Author: J. R. R. Tolkien

Tolkien built the languages before he built the world, and Middle-earth began as somewhere they could be spoken. Born in Bloemfontein on 3 January 1892 and in England from the age of three, he spent his working life on Old and Middle English: the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, the Merton chair in English Language and Literature from 1945 to 1959, an edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and early work on the Oxford English Dictionary. His 1936 lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics insisted that the poem's monsters were its subject rather than an embarrassment, and it reset the scholarship. The Hobbit, or There and Back Again reached print in 1937. The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers followed in 1954 and The Return of the King in 1955, read aloud in draft to the Inklings, C. S. Lewis among them. He died in Bournemouth on 2 September 1973.