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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
- The philologist and writer was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892. He studied in Birmingham, England
at the King Edward's School, where he was taught the Classics, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. He had great linguistic talent,
and after studying old Welsh and Finnish he started to invent his own "Elvish" languages.
He then studied at Oxford and became a professor of Anglo-Saxon (1925--45). There
he was soon to prove himself one of the finest philologists in the world. He had already started to write a great
cycle of the myths and legends of Middle-earth which was to become The Silmarillion.
and of English language and literature (1945--59).
It was for his four children that
he first told the tale of The Hobbit, published in 1937 by Sir Stanley Unwin.
His scholarly publications include studies on Chaucer (1934) and an edition of Beowulf (1937).
- The Hobbit proved to be so successful that Sir Stanley was soon
asking for a sequel. But it was not until 1954, when Tolkien was approaching retirement, that the first volume of his great masterpiece, The Lord
of the Rings, was published, and its terrific success took him by surprise. After retirement Ronald moved to Bournemouth to escape countless fans, scholars and cameras
brought on by his new success.
But when
his wife died in 1971, Ronald returned to Oxford. He died after a brief illness on 2nd September 1973, leaving his great mythological work, The
Silmarillion, to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher.
- In the decades after Tolkien's death, his fame and prestige have only increased. And that fame, unwelcome by Tolkien's family has forced them to distance themselves
from everything that has to do with their fathers work. So extreme has this fame become that they live in seclusion and under false identities. It is fearing
even more public interest and violation of their privacy that the Tolkien family has criticized the upcoming trilogy.
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