At just 4 years old, Tolkiens father passed from a fever, and when he was 12 his mother passed from

diabetic complications leaving Tolkien & his brother orphans.

A trip through Switzerlands Interlaken & Lauterbrunnen in 1911 gave Tolkien the initial inspiration to
write Bilbos journey.
Tolkien studied at Oxford where he spent beyond his means to keep up with his more financially
fortunate students. At one point, Tolkien stole a city bus and took his friends on a joyride.
Also in the 1920s, Tolkien began a translation of Beowulf, which he completed in 1926. He held off from
publishing it, but instead opted to publish an article and hold a lecture entitled Beowulf: The Monsters
and the Critics. Tolkien brought new attention to Beowulf, which started to be seen as poetry not just a
story with literary elements. Tolkiens son finally published the translation in 2014.
The Hobbit began on a blank exam paper. Tolkien jotted down: In a hole in the ground lived a
hobbit.Tolkien liked to think that The Lord of the Rings was written as if it was translated into English
from Westron, which was a common language spoken among Elves, Men, Dwarves, Hobbits, and even
Orcs.
Tolkiens later life was spent dealing with the benefits and troubles of fame. His books had become
quite popular, and he received an overwhelming amount of calls and letters. He frequently responded to
the enquiries. He jokingly said he wish he had taken an early retirement.
At one point during his first semester at Oxford, Tolkien stole a city bus as a prank, and took his friends
on a joyride.
Tolkien met Edith Bratt about four years after his mother died. They lived in the same lodging house.
She was three years older than Tolkien, but they gradually fell in love. Actually, Tolkien adored her.
Unfortunately, his guardian felt that she was distracting him from his studies, and that at eighteen he
was too young to marry. Tolkien agreed to not see her for three years, and she moved away to stay with
friends. At midnight on the day he turned twenty-one Tolkien wrote to Edith asking when he could see
her again. When he learned that she had become engaged to marry another man he boarded a train and
went to convince her to marry him instead. Needless to say, he was successful.
Tolkien & his wife Edith were married for more than 50 years. She passed in 1971. His grandson recalled
that after she passed, he suffered from large periods of sadness and loneliness. Tolkien passed just 21
months later.
Three of the first languages that Tolkien worked on as a child were Animalic (he explored this one with
friends, and did not actually invent it himself), Nevbosh (meaning new nonsense, Tolkien helped to
construct it and enjoyed conversing with his friends in it), and Naffarin (the first language he worked on
alone at age eight or nine.)
Tolkien fought in World War I and lost all but one of his childhood friends there.

The inspiration for Bilbo and Frodo Baggins' home of Bag End came from Tolkien's aunt's farm of the
same name.
As a child, Tolkien was bit by a large South African tarantula called a baboon spider. (Three guesses as to
where the inspiration for Shelob the gigantic spider came from!)
When Tolkiens son Michael entered the army he listed his fathers profession on his paperwork as
Wizard. It would seem that Michael really understood his father.
Rayner Unwin, age ten at the time, is the one who judged The Hobbit worthy of publishing. He was paid
a shilling for his review. (For the record, his father, Sir Stanley Unwin, was the director of publisher
George Allen & Unwin at that point.)
Tolkiens four children were the ultimate inspiration for his fiction writing. Can you imagine the sorts of
bedtime stories that they got to hear?
Until he went off to school, Tolkien was tutored by his mother, Mabel, and Ronald, as he was called by
the family, was not only a keen student, his favorite lessons were languages, and therefore was taught
the rudiments of Latin quite early.
After their deaths, the gravestones of both J.R. and Edith Tolkien were marked with the character names
"Beren" (J.R.) and "Luthien" (Edith), taken from one of Tolkien's "pre-history" stories that, in his fantasy
worlds, took place long before the War of the Ring. (Beren and Luthien were the first of many
subsequent matches between mortals and Elf-kind, and their story echoes a bit like Arwen and Aragorn.
Read the story of Beren and Luthien at this link.

