J.R.R. Tolkien

Biography

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973) was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, a veteran of the Battle of the Somme (1916), and a philologist who created languages — Quenya and Sindarin among them — before he created the stories that would use them. He began writing The Hobbit in the late 1920s on blank exam papers while grading student essays, telling the story to his children. His friend and colleague C.S. Lewis pushed him to publish it. It appeared in 1937. Tolkien's WWI experience — he lost nearly all his close friends at the Somme — shaped Middle-earth's elegiac tone and its obsession with loss, courage, and the smallness of individuals against vast forces. His philological training meant every name, every language, every place-name in the book was etymologically reasoned and internally consistent — a level of linguistic depth unprecedented in fantasy.

J.R.R. Tolkien at a glance