John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, in what is now South Africa, on 3 January 1892. His family moved to England when he was three, his father died a year later, and his mother died when he was twelve, leaving him and his brother in the care of a Catholic priest in Birmingham.
He studied English language and literature at Exeter College, Oxford, then served as a signals officer in the First World War and fought at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the same year he married Edith Bratt. After the war he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, taught at Leeds, and in 1925 became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where he spent the rest of his career. With C.S. Lewis and others he belonged to the Inklings, a writers' group that met to read work in progress.
The Hobbit began as a story for his children and was published in 1937. Its publisher asked for a sequel, and the result, written over more than a decade, was The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955. Tolkien invented languages first and built Middle-earth's history around them, which is why the world feels so deep.
He was made a CBE in 1972 and died in Bournemouth on 2 September 1973. His son Christopher edited The Silmarillion and many other volumes from his papers after his death.
