John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892-1973)

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3rd January 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but at the age of four he was taken by his mother, Mary Suffield, together with his younger brother, Hilary, back to England for 'home leave'. After his father's death from rheumatic fever, the family made their home at Sarehole, on the south-eastern edge of Birmingham. Ronald spent a happy childhood in the Sarehole countryside, and his sensiblity to the rural landscape can clearly be seen both in his writings and in his pictures.

After his mother's death, when Ronald was twelve, he and Hilary became wards of a kindly priest at the Birmingham Oratory. They both attended Kind Edward's School, Birmingham, where Ronald achieved distinction in Classics, and also encountered Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. At this time also, he began to develop his linguistics abilities by inventing languages which he related to 'fairy' or 'elvish' people.

After taking a First in English Language and Literature at Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien married Edith Bratt, with whom he had formed an attachement when they both lived in the same lodging-house in Birmingham. He was also commissioned in the Lancashire Fusiliers and served in the battle of Somme, where two of his three closest friends were killed.

After the war, he obtained a post on the New English Dictionary, and began to write the mythological and legendary cycle which he originally called "The Book of Lost Tales" but which eventually became known as The Silmarillion.

In 1920 Tolkien, now with two children, was appointed as Reader in the English Language at the University of Leeds, a post that was converted to a Professorship four years later. He distuinguished himself by his lively and imaginative teaching, and in 1925 was elected Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where he worked with great skill and enthusiasm for many years. Indeed he was one of the most accomplished philologists that has ever been known. Meanwhile, his family, now numbering four children, encouraged Tolkien to use his mythological imagination to deal with more homely topics. For them he wrote and illustrated The Father Christmas Letters, and to them he told the story of The Hobbit published some years later in 1937 by Stanley Unwin, who then asked for a 'sequel'. At first, Tolkien applied himself only unwillingly to this task, but soon he was inspired, and what meant to be another book for children grew into The Lord of the Rings, truly a sequel to the Silmarillion than to the Hobbit. This huge story took twelve years to complete, and it was not published until Tolkien was approaching retirement. When it did reach print, its extraordinary popularity took him by surprise.

After retirement, Tolkien and his wife lived first in the Headington area of Oxford, then moved to Bournemouth, but after his wife's death in 1971, Tolkien returned to Oxford and died after a very brief illness on 2nd September 1973, leaving his great mythological van legendary cycle The Silmarillion to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher.

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Source: Tolkien's World, paintings of Middle-Earth

Copyright © 2002 Cassandra, www.chimerra.com