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| A fragment of Michael Tolkien's letter from 1963 |
Be sure to read the earlier part of this story about the correspondence between Professor J.R.R. Tolkien's family and his cousins in the USA first - it can be found here: "Previously unknown letter by J. R. R. Tolkien on his ancestor from Poland! (1951)".
Thanks to my friendship with the Tolkien family from the USA, I was able not only to reconstruct their genealogy in detail and their connection to the Tolkiens from England through a common ancestor, the Gdańsk soldier Christian Tolkien (1706-1791), but I could also perform genetic research on the Tolkien family, and I also gained access to correspondence from 1951-1963 between these two branches of the same Tolkien family, whose roots I traced to East Prussia. Thanks to my blog, you have already seen a letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to his cousins in America with a very interesting fragment about the Tolkien pseudo-heraldry and a description of the Polish thread in the history of this family (see here).
I will now present a letter from Michael H.R. Tolkien to Charles Woodrow Tolkien from California and his children. Following the letter, which presents the legendary history of the Tolkien family (almost 100 percent untrue), I will briefly reconstruct the family's history based on documents from archives in Berlin, Gdansk, and London.
The
Haven, Gilling East, YORK.
April 9th, 1963.
My dear Cousin,
for such you must be, however many times removed! – very many thanks for your letter of March 10th, received by me on March 29th after two forwardings, my Father and Mother being away on holiday from Oxford when your letter reached Sandfield Road.
Well, the Tolkien tribe is well spread about the globe, and many thanks to you for information about your part of it – I should be interested to know when Tolkiens first set out for the "New World" – I always understood that my father’s uncle, Lawrence Tolkien, emigrated to USA or Canada, but perhaps your connection with USA goes back to an earlier period than that.
I have sent the advert you enclosed to the firm in York and told them to get in touch with you if their investigations lead anywhere. Strangely enough York is only about 20 miles away from my home and the boarding school (Ampleforth College, run by the Benedictine monks) in which I teach in North Yorkshire.
My knowledge of the family's origins is limited but I can tell you the following which you might care to pass on to your son Rick. The name Tolkien is derived from the German Tollkühn (Old German Tollkiehn) meaning rash or foolhardy. It was applied in 1529 to George, Count of Ansbach, by Ferdinand Archduke of Austria at the Turkish siege of Vienna: the Sultan, Suleyman the Magnificent had invested the city, and the Count of Ansbach weary of the siege decided, with a handful of personal followers, to raid the Turkish camp at night, although the sky was ablaze with their camp-fires! To cut a long and enthralling story short down came a few hundred wild young men on horseback, hallooing and roaring, resolved on a hit and run raid, but the Turks thought it was the great counter-attack they had long feared and began to fall back in mounting chaos: then a counter-attack really got under way successful. The Archduke Ferdinand of Hapsburg and Austria, brother of the Emperor Charles II (1519-1558?) was the commander-in-chief of the Imperial armies defending Europe against the invasion of the Turks: he summoned Count George before him, praised him for his valour but referred to him "der Tollkühn" the foolhardy, a name retained proudly by himself and his descendants.
So much for the origin of the name. George of Ansbach was connected with the Jagellons, the royal family of Poland, and the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg and Baireuth. The family became much more wealthy in the Reformation. George was known as „the Pious" for his zealous defence of Christendom against the Turks, and was Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights. But this did not prevent him from entering the scramble of the nobility for Church lands and so he became Lutheran Protestant. The family held lands in Saxony and South Germany, also in France, as a result of marriages with French landowners daughters. Hostility to Russia at the end of the 18th century and to the French Revolution resulted in a total loss of everything possessed by them and their emigration (the few that survived) England: a Tollkühn was guillotined for his scrupulous fidelity to Louis XVI of France – being one of the commanders of Les Allemaines Royales the French King’s German guards and refused to desert when prudence rather than heroism dictated such a course! And so the Tolkiens re-established themselves as middle-class Englishmen – for instance Tolkien’s pianos were famous in mid-19th century England! I hope this brief summary will interest you and your son. I fear that armorial bearings of European families can be difficult to trace, and I know no more than my Father on this side of the business. But York Insignia may be able to help us out.
There are not very many Tolkiens in England, all of them being fairly closely related and able to tie up their descent with a common ancestor. An acquaintance of mine in the war, an intelligence officer came across a Count Tolkienski in Poland, whose family had lived there since the French Revolution – and the original Tolkienski had been a benefactor to the nearby town whose main street bore his name. But I have not been able to follow up that fascinating by way of Tolkien history.
I am 42, am married with three children: I have a son aged 20, Michael George, who is studying at St. Andrews University, Scotland, to become schoolmaster, as his father has been for the past 17 years! I was planning to be a professional soldier, but war damage put an end to that career and neither Industry nor the Civil Service satisfied: I started teaching as an experiment in 1946 and have been at it ever since with varying success! My daughter Joan Anne, aged 18, is training to be a nurse, and my younger daughter Judith Mary, is still at school, and doesn’t yet know what she wants to be!
