J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, in southern Africa, where his father was a bank manager. After his father's death, his mother brought him to England, near Birmingham; she became a Catholic and died when he was twelve, and he and his brother were raised under the guardianship of a Catholic priest, Father Francis Morgan. He loved languages and invented his own. He studied at Exeter College, Oxford, and served as a signals officer at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where most of his close school friends were killed. He married Edith Bratt that year. He became a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford in 1925, and his lecture on Beowulf changed how the poem was studied. He was a member of the Inklings, a group of writers that included C. S. Lewis. The Hobbit (1937), first told to his children, was followed by The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), set in the imagined world of Middle-earth, which became one of the best-selling books ever written. He died in Bournemouth in 1973.

J. R. R. Tolkien is also an author in the library: author page and works.

Faith: A devout Roman Catholic throughout his life; his mother had become a Catholic in 1900. Source: Wikipedia