 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's father's family appears to have migrated to England from Saxony in the 18th century, but over the century and a half before his birth had become thoroughly anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English.
Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890's for better prospects of promotion. John Ronald was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on 3 January 1892. On 15 February 1896 his father died, and John, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England and went to live in the West Midlands.
He attended King Edward school in in the grimy industrial city of Birmingham while residing in a small rural hamlet south of the city, and the Tolkien family life was generally lived on the genteel side of poverty.
His situation worsened in 1904, when Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, usually fatal in those pre-insulin days. She died on 14 November of that year leaving the two orphaned boys effectively destitute. Fortunately, their welfare was looked after by Father Francis the local parish priest who found them places to stay.
By this time Tolkien was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish.
He was already making up his own languages, purely for fun. He went on to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911, where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1913, then obtained a disappointing second class degree.
As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature.
The First World War broke out in August 1914 and Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he worked hard and finally achieved a first-class degree in June 1915. Tolkien enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and when he found out he was going to be sent overseas he married his long-time sweetheart Edith on 22 March 1916. He was sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive.
After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to "trench fever", a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in hospital in Birmingham.
Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, although periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to lieutenant. It was when he was stationed at Hull that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him. This later was the inspiration for the tale of Beren and Lúthien.
Their first son, John Francis Reuel (later Father John Tolkien) had already been born on 16 November 1917. After the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien was appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the "Oxford English Dictionary"), then in preparation.
In the summer of 1920 he was appointed Assistant Professor of English at Leeds University.
At Leeds, as well as teaching, he collaborated with EV Gordon on the famous edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and continued writing and refining his long-term writing project The Book of Lost Tales and his invented "Elvish" languages. In 1925 he returned to Oxford as a full-time Professor of English.
Tolkien became one of the founder members of a loose grouping of Oxford friends, with similar interests, known as "The Inklings".
One of the more prominent members was CS Lewis who became a close friend of Tolkien's. Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages.
He told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously such as Roverandom and he invented the hobbits.
Word of the tales got around and Tolkien eventually presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin.
It was published as The Hobbit in 1937. It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any similar material available for publication.
Tolkien presented The Silmarillion as a collection of prose and poetry but it was rejected as lacking commercial appeal, and would only be published much later.
Tolkien then decided to write a sequel to The Hobbit and thus began the 16 year journey that would lead to the Lord of the Rings , Tolkien's definitive work. [edit]
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