who is tolkien in fact?

[Lotrelf]

Originally Posted by Banazîr

I've noticed a few similarities with him and Frodo, for example, Frodo's parents died when he was 12, Tolkien's mother died when he was also 12. Tolkien loved mushrooms and I remember reading somewhere that when he was a kid, he got caught(or almost) running away with mushrooms he had stolen(from a farmer?)in a field..just like Frodo. And I remember something about dogs.
I've also read that he was stung by a spider when living in South Africa, and so was Frodo by Shelob... I can't think of any other right now..

I didn't know this! Is it true? In one of his letters, Professor says the character who is most like him is Faramir.

[mhagain]

The Faramir similarity comes primarily from the Numenor/Atlantis dream, referenced in Letter 163:

I say this about the 'heart', for I have what some might call an Atlantis complex. Possibly inherited, though my parents died too young for me to know such things about them, and too young to transfer such things by words. Inherited from me (I suppose) by one only of my children, though I did not know that about my son until recently, and he did not know it about me. I mean the terrible recurrent dream (beginning with memory) of the Great Wave, towering up, and coming in ineluctably over the trees and green fields. (I bequeathed it to Faramir.) I don't think I have had it since I wrote the 'Downfall of Númenor' as the last of the legends of the First and Second Age.

There may have been other personality-similarities, but I'm not personally aware of such, and in any event this is the one that most people will know of.

[doug*platypus]

From reading Letters, I recall that Tolkien wrote to someone that he was most like Faramir. I can't recall which Letter it was, though. But my own opinion is that an author is necessarily like all of their characters. In order to understand, create and write a character, they have to have that in them to start with.

Of course, an author is more like some characters than others. To work out which, we can either look to Tolkien's life and what we know of it, or we can look to the characters themselves. Those that aren't fleshed out enough or feel significantly real would, imho, be the ones Tolkien is least similar to. And conversely, we may guess that the most fully formed characters (such as Gandalf, Frodo, Aragorn to name a few) are ones that he was more similar to.