J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, an English philologist and author, was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State of South Africa. In early 1895, his mother, Mabel, exhausted by the climate, returned to England with her two sons. His parents died very early, leaving the two young children in the care of Father Francis Morgan, a priest at a church in Birmingham. At King Edward's School, Ronald was taught the classics, Anglo-Saxon, and medieval English. Gifted with great linguistic talent, he began creating his own "elvish" language, having studied Finnish and Old Welsh. After participating in World War I, he dedicated himself to teaching. As a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, he emerged as one of the world's best philologists. His academic positions included Reader in English Language at the University of Leeds, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, and Professor of English Language and Literature at the same university. In 1916, he married Edith Bratt, with whom he had three sons and a daughter. His writing career began as early as 1911, but his first significant work on Middle-earth mythology, "The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again," was completed in 1936 and published in 1937. In the following years, his works were published in various languages and received many honors. He passed away in September 1973. Although he worked on "The Silmarillion" (which he considered his greatest work) for 18 years, he did not live to complete it. Today, with over fifty million readers worldwide and with the repeated reissues of his works "The Hobbit," "The Lord of the Rings," and "The Silmarillion" in 17 languages, J. R. R. Tolkien is regarded as the undisputed progenitor of fantasy literature.