Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien

While John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is known for his contribution to British literature and his reliance upon old Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon literature, the author was not born in Europe but in Africa. In 1892, Tolkien was born in the South African town of Bloemfontein, in an area known as the Orange Free State. His father, Arthur Tolkien, had left England in order to take up a senior position with a bank in the colony. When J.R.R. Tolkien was almost three years old, he returned to England with his mother and his younger brother.

After Arthur's death from rheumatic fever, the family made their home at Sarehole, near Birmingham. This beautiful rural area made a great impression on the young Ronald, and its effect can be seen in his later writings and his pictures. Mabel died in 1904, leaving the boys to the care of Father Francis Morgan, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. At King Edward's School, Ronald was taught 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.

1914 saw the outbreak of the First World War. Ronald was in his final year at Exeter College, Oxford: he graduated the following year with a First in English Language and Literature and at once took up his commission as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Before embarking for France in June 1916, he married his childhood sweetheart Edith Bratt. Tolkien survived the Battle of the Somme, where two of his three closest friends were killed, but later that year he was struck down by trench fever and sent back to England.

The years after the Great War were devoted to his work as an academic: as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where 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. He and Edith had four children and it was for them that Tolkien first told the tale of The Hobbit, published in 1937 by Sir Stanley Unwin. 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 from Oxford, in 1956, Ronald and Edith moved to Bournemouth but when Edith died in 1971, Ronald returned to Oxford. He died after a brief illness on September 2, 1973, leaving his great mythological work, The Silmarillion, to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher.


Study Guides on Works by J.R.R. Tolkien

In terms of Tolkien's literary context, we should look to his twin focuses: philology (the study of languages) and philosophy (moral, rather than political ethics). The Hobbit is a literary exposition of Tolkien's personal grappling with the "big...

"Leaf by Niggle" is a short fictional work, alternately called a short story and a novella, by acclaimed fantasy writer and Christian essayist J.R.R. Tolkien. The story was first published in the Dublin Review in January 1945, despite being...

"On Fairy-Stories" is a critical essay by J.R.R. Tolkien, the acclaimed author of The Lord of the Rings. The essay was published in its final form in the collection Essays Presented to Charles Williams from Oxford University Press in 1947, but the...

Written by English author J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion is a collection of mythopoeic tales and legends of the fictional universe Eä. It was posthumously edited and published in 1977 by his son, Christopher Tolkien, with aid from fiction...

Initially entitled The Great Cake, J.R.R. Tolkien's novella Smith of Wootton Major is one of his shorter tales but one that still carries great import for the understanding of his philosophy. Originally intended to be a preface to George...