Lewis: An Irish Writer". ''Irish Studies Review'', Volume 18, Issue 1, February 2010, pages 17 – 38.

James Como, ''Branches to Heaven: The Geniuses of C. S. Lewis''. Spence, 1998.

James Como, ''Remembering C. S. Lewis'' (3rd ed. of ''C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table''). Ignatius, 2006

Sean Connolly, ''Inklings of Heaven: C. S. Lewis and Eschatology''. Gracewing, 2007. ISBN 978-0-85244-659-1

Michael Coren, ''The Man Who Created Narnia: The Story of C. S. Lewis''. Eerdmans, reprint edition 1996. ISBN 0-8028-3822-7

Christopher Derrick, ''C. S. Lewis and the Church of Rome: A Study in Proto-Ecumenism''. Ignatius Press, 1981. ISBN 978-9991718507

David C. Downing, ''Into the Region of Awe: Mysticism in C. S. Lewis''. InterVarsity, 2005. ISBN 0-8308-3284-X

David C. Downing, ''Into the Wardrobe: C. S. Lewis and the Narnia Chronicles''. Jossey-Bass, 2005. ISBN 0-7879-7890-6

David C. Downing, ''The Most Reluctant Convert: C. S. Lewis's Journey to Faith''. InterVarsity, 2002. ISBN 0-8308-3271-8

David C. Downing, ''Planets in Peril: A Critical Study of C. S. Lewis's Ransom Trilogy''. University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. ISBN 0-87023-997-X

Colin Duriez and David Porter, ''The Inklings Handbook: The Lives, Thought and Writings of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Owen Barfield, and Their Friends''. 2001. ISBN 1-902694-13-9

Colin Duriez, ''Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship''. Paulist Press, 2003. ISBN 1-58768-026-2

Bruce L. Edwards, ''Not a Tame Lion: The Spiritual World of Narnia''. Tyndale, 2005. ISBN 1414303815

Bruce L. Edwards, ''Further Up and Further In: Understanding C. S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe''. Broadman and Holman, 2005. ISBN 0805440704

Bruce L. Edwards (ed.), ''C. S. Lewis: Life, Works, and Legacy''. 4 Vol. Praeger Perspectives, 2007. ISBN 0275991164

Bruce L. Edwards (ed.), ''The Taste of the Pineapple: Essays on C. S. Lewis as Reader, Critic, and Imaginative Writer''. The Popular Press, 1988. ISBN 0879724072

Bruce L. Edwards, ''A Rhetoric of Reading: C. S. Lewis's Defense of Western Literacy''. Center for the Study of Christian Values in Literature, 1986. ISBN 0939555018

Alastair Fowler, "C. S. Lewis: Supervisor", ''Yale Review'', Vol. 91, No. 4 (October 2003).

Helen Gardner, "† Clive Staples Lewis, 1898–1963". Biographical memoir, in ''Proceedings of the British Academy'' 51 (1966), 417-428.

Jocelyn Gibb (ed.), ''Light on C. S. Lewis''. Geoffrey Bles, 1965 & Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. ISBN 0-15-652000-1

Douglas Gilbert & Clyde Kilby, ''C. S. Lewis: Images of His World''. Eerdmans, 1973 & 2005. ISBN 0-8028-2800-0

Diana Glyer ''The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community''. Kent State University Press. Kent Ohio. 2007. ISBN 9780873388900

David Graham (ed.), ''We Remember C. S. Lewis''. Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2001. ISBN 0805422994

Roger Lancelyn Green & Walter Hooper, ''C. S. Lewis: A Biography''. Fully revised & expanded edition. HarperCollins, 2002. ISBN 0-00-628164-8

Douglas Gresham, ''Jack's Life: A Memory of C. S. Lewis''. Broadman & Holman Publishers, 2005. ISBN 0-8054-3246-9

Douglas Gresham, ''Lenten Lands: My Childhood with Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis''. HarperSanFrancisco, 1994. ISBN 0-06-063447-2

William Griffin, ''C. S. Lewis: The Authentic Voice'' (formerly ''C. S. Lewis: A Dramatic Life''). Lion, 2005. ISBN 0-7459-5208-9

Dabney Adams Hart, ''Through the Open Door: A New Look at C. S. Lewis''. University of Alabama Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8173-0187-9

Joel D. Heck, ''Irrigating Deserts: C. S. Lewis on Education''. Concordia Publishing House, 2006. ISBN 0-7586-0044-5

David Hein, "A Note on C. S. Lewis's ''The Screwtape Letters''", ''The Anglican Digest'' 49.2 (Easter 2007), 55–58. Argues that Lewis's portrayal of the activity of the Devil was influenced by contemporary events — in particular, by the threat of a Nazi invasion of Britain in 1940.

David Hein and Edward Henderson (ed.), ''C. S. Lewis and Friends: Faith and the Power of Imagination''. London: SPCK, 2011. Discusses Lewis, Austin Farrer, Rose Macaulay, Charles Williams, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Contributors include Peter Schakel, Ann Loades, Ralph Wood, Charles Hefling, and the editors. Foreword by David Brown.

David Hein and Edward Hugh Henderson (ed.), ''Captured by the Crucified: The Practical Theology of Austin Farrer''. New York and London: T&T; Clark / Continuum, 2004. A study of Lewis's close friend the theologian Austin Farrer, this book also contains material on Farrer's circle, "the Oxford Christians", including C. S. Lewis.

Walter Hooper, ''C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide''. HarperCollins, 1996. ISBN 0006278000

Walter Hooper, ''Through Joy and Beyond: A Pictorial Biography of C. S. Lewis''. Macmillan, 1982. ISBN 0025536702

Alan Jacobs, ''The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C. S. Lewis''. HarperSanFrancisco, 2005. ISBN 0060766905

Carolyn Keefe, ''C. S. Lewis: Speaker & Teacher''. Zondervan, 1979. ISBN 0-310-26781-1

Jon Kennedy, ''The Everything Guide to C.S. Lewis and Narnia''. Adams Media, 2008. ISBN 0-1-59869-427-8

Clyde S. Kilby, ''The Christian World of C. S. Lewis''. Eerdmans, 1964, 1995. ISBN 0-8028-0871-9

Don W. King, ''C. S. Lewis, Poet: The Legacy of His Poetic Impulse''. Kent State University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-87338-681-7

W.H. Lewis (ed.), ''Letters of C. S. Lewis''. Geoffrey Bles, 1966. ISBN 0-00-242457-6. (Followed in 1988 by an expanded version edited by Walter Hooper, Fount Paperbacks, ISBN 0006273297.)

Kathryn Lindskoog, ''Light in the Shadowlands: Protecting the Real C. S. Lewis''. Multnomah Pub., 1994. ISBN 0-88070-695-3

Susan Lowenberg, ''C. S. Lewis: A Reference Guide 1972–1988''. Hall & Co., 1993. ISBN 0-8161-1846-9

Wayne Mardindale & Jerry Root, ''The Quotable Lewis''. Tyndale House Publishers, 1990. ISBN 0-8423-5115-9

David Mills (editor) (ed), ''The Pilgrim's Guide: C. S. Lewis and the Art of Witness''. Eerdmans, 1998 ISBN 0-8208-3777-8

Thomas L. Martin (ed.), ''Reading the Classics with C. S. Lewis''. Baker Academic, 2000. ISBN 1-84227-0737

Markus Mühling, ''A Theological Journey into Narnia: An Analysis of the Message beneath the Text'', Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2005, ISBN 3525604238

Joseph Pearce, ''C. S. Lewis and the Catholic Church''. HarperCollins, 1999; then Ignatius Press, 2003. ISBN 0-89870-979-2

Thomas C. Peters, ''Simply C. S. Lewis. A Beginner's Guide to His Life and Works''. Kingsway Publications, 1998. ISBN 0-85476-762-2

Justin Phillips, ''C. S. Lewis at the BBC: Messages of Hope in the Darkness of War''. Marshall Pickering, 2003. ISBN 0-00-710437-5

Harry Lee Poe & Rebecca Whitten Poe (ed.), ''C. S. Lewis Remembered: Collected Reflections of Students, Friends & Colleagues''. Zondervan, 2006. ISBN 978-0-310-26509-2

Victor Reppert, ''C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea: In Defense of the Argument from Reason''. InterVarsity Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8308-2732-3

George Sayer, ''Jack: C. S. Lewis and His Times''. Macmillan, 1988. ISBN 0-333-43362-9

Peter J. Schakel, ''Imagination and the Arts in C. S. Lewis: Journeying to Narnia and Other Worlds.'' University of Missouri Press, 2002. ISBN 082621407X

Peter J. Schakel. ''Reason and Imagination in C. S. Lewis: A Study of "Till We Have Faces."'' Available online. Eerdmans, 1984. ISBN 0802819982

Peter J. Schakel (ed.), ''The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C. S. Lewis''. Kent State University Press, 1977. ISBN 0873382048

Peter J. Schakel and Charles A. Huttar (ed.), ''Word and Story in C. S. Lewis'.' University of Missouri Press, 1991. ISBN 082620760X

Stephen Schofield. ''In Search of C. S. Lewis''. Bridge Logos Pub. 1983. ISBN 0-88270-544-X

Jeffrey D. Schultz and John G. West, Jr. (eds.), ''The C. S. Lewis Readers' Encyclopedia''. Zondervan Publishing House, 1998. ISBN 0310215382

Sanford Schwartz, ''C. S. Lewis on the Final Frontier: Science and the Supernatural in the Space Trilogy''. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 9780195374728.

G. B. Tennyson (ed.), ''Owen Barfield on C. S. Lewis''. Wesleyan University Press, 1989. ISBN 0-8195-5233-X.

Richard J. Wagner. ''C. S. Lewis and Narnia for Dummies''. For Dummies, 2005. ISBN 0-7645-8381-6

Andrew Walker, Patrick James (ed.), ''Rumours of Heaven: Essays in Celebration of C. S. Lewis'', Guildford: Eagle, 1998, ISBN 0863472508

Chad Walsh, ''C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics''. Macmillan, 1949.

Chad Walsh, ''The Literary Legacy of C. S. Lewis''. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979. ISBN 0-15-652785-5.

Michael Ward, ''Planet Narnia''. Oxford University Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-19-531387-1.

George Watson (ed.), ''Critical Essays on C. S. Lewis''. Scolar Press, 1992. ISBN 0-85967-853-9

Michael White, ''C. S. Lewis: The Boy Who Chronicled Narnia''. Abacus, 2005. ISBN 0-349-11625-3

Erik J. Wielenberg, ''God and the Reach of Reason''. Cambridge University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-521-70710-7

A. N. Wilson, ''C. S. Lewis: A Biography''. W. W. Norton, 1990. ISBN 0-393-32340-4

Notes

References

Fiddes, Paul (1990), 'C.S. Lewis the myth-maker', in Andrew Walker and James Patrick, ''A Christian for all Christians: essays in honour of C.S. Lewis'' (London: Hodder & Stoughton), pp. 132–55 [reprinted as ''Rumours of Heaven: essays in celebration of C.S. Lewis'' (Guildford: Eagle, 1998)]

External links

Journal of Inklings Studies – British academic journal on C. S. Lewis and his circle

C. S. Lewis Society of California

C. S. Lewis Review

Rare photos of the youthful C.S. Lewis, with his family

Works and archive

The Center for the Study of C.S. Lewis & Friends at Taylor University, Upland, Indiana, Lewis archive.

C.S. Lewis Reading Room, with extensive links to online primary and secondary literature (Tyndale Seminary)

De Descriptione Temporum – Lewis' inaugural Lecture as Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University

Open Directory entry for C. S. Lewis

Audio

Lewis on The George MacDonald Informational Web Has an excerpt of Lewis talking about friend and fellow author: Charles Williams, bottom of page

Lewis's Surviving Broadcast Talks on the BBC BBC page on Lewis with original audio recordings.

Complete text and audio of C. S. Lewis's BBC Radio Broadcast 'Beyond Personality – Mere Men'

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name	Sigmund Freud
birth date	May 06, 1856
birth place	Freiberg in Mähren, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic), Austrian Empire
death date	September 23, 1939
death place	London, England, UK
residence	Austria
nationality	Austrian
fields	NeurologyPsychotherapyPsychoanalysis
workplaces	University of Vienna
alma mater	University of Vienna
known for	Psychoanalysis
influences	Breuer, Charcot, Darwin, Dostoyevsky, Goethe, Haeckel, Hartmann, Jackson, Aristotle , Plato , Jacobsen, Kant, Mayer, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Sophocles
influenced	Eugen Bleuler, John Bowlby, Viktor Frankl, Anna Freud, Otto Gross, Arthur Janov, Ernest Jones, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Jacques Lacan, Fritz Perls, Otto Rank, Wilhelm Reich
awards	Goethe PrizeForeign Member of the Royal Society (London)
signature	FreudSignature.svg
spouse	}}

Sigmund Freud (), born Sigismund Schlomo Freud (6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939), was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis. An early neurological researcher into cerebral palsy, aphasia and microscopic neuroanatomy, Freud later developed theories about the unconscious and the mechanism of repression, and created psychoanalysis as a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient (or "analysand") and a psychoanalyst.

Freud postulated that sexual drives were the primary motivational forces of human life, developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association, discovered the phenomenon of transference in the therapeutic relationship and established its central role in the analytic process, and interpreted dreams as sources of insight into unconscious desires. He was also a prolific essayist, drawing on psychoanalysis to contribute to the history, interpretation and critique of culture.

Early life

Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on 6 May 1856, to Jewish Galician parents in the Moravian town of Příbor (), then part of the Austrian Empire (1804–1867), now the Czech Republic. His father, Jacob Freud (1815–1896), was 41, a wool merchant, and had two children by a previous marriage. His mother, Amalié (née Nathansohn), the third wife of Jacob, was 21.. He was the first of their eight children and, in accordance with tradition, his parents favored him over his siblings from the early stages of his childhood. Freud was born with a caul, which the family accepted as a positive omen.

Despite their poverty, the Freuds ensured Sigmund’s schooling and education. Due to the Panic of 1857, Freud's father lost his business, and the Freud family moved to Leipzig before settling in Vienna. In 1865, the nine-year-old student Freud entered the ''Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium'', a prominent high school. He proved an outstanding pupil and graduated from the Matura in 1873 with honors. He went to the University of Vienna at 17. Freud had planned to study law, but instead joined the medical faculty at the University of Vienna to study under Darwinist Professor Karl Claus. At that time, the eel life cycle was unknown and Freud spent four weeks at the Austrian zoological research station in Trieste, dissecting hundreds of eels in an unsuccessful search for their male reproductive organs.

Freud greatly admired the philosopher Franz Brentano, known for his theory of perception, as well as Theodor Lipps, who was one of the main supporters of the ideas of the unconscious and empathy. Brentano discussed the possible existence of the unconscious mind in his 1874 book ''Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint''. Although Brentano himself rejected the unconscious, his discussion of it probably helped introduce Freud to the concept. Brentano identified Thomas Aquinas as one of the earliest people to suggest the existence of the unconscious; Freud may therefore have been unknowingly siding with Aquinas on this issue.

Freud read Friedrich Nietzsche as a student, and bought his collected works in 1900, the year of Nietzsche's death; Freud told Wilhelm Fliess that he hoped to find in Nietzsche "the words for much that remains mute in me." According to Peter Gay, however, Freud treated Nietzsche's writings "as texts to be resisted far more than to be studied"; immediately after reporting to Fliess that he had bought Nietzsche's works, Freud added that he had not yet opened them. Students of Freud began to point out analogies between his work and that of Nietzsche almost as soon as he developed a following.

