J. R. R. Tolkien was an English writer, poet, and philologist, born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in 1892 in Bloemfontein, in what is now South Africa. Orphaned young after the family returned to England, he was raised by a Catholic priest and educated at Oxford, where he developed the lifelong fascination with languages and mythology that would shape his life's work.
After serving in the First World War, where he survived the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien pursued an academic career as a professor of Anglo-Saxon and later English language and literature at Oxford. A renowned philologist, he was an authority on Old and Middle English and produced influential scholarship, including a landmark lecture on Beowulf.
Tolkien's invented languages and the mythology he built around them grew into Middle-earth, the setting of his fiction. The Hobbit, published in 1937 as a children's book, was followed by his epic masterpiece The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes in the 1950s. Together they established the conventions of modern epic fantasy and have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide.
A devout Catholic and a member of the Oxford literary group the Inklings alongside C. S. Lewis, Tolkien continued to develop the deeper mythology of Middle-earth throughout his life. Much of it, including The Silmarillion, was published posthumously by his son Christopher. He died in 1973, leaving a legacy as the father of modern fantasy literature.
