J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, in what is now South Africa, and moved to England as a small child. His father died when he was four and his mother when he was twelve. A Catholic priest then raised him and his brother in Birmingham. He studied English language and literature at Oxford.

He fought in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and lost most of his close friends in the war. He then worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and became a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where he taught for most of his career. He invented languages for pleasure and built a mythology around them.

The Hobbit (1937) began as a story for his children. It follows Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable hobbit pulled into a quest for a dragon's treasure, and shows an ordinary person finding courage he did not know he had. Its sequel, The Lord of the Rings (1954 to 1955), became one of the best-selling novels ever written. He died in Bournemouth in 1973, aged 81.