Freud began smoking tobacco at age 24; initially a cigarette smoker, he became a cigar smoker. Freud believed that smoking enhanced his capacity to work, and believed he could exercise self-discipline in moderating his tobacco-smoking; yet, despite health warnings from Fliess, and to the detriment of his health, Freud remained a smoker, eventually suffering a buccal cancer.

Carl Jung initiated the rumor that a romantic relationship may have developed between Freud and his sister-in-law, Minna Bernays, who had moved into Freud's apartment at 19 Berggasse in 1896. Hans Eysenck suggests that the affair occurred, resulting in an aborted pregnancy for Miss Bernays. The publication in 2006 of a Swiss hotel log, dated 13 August 1898, has been regarded by some Freudian scholars (including Peter Gay) as showing that there was a factual basis to these rumors.

Freud was a "partially assimilated, mostly secular Jew." According to biographer Ernest Jones (1945) "Freud's Jewishness contributed greatly to his work and his firm convictions about his findings. Freud often referred to his ability to stand alone, if need be, without wavering or surrendering his intellectual and scientific discoveries, and he attributed this ability to his irreligious but strong Jewish identity in an antisemitic society, whereby he was accustomed to a marginal status and being set aside as different." Freud once described himself as "an author who is ignorant of the language of holy writ, who is completely estranged from the religion of his fathers—as well as from every other religion", but who remains "in his essential nature a Jew, and who has no desire to alter that nature".

Development of psychoanalysis

In October 1885, Freud went to Paris on a fellowship to study with Jean-Martin Charcot, a renowned neurologist and researcher of hypnosis. He was later to remember the experience of this stay as catalytic in turning him toward the practice of medical psychopathology and away from a less financially promising career in neurology research. Charcot specialized in the study of hysteria and susceptibility to hypnosis, which he frequently demonstrated with patients on stage in front of an audience. Freud later turned away from hypnosis as a potential cure for mental illness, instead favouring free association and dream analysis.

After opening his own medical practice, specializing in neurology, Freud married Martha Bernays in 1886. Her father Berman was the son of Isaac Bernays, chief rabbi in Hamburg. The couple had six children (Mathilde, 1887; Jean-Martin, 1889; Olivier, 1891; Ernst, 1892; Sophie, 1893; Anna, 1895).

After experimenting with hypnosis on his neurotic patients, Freud abandoned it as ineffective. He instead adopted a form of treatment where the patient talked through his or her problems. This came to be known as the "talking cure" and its goal was to locate and release powerful emotional energy that had initially been rejected or imprisoned in the unconscious mind. Freud called this psychic action “repression”, and he believed that it was an impediment to the normal functioning of the psyche, even capable of causing physical retardation which he described as "psychosomatic". The term "talking cure" was initially coined by a patient, Anna O., who was treated by Freud's colleague Josef Breuer. The "talking cure" is widely seen as the basis of psychoanalysis. In late 1895 Freud arrived at the view that unconscious memories of sexual molestation in early childhood were a necessary precondition for the ''psychoneuroses'' (hysteria and obsessional neurosis), now known as the seduction theory. However he later lost faith in the theory and that led in 1897 to the emergence of Freud's new theory of infantile sexuality, and eventually to the Oedipus complex.

After the publication of ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' in November 1899, interest in his theories began to grow, and a circle of supporters developed. However, Freud often clashed with those supporters who criticized his theories, the most famous of whom was Carl Jung. Part of the disagreement between them was due to Jung's interest in and commitment to spirituality and occultism, which Freud saw as unscientific.

Karen Horney, a pupil of Karl Abraham, criticized Freud's theory of femininity, leading him to defend it against her. Horney's challenge to Freud's theories, along with that of Melanie Klein, produced the first psychoanalytic debate on femininity. Ernest Jones, although usually an "ultra-orthodox" Freudian, sided with Horney and Klein. Horney was Freud's most outspoken critic, although her and Jones's disagreement with Freud was over how to interpret penis envy rather than whether it existed. Horney understood Freud's conception of the castration complex as a theory about the biological nature of women, one in which women were biologically castrated men, and rejected it as scientifically unsatisfying.

In his forties, Freud experienced several, probably psychosomatic, medical problems, including depression and heart irregularities that fuelled a superstitious belief that he would die at the age of 51. Around this time Freud began exploring his own dreams, memories, and the dynamics of his personality development. During this self-analysis, he came to realize a hostility he felt towards his father, Jacob Freud, who had died in 1896. He also became convinced that he had developed sexual feelings towards his mother in infancy ("between two and two and a half years"). Richard Webster argues that Freud’s account of his self-analysis shows that he “had remembered only a long train journey, from whose duration he ''deduced'' that he might have seen his mother undressing”, and that Freud’s memory was an artificial reconstruction.

Patients

Freud used pseudonyms in his case histories. Some patients known by pseudonyms were Cäcilie M. (Anna von Lieben); Dora (Ida Bauer, 1882–1945); Frau Emmy von N. (Fanny Moser); Fräulein Elisabeth von R. (Ilona Weiss); Fräulein Katharina (Aurelia Kronich); Fräulein Lucy R.; Little Hans (Herbert Graf, 1903–1973); Rat Man (Ernst Lanzer, 1878–1914); Enos Fingy (Joshua Wild, 1878–1920); and Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff, 1887–1979). Other famous patients included H.D. (1886–1961); Emma Eckstein (1865–1924); Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), with whom Freud had only a single, extended consultation; and Princess Marie Bonaparte.

Several writers have criticized both Freud's clinical efforts and his accounts of them. Eysenck writes that Freud consistently mis-diagnosed his patients and fraudulently misrepresented case histories. Frederick Crews writes that "...even applying his own indulgent criteria, with no allowance for placebo factors and no systematic followup to check for relapses, Freud was unable to document a single unambiguously efficacious treatment". Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen writes that historians of psychoanalysis have shown "that things did not happen in the way Freud and his authorised biographers told us"; he cites Han Israëls's view that "Freud...was so confident in his first theories that he publicly boasted of therapeutic successes that he had not yet obtained." Freud, in that interpretation, was forced to provide explanations for his abandonment of those theories that concealed his real reason, which was that the therapeutic benefits he expected did not materialise; he knew that his patients were not cured, but "did not hesitate to build grand theories on these non-existent foundations."

Followers

Freud spent most of his life in Vienna. From 1891 until 1938 he and his family lived in an apartment at Berggasse 19 near the ''Innere Stadt'' or historical quarter of Vienna. As a docent of the University of Vienna, Freud, since the mid-1880s, had been delivering lectures on his theories to small audiences every Saturday evening at the lecture hall of the university's psychiatric clinic. His work generated a considerable degree of interest from a small group of Viennese physicians. From the autumn of 1902 and shortly after his promotion to the honourific title of ''außerordentlicher Professor'', a small group of followers formed around him, meeting at his apartment every Wednesday afternoon, to discuss issues relating to psychology and neuropathology. This group was called the Wednesday Psychological Society (''Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft'') and it marked the beginnings of the worldwide psychoanalytic movement.

This discussion group was founded around Freud at the suggestion of the physician Wilhelm Stekel. Stekel had studied medicine at the University of Vienna under Richard von Krafft-Ebing. His conversion to psychoanalysis is variously attributed to his successful treatment by Freud for a sexual problem or as a result of his reading ''The Interpretation of Dreams'', to which he subsequently gave a positive review in the Viennese daily newspaper ''Neues Wiener Tagblatt''. The other three original members whom Freud invited to attend, Alfred Adler, Max Kahane, and Rudolf Reitler, were also physicians and all five were Jewish by birth. Both Kahane and Reitler were childhood friends of Freud. Kahane had attended the same secondary school and both he and Reitler went to university with Freud. They had kept abreast of Freud's developing ideas through their attendance at his Saturday evening lectures. In 1901, Kahane, who first introduced Stekel to Freud's work, had opened an out-patient psychotherapy institute of which he was the director in Bauernmarkt, in Vienna. In the same year his medical textbook, ''Outline of Internal Medicine for Students and Practicing Physicians'' was published. In it he provided an outline of Freud's psychoanalytic method. Kahane broke with Freud and left the Wednesday Psychological Society in 1907 for unknown reasons and in 1923 he committed suicide. Reitler was the director of an establishment providing thermal cures in Dorotheergasse which had been founded in 1901. He died prematurely in 1917. Adler, regarded as the most formidable intellect among the early Freud circle, was a socialist who in 1898 had written a health manual for the tailoring trade. He was particularly interested in the potential social impact of psychiatry.

Max Graf, a Viennese musicologist and father of "Little Hans", who had first encountered Freud in 1900 and joined the Wednesday group soon after its initial inception, described the ritual and atmosphere of the early meetings of the society:

''The gatherings followed a definite ritual. First one of the members would present a paper. Then, black coffee and cakes were served; cigar and cigarettes were on the table and were consumed in great quantities. After a social quarter of an hour, the discussion would begin. The last and decisive word was always spoken by Freud himself. There was the atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet who made the heretofore prevailing methods of psychological investigation appear superficial.''

By 1906 the group had grown to sixteen members, including Otto Rank, who was employed as the group's paid secretary. Also in that year Freud began correspondence with Carl Gustav Jung who was then an assistant to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli Mental Hospital in Zurich. In March 1907 Jung and Ludwig Binswanger, also a Swiss psychaitrist, travelled to Vienna to visit Freud and attend the discussion group. Thereafter they established a small psychoanalytic group in Zurich. In 1908, reflecting its growing institutional status, the Wednesday group was renamed the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society.

Some of Freud's followers subsequently withdrew from the original psychoanalytic society and founded their own schools. The most famous of these are Alfred Adler, Carl Jung and Otto Rank.

From 1909, Adler's views on topics such as neurosis began to differ markedly from those held by Freud. As Adler's position appeared increasingly incompatible with Freudianism a series of confrontations between their respective viewpoints took place at the meetings of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Society in January and February 1911. In February 1911 Adler, then the President of the society, resigned his position. At this time Stekel also resigned his position as vice-president of the society. Adler finally left the Freudian group altogether in June 1911 to found his own heretical organisation with nine other members who had also resigned from the group. This new formation was initially called ''Society for Free Psychoanalysis'' but it was soon renamed the ''Society for Individual Psychology''. In the period after World War I, Adler became increasingly associated with the psychological position which he devised and that is termed individual psychology.

In 1912 Jung published ''Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido'' (published in English in 1916 as ''Psychology of the Unconscious'') and it became clear that his views were taking a direction quite different from those of Freud. To distinguish his system from psychoanalysis, Jung called it analytical psychology. In the autumn of 1913 the relationship between Freud and Jung broke down irretrievably and the Swiss psychoanalytic organisation fell into disrepair.

Freud published a paper entitled The History of the Psychoanalytic Movement in 1914, German original being first published in the ''Jahrbuch der Psychoanalyse'', where he gave his view on the birth and evolution of the psychoanalytic movement and the withdrawal of Adler and Jung from it.

In 1924, Otto Rank published ''Das Trauma der Geburt'' (translated into English as ''The Trauma of Birth'' in 1929), exploring how art, myth, religion, philosophy and therapy were illuminated by separation anxiety in the “phase before the development of the Oedipus complex.” But there was no such phase in Freud’s theories. The Oedipus complex, Freud explained tirelessly, was the nucleus of the neurosis and the foundational source of all art, myth, religion, philosophy, therapy – indeed of all human culture and civilization. It was the first time that anyone in the inner circle had dared to suggest that the Oedipus complex might not be the supreme causal factor in psychoanalysis. Rank coined the term “pre-Oedipal” in 1925, and is now considered the first object-relations theorist and therapist. As an outcome of their dispute over ''Das Trauma der Geburt'', Rank broke with Freud in 1926.

Struggle with cancer

In February 1923, Freud detected a leukoplakia, a benign growth associated with heavy smoking, on his mouth. Freud initially kept this secret, but in April 1923 he informed Ernest Jones, telling him that the growth had been removed. Freud consulted the dermatologist Maximilian Steiner, who advised him to quit smoking but lied about the growth's seriousness, minimizing its importance. Freud later saw Felix Deutsch, who saw that the growth was cancerous; he identified it to Freud using the euphemism "a bad leukoplakia" instead of the technical diagnosis epithelioma. Deutsch advised Freud to stop smoking and have the growth excised. Freud was treated by Marcus Hajek, a rhinologist whose competence he had previously questioned. Hajek performed an unnecessary cosmetic surgery in his clinic's outpatient department. Freud bled during and after the operation, and may narrowly have escaped death. Freud subsequently saw Deutsch again. Deutsch saw that further surgery would be required, but refrained from telling Freud that he had cancer because he was worried that Freud might wish to commit suicide.

Escape from Nazism

In 1930, Freud was awarded the Goethe Prize in recognition of his contributions to psychology and to German literary culture. In January 1933, the Nazis took control of Germany, and Freud's books were prominent among those they burned and destroyed. Freud quipped: “What progress we are making. In the Middle Ages they would have burned me. Now, they are content with burning my books.” On 12 March 1938, Nazi Germany annexed Austria in the Anschluss. This led to violent outbursts of anti-Semitism in Vienna, and Freud and his family received visits from the Gestapo. Freud decided to go into exile "to die in freedom". He was fortuitously assisted by Anton Sauerwald, a Nazi official given control over Freud's assets in Austria. Four of Freud's five sisters perished in Nazi concentration camps.

At the University of Vienna, Sauerwald had been a student of Professor Josef Herzig, who often played cards with Freud. Sauerwald did not inform his Nazi superiors that Freud had many secret bank accounts and disobeyed a Nazi directive to have Freud's books on psychoanalysis destroyed, instead smuggling them with an accomplice to the Austrian national library, where they were hidden. Finally, dismayed at being ordered to transform Freud's home into an institute for the study of Aryan superiority, Sauerwald signed Freud's exit visa. In June 1938, Freud and his family left Vienna aboard the Orient Express train. They settled in London, at 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead. In the United Kingdom, Freud told a newspaper that “all my money and property in Vienna is gone”; he did not mention his secret bank accounts. When Anton Sauerwald was tried for stealing Freud’s secret wealth after the war, Anna Freud intervened to protect Sauerwald. She disclosed to her cousin Harry Freud, a US army officer who had had Sauerwald arrested, that: "[The] truth is that we really owe our lives and our freedom to ,... [Sauerwald]. Without him we would never have got away." Sauerwald was then released from U.S. custody.

Death

In September 1939, Freud, who was suffering from cancer and in severe pain, persuaded his doctor and friend Max Schur to help him commit suicide. After reading Honoré de Balzac's ''La Peau de chagrin'' in a single sitting, Freud asked him, “Schur, you remember our ‘contract’ not to leave me in the lurch when the time had come. Now it is nothing but torture and makes no sense.” When Schur replied that he had not forgotten, Freud said, “I thank you.” and then “Talk it over with Anna, and if she thinks it’s right, then make an end of it.” Anna Freud wanted to postpone her father’s death, but Schur convinced her it was pointless to keep him alive, and on 21 and 22 September administered doses of morphine that resulted in Freud's death on 23 September 1939. Three days after his death, Freud's body was cremated at Golders Green Crematorium in England during a service attended by Austrian refugees, including the author Stefan Zweig. His ashes were later placed in the crematorium's columbarium. They rest in an ancient Greek urn that Freud received as a gift from Marie Bonaparte, and which he had kept in his study in Vienna for many years. After his wife Martha's death in 1951, her ashes were also placed in the urn.

