J.R.R. Tolkien

Born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State of South Africa, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was the son of an English bank manager who died when the boy was three. His mother Mabel brought him and his brother back to England, converted to Roman Catholicism, a decision that estranged her from her Protestant family, and died of diabetes in 1904, leaving two young orphans in the care of a Catholic priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan of the Birmingham Oratory. At sixteen Tolkien met Edith Bratt, three years his senior, in a boarding house; both were orphans, and their attachment was immediate. He won a scholarship to Exeter College, Oxford, where he abandoned Classics for the study of Old English, Old Norse, and Germanic philology. He married Edith in 1916, was commissioned as a second lieutenant, and served in the Battle of the Somme, where he contracted trench fever and was invalided home. He became Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925 and held academic positions there until his retirement in 1959. The Hobbit (1937) began as a story for his children. The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), published when he was in his sixties, became one of the most widely read works of fiction in any language and established the modern fantasy genre. He died on September 2, 1973, in Bournemouth, at the age of eighty-one, twenty months after Edith.

In 1916 Tolkien fought at the Somme as a battalion signals officer, sending orders by lamp and runner through the mud until trench fever invalided him home that November. Two of his three closest schoolfriends, the fellow dreamers of his boyhood Tea Club, were killed the same year. By 1918, he wrote, all but one of his close friends were dead.