I am away from home at the moment, on the Yorkshire coast, having a break from school for the Easter holidays (i.e. vacation), so I have had to jot down the above facts from memory. However, I have put my home address at the top of this letter in case you would like to get in touch with me again.
With kind regards and every good wish to yourself and your wife and family from my wife and myself -
Very sincerely Yours
Michael H.R. Tolkien
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| Michael H.R. Tolkien died in 1984. You can read more about him on Oronzo Cilli's blog (here) |
And now it's time to summarize the true history of the Tolkien family. First of all, the recipient of the letter, Charles Woodrow Tolkien, was a fourth cousin of J.R.R. Tolkien. You may know his as an American actor, Wilson Wood (see here). Their common ancestor was Christian Tolkien, who was born in 1706 in Kreuzburg, Kingdom of Prussia, and died in 1791 in Gdańsk, Kingdom of Poland:
The two cousins looked very similar:
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| Charles Woodrow Tolkien aka Wilson Wood (1915-2004) |
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| John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) |
According to my research the name Tolkien is derived from the place name in East Prussia, from Tollkeim (see here). J.R.R. Tolkien's first ancestor with this surname was a 16th-century middle-class farmer in the village of Globuhnen in the parish of Kreuzburg in East Prussia. His name was Jacob Tolkien, and his surname appears in the forms Tolckin, Tollkeim, and Tollkeimer, meaning that he or his father came to Globuhnen from the village of Tollkeim in Natangia, about 20 kilometers away (or possibly from the village known before World War II as Dolkeim in Sambia, East Prussia). In 1514, when Prince George of Brandenburg-Ansbach (see here), mentioned in Michael Tolkien's letter as the Tolkiens' supposed ancestor, was alive, Jacob Tolkien's predecessor on the Globuhnen farm, Paul Katten, received the privilege of freehold ownership from Prince George's brother, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, Albert (see here; and, by the way, George the Pious was the ruler of Silesia where the author of this blog lives). Here is a copy of it, which mentions another relative of J.R.R. Tolkien, Michael Tolkien ("Schultzen zu Globuhnen Michael Tolckeins Verschreibung"):
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| Ostpr. Fol. 159a-b (Hausbuch Brandenburg, Bd. 4) GStA PK, Berlin-Dahlem |
Jacob Tolkien, the village mayor of Globuhnen from 1601, looked more like the village mayor of nearby Tolksdorf, Hans Blaman, than like Prince George of Brandenburg-Ansbach:
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| Hans Blaman, a village mayor of Tolksdorf in the 17th c. |
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| George the Pious from Michael Tolkien's letter |
The village of Globuhnen was converted to the Culm law in 1601, and Jacob Tolkien and his descendants until the beginning of In the 18th century, had the occupation of the village Culm mayors (German Schulz). Already in the second decade of the 17th century, one of Jacob’s sons, Friedrich Tolkien, became a resident of the nearby town, the capital of Natangia, Kreuzburg. His descendants would be bakers, shoemakers in Kreuzburg in the 17th and 18th centuries, and in the times of the Kingdom of Prussia also soldiers of the local garrison.
At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, one of these Tolkiens achieved the honour of city treasurer, and then in the years 1798-1818 the mayor of Kreuzburg - his name was Ernst Tolkiehn. His descendant was a classical philologist from Koenigsberg on Albertina University, Prof. Johannes Tolkiehn (author of books that J.R.R. Tolkien may have known).
Meanwhile, in the years 1733-1740, two brothers, sons of the baker Christian Tolkien, migrated from Kreuzburg to Danzig (today Gdańsk) in search of work, to take part in the Siege of Gdańsk (see here), and also to protect themselves from serving in the Prussian army. Their names were Christian Tolkien and Michael Tolkien. Christian Tolkien (1706-1791), great-great-great-grandfather of J.R.R. Tolkien became a soldier-artilleryman of the Gdańsk Garrison (see his biography), and his younger brother became a master furrier in the Broad Quarter of the Main City in Gdańsk. Michael’s descendant, antiquarian Christian Tolkien, lived in Gdańsk until 1821. He left no sons. These Tolkiens were of German language.
The two sons of artilleryman Christian Tolkien in the era of the so-called "Prussian plagues" emigrated through Amsterdam to England and settled in 1770 in London. Today, the American branch of the Tolkien family descends from the elder son, a London gentleman and master furrier from the City, Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1746-1813). The second son was J.R.R. Tolkien’s great-great-grandfather, a watchmaker (Gravell & Tolkien) and a China dealer, John (< Johann) Benjamin Tolkien (1752-1819).
His son was George Tolkien (1784-1840), the Professor's great-grandfather, who was a London music teacher and singer at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane (see especially here). George was born an English citizen and his language was English. One of George’s sons was John Benjamin Tolkien (1807-1896), the Professor's grandfather, a piano and music dealer and music teacher in Birmingham. The Professor’s father was Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857-1896), a bank clerk who died on duty in South Africa (Orange Free State).
If you want to know more about the results of my #TolkienAncestry research, see here: Tolkien Ancestry Research Summary.