J.R.R. Tolkien
The writer and academic J.R.R. Tolkien is best known for his elaborately constructed worlds that resulted in the books The Hobbit, and the epic trilogy The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien was born in South Africa, but raised in England. Orphaned by the time he was twelve years old, he continued his schooling and went on to attend Oxford University. He married his long-time sweetheart Edith Bratt, with whom he would have four children. Tolkien entered the army during World War I and served on the Western Front. While many of his friends died during the war, Tolkien was sent back to England in 1917 to recover from trench fever. During this recovery he began working in earnest on story lines about Middle-earth, layering details that included imaginary languages, maps, and invented genealogies over the course of several years. In the early 1920s he joined the faculty of Oxford University, where he worked until his retirement in 1959. At Oxford, Tolkien published a number of important studies and translations of Middle English works, and pursued his interests in myths and languages - Celtic, English and Scandinavian in particular. Tolkien was part of an informal gathering of fellow academics and Christians, C.S. Lewis among them, who called themselves The Inklings. He read portions of his work to this group, who encouraged him to publish it. In 1937 The Hobbit came out, and Tolkien continued working on this narrative thread, culminating in the Lord of the Rings trilogy in 1954-55. Much to his dismay, the success of these novels developed into a cult following during the 1960s and 70s and multiple interpretations of the meaning of his work evolved. Tolkien himself held that the stories were created merely to support his body of work surrounding language and mythology. At the time of his death in 1973 there were a number of unfinished Middle-earth narratives; his son, Christopher Tolkien, edited many of the manuscripts and published them, the most complete being The Silmarillion. Where would fantasy fiction, role-playing games, and even Second Life be without J.R.R.Tolkien?