Ideas

Freud simultaneously developed a theory of the human mind's organization and internal operations and a theory that human behavior both conditions and results from how the mind is organized. This led him to favor certain clinical techniques for trying to help cure mental illness. He theorized that personality is developed by a person's childhood experiences.

Early work

Freud began his study of medicine at the University of Vienna in 1873. He took almost nine years to complete his studies, due to his interest in neurophysiological research, specifically investigation of the sexual anatomy of eels and the physiology of the fish nervous system. He entered private practice in neurology for financial reasons, receiving his M.D. degree in 1881 at the age of 25. He was also an early researcher in the field of cerebral palsy, which was then known as "cerebral paralysis." He published several medical papers on the topic, and showed that the disease existed long before other researchers of the period began to notice and study it. He also suggested that William Little, the man who first identified cerebral palsy, was wrong about lack of oxygen during birth being a cause. Instead, he suggested that complications in birth were only a symptom. Freud hoped that his research would provide a solid scientific basis for his therapeutic technique. The goal of Freudian therapy, or psychoanalysis, was to bring repressed thoughts and feelings into consciousness in order to free the patient from suffering repetitive distorted emotions.

Classically, the bringing of unconscious thoughts and feelings to consciousness is brought about by encouraging a patient to talk in free association and to talk about dreams. Another important element of psychoanalysis is lesser direct involvement on the part of the analyst, which is meant to encourage the patient to project thoughts and feelings onto the analyst. Through this process, transference, the patient can discover and resolve repressed conflicts, especially childhood conflicts involving parents.

The origin of Freud's early work with psychoanalysis can be linked to Josef Breuer. Freud credited Breuer with opening the way to the discovery of the psychoanalytical method by his treatment of the case of Anna O. In November 1880 Breuer was called in to treat a highly intelligent 21-year-old woman (Bertha Pappenheim) for a persistent cough which he diagnosed as hysterical. He found that while nursing her dying father she had developed a number of transitory symptoms, including visual disorders and paralysis and contractures of limbs, which he also diagnosed as hysterical. Breuer began to see his patient almost every day as the symptoms increased and became more persistent, and observed that she entered states of ''absence''. He found that when, with his encouragement, she told fantasy stories in her evening states of ''absence'' her condition improved, and most of her symptoms had disappeared by April 1881. However, following the death of her father in that month her condition deteriorated again. Breuer recorded that some of the symptoms eventually remitted spontaneously, and that full recovery was achieved by inducing her to recall events that had precipitated the occurrence of a specific symptom. In the years immediately following Breuer's treatment, Anna O. spent three short periods in sanatoria with the diagnosis "hysteria" with "somatic symptoms," and some authors have challenged Breuer's published account of a cure. Richard Skues rejects this interpretation, which he sees as stemming from both Freudian and anti-psychoanalytical revisionism, that regards both Breuer's narrative of the case as unreliable and his treatment of Anna O. as a failure.

In the early 1890s Freud used a form of treatment based on the one that Breuer had described to him, modified by what he called his "pressure technique" and his newly developed analytic technique of interpretation and reconstruction. According to Freud's later accounts of this period, as a result of his use of this procedure most of his patients in the mid-1890s reported early childhood sexual abuse. He believed these stories, but then came to believe that they were fantasies. He explained these at first as having the function of "fending off" memories of infantile masturbation, but in later years he wrote that they represented Oedipal fantasies.

Another version of events focuses on Freud's proposing that unconscious memories of infantile sexual abuse were at the root of the psychoneuroses in letters to Fliess in October 1895, before he reported that he had actually discovered such abuse among his patients. In the first half of 1896 Freud published three papers stating that he had uncovered, in all of his current patients, deeply repressed memories of sexual abuse in early childhood. In these papers Freud recorded that his patients were not consciously aware of these memories, and must therefore be present as ''unconscious memories'' if they were to result in hysterical symptoms or obsessional neurosis. The patients were subjected to considerable pressure to "reproduce" infantile sexual abuse "scenes" that Freud was convinced had been repressed into the unconscious. Patients were generally unconvinced that their experiences of Freud's clinical procedure indicated actual sexual abuse. He reported that even after a supposed "reproduction" of sexual scenes the patients assured him emphatically of their disbelief.

As well as his pressure technique, Freud's clinical procedures involved analytic inference and the symbolic interpretation of symptoms to trace back to memories of infantile sexual abuse. His claim of one hundred percent confirmation of his theory only served to reinforce previously expressed reservations from his colleagues about the validity of findings obtained through his suggestive techniques.

Cocaine

As a medical researcher, Freud was an early user and proponent of cocaine as a stimulant as well as analgesic. He believed that cocaine was a cure for many mental and physical problems, and in his 1884 paper "On Coca" he extolled its virtues. Between 1883 and 1887 he wrote several articles recommending medical applications, including its use as an antidepressant. He narrowly missed out on obtaining scientific priority for discovering its anesthetic properties of which he was aware but had mentioned only in passing. (Karl Koller, a colleague of Freud's in Vienna, received that distinction in 1884 after reporting to a medical society the ways cocaine could be used in delicate eye surgery.) Freud also recommended cocaine as a cure for morphine addiction. He had introduced cocaine to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow who had become addicted to morphine taken to relieve years of excruciating nerve pain resulting from an infection acquired while performing an autopsy. However, his claim that Fleischl-Marxow was cured of his addiction was premature, though he never acknowledged he had been at fault. Fleischl-Marxow developed an acute case of "cocaine psychosis", and soon returned to using morphine, dying a few years later after more suffering from intolerable pain.

The application as an anesthetic turned out to be one of the few safe uses of cocaine, and as reports of addiction and overdose began to filter in from many places in the world, Freud's medical reputation became somewhat tarnished.

After the "Cocaine Episode" Freud ceased to publicly recommend use of the drug, but continued to take it himself occasionally for depression, migraine and nasal inflammation during the early 1890s, before giving it up in 1896. In this period he came under the influence of his friend and confidant Fliess, who recommended cocaine for the treatment of the so-called "nasal reflex neurosis". Fliess, who operated on the noses of several of his own patients, also performed operations on Freud and on one of Freud's patients whom he believed to be suffering from the disorder, Emma Eckstein. However, the surgery proved disastrous.

Some critics have suggested that much of Freud's early psychoanalytical theory was a by-product of his cocaine use.

The Unconscious

Freud argued for the importance of the unconscious mind in understanding conscious thought and behavior. However, as psychologist Jacques Van Rillaer pointed out, "the unconscious was not discovered by Freud. In 1890, when psychoanalysis was still unheard of, William James, in his monumental treatise on psychology, examined the way Schopenhauer, von Hartmann, Janet, Binet and others had used the term 'unconscious' and 'subconscious'". Moreover, as historian of psychology Mark Altschule observed, "It is difficult—or perhaps impossible—to find a nineteenth-century psychologist or psychiatrist who did not recognize unconscious cerebration as not only real but of the highest importance."

Freud's theory of dreams has been compared to Plato's. Ernest Gellner writes that, "Plato and Freud hold virtually the same theory of dreams", but Michel Foucault denies any such equivalence: "The sentence 'dreams fulfil desires' may have been repeated throughout the centuries; it is not the same statement in Plato and in Freud." Freud's dream theory was criticized during his life by Lydiard H. Horton, who in 1915 read a paper at a joint meeting of the American Psychological Association and the New York Academy of Sciences that called Freud's dream theory "dangerously inaccurate" and suggested that "rank confabulations...appear to hold water, psychoanalytically".

Freud developed his first topology of the psyche in ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (1899) in which he proposed that the unconscious exists and described a method for gaining access to it. The preconscious was described as a layer between conscious and unconscious thought; its contents could be accessed with a little effort. One key factor in the operation of the unconscious is "repression". Freud believed that many people "repress" painful memories deep into their unconscious mind. Although Freud later attempted to find patterns of repression among his patients in order to derive a general model of the mind, he also observed that repression varies among individual patients. Freud also argued that the act of repression did not take place within a person's consciousness. Thus, people are unaware of the fact that they have buried memories or traumatic experiences.

Later, Freud distinguished between three concepts of the unconscious: the descriptive unconscious, the dynamic unconscious, and the system unconscious. The descriptive unconscious referred to all those features of mental life of which people are not subjectively aware. The dynamic unconscious, a more specific construct, referred to mental processes and contents that are defensively removed from consciousness as a result of conflicting attitudes. The system unconscious denoted the idea that when mental processes are repressed, they become organized by principles different from those of the conscious mind, such as condensation and displacement.

Eventually, Freud abandoned the idea of the system unconscious, replacing it with the concept of the id, ego, and super-ego. Throughout his career, however, he retained the descriptive and dynamic conceptions of the unconscious.

Psychosexual development

Freud hoped to prove that his model was universally valid and thus turned to ancient mythology and contemporary ethnography for comparative material. Freud named his new theory the Oedipus complex after the famous Greek tragedy ''Oedipus Rex'' by Sophocles. "I found in myself a constant love for my mother, and jealousy of my father. I now consider this to be a universal event in childhood," Freud said. Freud sought to anchor this pattern of development in the dynamics of the mind. Each stage is a progression into adult sexual maturity, characterized by a strong ego and the ability to delay gratification (cf. ''Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality''). He used the Oedipus conflict to point out how much he believed that people desire incest and must repress that desire. The Oedipus conflict was described as a state of psychosexual development and awareness. He also turned to anthropological studies of totemism and argued that totemism reflected a ritualized enactment of a tribal Oedipal conflict. Freud also believed that the Oedipus complex was bisexual, involving an attraction to both parents

Traditional accounts have held that, as a result of frequent reports from his patients, in the mid-1890s Freud posited that psychoneuroses were a consequence of early childhood sexual abuse. More specifically, in three papers published in 1896 he contended that ''unconscious memories'' of sexual abuse in infancy are a necessary precondition for the development of adult psychoneuroses. However, examination of Freud's original papers has revealed that his clinical claims were not based on patients' reports but were findings deriving from his analytical clinical methodology, which at that time included coercive procedures. He privately expressed his loss of faith in the theory to his friend Fliess in September 1897, giving several reasons, including that he had not been able to bring a single case to a successful conclusion. In 1906, while still maintaining that his earlier claims to have uncovered early childhood sexual abuse events remained valid, he postulated a new theory of the occurrence of unconscious infantile fantasies. He had incorporated his notions of unconscious fantasies in ''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (1900), but did not explicitly relate his seduction theory claims to the Oedipus theory until 1925. Notwithstanding his abandonment of the seduction theory, Freud always recognized that some neurotics had experienced childhood sexual abuse.

Freud also believed that the libido developed in individuals by changing its object, a process codified by the concept of sublimation. He argued that humans are born "polymorphously perverse", meaning that any number of objects could be a source of pleasure. He further argued that, as humans develop, they become fixated on different and specific objects through their stages of development—first in the oral stage (exemplified by an infant's pleasure in nursing), then in the anal stage (exemplified by a toddler's pleasure in evacuating his or her bowels), then in the phallic stage. In the latter stage, Freud contended, male infants become fixated on the mother as a sexual object (known as the Oedipus Complex), a phase brought to an end by threats of castration, resulting in the ''castration complex'', the severest trauma in his young life. (In his later writings Freud postulated an equivalent Oedipus situation for infant girls, the sexual fixation being on the father. Though not advocated by Freud himself, the term 'Electra complex' is sometimes used in this context.) The repressive or dormant latency stage of psychosexual development preceded the sexually mature genital stage of psychosexual development.

Id, ego, and super-ego

In his later work, Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego, and super-ego. Freud discussed this model in the 1920 essay ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'', and fully elaborated upon it in ''The Ego and the Id'' (1923), in which he developed it as an alternative to his previous topographic schema (i.e., conscious, unconscious, and preconscious). The id is the impulsive, child-like portion of the psyche that operates on the "pleasure principle" and only takes into account what it wants and disregards all consequences.

Freud acknowledged that his use of the term ''Id'' (''das Es'', "the It") derives from the writings of Georg Groddeck.

The super-ego is the moral component of the psyche, which takes into account no special circumstances in which the morally right thing may not be right for a given situation. The rational ego attempts to exact a balance between the impractical hedonism of the id and the equally impractical moralism of the super-ego; it is the part of the psyche that is usually reflected most directly in a person's actions. When overburdened or threatened by its tasks, it may employ defense mechanisms including denial, repression, and displacement. This concept is usually represented by the "Iceberg Model". This model represents the roles the Id, Ego, and Super Ego play in relation to conscious and unconscious thought.

Life and death drives

Freud believed that people are driven by two conflicting central desires: the life drive (libido or Eros) (survival, propagation, hunger, thirst, and sex) and the death drive. The death drive was also termed "Thanatos", although Freud did not use that term; "Thanatos" was introduced in this context by Paul Federn.

In ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'', Freud inferred the existence of the death instinct. Its premise was a regulatory principle that has been described as "the principle of psychic inertia", "the Nirvana principle", and "the conservatism of instinct". Its background was Freud's earlier ''Project for a Scientific Psychology'', where he had defined the principle governing the mental apparatus as its tendency to divest itself of quantity or to reduce tension to zero. Freud had been obliged to abandon that definition, since it proved to be adequate only to the most rudimentary kinds of mental functioning, and replaced the idea that the apparatus tends toward a level of zero tension with the idea that it tends toward a minimum level of tension.

Freud in effect readopted the original definition in ''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'', this time applying it to a different principle. He asserted that on certain occasions the mind acts as though could eliminate tension entirely, or in effect to reduce itself to a state of extinction; his key evidence for this was the existence of the compulsion to repeat. Examples of such repetition included the dream life of traumatic neurotics and children's play. In the phenomenon of repetition, Freud saw a psychic trend to work over earlier impressions, to master them and derive pleasure from them, a trend was prior to the pleasure principle but not opposed to it. In addition to that trend, however, there was also a principle at work that was opposed to, and thus "beyond" the pleasure principle. If repetition is a necessary element in the binding of energy or adaptation, when carried to inordinate lengths it becomes a means of abandoning adaptations and reinstating earlier or less evolved psychic positions. By combining this idea with the hypothesis that all repetition is a form of discharge, Freud reached the conclusion that the compulsion to repeat is an effort to restore a state that is both historically primitive and marked by the total draining of energy: death.

Religion

Freud regarded the monotheistic god as an illusion based upon the infantile emotional need for a powerful, supernatural pater familias. He maintained that religion – once necessary to restrain man’s violent nature in the early stages of civilization – in modern times, can be set aside in favor of reason and science. “Obsessive Actions and Religious Practices” (1907) notes the likeness between faith (religious belief) and neurotic obsession. ''Totem and Taboo'' (1913) proposes that society and religion begin with the patricide and eating of the powerful paternal figure, who then becomes a revered collective memory. In ''Civilization and its Discontents'' (1930), he describes religion as an “oceanic sensation” he never experienced, (despite being a self-identified cultural Jew). ''Moses and Monotheism'' (1937) proposes that Moses was the tribal pater familias, killed by the Jews, who psychologically coped with the patricide with a reaction formation conducive to their establishing monotheist Judaism; analogously, he described the Roman Catholic rite of Holy Communion as cultural evidence of the killing and devouring of the sacred father. Moreover, he perceived religion, with its suppression of violence, as mediator of the societal and personal, the public and the private, conflicts between Eros and Thanatos, the forces of life and death. Later works indicate Freud’s pessimism about the future of civilization, which he noted in the 1931 edition of ''Civilization and its Discontents''.

