John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was
born on January 3, 1892, in
Bloemfontain, South Africa. His parents had moved there from England
so that his father, Arthur, could work for the bank of Africa. Tolkien
lost both parents early in life—his father died in Africa in 1896 after
the rest of the family had returned to England, and his mother,
Mabel, died in 1904 near Birmingham, England.
After Mabel’s death, Tolkien and his younger brother, Hilary, came
under the care of Father Francis Morgan, a friend of the family’s.
Soon after, Tolkien went to King Edward’s School and then to Oxford.
At Oxford, Tolkien pursued a degree in English language
and literature. He developed a particular passion for philology,
the study of languages. While studying Old English, Anglo-Saxon,
and Welsh poetry, he continued experimenting with a language of
his own, which he had started to do in his youth. This language
would form the groundwork for his imagined world known as Middle-Earth.
By 1916, Tolkien had received
his degree and married his childhood sweetheart, Edith Bratt. He
eventually took a teaching position at Oxford. By 1929,
he had had his fourth child with Edith. During these years, he also
began his great mythology of Middle-Earth, a compendium of stories
called The Silmarillion. Out of these stories grew The
Hobbit (1936), his first published
work. A simple children’s story about a small person who takes part
in great adventures, the novel’s playful tone and imagery made it
a hit both with children and adults. The Hobbit’s
success also gave Tolkien a huge public that was anxious to learn
more about the meticulously developed world that he had created
around his invented language and mythology, only a small part of
which was detailed in The Hobbit.
The Hobbit’s plot and characters combined
the ancient heroic Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian epics Tolkien studied
with the middle-class rural England in which he lived. In many ways,
the novel’s charm and humor lie in transplanting a simple, pastoral
Englishman of the 1930s into a heroic medieval
setting. Tolkien acknowledged that his hero, Bilbo Baggins, was
patterned on the rural Englishmen of his own time.
By the time Tolkien began to work on the sequel to The
Hobbit, he had developed a friendship with another well-known
Oxford professor and writer, C. S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles
of Narnia. Their friendship lasted for many years. Tolkien
helped convert Lewis to Christianity (although Tolkien, a Roman
Catholic, was disappointed that Lewis became a Protestant), and
the two critiqued each other’s work as part of an informal group
of writers known as the Inklings.
From 1945 to 1959,
Tolkien continued to teach at Oxford and wrote The Lord
of the Rings trilogy, which served as a follow-up to The
Hobbit. The trilogy brought Tolkien fame in England and America,
but he was never a public figure. He continued work on The
Silmarillion and other tales and led a quiet life. Despite
his public acclaim, he was most comfortable with middle-class surroundings
and peace in which to write and think. Tolkien died on September 2, 1973. The
Silmarillion was edited and published posthumously by his
son Christopher in 1977.