There is much to be explored in Tolkien's world beyond "The Hobbit" and "Lord of the Rings," especially
if you read "The Silmarillion," which provides something of a lengthy background of what happened long
before Gandalf, Gollum, Sam, Frodo. Bilbo, Arwen, Aragorn and everyone else came into being. There
are other posthumous works being published these days by Christopher Tolkien, the appointed literary
executor of the Tolkien Estate. There is even a Lord of the Rings tarot deck, which I own and enjoy using
immensely, as the story of Frodo and the Ring is a consummate Hero-Journey story that reflects many of
our common Jungian/Campbellian archetypes we all recognize in other stories, both in print and in film.
He met Edith, his future wife, after his mother died, but the schoolmaster who had taken guardianship
of Ronald, forbid him to see Edith
Tolkien was born on Jan. 3, 1892, the son of English-born parents in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free
State of South Africa, where his father worked as a bank manager. To escape the heat and dust of
southern Africa and to better guard the delicate health of Ronald (as he was called), Tolkien's mother
moved back to England with him and his younger brother when they were very young boys. Within a

year of this move their father, Arthur Tolkien, died in Bloemfontein, and a few years later the boys'
mother died as well. The boys lodged at several homes from 1905 until 1911, when Ronald entered
Exeter College, Oxford. Tolkien received his B.A. from Oxford in 1915 and an M.A. in 1919. During the
interim he married his longtime sweetheart, Edith Bratt, and served for a short time on the Western
Front with the Lancashire Fusiliers. While in England recovering from "trench fever" in 1917, Tolkien
began writing "The Book of Lost Tales, " which eventually became The Silmarillion (1977) and laid the
groundwork for his stories about Middle-earth. After the Armistice he returned to Oxford, where he
joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary and began work as a free-lance tutor. In 1920 he was
appointed Reader in English Language at Leeds University, where he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on
an acclaimed translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was completed and published in
1925. (Some years later, Tolkien completed a second translation of this poem, which was published
posthumously.) The following year, having returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of
Anglo-Saxon, Tolkien became friends with a fellow of Magdalen College, C. S. Lewis. They shared an
intense enthusiasm for the myths, sagas, and languages of northern Europe; and to better enhance
those interests, both attended meetings of "The Coalbiters, " an Oxford club, founded by Tolkien, at
which Icelandic sagas were read aloud.

During the rest of his years at Oxfordtwenty as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon,
fourteen as Merton Professor of English Language and LiteratureTolkien published several esteemed
short studies and translations. Notable among these are his essays "Beowulf: The Monsters and the
Critics" (1936), " Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve's Tale" (1934), and "On Fairy-Stories" (1947); his
scholarly edition of Ancrene Wisse (1962); and his translations of three medieval poems: "Sir Gawain
and the Green Knight, " "Pearl, " and "Sir Orfeo" (1975). As a writer of imaginative literature, though,
Tolkien is best known for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, tales which were formed during his
years attending meetings of "The Inklings, " an informal gathering of like-minded friends and fellow
dons, initiated after the demise of The Coalbiters. The Inklings, which was formed during the late 1930s
and lasted until the late 1940s, was a weekly meeting held in Lewis's sitting-room at Magdalen, at which
works-in-progress were read aloud and discussed and critiqued by the attendees, all interspersed with
free-flowing conversation about literature and other topics. The nucleus of the group was Tolkien,
Lewis, and Lewis's friend, novelist Charles Williams; other participants, who attended irregularly,
included Lewis's brother Warren, Nevill Coghill, H. V. D. Dyson, Owen Barfield, and others. The common
thread which bound them was that they were all adherents of Christianity and all had a love of story.
Having heard Tolkien's first hobbit story read aloud at a meeting of the Inklings, Lewis urged Tolkien to
publish The Hobbit, which appeared in 1937. A major portion of The Fellowship of the Ring was also
read to The Inklings before the group disbanded in the late 1940's.

Tolkien retired from his professorship in 1959. While the unauthorized publication of an American
edition of The Lord of the Rings in 1965 angered him, it also made him a widely admired cult figure in
the United States, especially among high school and college students. Uncomfortable with this status, he

and his wife lived quietly in Bournemouth for several years, until Edith's death in 1971. In the remaining
two years of his life, Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he was made an honorary fellow of Merton
College and awarded a doctorate of letters. He was at the height of his fame as a scholarly and
imaginative writer when he died in 1973, though critical study of his fiction continues and has increased
in the years since.

A devout Roman Catholic throughout his life, Tolkien began creating his own languages and mythologies
at an early age and later wrote Christian-inspired stories and poems to provide them with a narrative
framework. Based on bedtime stories Tolkien had created for his children, The Hobbit concerns the
reluctant efforts of a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, to recover a treasure stolen by a dragon. During the course
of his mission, the hobbit discovers a magical ring which, among other powers, can render its bearer
invisible. The ability to disappear helps Bilbo fulfill his quest; however, the ring's less obvious faculties
prompt the malevolent Sauron, Dark Lord of Mordor, to seek it. The hobbits' attempt to destroy the
ring, thereby denying Sauron unlimited power, is the focal point of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which
consists of the novels The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the
King (1955). In these books Tolkien rejects such traditional heroic attributes as strength and size,
stressing instead the capacity of even the humblest creatures to prevail against evil.