Legacy

Psychotherapy

Freud provided the basis for the entire field of individual verbal psychotherapy. According to Donald H. Ford and Hugh B. Urban, "Later systems have differed about therapy and technique in certain respects, but all of them have been constructed around Freud's basic discovery that if one can arrange a special set of conditions and have the patient talk about his difficulties in certain ways, behavior changes of many kinds can be accomplished." For Joel Kovel, "Freud with his methods and central insight remains the progenitor of modern therapy", even though psychoanalysis itself has "sunk to a relatively minor role so far as actual therapeutic practice goes."

Jacques Lacan approached psychoanalysis through linguistics and literature. Lacan believed that Freud's essential work had been done prior to 1905, and concerned the interpretation of dreams, neurotic symptoms, and slips, which had been based on a revolutionary way of understanding language and its relation to experience and subjectivity. Lacan regarded ego psychology and object relations theory as based upon misreadings of Freud's work; for Lacan, the determinative dimension of human experience is neither the self (as in ego psychology) nor relations with others (as in object relations theory), but language. Lacan saw desire as more important than need, and considered it necessarily ungratifiable; in Stephen A. Mitchell and Margaret J. Black's words, "for Lacan, the child comes to desire above all else to be the completing object of the m(other's) desire."

Wilhelm Reich developed ideas that Freud had developed at the beginning of his psychoanalytic investigation, but then superseded but never finally discarded; these were the concept of the Actualneurosis, and a theory of anxiety based upon the idea of dammed-up libido. In Freud's original view, what really happened to a person (the 'actual') determined the resulting neurotic disposition. Freud applied that idea both to infants and to adults; in the former case, seductions were sought as the causes of later neuroses, and in the latter incomplete sexual release. Unlike Freud, Reich retained the idea that actual experience, especially sexual experience, was of key significance. Kovel writes that by the 1920s, Reich had "taken Freud's original ideas about sexual release to the point of specifying the orgasm as the criteria of healthy function." Reich was also "developing his ideas about character into a form that would later take shape, first as 'muscular armour', and eventually as a transducer of universal biological energy, the ''orgone''."

Arthur Janov's primal therapy has been an influential post-Freudian psychotherapy. Joel Kovel writes that primal therapy resembles psychoanalytic therapy in its emphasis on early childhood experience, but nevertheless has profound differences with it. While Janov's theory is akin to Freud's early idea of Actualneurosis, he does not have a dynamic psychology but a nature psychology in which need is primary while wish is derivative and dispensable when need is met. Despite its surface similarity to Freud's ideas, Janov's theory lacks a strictly psychological account of the unconscious and belief in infantile sexuality. While for Freud there was a hierarchy of danger situations, for Janov the key event in the child's life is awareness that the parents do not love it. Mark Pendergrast writes that Janov provided the prototype for the current trauma therapist.

Journalist Ethan Watters and Professor of Sociology Richard Ofshe write, "There is no scientific evidence of...[a] purposeful unconscious, nor is there evidence that psychotherapists have special methods for laying bare our out-of-awareness mental processes." They also write that, "Because of the massive investment the field of psychotherapy has made in the psychodynamic approach, the dying convulsions of the paradigm will not be pretty."

Science

Verdicts on the scientific merits of Freud's theories have differed. Gilbert Ryle calls Freud "psychology's one man of genius" and the influence of his teaching "deservedly profound" even though its allegories have been "damagingly popular", while David Stafford-Clark calls him "a man whose name will always rank with those of Darwin, Copernicus, Newton, Marx and Einstein; someone who really made a difference to the way the rest of us can begin to think about the meaning of human life and society." Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg write that, "A reservoir of experimental data pertinent to Freud's work currently exists and...offers support for a respectable number of his major ideas and theories." In contrast, Eysenck claims that Freud "set psychiatry back one hundred years" and that "what is true in his theories is not new and what is new in his theories is not true", Peter Medawar, a Nobel Prize winning immunologist, made the oft-quoted remark that psychoanalysis is the "most stupendous intellectual confidence trick of the twentieth century", and Webster calls it "perhaps the most complex and successful" pseudoscience in history. Crews writes that "Step by step, we are learning that Freud has been the most overrated figure in the entire history of science and medicine—one who wrought immense harm through the propagation of false etiologies, mistaken diagnoses, and fruitless lines of inquiry."

Karl Popper, who argued that all proper scientific theories must be potentially falsifiable, claimed that Freud's psychoanalytic theories were presented in unfalsifiable form, meaning that no experiment or observation could ever prove them wrong. Grünbaum considers Popper's critique of Freud flawed, and argues that many of Freud's theories are empirically testable, for example the theory that paranoia results from repressed homosexuality invites the falsifiable prediction that a decline in the repression of homosexuality will result in a corresponding decline in paranoia, thereby disproving Popper's claim that psychoanalytic propositions can never be proven wrong. However, Grünbaum's view has in turn been challenged from different perspectives. Gellner describes Freudian psychoanalysis as "an inherently untestable system [that] can and does often permit a kind of ''ex gratia'' testing, on the understanding that this privilege remains easily revocable at will and short notice". Frank Cioffi and Allen Esterson both dispute Grünbaum's contentions that Freud was "hospitable to refutation" and his modifications of his theories as a rule "clearly motivated by evidence", arguing that his exegesis of Freud's writings is flawed on this issue.

According to a study that appeared in the June 2008 issue of ''The Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association'', while psychoanalysis remains influential in the humanities, it is regarded as "desiccated and dead" by psychology departments and textbooks. ''The New York Times'' commented that to psychoanalysts the report underscores "pressing questions about the relevance of their field and whether it will survive as a practice", noting that the marginalization of Freudian theory in psychology departments has been attributed to psychoanalysts being out of step with the way in which other disciplines in psychology have placed "emphasis on testing the validity of their approaches scientifically." Meanwhile, advances in neuroscience have "attracted new students and resources, further squeezing out psychoanalysis."

Researchers in the emerging field of neuro-psychoanalysis, founded by neuroscientist and psychoanalyst Mark Solms, have argued for Freud's theories, pointing out brain structures relating to Freudian concepts such as libido, drives, the unconscious, and repression. However, Solms's case is frequently dependent on the notion of neuro-scientific findings being "broadly consistent" with Freudian theories, rather than strict validations of those theories. More generally the dream researcher G. William Domhoff has disputed claims of ''specifically'' Freudian dream theory being validated as contended by Solms. There has also been criticism of the very concept of neuro-psychoanalysis by psychoanalysts.

Philosophy

Freud's theories have influenced the Frankfurt School and critical theory. Herbert Marcuse's ''Eros and Civilization'' helped make the idea that Freud and Marx were "speaking to similar questions, if from very different vantage points" credible to the left. Marcuse criticized neo-Freudian revisionism for discarding the death instinct, the primal horde, and the killing of the primal father, which he saw as Freud's most daring hypotheses and possessed of symbolic value, and for flattening out the conflicts between individual and society and between instinctual desires and consciousness, which he saw as a conformist return to pre-Freudian psychology. Rejecting the idea that the death instinct meant an innate urge to aggression, Marcuse interpreted it instead as aiming at the end of the tension that is life. For Marcuse, since it was based on the so-called Nirvana principle, which expressed yearning for the tranquility of inorganic nature, the death instinct was similar in its goals to the life instinct. Marcuse argued that if the tension of life were reduced, the death instinct would cease to be very powerful, thereby turning Freud's seemingly pessimistic conclusions in a utopian direction.

Erich Fromm identifies Freud, together with Karl Marx and Albert Einstein, as the "architects of the modern age", while nevertheless remarking, "That Marx is a figure of world historical significance with whom Freud cannot even be compared in this respect hardly needs to be said." For Paul Robinson, Freud "rendered for the twentieth century services comparable to those Marx rendered for the nineteenth."

Maurice Merleau-Ponty considers Freud, like Hegel, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche, to be one of the anticipators of phenomenology. Theodor W. Adorno writes that Freud was Edmund Husserl's "opposite number...against the entire claim and tendency of whose psychology Husserl's polemic against psychologism could have been directed." Paul Ricoeur sees Freud as one of the masters of the "school of suspicion", alongside Marx and Nietzsche. Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas have helped create "a distinctly hermeneutic version of Freud", one which "claimed him as the most significant progenitor of the shift from an objectifying, empiricist understanding of the human realm to one stressing subjectivity and interpretation." Their hermeneutic interpretation of Freud has been criticized by Adolf Grünbaum, who argues that it radically misrepresents Freud's views.

Jacques Derrida finds Freud to be both a late figure in the history of western metaphysics and, with Nietzsche and Heidegger, an important precursor of his own brand of radicalism.

Bernard Williams writes that there has been hope that some psychoanalytical theories may "support some ethical conception as a necessary part of human happiness", but that in some cases the theories appear to support such hopes because they themselves involve ethical thought. In his view, while such theories may be better as channels of individual help because of their ethical basis, it disqualifies them from providing a basis for ethics.

Feminism

Robinson, observing that "Everyone knows that Freud has fallen from grace", suggests that the disenchantment with Freud can be traced to the revival of feminism. Simone de Beauvoir criticized Freud and psychoanalysis in ''The Second Sex''. Betty Friedan criticized Freud and what she considered his Victorian view of women in ''The Feminine Mystique''. Freud's concept of penis envy was attacked by Kate Millett, whose ''Sexual Politics'' accused him of confusion and oversights. Naomi Weisstein writes that Freud and his followers erroneously thought that his "years of intensive clinical experience" added up to scientific rigor. Freud was also criticized by Shulamith Firestone and Eva Figes. In ''The Dialectic of Sex'', Firestone argued that Freud was a "poet" who produced metaphors rather than literal truths; in her view, Freud, like feminists, recognized that sexuality was the crucial problem of modern life, but ignored the social context and failed to question society itself. Firestone interpreted Freudian "metaphors" in terms of the literal facts of power within the family. Juliet Mitchell defended Freud against de Beauvoir, Friedan, Millett, Figes, and Firestone in ''Psychoanalysis and Feminism'', accusing them of misreading him and misunderstanding the implications of psychoanalytic theory for feminism. Mitchell's views were in turn criticized by Jane Gallop in ''The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis''. Gallop complements Mitchell for her criticism of "the distortions inflicted by feminists upon Freud's text and his discoveries", but finds her treatment of Lacanian theory lacking.

Some French feminists, among them Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, have been influenced by Freud as interpreted by Jacques Lacan. Irigaray has produced a theoretical challenge to Freud and Lacan, using their theories against them to "put forward a coherent psychoanalytic explanation for theoretical bias. She claims that the cultural unconscious only recognizes the male sex, and details the effects of this unconscious belief on accounts of the psychology of women."

Carol Gilligan writes that "The penchant of developmental theorists to project a masculine image, and one that appears frightening to women, goes back at least to Freud..." She sees Freud's criticism of women's sense of justice reappearing in the work of Jean Piaget and Lawrence Kohlberg. Gilligan notes that Nancy Chodorow, in contrast to Freud, attributes differences between the sexes not to anatomy but to the fact that "the early social environment differs for and is experienced differently by male and female children." Chodorow writes "against the masculine bias of psychoanalytic theory" and "replaces Freud's negative and derivative description of female psychology with a positive and direct account of her own."

Works

Major works by Freud

''The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works'' of Sigmund Freud, translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey. In collaboration with Anna Freud. Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson, 24 volumes, Vintage, 1999

''Studies on Hysteria'' (with Josef Breuer) (''Studien über Hysterie'', 1895)

''The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904'', Publisher: Belknap Press, 1986, ISBN 978-0-674-15421-6

''The Interpretation of Dreams'' (''Die Traumdeutung'', 1899 [1900]) ISBN 978-0-465-01977-9

''The Psychopathology of Everyday Life'' (''Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens'', 1901) ISBN 978-1-4565-6856-6

''Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality'' (''Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie'', 1905)

''Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious'' (''Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten'', 1905)

''Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva (''Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva'', 1907)

''Totem and Taboo'' (''Totem und Tabu'', 1913)

''On Narcissism'' (''Zur Einführung des Narzißmus'', 1914)

''Introduction to Psychoanalysis'' (''Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse'', 1917)

''Beyond the Pleasure Principle'' (''Jenseits des Lustprinzips'', 1920)

''The Ego and the Id'' (''Das Ich und das Es'', 1923)

''The Future of an Illusion'' (''Die Zukunft einer Illusion'', 1927)

''Civilization and Its Discontents'' (''Das Unbehagen in der Kultur'', 1930)

''Moses and Monotheism'' (''Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion'', 1939)

''An Outline of Psycho-Analysis'' (''Abriß der Psychoanalyse'', 1940)

Correspondence

'' The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank: Inside Psychoanalysis'' (eds. E. J. Lieberman and Robert Kramer). Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. http://www.amazon.com/Letters-Sigmund-Freud-Otto-Rank/dp/1421403544

''The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, (editor and translator Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson), 1985, ISBN 978-0-674-15420-9

''The Sigmund Freud Carl Gustav Jung Letters'', Publisher: Princeton University Press; Abr edition, 1994, ISBN 978-0-691-03643-4

''The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Karl Abraham, 1907–1925'', Publisher: Karnac Books, 2002, ISBN 978-1-85575-051-7

''The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 1908–1939.'', Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1995, ISBN 978-0-674-15424-7

''The Sigmund Freud Ludwig Binswanger Letters'', Publisher: Open Gate Press, 2000, ISBN 978-1-871871-45-6

''The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 1, 1908–1914'', Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1994, ISBN 978-0-674-17418-4

''The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 2, 1914–1919'', Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 1996, ISBN 978-0-674-17419-1

''The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, Volume 3, 1920–1933'', Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, 2000, ISBN 978-0-674-00297-5

''The Letters of Sigmund Freud to Eduard Silberstein, 1871–1881'', Belknap Press, Harvard University Press, ISBN 978-0-674-52828-4

''Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salome; letters'', Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1972, ISBN 978-0-15-133490-2

''The Letters of Sigmund Freud and Arnold Zweig'', Publisher: New York University Press, 1987, ISBN 978-0-8147-2585-6

''Letters of Sigmund Freud – selected and edited by Ernst Ludwig Freud'', Publisher: New York: Basic Books, 1960, ISBN 978-0-486-27105-7

Other works and essays

''Reflections on War and Death'' (''Zeitgemäßes über Krieg und Tod'', 1918)

See also

A Dangerous Method

Afterwardsness

American Psychoanalytic Association

Dark City (1998 film)

Dostoevsky and Parricide

Edward Bernays

Freud and religion

Freud: The Secret Passion

Freud's seduction theory

Freudian slip

Freudo-Marxism

History of the Jews in Galicia (Eastern Europe)

Neo-Freudian

Psychoanalytic literary criticism

Psychoanalytic theory

Psychodynamics

Psychosexual development

Sigmund Freud Archives

Sigmund Freud Museum (London)

Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna)

Sigmund Freud's views on homosexuality

Signorelli parapraxis

The Century of the Self (related documentary)

The Death of Salvador Dali

The Mark Steel Lectures – Freud

References

Further reading

Substantial biographies

Authorized biography

Jones, Ernest. ''The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.'' 3 vols. New York: Basic Books, 1953–1957

Other biographies

Gay, Peter. ''Freud: A Life for Our Time.'' London: Papermac, 1988; 2nd revised hardcover edition, Little Books (1 May 2006), 864 pages, ISBN 978-1904435532; Reprint hardcover edition, W. W. Norton & Company (1988); trade paperback, W. W. Norton & Company (17 May 2006), 864 pages, ISBN 978-0393328615

Puner, Helen Walker. ''Freud: His Life and His Mind.'' New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1947

Roazen, Paul. ''Freud and His Followers.'' New York: Knopf, 1975, hardcover; trade paperback, De Capo Press (22 March 1992), 600 pages, ISBN 978-0306804724

Other works about Freud and the psychoanalytic movement

Cioffi, Frank. ''Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience.'' Peru, IL: Open Court, 1999.

