Leaf by Niggle Study Guide

J. R. R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892 before leaving for England, the home country of his parents, at the age of three with his mother and brother. His father passed away in Bloemfontein before he could join them. Tolkien spent the rest of his childhood in Worcestershire, England and was brought up as a Catholic by his mother, who died when he was 12 years old. At the age of 16, Tolkien began a relationship with Edith Bratt, whom he married in 1916. During his engagement to Edith, Tolkien completed a degree in English language and literature at Exeter College, Oxford. He delayed enlistment in the British Army, which was at that time fighting in the First World War, but he was eventually commissioned and posted to France. After contracting trench fever in 1916, he was sent back to England and began to create the mythology of his fictional world that would eventually form the setting of The Silmarillion, The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings. He became a professor at Oxford in 1925 and completed The Lord of the Rings during his tenure before retiring in 1959, having found fame as an author. Tolkien died in 1973 at the age of 81.

After “Leaf by Niggle” was published in the Dublin Review, it was printed alongside Tolkien’s essay, “On Fairy Stories,” in the book Tree and Leaf. Through both parts of this book, Tolkien demonstrated his theories of fantasy and his approach to writing, which also included his philosophy that true creation could only be the work of God while the creative attempts of humans, which he called “sub-creation,” were works that mimicked or praised God’s creation. It’s also theorized by many scholars that “Leaf by Niggle” is not only an allegory for the journey from mortality to the afterlife, but an allegory of Tolkien’s life specifically and his tendency to focus singularly on his creative projects while procrastinating more mundane and practical tasks.

Tolkien wrote “Leaf by Niggle” a few years after the publication of his first book, The Hobbit, a fantasy novel for younger readers featuring a three-foot-six protagonist called Bilbo who is perhaps even crankier than Niggle. Tolkien’s following three-volume novel, The Lord of the Rings, is set in the same fictional universe as The Hobbit, as is his posthumously published volume of mythology, The Silmarillion. The representation of the afterlife in “Leaf by Niggle” is in some ways similar to the Christian ideas of paradise mentioned in the Bible, particularly in the Book of Revelation. The same year that “Leaf by Niggle” was published, C. S. Lewis, a friend of Tolkien’s, published a novel with a similar focus on the afterlife—though with more explicit theological references—called The Great Divorce.