The initial critical reception to The Lord of the Rings varied. While some reviewers expressed
dissatisfaction with the story's great length and one-dimensional characters, the majority enjoyed
Tolkien's enchanting descriptions and lively sense of adventure. Religious, Freudian, allegorical, and
political interpretations of the trilogy soon appeared, but Tolkien generally rejected such explications.
He maintained that The Lord of the Rings was conceived with "no allegorical intentions , moral,
religious, or political, " but he also denied that the trilogy is a work of escapism: "Middle-earth is not an
imaginary world. The theatre of my tale is this earth, the one in which we now live." Tolkien contended
that his story was "fundamentally linguistic in inspiration," a "religious and Catholic work" whose
spiritual aspects were "absorbed into the story and symbolism." Tolkien concluded, "The stories were
made to provide a world for the languages rather than the reverse."

Throughout his career Tolkien composed histories, genealogies, maps, glossaries, poems, and songs to
supplement his vision of Middle-earth. Among the many works published during his lifetime were a
volume of poems, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962), and a
fantasy novel, Smith of Wootton Major (1967). Though many of his stories about Middle-earth remained
incomplete at the time of Tolkien's death, his son, Christopher, rescued the manuscripts from his
father's collections, edited them, and published them. One of these works, The Silmarillion, takes place
before the time of The Hobbit and, in a heroic manner which recalls the Christian myths of Creation and
the Fall, tells the tale of the first age of Holy Ones and their offspring. Unfinished Tales of Numenor and
Middle-earth (1980) is a similar collection of incomplete stories and fragments written during World

War I. The Book of Lost Tales, Part I (1984) and The Book of Lost Tales, Part II (1984) deal respectively
with the beginnings of Middle-earth and the point at which humans enter the saga. In addition to these
posthumous works, Christopher Tolkien also collected his father's correspondence to friends, family,
and colleagues in The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien (1981).

It is as a writer of timeless fantasy that Tolkien is most highly regarded today. From 1914 until his death
in 1973, he drew on his familiarity with Northern and other ancient literatures and his own invented
languages to create not just his own story, but his own world: Middle-earth, complete with its own
history, myths, legends, epics, and heroes. "His life's work, " Augustus M. Kolich has written, "
encompasses a reality that rivals Western man's own attempt at recording the composite, knowable
history of his species. Not since Milton has any Englishman worked so successfully at creating a
secondary world, derived from our own, yet complete in its own terms with encyclopedic mythology; an
imagined world that includes a vast gallery of strange beings: hobbits, elves, dwarfs, orcs, and, finally,
the men of Westernesse." His worksespecially The Lord of the Ringshave pleased countless readers
and fascinated critics who recognize their literary depth.

He died on 2nd September, in 1973, in Oxford, England(3 rings... backweard)

While The Hobbit was written for children, The Lord of the Rings became darker, and took a more
serious tone.(anyone know what happened in that period?? the war!)
With his aptitude of languages, Tolkien had learnt: Danish, Dutch, French, German, Gothic, Greek,
Italian, Latin, Lombardic, Middle and Old English, Old Norse, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish,
Swedish, Welsh and Medieval Welsh.
When he was a baby, the young Tolkien was kidnapped for a day, by a house boy, who was captivated
by the baby.
Aged 16, he met his future wife Edith. But, his guardian Father Francis Morgan prohibited Tolkien seeing
her until Tolkien came of age, aged 21.
Tolkien said his character of Sam Gamgee was based on the ordinary solidiers who he commanded and
who faced so much hardship without rancour.
Tolkien was a great lecturer. When giving lectures on Beowulf, he would often startle students by
exclaiming in Anglo-Saxon, and speaking in the manner of an old bar.
The first famous lines to the hobbit were written down on a blank, empty exam paper he was once
marking. 'In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit"

Tolkien had a dislike for cars, and spent most of his adult life relying on bicycles and trains. He had a
particular love of the Oxfordshire countryside and was dismayed when it was covered with new
roads.(charge em and scatter)
The novel took him over 14 years to write. After he wrote the Hobbit in 1937, it wasn't until the mid
1950s when the first volume "The Fellowship of the Ring" was actually published.

When all was said and done, the book was over 1200 pages that he typed himself! It is said that when he
needed a copy of the manuscript, he didn't have the resources to make one, so he retyped the whole
thing himself.