Crews, Frederick. ''The Memory Wars: Freud's Legacy in Dispute.'' New York: The New York Review of Books, 1995.

Crews, Frederick. ''Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend.'' New York: Penguin Books, 1998.

Dufresne, Todd. ''Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis.'' New York: Continuum, 2003.

Dufresne, Todd, ed. ''Against Freud: Critics Talk Back.'' Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007.

Ellenberger, Henri. ''Beyond the Unconscious: Essays of Henri F. Ellenberger in the History of Psychiatry.'' Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Ellenberger, Henri. ''The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry.'' New York: Basic Books, 1970.

Esterson, Allen. ''Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of the Work of Sigmund Freud.'' Chicago: Open Court, 1993.

Gellner, Ernest. ''The Psychoanalytic Movement: The Cunning of Unreason.'' London: Fontana Press, 1993.

Grünbaum, Adolf. ''The Foundations of Psychoanalysis: A Philosophical Critique.'' Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.

Grünbaum, Adolf. ''Validation in the Clinical Theory of Psychoanalysis: A Study in the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis.'' Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press, 1993.

Hale, Nathan G., Jr. ''Freud and the Americans: The Beginnings of Psychoanalysis in the United States, 1876–1917.'' New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Hale, Nathan G., Jr. ''The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States: Freud and the Americans, 1917–1985.'' New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Hirschmüller, Albrecht. ''The Life and Work of Josef Breuer.'' New York University Press, 1989.

Jung, Carl Gustav. ''The Collected Works of C. G. Jung Volume 4: Freud and Psychoanalysis.'' Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd, 1961.

Macmillan, Malcolm. ''Freud Evaluated: The Completed Arc.'' Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1997.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff. ''The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory.'' New York: Pocket Books, 1998

Ricoeur, Paul. ''Freud and Philosophy.'' New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970.

Rieff, Philip. ''Freud: The Mind of the Moralist.'' Garden City, New York: Anchor Books, 1961

Roazen, Paul. ''Freud: Political and Social Thought.'' London: Hogarth Press, 1969.

Roth, Michael, ed. ''Freud: Conflict and Culture.'' New York: Vintage, 1998.

Stannard, David E. ''Shrinking History: On Freud and the Failure of Psychohistory.'' Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Sulloway, Frank J. ''Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend.'' London: Basic Books, 1979

Webster, Richard. ''Why Freud Was Wrong: Sin, Science and Psychoanalysis.'' Oxford: The Orwell Press, 2005.

Wollheim, Richard. ''Freud.'' Fontana, 1971.

Wollheim, Richard, and James Hopkins, eds. ''Philosophical Essays on Freud.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

External links

, made in 1938

''Dream Psychology'' by Sigmund Freud

Essays by Freud at Quotidiana.org

Freud Archives at Library of Congress

Freud Museum, Maresfield Gardens, London

International Network of Freud Critics

International Psychoanalytical Association, founded by Freud in 1910

Sigmund Freud Collection at Bartleby.com (15 works in English)

Works by Sigmund Freud (public domain in Canada)

Works by Sigmund Freud in audio format from LibriVox

{{s-ttl|title=Cover of Time Magazine |years=27 October 1924}}

Category:Austrian atheists Category:Austrian Jews Category:Austrian psychoanalysts Category:Foreign Members of the Royal Society Category:Jewish atheists Category:Jews who emigrated to the United Kingdom to escape Nazism Category:Narcissism Category:People from Příbor Category:People of the Edwardian era Category:1856 births Category:1939 deaths Category:History of psychiatry

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Name	Brooke Fraser
Img capt	Fraser during the NZ Fashion Week 2010
Background	solo_singer
Birth name	Brooke Gabrielle Fraser
Born	December 15, 1983Wellington, New Zealand
Origin	Wellington, New Zealand
Genre	PopFolk rock Christian music
Occupation(s)	Singer-songwriter
Instruments	SingingvocalsPianoGuitar
Years active	2002–present
Label	Sony Music Wood + Bone
Notable songs	Deciphering MeLifelineShadowfeet
Website	http://www.brookefraser.com }}

Brooke Gabrielle Fraser Ligertwood, better known as simply Brooke Fraser (born 15 December 1983) is a New Zealand award-winning folk-pop and Christian music artist. Her third studio album Flags has become the most successful album of her career, with the single "Something in the Water" reaching number one on the RIANZ singles chart in 2010.

Early life

Fraser is the eldest of the three children born to Fiji-born former All Black, Bernie Fraser and his wife Lynda Fraser. She grew up in Naenae, Lower Hutt and attended Dyer Street School, Naenae Intermediate School and Naenae College.

Fraser took piano lessons between the ages of seven and seventeen. She started writing songs at age twelve and taught herself the acoustic guitar at fifteen, although despite her singing success she has never taken singing lessons.

She performed at Parachute, an annual New Zealand music festival in 2000 – including a special guest performance in 2007.

She began writing for the ''Soul Purpose'' magazine at age fifteen, and was later made editor in 2002. She gave up her job as editor shortly after moving to Auckland in late 2002 in order to pursue her music career.

Musical career

In 2002, while Fraser was in Auckland, Scotty Pearson, the drummer for Elemeno P, organised a meeting with producer Matty J for her. Matty J became her manager, liaising with the major labels who had shown interest and compared their offers. Fraser had about five different labels offer her deals and chose to sign a multi-album deal with Sony Music at the age of 17. She has also performed with Hillsong.

''What to Do With Daylight''

Fraser's first album, ''What to Do with Daylight'', was released in New Zealand in late 2003, debuting at number one and achieved gold status in the same week. The album eventually went seven times platinum, selling over 105,000 copies in New Zealand alone. It remained on the album charts for sixty-six weeks. All five singles from the album reached the top twenty in the New Zealand Singles Chart. Her album also topped the New Zealand Top 50 Albums of 2004.

Following the release of ''What to Do with Daylight'', Fraser toured Australia and New Zealand with American artist John Mayer and then toured New Zealand with veteran U.K. rock artist David Bowie. Whilst on tour with John Mayer, she met with his guitarist and keyboardist Michael Chaves who, after recording Mayer's album ''Heavier Things'', Fraser enlisted to play on her album and future concerts.

''Albertine''

In 2005, prior to writing and preparing her follow-up album, Fraser took a trip to Africa to immerse herself in Rwanda before visiting her sponsor children in Tanzania, as she is an advocate for child sponsorship. In this trip, she was so moved that she wrote the song ''Albertine'' about a young child (named Albertine), whom she met while in Rwanda. It was later decided to make this song the album's title track.

For the second album, Fraser decided to enlist a new band, primarily constructed from American musicians who'd worked with an array of notable artists, both live and recorded. In 2006, Fraser and the band went into the studio in Los Angeles to record the album. Later Fraser allowed her fans to listen to the album's first single ''Deciphering Me'' via her MySpace page. The single was later released initially to radio and ultimately to CD single, and achieved number four in the New Zealand single charts.

On 4 December 2006 ''Albertine'' was released in New Zealand, achieving double platinum status less than a month after its release and has remained, to date, in the top 20 every week since. The album was released in Australia and internationally on 31 March 2007. In Australia, it charted at number twenty-nine in its first week on 9 April and has thus far achieved Gold sales status.

On 6 April 2007, Fraser performed "Deciphering Me" for the Good Friday Appeal, an annual televised fundraising event to raise money for the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne.

In 2008, Fraser appeared on the Dave Barnes song "Believe" from his album ''Me + You + the World'', performing backing vocals.

''Albertine'' was also Fraser's U.S. debut, released 27 May 2008 and entered the Billboard 200 at number ninety on 19 July 2008. Her album propelled in success with online sales after being chosen as Editor's Choice on iTunes. On 4 July 2008 Fraser supported Canadian artist/U2 collaborator Daniel Lanois at the Montreal Jazz Festival. In August she toured the southern U.S. In September, she re-toured several major U.S. cities and completed the tour at the Shepherd's Bush Empire in London, UK.

''Flags''

''Flags'' was recorded at East West Studios in Hollywood in the summer of 2010 and released by Wood & Bone Records on October 12, 2010. Fraser celebrated with sold-out tours in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand. ''Flags'' reached the #1 spot on the New Zealand album chart , #3 in Australia and entered at #59 on the Billboard 200 in America and climbed as high as #3 on the U.S iTunes album chart. The album has already gone Gold in Australia and 3x Platinum in New Zealand where it remains in the top 5 on the albums chart . The first single, “Something in the Water,” was a radio hit around the globe. It was added twice to the BBC Radio 2 A-list rotation . "Flags" was released in July 2011 in Germany, Austria and Switzerland and debuted in the following positions: #6 in Germany, #33 in Austria & #24 in Switzerland. One month on from release, "Flags" remained in the German top 20 at #13 and "Something in the Water" on the singles charts at #8. ''Flags'' has received accolades from peers and press alike. Sara Bareilles announced to her 2 million followers on Twitter “If you don’t know her, you should. @brookefraser is a freakin gem. New album out now. Yay.” and Women’s Wear Daily has called Brooke “The Kiwi Norah Jones .”

In its review of ''Flags'', ''Glide Magazine'' said: "Brooke Fraser’s third release, ''Flags'', is a wonder. From the stunning lyrical imagery throughout to the impressive guest vocalists who join her (Cary Brothers, Jon Foreman and Aqualung among them), from Fraser’s ethereal and breathy performances to the wide-ranging soundscapes, this record is drenched in beauty and stands as one of the more remarkable achievements of 2010."

Personal life

After the success of her first album, Fraser moved to Sydney, where she has lived since 2004. On 17 March 2008 she married Scott Ligertwood, in Sydney, changing her name to Brooke Ligertwood. "Brooke Fraser" has remained her stage name for her activity as a Sony BMG recording/touring artist. She continues to write songs for Hillsong Church, now as "Brooke Ligertwood". Among her notable congregational songs are "Desert song" and "Hosanna". Despite being a Christian, Fraser has made clear efforts to distance herself from the Contemporary Christian Music scene.

After touring her second album ''Albertine'' for almost 4 years, Fraser returned home to Sydney exhausted. She took almost a year off from music-making. After attending the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in the US and seeing Fleet Foxes set she was inspired to work on her latest album ''Flags''.

Fraser also runs a blog from her website where she comments on everything from touring, to fashion and food.

Charity work

Even though Fraser has enjoyed success in her career for many years, she has always used her position to highlight many worthy causes and charity projects, and raising large amounts of money for them in the process. In late 2010 whilst on tour in the U.S. promoting her third album ''Flags'', Fraser, in conjunction with charity: water ran a birthday campaign asking her fans to donate $27 in honor of her 27th birthday. The goal was to raise $50,000 to build clean water wells in Ethiopia. Joining the likes of Justin Bieber, Will Smith and Adam Lambert Fraser's birthday campaign was a success raising over $54,000. She has vowed to continue her work with charity: water on future projects.

Fraser has worked with World Vision as an Artist Associate since 2001. She has visited Cambodia and Tanzania with World Vision, the Philippines with Opportunity International and independently traveled to Rwanda in June 2005, in June 2006 as part of charity event "Hope Rwanda", and in May 2007 when she filmed the music video for the song "Albertine" off her second studio album of the same name. In 2006 she, along with Petra Bagust and Tau from Spacifix, appeared in an advertisement for the World Vision 40 Hour Famine; an event which raises funds for children in third world countries. She also sponsors eleven children through World Vision and makes child ways of contributing to the work of World Vision (i.e. fundraising t-shirts etc.).

Discography

;Studio albums

''What to Do with Daylight'' (2003)

''Albertine'' (2006)

''Flags'' (2010)

Awards and nominations

;APRA Awards |- |2004 |''Better'' |rowspan="2"|Most Played Composition in New Zealand | |- |rowspan="3"|2007 |rowspan="2"|''Deciphering Me'' | |- |rowspan="2"|APRA Silver Scroll | |- |''Albertine'' | ;New Zealand Music Awards |- |rowspan="6"|2004 |Herself |People's Choice Award | |- |rowspan="3"|''What To Do With Daylight'' |Album of the Year | |- |Best Female Solo Artist | |- |Breakthrough Artist of the Year | |- |rowspan="2"|''Lifeline'' |Single of the Year | |- |Songwriter of the Year | |- |rowspan="6"|2007 |Herself |People's Choice Award | |- |rowspan="3"|''Albertine'' |Album of the Year | |- |Best Female Solo Artist | |- |Highest Selling Album | |- |rowspan="2"|''Deciphering Me'' |Single of the Year | |- |Airplay Record of the Year | |- |2009 |Herself |International Achievement |

;GMA Dove Awards

Year	! Nominated work	! Award	! Result
		!rowspan="1"	Herself	Female Vocalist of the Year

References

External links

Official Brooke Fraser Website

New Zealand Herald article

Category:1983 births Category:Living people Category:New Zealand female singers Category:New Zealand pop singers Category:New Zealand singer-songwriters

de:Brooke Fraser it:Brooke Fraser mi:Brooke Fraser nl:Brooke Fraser pl:Brooke Fraser pt:Brooke Fraser

Name	J. R. R. Tolkien
Birth name	John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Birth date	January 03, 1892
Birth place	Bloemfontein, Orange Free State
Death date	September 02, 1973
Death place	Bournemouth, England
Spouse	Edith Bratt (1916–1971)
Occupation	Author, Academic, Philologist, Poet
Nationality	English
Influences
Influenced
Genre	Fantasy, high fantasy, translation, criticism
Notableworks	''The Hobbit''''The Lord of the Rings''''The Silmarillion''
Signature	JRR Tolkien signature.svg }}

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE (, ; 3 January 1892 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works ''The Hobbit'', ''The Lord of the Rings'', and ''The Silmarillion''.

Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature there from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

After his death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including ''The Silmarillion''. These, together with ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term ''legendarium'' to the larger part of these writings.

While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the great success of ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy. In 2008, ''The Times'' ranked him sixth on a list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". ''Forbes'' ranked him the 5th top-earning dead celebrity in 2009.

Biography

Family origins

Most of Tolkien's paternal ancestors were craftsmen. The Tolkien family had their roots in Lower Saxony, but had been living in England since the 18th century, becoming "quickly intensely English". The surname ''Tolkien'' is said to come from the German word ''tollkühn'' ("foolhardy"). German writers have suggested that in reality the name is more likely to derive from the village Tolkynen, near Rastenburg, East Prussia. The name of that place is derived from the now extinct Old Prussian language.

Tolkien's maternal grandparents, John and Edith Jane Suffield, were Baptists who lived in Birmingham and owned a shop in the city centre. The Suffield family had run various businesses out of the same building, called Lamb House, since the early 19th century. From 1810 Tolkien's great-great-grandfather William Suffield had a book and stationery shop there; from 1826 Tolkien's great-grandfather, also named John Suffield, had a drapery and hosiery business there.

Childhood

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State Province, part of South Africa) to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, ''née'' Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel, who was born on 17 February 1894.

As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden, an event which some think would have later echoes in his stories, although Tolkien admitted no actual memory of the event and no special hatred of spiders as an adult. In another incident, a family house-boy, who thought Tolkien a beautiful child, took the baby to his kraal to show him off, returning him the next morning.

