J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892 – September 2, 1973)

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 20 years since the first “Lord of the Rings” film was released to cinemas the world over. This concept came from the mind of J.R.R. Tolkien.

All the astrology sites have followed one another with a birth time of 10:00 pm, and gave that time a “C” rating, meaning that it was rectified from an estimated birth time. Well, maybe they should have pinned the whole thing on Venus at age 21 when he finally proposed to Edith. To me that placed the birth time at 9:00 pm instead.

On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with family friend C. H. Jessop at Cheltenham. He declared that he had never ceased to love her, and asked her to marry him. Edith replied that she had already accepted the proposal of George Field, the brother of one of her closest school friends. But Edith said she had agreed to marry Field only because she felt “on the shelf” and had begun to doubt that Tolkien still cared for her. She explained that, because of Tolkien’s letter, everything had changed.

On 8 January 1913, Tolkien travelled by train to Cheltenham and was met on the platform by Edith. The two took a walk into the countryside, sat under a railway viaduct, and talked. By the end of the day, Edith had agreed to accept Tolkien’s proposal. She wrote to Field and returned her engagement ring. Field was “dreadfully upset at first”, and the Field family was “insulted and angry”. Upon learning of Edith’s new plans, Jessop wrote to her guardian, “I have nothing to say against Tolkien, he is a cultured gentleman, but his prospects are poor in the extreme, and when he will be in a position to marry I cannot imagine. Had he adopted a profession it would have been different.”

Following their engagement, Edith reluctantly announced that she was converting to Catholicism at Tolkien’s insistence. Jessop, “like many others of his age and class … strongly anti-Catholic”, was infuriated, and he ordered Edith to find other lodgings.

Edith Bratt and Ronald Tolkien were formally engaged at Birmingham in January 1913, and married at St Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic Church, Warwick, on 22 March 1916

Wikipedia

The resulting Neptune/Pluto conjunction in the 10th House of Career absolutely makes this chart timing perfect, whereas the 10 pm timing would have this conjunction in the 9th House and have Tolkien only concentrate his focus on the higher learning and not the subsequent writing.

Moon Inconjunct Saturn

This aspect usually means that your need for emotional security conflicts with your need to live with the world’s demands. Each of us needs to be accepted and loved for what we are, in order to have enough self confidence to deal with the world. But we also have to learn to live with our own life situations in order to survive. In other words, we have to realize that we can’t have everything we want. With this aspect, these two needs are working against each other. Probably you will satisfy one of them at the expense of the other.

Mercury Inconjunct Midheaven

It is very important that you develop your mind and your powers of thought, so that you can use them to attain whatever objectives you set for yourself. However, before you can accomplish this, you may have to solve certain problems. You may feel that there is a tension between your natural spontaneous views and what is taught by your parents and other adults. Even though their teachings seem perfectly reasonable, you want to think matters through for yourself. But while you are young, you may not be able to accept your own ideas as valid if they contradict what you have been taught. Yet you cannot simply suppress your own ways of thinking. If you try, you will create tension and probably create a gap between what you are trying to do and what you say. When you get older you may express this tension by making indiscreet remarks that totally get in the way of your objectives.

Jupiter Inconjunct Ascendant

With this aspect, you may discover that in order to grow and get ahead in life, you will have to put aside your own needs and do whatever the situation or other people require. At times you will go through tremendous and possibly painful creative changes in your life, in which everything that you are is replaced by a new order. [Mordor?] Your environment may change radically, or you may lose all your old friends and find a whole set of new ones. During these times you will arrive at new understandings and realizations that make it impossible for your life to continue as before. You must always be open to new ideas and be willing to change your outlook on life.

Uranus Inconjunct Neptune (1893-1896 and 1924-1927)

This aspect indicates a generation that had mixed feelings about its ideals and how to implement them. They often felt very confused about their ideals, and when they found that their ideals failed because they were badly formulated, this group became disillusioned. States of consciousness beyond the ordinary are very confusing to them, and they prefer not to get involved with such matters.

Uranus Inconjunct Pluto (1892-1894 and 1911-1912)

This aspect indicates changes in the world of the people who were born at these times, changes that were difficult to understand because they were very revolutionary but subtle in many ways. The people born during the first period experienced the consequences of these changes through having to fight in the First World War. The second group reached maturity at the time of the Great Depression. Both the First World War and the Depression were expressions of the breakdown of the nineteenth-century world order that was dominated by Western Europe.

A Map of Middle Earth

All Rings fans recognize that Middle Earth is actually the Midlands and Wales in Great Britain. (This map seems to be proof enough of that fact.) But where exactly is Mordor?

But the most likely inspiration for Tolkien’s dark realm was a far less exotic locale. The allegory of evil in Tolkien’s universe had less to do with geography than a bending and twisting of nature. Mordor is all smoke and pollution, bellowing furnaces and blackening land. This was, in part, Tolkien’s reaction to industrialization. And its mark could be seen especially in areas around the city of Birmingham, the home of Tolkien’s parents. A recent exhibition in the nearby city of Wolverhampton linked images from Tolkien’s sketchbooks to depictions of the Black Country, a region northwest of Birmingham once known for its coal mines, steel mills and stretches of industrial blight.

The Washington Post

Hmm.