J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892 and raised in and around Birmingham after his family returned to England. Orphaned young, he showed an early genius for languages, inventing his own alongside his studies. He served as a signals officer in the First World War and fought at the Somme, where trench fever and the loss of close friends marked him deeply.

As Professor of Anglo-Saxon and later of English Language and Literature at Oxford, Tolkien was a leading scholar of Beowulf and medieval literature. From his invented languages grew an entire mythology. The Hobbit, begun as a story for his children, appeared in 1937; its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954 and 1955, grew into an epic of unprecedented depth, complete with languages, histories, and maps.

Tolkien died in Bournemouth in 1973, two years after his wife Edith; his son Christopher edited and published The Silmarillion and the vast legendarium he left behind. The Lord of the Rings became one of the best-selling books ever written and defined the fantasy genre that followed. Every invented world since stands in the shadow of Middle-earth, and readers still set out from the Shire each year.