When he was three, Tolkien went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, and so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Kings Heath, Birmingham. Soon after, in 1896, they moved to Sarehole (now in Hall Green), then a Worcestershire village, later annexed to Birmingham. He enjoyed exploring Sarehole Mill and Moseley Bog and the Clent, Lickey and Malvern Hills, which would later inspire scenes in his books, along with Worcestershire towns and villages such as Bromsgrove, Alcester, and Alvechurch and places such as his aunt Jane's farm of Bag End, the name of which would be used in his fiction. Mabel Tolkien herself taught her two sons, and Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early. He could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother allowed him to read many books. He disliked ''Treasure Island'' and ''The Pied Piper'' and thought ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' by Lewis Carroll was "amusing but disturbing". He liked stories about "Red Indians" and the fantasy works by George MacDonald. In addition, the "Fairy Books" of Andrew Lang were particularly important to him and their influence is apparent in some of his later writings.

Tolkien attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, and later St. Philip's School, before winning a Foundation Scholarship and returning to King Edward's School. While a pupil at King Edward's School, he was one of a party of cadets from the school's Officers Training Corps who helped "line the route" for the coronation parade of King George V, being posted just outside the gates of Buckingham Palace.

Mabel Tolkien was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1900 despite vehement protests by her Baptist family, who then stopped all financial assistance to her. In 1904, when Tolkien was 12, she died of acute diabetes at Fern Cottage in Rednal, which she was then renting. Mabel Tolkien was then about 34 years of age, about as old as a person with diabetes mellitus type 1 could live with no treatment—insulin would not be discovered until two decades later. Nine years after his mother's death, Tolkien wrote, "My own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it is not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to his great gifts as he did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labour and trouble to ensure us keeping the faith."

Prior to her death, Mabel Tolkien had assigned the guardianship of her sons to Fr. Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory, who was assigned to bring them up as good Catholics. Tolkien grew up in the Edgbaston area of Birmingham. He lived there in the shadow of Perrott's Folly and the Victorian tower of Edgbaston Waterworks, which may have influenced the images of the dark towers within his works. Another strong influence was the romantic medievalist paintings of Edward Burne-Jones and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery had a large collection of works on public display.

Youth

In 1911, while they were at King Edward's School, Birmingham, Tolkien and three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, formed a semi-secret society which they called the "T.C.B.S.", the initials standing for "Tea Club and Barrovian Society", alluding to their fondness for drinking tea in Barrow's Stores near the school and, secretly, in the school library. After leaving school, the members stayed in touch and, in December 1914, they held a "council" in London at Wiseman's home. For Tolkien, the result of this meeting was a strong dedication to writing poetry.

The 1911 census of England and Wales shows Tolkien (occupation "school") lodging at 4 Highfield Road, Edgbaston, along with his brother Hilary (occupation "hardware merchant's clerk").

In 1911, Tolkien went on a summer holiday in Switzerland, a trip that he recollects vividly in a 1968 letter, noting that Bilbo's journey across the Misty Mountains ("including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods") is directly based on his adventures as their party of 12 hiked from Interlaken to Lauterbrunnen and on to camp in the moraines beyond Mürren. Fifty-seven years later, Tolkien remembered his regret at leaving the view of the eternal snows of Jungfrau and Silberhorn ("the Silvertine (Celebdil) of my dreams"). They went across the Kleine Scheidegg to Grindelwald and on across the Grosse Scheidegg to Meiringen. They continued across the Grimsel Pass, through the upper Valais to Brig and on to the Aletsch glacier and Zermatt.

In October of the same year, Tolkien began studying at Exeter College, Oxford. He initially studied Classics but changed his course in 1913 to English Language and Literature, graduating in 1915 with first-class honours in his final examinations.

Courtship and marriage

At the age of 16, Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years older, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house in which she lived. According to Humphrey Carpenter: His guardian, Father Francis Morgan, viewing Edith as a distraction from Tolkien's school work and horrified that his young charge was seriously involved with a Protestant girl, prohibited him from meeting, talking to, or even corresponding with her until he was 21. He obeyed this prohibition to the letter, with one notable early exception which made Father Morgan threaten to cut short his University career if he did not stop.

On the evening of his twenty-first birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith a declaration of his love and asked her to marry him. Edith replied saying that she had already agreed to marry another man, but that she had done so because she had believed Tolkien had forgotten her. The two met up and beneath a railway viaduct renewed their love; Edith returned her engagement ring and announced that she was marrying Tolkien instead. Following their engagement Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien's insistence. Her landlord, a staunch Protestant, was infuriated and evicted her as soon as she was able to find other lodgings. Edith and Ronald were formally engaged in Birmingham, in January 1913, and married at Warwick, England, at Saint Mary Immaculate Catholic Church on 22 March 1916.

World War I

In 1914, the United Kingdom entered World War I. Tolkien's relatives were shocked when he elected not to immediately volunteer for the British Army. Instead, Tolkien entered a program wherein he delayed enlisting until completing his degree in July 1915. He was then commissioned as a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. He trained with the 13th (Reserve) Battalion on Cannock Chase, Staffordshire, for eleven months. In a letter to Edith, Tolkien complained, "Gentlemen are rare among the superiors, and even human beings rare indeed." Tolkien was then transferred to the 11th (Service) Battalion with the British Expeditionary Force, arriving in France on 4 June 1916. His departure from England on a troop transport inspired him to write his poem, ''The Lonely Isle''. He later wrote, "Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute. Parting from my wife then ... it was like a death."

Tolkien served as a signals officer at the Somme, participating in the Battle of Thiepval Ridge and the subsequent assault on the Schwaben Redoubt. According to John Garth, however:

Although Kitchener's army enshrined old social boundaries, it also chipped away at the class divide by throwing men from all walks of life into a desperate situation together. Tolkien wrote that the experience taught him, 'a deep sympathy and feeling for the Tommy; especially the plain soldier from the agricultural counties.' He remained profoundly grateful for the lesson. For a long time, he had been imprisoned in a tower, not of pearl, but of ivory.

Tolkien's time in combat was a terrible stress for Edith, who feared that every knock on the door might carry news of her husband's death. In order to get around the British Army's postal censorship, the Tolkiens had developed a secret code which accompanied his letters home. By using the code, Edith was able to track her husband's movements on a map of the Western Front.

On 27 October 1916 Tolkien came down with trench fever, a disease carried by the lice which were common in the dugouts. According to the memoirs of the Reverend Mervyn S. Evers, Anglican chaplain to the Lancashire Fusiliers:

Tolkien was invalided to England on 8 November 1916. Many of his dearest school friends, including Gilson and Smith of the T.C.B.S., were killed in the war. In later years, Tolkien indignantly declared that those who searched his works for parallels to the Second World War were entirely mistaken:

Homefront

A weak and emaciated Tolkien spent the remainder of the war alternating between hospitals and garrison duties, being deemed medically unfit for general service.

During his recovery in a cottage in Little Haywood, Staffordshire, he began to work on what he called ''The Book of Lost Tales'', beginning with ''The Fall of Gondolin''. Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, but he had recovered enough to do home service at various camps and was promoted to Lieutenant. It was at this time that Edith bore their first child, John Francis Reuel Tolkien.

When he was stationed at Kingston upon Hull, he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. After his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien remembered,

I never called Edith ''Luthien'' – but she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the ''Silmarillion''. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and ''dance''. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and ''I'' cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos.

This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien, and Tolkien often referred to Edith as "my Lúthien".

Academic and writing career

Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the ''Oxford English Dictionary'', where he worked mainly on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter ''W''. In 1920, he took up a post as Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, and became the youngest professor there. While at Leeds, he produced ''A Middle English Vocabulary'' and a definitive edition of ''Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'' with E. V. Gordon, both becoming academic standard works for several decades. He also translated ''Sir Gawain'', ''Pearl'', and ''Sir Orfeo''. In 1925, he returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College.

During his time at Pembroke College Tolkien wrote ''The Hobbit'' and the first two volumes of ''The Lord of the Rings'', whilst living at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford (where a blue plaque was placed in 2002). He also published a philological essay in 1932 on the name "Nodens", following Sir Mortimer Wheeler's unearthing of a Roman Asclepeion at Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, in 1928.

''Beowulf''

Tolkien's 1936 lecture, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," had a lasting influence on ''Beowulf'' research. Lewis E. Nicholson said that the article Tolkien wrote about ''Beowulf'' is "widely recognized as a turning point in Beowulfian criticism", noting that Tolkien established the primacy of the poetic nature of the work as opposed to its purely linguistic elements. At the time, the consensus of scholarship deprecated ''Beowulf'' for dealing with childish battles with monsters rather than realistic tribal warfare; Tolkien argued that the author of ''Beowulf'' was addressing human destiny in general, not as limited by particular tribal politics, and therefore the monsters were essential to the poem. Where ''Beowulf'' does deal with specific tribal struggles, as at Finnsburg, Tolkien argued firmly against reading in fantastic elements. In the essay, Tolkien also revealed how highly he regarded Beowulf: "Beowulf is among my most valued sources," and this influence may be seen throughout his Middle-earth legendarium.

According to Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien had an ingenious means of beginning his series of lectures on ''Beowulf'':

He would come silently into the room, fix the audience with his gaze, and suddenly begin to declaim in a resounding voice the opening lines of the poem in the original Anglo-Saxon, commencing with a great cry of ''Hwæt!'' (The first word of this and several other Old English poems), which some undergraduates took to be 'Quiet!' It was not so much a recitation as a dramatic performance, an impersonation of an Anglo-Saxon bard in a mead hall, and it impressed generations of students because it brought home to them that ''Beowulf'' was not just a set text to be read for the purposes of examination, but a powerful piece of dramatic poetry.

Decades later, W.H. Auden wrote to his former professor,

"I don't think that I have ever told you what an unforgettable experience it was for me as an undergraduate, hearing you recite ''Beowulf''. The voice was the voice of Gandalf."

In 2003, Tolkien's handwritten translation of and commentary on ''Beowulf'', running to roughly 2000 pages, was discovered in the archives of the Bodleian Library.

World War II

In the run-up to World War II, Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. In January 1939, he was asked whether he would be prepared to serve in the cryptographical department of the Foreign Office in the event of national emergency. He replied in the affirmative and, beginning on 27 March, took an instructional course at the London HQ of the Government Code and Cypher School. However, although he was "keen" to become a codebreaker, he was informed in October that his services would not be required at that time. Ultimately he never served as one. In 2009, ''The Daily Telegraph'' claimed Tolkien turned down a £500-a-year offer to become a full-time recruit for unknown reasons.

In 1945, Tolkien moved to Merton College, Oxford, becoming the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959. He served as an external examiner for University College, Dublin, for many years. In 1954 Tolkien received an honorary degree from the National University of Ireland (of which U.C.D. was a constituent college). Tolkien completed ''The Lord of the Rings'' in 1948, close to a decade after the first sketches.

Tolkien also translated the Book of Jonah for the ''Jerusalem Bible'', which was published in 1966.

Family

The Tolkiens had four children: John Francis Reuel Tolkien (17 November 1917 – 22 January 2003), Michael Hilary Reuel Tolkien (22 October 1920 – 27 February 1984), Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (born 21 November 1924) and Priscilla Mary Anne Reuel Tolkien (born 18 June 1929). Tolkien was very devoted to his children and sent them illustrated letters from Father Christmas when they were young. Each year more characters were added, such as the Polar Bear (Father Christmas's helper), the Snow Man (his gardener), Ilbereth the elf (his secretary), and various other, minor characters. The major characters would relate tales of Father Christmas's battles against goblins who rode on bats and the various pranks committed by the Polar Bear.

Retirement and later years

During his life in retirement, from 1959 up to his death in 1973, Tolkien received steadily increasing public attention and literary fame. The sales of his books were so profitable that he regretted that he had not chosen early retirement. At first, he wrote enthusiastic answers to readers' enquiries, but he became increasingly unhappy about the sudden popularity of his books with the 1960s counter-culture movement. In a 1972 letter, he deplored having become a cult-figure, but admitted that "even the nose of a very modest idol [...] cannot remain entirely untickled by the sweet smell of incense!"

Fan attention became so intense that Tolkien had to take his phone number out of the public directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, which was then a seaside resort patronized by the British upper class. Tolkien's status as a best-selling author gave them easy entry into polite society, but Tolkien deeply missed the company of his fellow Inklings. Edith, however, was overjoyed to step into the role of a society hostess, which had been the reason that Tolkien selected Bournemouth in the first place.

According to Humphrey Carpenter,

Those friends who knew Ronald and Edith Tolkien over the years never doubted that there was deep affection between them. It was visible in the small things, the almost absurd degree in which each worried about the other's health, and the care in which they chose and wrapped each other's birthday presents'; and in the large matters, the way in which Ronald willingly abandoned such a large part of his life in retirement to give Edith the last years in Bournemouth that he felt she deserved, and the degree in which she showed pride in his fame as an author. A principal source of happiness to them was their shared love of their family. This bound them together until the end of their lives, and it was perhaps the strongest force in the marriage. They delighted to discuss and mull over every detail of the lives of their children, and later their grandchildren.

Tolkien was appointed by Queen Elizabeth II a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the New Year's Honours List of 1 January 1972 and received the insignia of the Order at Buckingham Palace on 28 March 1972. In the same year Oxford University conferred upon him an honorary Doctorate of Letters.

Death

Edith Tolkien died on 29 November 1971, at the age of 82. According to Simon Tolkien:

"My grandmother died two years before my grandfather and he came back to live in Oxford. Merton College gave him rooms just off the High Street. I went there frequently and he'd take me to lunch in the Eastgate Hotel. Those lunches were rather wonderful for a 12-year-old boy spending time with his grandfather, but sometimes he seemed sad. There was one visit when he told me how much he missed my grandmother. It must have been very strange for him being alone after they had been married for more than 50 years."

Meanwhile, Tolkien had the name Lúthien engraved on the Edith's tombstone at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford. When Tolkien died 21 months later on 2 September 1973, at the age of 81, he was buried in the same grave, with Beren added to his name. The engravings read:

In Tolkien's Middle-earth legendarium, Lúthien was the most beautiful of all the Children of Ilúvatar, and forsook her immortality for her love of the mortal warrior Beren. After Beren was captured by the forces of the dark lord Morgoth, Lúthien rode to his rescue upon the talking wolfhound Huan. Ultimately, when Beren was slain in battle against the demonic wolf Carcharoth, Lúthien, like Orpheus, approached the Valar gods and persuaded them to restore her beloved to life.

Views

Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and in his religious and political views he was mostly conservative, in the sense of favouring established conventions and orthodoxies over innovation and modernization; in 1943 he wrote, "My political opinions lean more and more to Anarchy (philosophically understood, meaning abolition of control not whiskered men with bombs)—or to 'unconstitutional' Monarchy."

Tolkien had an intense dislike for the side effects of industrialization, which he considered to be devouring the English countryside. For most of his adult life, he was disdainful of cars, preferring to ride a bicycle. This attitude can be seen in his work, most famously in the portrayal of the forced "industrialization" of the Shire in ''The Lord of the Rings''.

Many commentators have remarked on a number of potential parallels between the Middle-earth saga and events in Tolkien's lifetime. ''The Lord of the Rings'' is often thought to represent England during and immediately after World War II. Tolkien ardently rejected this opinion in the foreword to the second edition of the novel, stating he preferred applicability to allegory. This theme is taken up at greater length in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", where he argues that fairy-stories are so apt because they are consistent both within themselves and with some truths about reality. He concludes that Christianity itself follows this pattern of inner consistency and external truth. His belief in the fundamental truths of Christianity leads commentators to find Christian themes in ''The Lord of the Rings.'' Tolkien objected strongly to C. S. Lewis's use of religious references in his stories, which were often overtly allegorical. However, Tolkien wrote that the Mount Doom scene exemplified lines from the Lord's Prayer.

