J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 - 1973) was an English writer, philologist and academic who held professorships of Anglo-Saxon and of English language and literature at the University of Oxford. He is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, set in the invented world of Middle-earth, works that established the conventions of modern fantasy fiction. [1][2]
Early life
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State in southern Africa, where his father worked as a bank manager. His mother brought him and his brother to England in 1895, and his father died the following year before he could rejoin them. [1]
His mother Mabel converted to Catholicism, a step that estranged her from her family, and died in 1904, leaving the boys in the guardianship of a priest, Father Francis Morgan. Tolkien attended King Edward's School in Birmingham, where he began inventing languages, and won a place at Exeter College, Oxford, to read classics before changing to English language and literature. [3]
War and academic career
Tolkien married Edith Bratt in 1916 and served the same year as an officer with the Lancashire Fusiliers at the Battle of the Somme, where several of his closest school friends were killed. Invalided home with trench fever, he spent much of the remaining war in hospital and began writing the earliest stories of his legendarium. [1]
After the war he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, taught at the University of Leeds, and in 1925 was elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, moving in 1945 to the Merton chair of English language and literature. His 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics argued that the poem should be read as a work of art rather than a historical document, and permanently changed the direction of Old English scholarship. [2]
Middle-earth
The Hobbit, developed from stories told to his children, was published in 1937 and was an immediate success. Its publisher asked for a sequel, and the work that followed grew over more than a decade into The Lord of the Rings, issued in three volumes between 1954 and 1955. [1]
The books rest on decades of private invention: the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin, devised first and supplied with histories, and the mythological cycle of the Elder Days from which the later narratives descend. Tolkien described his method as the creation of a secondary world with its own internal consistency, an idea set out in his essay On Fairy-Stories. [4]
He was a member of the Inklings, the Oxford writing circle that included C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, who read and discussed each other's work in progress. [3]
Later life and legacy
Tolkien retired from his chair in 1959 and lived latterly in Bournemouth and Oxford, troubled by the scale of his unexpected popular fame, particularly in the United States from the 1960s. He was appointed CBE in 1972 and died at Bournemouth on 2 September 1973. [1]
His son Christopher edited and published the unfinished mythology as The Silmarillion in 1977 and, over the following decades, a long series of volumes of drafts and commentary. The novels have sold in the hundreds of millions of copies and were adapted into award-winning films, and their influence extends across fantasy literature, illustration and role-playing and video games. [2]