The craziest thing is that he wasn't a particularly adept typer, so he pecked his way through the 1200
using only two fingers!
His wife, Edith Bratt, was the inspiration for the character Luthien. He first began creating the story of
Beren and Luthien when he saw his wife dancing in a forest clearing in 1917.
One of Tolkiens original motivations for writing about Middle Earth was to create an English mythology
(being jealous of other cultures and mythologies such as Germanic and Celtic.)
In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole
it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger
children, and even passed round. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan
Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (merged in 1990 with
HarperCollins).

She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of
the firm. He tried it out on his 10-year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was
published as The Hobbit in 1937. It immediately scored a success, and has not been out of childrens
recommended reading lists ever since. It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more
similar material available for publication.
After his retirement in 1959 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. On 22 November 1971 Edith
died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Ronald died on 2
September 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of

Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. (The grave is well signposted from the
entrance.) The legend on the headstone reads:

Edith Mary Tolkien, Lthien, 1889-1971

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892-1973

The virtues of charity and forgiveness that Tolkien learned from Fr. Morgan in the years after his
mother's death offset the pain and sorrow that her death engendered. The pain remained throughout
his life, and 60 years later he compared his mother's sacrifices for her faith with the complacency of
some of his own children toward the faith they had inherited from her:

"When I think of my mother's death . . . worn out with persecution, poverty, and, largely consequent,
disease, in the effort to hand on to us small boys the faith, and remember the tiny bedroom she shared
with us in rented rooms in a postman's cottage at Rednal, where she died alone, too ill for viaticum, I
find it very hard and bitter, when my children stray away."
Tolkien always considered his mother a martyr for the faith. Nine years after her death he wrote: "My
own dear mother was a martyr indeed, and it was not to everybody that God grants so easy a way to His
great gifts as He did to Hilary and myself, giving us a mother who killed herself with labor and trouble to
ensure us keeping the faith."
"No," Tolkien replied. "They are not lies." Far from being lies they were the best way sometimes the only
way of conveying truths that would otherwise remain inexpressible. We have come from God, Tolkien
argued, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, reflect a splintered fragment
of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Myths may be misguided, but they steer however
shakily toward the true harbor, whereas materialistic "progress" leads only to the abyss and the power
of evil.
We were supposed to have reached a stage of civilization in which it might still be necessary to execute
a criminal, but not to gloat, or to hang his wife and child by him while the orc-crowd hooted. The
destruction of Germany, be it 100 times merited, is one of the most appalling world-catastrophes. Well,
well,you and I can do nothing about it. And that [should] be a measure of the amount of guilt that can
justly be assumed to attach to any member of a country who is not a member of its actual Government.
Well the first War of the Machines seems to be drawing to its final inconclusive chapterleaving, alas,
everyone the poorer, many bereaved or maimed and millions dead, and only one thing triumphant: the
Machines.[117]

He also reacted with anger at the excesses of anti-German propaganda during the war. In 1944, he
wrote in a letter to his son Christopher:
... it is distressing to see the press grovelling in the gutter as low as Goebbels in his prime, shrieking that
any German commander who holds out in a desperate situation (when, too, the military needs of his
side clearly benefit) is a drunkard, and a besotted fanatic. ... There was a solemn article in the local
paper seriously advocating systematic exterminating of the entire German nation as the only proper
course after military victory: because, if you please, they are rattlesnakes, and don't know the difference
between good and evil! (What of the writer?) The Germans have just as much right to declare the Poles
and Jews exterminable vermin, subhuman, as we have to select the Germans: in other words, no right,
whatever they have done.[118]
According to Simon Tolkien
At age 16, Tolkien fell in love with Edith Bratt, three years his senior. His guardian, a Catholic priest, was
horrified that his ward was seeing a Protestant and ordered the boy to have no contact with Edith until
he turned 21. Tolkien obeyed, pining after Edith for years until that fateful birthday, when he met with
her under a railroad viaduct. She broke off her engagement to another man, converted to Catholicism,
and the two were married for the rest of their lives. At Tolkien's instructions, their shared gravestone
has the names "Beren" and "Luthien" engraved on it, a reference to a famous pair of star-crossed
lovers from the fictional world he created.:
"My grandmother died two years before my grandfather and he came back to live in Oxford. Merton
College gave him rooms just off the High Street. I went there frequently and he'd take me to lunch in the
Eastgate Hotel. Those lunches were rather wonderful for a 12-year-old boy spending time with his
grandfather, but sometimes he seemed sad. There was one visit when he told me how much he missed
my grandmother. It must have been very strange for him being alone after they had been married for
more than 50 years."[88]
HE INVENTED LANGUAGES FOR FUN.

A philologist by trade, Tolkien kept his mind exercised by inventing new languages, many of which (like
the Elvish languages Quenya and Sindarin) he used extensively in his writing.