His love of myths and his devout faith came together in his assertion that he believed mythology to be the divine echo of "the Truth". This view was expressed in his poem and essay entitled ''Mythopoeia''. His theory that myths held "fundamental truths" became a central theme of the Inklings in general.

Religion

Tolkien's devout Catholic faith was a significant factor in the conversion of C. S. Lewis from atheism to Christianity, although Tolkien was dismayed that Lewis chose to join the Church of England.

In the last years of his life, Tolkien became greatly disappointed by some of the liturgical reforms and changes implemented after the Second Vatican Council, as his grandson Simon Tolkien recalls:

I vividly remember going to church with him in Bournemouth. He was a devout Roman Catholic and it was soon after the Church had changed the liturgy from Latin to English. My grandfather obviously didn't agree with this and made all the responses very loudly in Latin while the rest of the congregation answered in English. I found the whole experience quite excruciating, but my grandfather was oblivious. He simply had to do what he believed to be right.

Politics and race

Anarchism

In a 1943 letter to his son Christopher, Tolkien wrote:

Anti-Stalinism

Tolkien voiced support for the Nationalists (eventually led by Franco during the Spanish Civil War) upon hearing that Republicans were destroying churches and killing priests and nuns.

Tolkien was contemptuous of Joseph Stalin. During World War II, Tolkien referred to Stalin as "that bloodthirsty old murderer." Tolkien also expressed hope that the United States would overthrow both Stalin and the CPSU after Hitler's defeat.

However, in 1961, Tolkien sharply criticized a Swedish commentator who suggested that ''The Lord of the Rings'' was an anti-communist parable and identified the Dark Lord with Stalin. Tolkien retorted,

"I utterly repudiate any such 'reading', which angers me. The situation was conceived long before the Russian revolution. Such allegory is entirely foreign to my thought."

Debate over race

The question of racist or racialist elements in Tolkien's views and works has been the matter of some scholarly debate. Christine Chism distinguishes accusations as falling into three categories: intentional racism, unconscious Eurocentric bias, and an evolution from latent racism in Tolkien's early work to a conscious rejection of racist tendencies in his late work.

Tolkien expressed disgust at what he acknowledged as racism and once wrote of racial segregation in South Africa, "The treatment of colour nearly always horrifies anyone going out from Britain."

Opposition to Nazism

Tolkien vocally opposed Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party prior to the Second World War. In 1938, the publishing house Rütten & Loening Verlag was preparing to release ''The Hobbit'' in Nazi Germany. To Tolkien's outrage, he was asked beforehand whether he was of Aryan origin. In a letter to his British publisher Stanley Unwin, he condemned Nazi "race-doctrine" as "wholly pernicious and unscientific". He added that he had many Jewish friends and was considering, "letting a German translation go hang". He provided two letters to Rütten & Loening and instructed Unwin to send whichever he preferred. The more tactful letter was sent and was lost during the later bombing of Germany. In the unsent letter, Tolkien makes the point that "Aryan" is a linguistic term, denoting speakers of Indo-Iranian languages. He continued,

But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of ''Jewish'' origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have ''no'' ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject—which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.

In a 1941 letter to his son Michael, he expressed his resentment at the distortion of Germanic history in "Nordicism":

You have to understand the good in things, to detect the real evil. But no one ever calls on me to 'broadcast' or do a postscript. Yet I suppose I know better than most what is the truth about this 'Nordic' nonsense. Anyway, I have in this war a burning private grudge... against that ruddy little ignoramus Adolf Hitler ... Ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe, which I have ever loved, and tried to present in its true light. Nowhere, incidentally, was it nobler than in England, nor more early sanctified and Christianized.

In 1968, he objected to a description of Middle-earth as "Nordic", a term he said he disliked because of its association with racialist theories.

Total war

Tolkien criticized Allied use of total war tactics against civilians from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. In a 1945 letter to his son Christopher, he wrote:

We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well, well,—you and I can do nothing about it. And that [should] be a measure of the amount of guilt that can justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Government. Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapter—leaving, alas, everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the Machines.

He also reacted with anger at the excesses of anti-German propaganda during the war. In 1944, he wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:

... it is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic. ... There was a solemn article in the local paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right, whatever they have done.

He was horrified by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, referring to the scientists of the Manhattan Project as "these lunatic physicists" and "Babel-builders".

Writing

Tolkien devised several themes that were reused in successive drafts of his ''legendarium'', beginning with ''The Book of Lost Tales'', written while recuperating from illnesses contracted during The Battle of the Somme. The two most prominent stories, the tale of Beren and Lúthien and that of Túrin, were carried forward into long narrative poems (published in ''The Lays of Beleriand'').

Influences

British adventure stories

One of the greatest influences on Tolkien was the Arts and Crafts polymath William Morris. Tolkien wished to imitate Morris's prose and poetry romances, from which he took hints for the names of features such as the Dead Marshes in ''The Lord of the Rings'' and Mirkwood, along with some general aspects of approach.

Edward Wyke-Smith's ''The Marvellous Land of Snergs'', with its "table-high" title characters, strongly influenced the incidents, themes, and depiction of Bilbo's race in ''The Hobbit''.

Tolkien also cited H. Rider Haggard's novel ''She'' in a telephone interview: "I suppose as a boy ''She'' interested me as much as anything—like the Greek shard of Amyntas [Amenartas], which was the kind of machine by which everything got moving." A supposed facsimile of this potsherd appeared in Haggard's first edition, and the ancient inscription it bore, once translated, led the English characters to She's ancient kingdom. Critics have compared this device to the ''Testament of Isildur'' in ''The Lord of the Rings'' and to Tolkien's efforts to produce as an illustration a realistic page from the ''Book of Mazarbul.'' Critics starting with Edwin Muir have found resemblances between Haggard's romances and Tolkien's.

Tolkien wrote of being impressed as a boy by S. R. Crockett's historical novel ''The Black Douglas'' and of basing the Necromancer (Sauron) on its villain, Gilles de Retz. Incidents in both ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' are similar in narrative and style to the novel, and its overall style and imagery have been suggested as an influence on Tolkien.

European mythology

Tolkien was much inspired by early Germanic, especially Old English literature, poetry, and mythology, which were his chosen and much-loved areas of expertise. These sources of inspiration included Old English literature such as ''Beowulf'', Norse sagas such as the ''Volsunga saga'' and the ''Hervarar saga'', the ''Poetic Edda'', the ''Prose Edda'', the ''Nibelungenlied'', and numerous other culturally related works. Despite the similarities of his work to the ''Volsunga saga'' and the ''Nibelungenlied'', which were the basis for Richard Wagner's opera cycle ''Der Ring des Nibelungen'', Tolkien dismissed critics' direct comparisons to Wagner, telling his publisher, "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases." However, some critics believe that Tolkien was, in fact, indebted to Wagner for elements such as the "concept of the Ring as giving the owner mastery of the world ..." Two of the characteristics possessed by the One Ring, its inherent malevolence and corrupting power upon minds and wills, were not present in the mythical sources but have a central role in Wagner's opera.

Tolkien also acknowledged several non-Germanic influences or sources for some of his stories and ideas. Sophocles' play ''Oedipus the King'' he cited as inspiring elements of ''The Silmarillion'' and ''The Children of Húrin''. In addition, Tolkien first read William Forsell Kirby's translation of the Finnish national epic, the ''Kalevala'', while attending King Edward's School. He described its character of Väinämöinen as one of his influences for Gandalf the Grey. The ''Kalevala'''s antihero Kullervo was further described as an inspiration for Turin Turambar. Dimitra Fimi, Douglas A. Anderson, John Garth, and many other prominent Tolkien scholars believe that Tolkien also drew influence from a variety of Celtic (Irish, Scottish and Welsh) history and legends. However, after the ''Silmarillion'' manuscript was rejected, in part for its "eye-splitting" Celtic names, Tolkien denied their Celtic origin:

Catholicism

Catholic theology and imagery played a part in fashioning Tolkien's creative imagination, suffused as it was by his deeply religious spirit. Tolkien acknowledged this himself:

Specifically, Paul H. Kocher argues that Tolkien describes evil in the orthodox Christian way as the absence of good. He cites many examples in ''The Lord of the Rings'', such as Sauron's "Lidless Eye": "the black slit of its pupil opened on a pit, a window into nothing." Kocher sees Tolkien's source as Thomas Aquinas, "whom it is reasonable to suppose that Tolkien, as a medievalist and a Catholic, knows well". Tom Shippey makes the same point, but, instead of referring to Aquinas, says Tolkien was very familiar with Alfred the Great's Anglo-Saxon translation of Boethius' ''Consolation of Philosophy'', known as the ''Lays of Boethius''. Shippey contends that this Christian view of evil is most clearly stated by Boethius: "evil is nothing." He says Tolkien used the corollary that evil cannot create as the basis of Frodo's remark, "the Shadow ... can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own," and related remarks by Treebeard and Elrond. He goes on to argue that in ''The Lord of the Rings'' evil does sometimes seem to be an independent force, more than merely the absence of good (though not independent to the point of the Manichaean heresy), and suggests that Alfred's additions to his translation of Boethius may have inspired that view.

Another interesting argument is Stratford Caldecott's theological view on the Ring and what it represents. "The Ring of Power exemplifies the dark magic of the corrupted will, the assertion of self in disobedience to God. It appears to give freedom, but its true function is to enslave the wearer to the Fallen Angel. It corrodes the human will of the wearer, rendering him increasingly “thin” and unreal; indeed, its gift of invisibility symbolizes this ability to destroy all natural human relationships and identity. You could say the Ring is sin itself: tempting and seemingly harmless to begin with, increasingly hard to give up and corrupting in the long run".

Publications

''Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics''

As well as his fiction, Tolkien was also a leading author of academic literary criticism. His seminal 1936 lecture, later published as an article, revolutionized the treatment of the Anglo-Saxon epic ''Beowulf'' by literary critics. The essay remains highly influential in the study of Old English literature to this day. ''Beowulf'' is one of the most significant influences upon Tolkien's later fiction, with major details of both ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' being adapted from the poem. The piece reveals many of the aspects of ''Beowulf'' which Tolkien found most inspiring, most prominently the role of monsters in literature, particularly that of the dragon which appears in the final third of the poem:

As for the poem, one dragon, however hot, does not make a summer, or a host; and a man might well exchange for one good dragon what he would not sell for a wilderness. And dragons, real dragons, essential both to the machinery and the ideas of a poem or tale, are actually rare.

''The Silmarillion''

Tolkien wrote a brief "Sketch of the Mythology" which included the tales of Beren and Lúthien and of Túrin, and that sketch eventually evolved into the ''Quenta Silmarillion'', an epic history that Tolkien started three times but never published. Tolkien desperately hoped to publish it along with ''The Lord of the Rings'', but publishers (both Allen & Unwin and Collins) got cold feet. Moreover, printing costs were very high in 1950s Britain, requiring ''The Lord of the Rings'' to be published in three volumes. The story of this continuous redrafting is told in the posthumous series ''The History of Middle-earth'', edited by Tolkien's son, Christopher Tolkien. From around 1936, Tolkien began to extend this framework to include the tale of ''The Fall of Númenor'', which was inspired by the legend of Atlantis. Published in 1977, the final work, entitled ''The Silmarillion'', received the Locus Award for Best Fantasy novel in 1978.

Children's books and other short works

In addition to his mythopoeic compositions, Tolkien enjoyed inventing fantasy stories to entertain his children. He wrote annual Christmas letters from Father Christmas for them, building up a series of short stories (later compiled and published as ''The Father Christmas Letters''). Other stories included ''Mr. Bliss'' and ''Roverandom'' (for children), and ''Leaf by Niggle'' (part of ''Tree and Leaf''), ''The Adventures of Tom Bombadil'', ''On Fairy-Stories'', ''Smith of Wootton Major'' and ''Farmer Giles of Ham''. ''Roverandom'' and ''Smith of Wootton Major'', like ''The Hobbit'', borrowed ideas from his ''legendarium''.

''The Hobbit''

Tolkien never expected his stories to become popular, but by sheer accident a book called ''The Hobbit'', which he had written some years before for his own children, came in 1936 to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the London publishing firm George Allen & Unwin, who persuaded Tolkien to submit it for publication. However, the book attracted adult readers as well as children, and it became popular enough for the publishers to ask Tolkien to produce a sequel.

''The Lord of the Rings''

The request for a sequel prompted Tolkien to begin what would become his most famous work: the epic novel ''The Lord of the Rings'' (originally published in three volumes 1954–1955). Tolkien spent more than ten years writing the primary narrative and appendices for ''The Lord of the Rings'', during which time he received the constant support of the Inklings, in particular his closest friend Lewis, the author of ''The Chronicles of Narnia''. Both ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' are set against the background of ''The Silmarillion'', but in a time long after it.

Tolkien at first intended ''The Lord of the Rings'' to be a children's tale in the style of ''The Hobbit'', but it quickly grew darker and more serious in the writing. Though a direct sequel to ''The Hobbit'', it addressed an older audience, drawing on the immense back story of Beleriand that Tolkien had constructed in previous years, and which eventually saw posthumous publication in ''The Silmarillion'' and other volumes. Tolkien's influence weighs heavily on the fantasy genre that grew up after the success of ''The Lord of the Rings''.

''The Lord of the Rings'' became immensely popular in the 1960s and has remained so ever since, ranking as one of the most popular works of fiction of the 20th century, judged by both sales and reader surveys. In the 2003 "Big Read" survey conducted by the BBC, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was found to be the "Nation's Best-loved Book". Australians voted ''The Lord of the Rings'' "My Favourite Book" in a 2004 survey conducted by the Australian ABC. In a 1999 poll of Amazon.com customers, ''The Lord of the Rings'' was judged to be their favourite "book of the millennium". In 2002 Tolkien was voted the 92nd "greatest Briton" in a poll conducted by the BBC, and in 2004 he was voted 35th in the SABC3's Great South Africans, the only person to appear in both lists. His popularity is not limited to the English-speaking world: in a 2004 poll inspired by the UK's "Big Read" survey, about 250,000 Germans found ''The Lord of the Rings'' to be their favourite work of literature.

Posthumous publications

''The Silmarillion''

Tolkien had appointed his son Christopher to be his literary executor, and he (with assistance from Guy Gavriel Kay, later a well-known fantasy author in his own right) organized some of his father's unpublished material into a single coherent volume, published as ''The Silmarillion'' in 1977—his father had previously attempted to get a collection of "Silmarillion" material published in 1937 before writing ''The Lord of the Rings''.

''Unfinished Tales'' and ''The History of Middle-earth''

In 1980 Christopher Tolkien published a collection of more fragmentary material, under the title ''Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth''. In subsequent years (1983–1996) he published a large amount of the remaining unpublished materials, together with notes and extensive commentary, in a series of twelve volumes called ''The History of Middle-earth''. They contain unfinished, abandoned, alternative, and outright contradictory accounts, since they were always a work in progress for Tolkien and he only rarely settled on a definitive version for any of the stories. There is not complete consistency between ''The Lord of the Rings'' and ''The Hobbit'', the two most closely related works, because Tolkien never fully integrated all their traditions into each other. He commented in 1965, while editing ''The Hobbit'' for a third edition, that he would have preferred to completely rewrite the book because of the style of its prose.

''The Children of Húrin''

More recently, in 2007, the collection was completed with the publication of ''The Children of Húrin'' by HarperCollins (in the UK and Canada) and Houghton Mifflin (in the US). The novel tells the story of Túrin Turambar and his sister Nienor, children of Húrin Thalion. The material was compiled by Christopher Tolkien from ''The Silmarillion'', ''Unfinished Tales'', ''The History of Middle-earth'', and unpublished manuscripts.

''The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún''

In February 2009, ''Publishers Weekly'' announced that Houghton Mifflin Harcourt had acquired the American rights to Tolkien's unpublished work ''The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún''. The work, which was released worldwide on 5 May 2009 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and HarperCollins, retells the legend of Sigurd and the fall of the Niflungs from Germanic mythology. It is a narrative poem composed in alliterative verse and is modelled after the Old Norse poetry of the Elder Edda. Christopher Tolkien supplied copious notes and commentary upon his father's work.

According to Christopher Tolkien, it is no longer possible to trace the exact date of the work's composition. On the basis of circumstantial evidence, he suggests that it dates from the 1930s. In his foreword he wrote, "He scarcely ever (to my knowledge) referred to them. For my part, I cannot recall any conversation with him on the subject until very near the end of his life, when he spoke of them to me, and tried unsuccessfully to find them." In a 1967 letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien wrote, "Thank you for your wonderful effort in translating and reorganizing ''The Song of the Sibyl''. In return again I hope to send you, if I can lay my hands on it (I hope it isn't lost), a thing I did many years ago when trying to learn the art of writing alliterative poetry: an attempt to unify the lays about the Völsungs from the Elder Edda, written in the old eight-line fornyrðislag stanza."

''Mr. Bliss''

One of Tolkien's least-known short works is the children's storybook ''Mr. Bliss'', published in 1982. It tells the story of Mr. Bliss and his first ride in his new motor-car. Many adventures follow: encounters with bears, angry neighbours, irate shopkeepers, and assorted collisions. The story was inspired by Tolkien's own vehicular mishaps with his first car, purchased in 1932. The bears were based on toy bears owned by Tolkien's sons. Tolkien was both author and illustrator of the book. He submitted it to his publishers as a balm to readers who were hungry for more from him after the success of ''The Hobbit''. The lavish ink and coloured-pencil illustrations would have made production costs prohibitively expensive. Tolkien agreed to redraw the pictures in a simpler style, but then found he did not have time to do so. The book was published in 1982 as a facsimile of Tolkien's difficult-to-read illustrated manuscript, with a typeset transcription on each facing page.

Manuscript locations

The Department of Special Collections and University Archives at Marquette University's John P. Raynor, S.J., Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, preserves many of Tolkien's manuscripts; other original material is in Oxford University's Bodleian Library. Marquette University has the manuscripts and proofs of ''The Lord of the Rings'', ''The Hobbit'', and other works, including ''Farmer Giles of Ham'', while the Bodleian Library holds the papers containing Tolkien's Silmarillion mythology and his academic work.

In 2009, a partial draft of ''Language and Human Nature'', which Tolkien had begun co-writing with C.S. Lewis but had never completed, was discovered at the Bodleian Library.

Languages and philology

Linguistic career

Both Tolkien's academic career and his literary production are inseparable from his love of language and philology. He specialized in English philology at university and in 1915 graduated with Old Norse as special subject. He worked for the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918 and is credited with having worked on a number of words starting with the letter W, including walrus, over which he struggled mightily. In 1920, he became Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, where he claimed credit for raising the number of students of linguistics from five to twenty. He gave courses in Old English heroic verse, history of English, various Old English and Middle English texts, Old and Middle English philology, introductory Germanic philology, Gothic, Old Icelandic, and Medieval Welsh. When in 1925, aged thirty-three, Tolkien applied for the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, Oxford, he boasted that his students of Germanic philology in Leeds had even formed a "Viking Club". He also had a certain, if imperfect, knowledge of Finnish.

Privately, Tolkien was attracted to "things of racial and linguistic significance", and in his 1955 lecture ''English and Welsh'', which is crucial to his understanding of race and language, he entertained notions of "inherent linguistic predilections", which he termed the "native language" as opposed to the "cradle-tongue" which a person first learns to speak. He considered the West Midlands dialect of Middle English to be his own "native language", and, as he wrote to W. H. Auden in 1955, "I am a West-midlander by blood (and took to early west-midland Middle English as a known tongue as soon as I set eyes on it)."

Tolkien learned Latin, French, and German from his mother, and while at school he learned Middle English, Old English, Finnish, Gothic, Greek, Italian, Old Norse, Spanish, Welsh, and Medieval Welsh. He was also familiar with Danish, Dutch, Lombardic, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Swedish and older forms of modern Germanic and Slavonic languages, revealing his deep linguistic knowledge, above all of the Germanic languages.

Language construction

Parallel to Tolkien's professional work as a philologist, and sometimes overshadowing this work, to the effect that his academic output remained rather thin, was his affection for constructing languages. The most developed of these are Quenya and Sindarin, the etymological connection between which formed the core of much of Tolkien's ''legendarium''. Language and grammar for Tolkien was a matter of aesthetics and euphony, and Quenya in particular was designed from "phonaesthetic" considerations; it was intended as an "Elvenlatin", and was phonologically based on Latin, with ingredients from Finnish, Welsh, English, and Greek. A notable addition came in late 1945 with Adûnaic or Númenórean, a language of a "faintly Semitic flavour", connected with Tolkien's Atlantis legend, which by ''The Notion Club Papers'' ties directly into his ideas about inability of language to be inherited, and via the "Second Age" and the story of Eärendil was grounded in the ''legendarium'', thereby providing a link of Tolkien's 20th-century "real primary world" with the legendary past of his Middle-earth.

Tolkien considered languages inseparable from the mythology associated with them, and he consequently took a dim view of auxiliary languages: in 1930 a congress of Esperantists were told as much by him, in his lecture ''A Secret Vice'', "Your language construction will breed a mythology", but by 1956 he had concluded that "Volapük, Esperanto, Ido, Novial, &c;, &c;, are dead, far deader than ancient unused languages, because their authors never invented any Esperanto legends".

The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings ''dwarves'' and ''dwarvish'' (alongside ''dwarfs'' and ''dwarfish''), which had been little used since the mid-19th century and earlier. (In fact, according to Tolkien, had the Old English plural survived, it would have been ''dwerrow''.) He also coined the term ''eucatastrophe'', though it remains mainly used in connection with his own work.

Legacy

Adaptations

In a 1951 letter to Milton Waldman, Tolkien wrote about his intentions to create a "body of more or less connected legend", of which "[t]he cycles should be linked to a majestic whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music and drama". The hands and minds of many artists have indeed been inspired by Tolkien's legends. Personally known to him were Pauline Baynes (Tolkien's favourite illustrator of ''The Adventures of Tom Bombadil'' and ''Farmer Giles of Ham'') and Donald Swann (who set the music to ''The Road Goes Ever On''). Queen Margrethe II of Denmark created illustrations to ''The Lord of the Rings'' in the early 1970s. She sent them to Tolkien, who was struck by the similarity they bore in style to his own drawings.

However, Tolkien was not fond of all the artistic representation of his works that were produced in his lifetime, and was sometimes harshly disapproving. In 1946, he rejected suggestions for illustrations by Horus Engels for the German edition of ''The Hobbit'' as "too Disnified ... Bilbo with a dribbling nose, and Gandalf as a figure of vulgar fun rather than the Odinic wanderer that I think of".

Tolkien was sceptical of the emerging Tolkien fandom in the United States, and in 1954 he returned proposals for the dust jackets of the American edition of ''The Lord of the Rings'':

He had dismissed dramatic representations of fantasy in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", first presented in 1939: .}}

On receiving a screenplay for a proposed film adaptation of ''The Lord of the Rings'' by Morton Grady Zimmerman, Tolkien wrote:

Tolkien went on to criticize the script scene by scene ("yet one more scene of screams and rather meaningless slashings"). He was not implacably opposed to the idea of a dramatic adaptation, however, and sold the film, stage and merchandise rights of ''The Hobbit'' and ''The Lord of the Rings'' to United Artists in 1968. United Artists never made a film, although director John Boorman was planning a live-action film in the early 1970s. In 1976 the rights were sold to Tolkien Enterprises, a division of the Saul Zaentz Company, and the first movie adaptation of ''The Lord of the Rings'' appeared in 1978, an animated rotoscoping film directed by Ralph Bakshi with screenplay by the fantasy writer Peter S. Beagle. It covered only the first half of the story of ''The Lord of the Rings''. In 1977 an animated TV production of ''The Hobbit'' was made by Rankin-Bass, and in 1980 they produced an animated ''The Return of the King'', which covered some of the portions of ''The Lord of the Rings'' that Bakshi was unable to complete.

From 2001 to 2003, New Line Cinema released ''The Lord of the Rings'' as a trilogy of live-action films that were filmed in New Zealand and directed by Peter Jackson. The series was successful, performing extremely well commercially and winning numerous Oscars.

There are currently plans for a two-film series based on ''The Hobbit'' (see ''The Hobbit (2012 film)''). The films are scheduled for release in December 2012 and December 2013. Peter Jackson will serve as executive producer, director and co-writer.

Memorials

Posthumously named after Tolkien are the Tolkien Road in Eastbourne, East Sussex, and the asteroid 2675 Tolkien discovered in 1982. Tolkien Way in Stoke-on-Trent is named after Tolkien's eldest son, Fr. John Francis Tolkien, who was the priest in charge at the nearby Roman Catholic Church of Our Lady of the Angels and St. Peter in Chains. There is also a professorship in Tolkien's name at Oxford, the J.R.R. Tolkien Professor of English Literature and Language.

In the Dutch town of Geldrop, near Eindhoven, the streets of an entire new neighbourhood are named after Tolkien himself ("Laan van Tolkien") and some of the best-known characters from his books. A gaff-topsail schooner of Netherlands registry used for passenger cruises on the Baltic Sea and elsewhere in European waters was named ''J.R. Tolkien'' in 1998.

In the Hall Green and Moseley areas of Birmingham there are a number of parks and walkways dedicated to J. R. R. Tolkien—most notably, the Millstream Way and Moseley Bog. Collectively the parks are known as the Shire Country Parks. Every year at Sarehole Mill the Tolkien Weekend is held in memory of the author; the fiftieth anniversary of the release of ''The Lord of the Rings'' was commemorated in 2005.

In the Silicon Valley towns of Saratoga and San Jose in California, there are two housing developments with street names drawn from Tolkien's works. At the University of California at Davis are "Baggins End Innovative Housing", an on-campus commune consisting of 14 polyurethane-insulated fibreglass domes, and an off-campus development known as "Village Homes", a planned community designed to be ecologically sustainable and whose street names are taken from ''The Lord of the Rings''. At the University of California at Irvine is the "Middle Earth" housing community where each building is named after a place in ''The Hobbit'' or ''The Lord of the Rings''. At the University of California, Berkeley, the Berkeley Student Cooperative includes a vegetarian theme house known as Lothlorien, whose residents are known as "elves".

The Columbia, Maryland neighbourhood of Hobbit's Glen and its street names (including Rivendell Lane, Tooks Way, and Oakenshield Circle) come from Tolkien's works. There is also a Hobbit Restaurant in Ocean City, Maryland.

Since 2003 The Tolkien Society in organizing Tolkien Reading Day, that takes place on 25 March.

Commemorative plaques

There are five blue plaques that commemorate places associated with Tolkien: one in Oxford, and four in Birmingham. One of the Birmingham plaques commemorates the inspiration provided by Sarehole Mill, near which he lived between the ages of four and eight, while two others mark childhood homes up to the time he left to attend Oxford University. The third one marks a hotel he stayed at while on leave from World War I. The Oxford plaque commemorates the residence where Tolkien wrote ''The Hobbit'' and most of ''The Lord of the Rings''.

! Address !! Commemoration !! Date unveiled !! Issued by
Sarehole MillHall Green, Birmingham	"Inspired" 1896–1900(i. e. lived nearby)	15 August 2002	Birmingham Civic Society andThe Tolkien Society
1 Duchess PlaceLadywood, Birmingham	Lived near here 1902–1910	Unknown	Birmingham Civic Society
4 Highfield RoadEdgbaston, Birmingham	Lived here 1910–1911	Unknown	Birmingham Civic Society andThe Tolkien Society
Plough and HarrowHagley Road, Birmingham	Stayed here June 1916	June 1997	The Tolkien Society
20 Northmoor Road North Oxford	Lived here 1930–1947	3 December 2002	Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board

Another two plaques marking buildings associated with Tolkien are found in Oxford and Harrogate. The Harrogate plaque commemorates a residence where Tolkien convalesced from trench fever in 1917, while the Oxford plaque marks his home from 1953–1968 at 76 Sandfield Road, Headington.

Bibliography

References

General references

''Biography'': ''Letters'':

Notes

Further reading

A small selection of books about Tolkien and his works:

External links

The Tolkien Estate Website

Journal of Inklings Studies peer-reviewed journal on Tolkien and his literary circle, based at Oxford

BBC film (1968) featuring Tolkien

HarperCollins Tolkien Website

Tolkien Library Website

List of Tolkien biographies

Tolkien Biography (The Tolkien Society)

Tolkien Archives at the Raynor Library, Marquette University

J.R.R. Tolkien: An Imaginative Life Three illustrated on-line lectures examining the life and work of Tolkien (at The Gnosis Archive)

Category:1892 births Category:1973 deaths Category:Alumni of Exeter College, Oxford Category:British Army personnel of World War I Category:British Traditionalist Catholics Category:Commanders of the Order of the British Empire Category:English anti-communists Category:English fantasy writers Category:English linguists Category:English philologists Category:Anglo-Saxon studies scholars Category:English people of German descent Category:English Roman Catholics Category:Fellows of Merton College, Oxford Category:Fellows of Pembroke College, Oxford Category:Academics of the University of Leeds Category:Inklings Category:Inventors of writing systems Category:Lancashire Fusiliers officers Category:Language creators Category:Mythopoeic writers Category:People educated at King Edward's School, Birmingham Category:People from Birmingham, West Midlands Category:Philologists Category:Traditionalist Catholic writers Category:Translators from Old English Category:Writers on Germanic paganism Category:Writers who illustrated their own writing Category:People from Bloemfontein Category:Statutory Professors of the University of Oxford Category:Prometheus Award winning authors

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Max McLean is an American actor and narrator for audio books. He is the President of Fellowship for the Performing Arts, narrator for the ''Listener's Bible'' audio line, and speaker on the daily radio program ''Listen to the Bible'' which airs on over 670 radio affiliates worldwide.

McLean is best known for his theatrical presentations of ''The Screwtape Letters'', ''Mark's Gospel'', and ''Genesis''.

Personal life

Born in Panama City, Panama on April 14, 1953, McLean immigrated to the United States when he was four. He married his wife Sharon in 1976.

Career

He has appeared in several off Broadway theater productions in New York, at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland, Pegasus Theater in Chicago, Illinois; the Dallas Theater Center in Dallas, Texas; the Stratford Festival Theater, as well as dozens of colleges and performing arts venues across the country.

McLean is president of Fellowship for the Performing Arts, which he founded. He also serves as the Producing Artistic Director.

Awards

McLean received the 2009 Jeff Award for Solo Performance in Mark's Gospel.

References

Challies, Tim. (January 21, 2008) "An Interview with Max McLean"

Category:American stage actors Category:Living people