Professor of literature and English, who became famous with his trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Tolkien's friend at Oxford University, C.S. Lewis, also achieved fame as fantasy writer with his Narnia series.

J.R.R. Tolkien was born of British parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but moved with his mother, Mabel Tolkien, to England when he was three. In 1904 Tolkien's mother died, and the young John Ronald Reuel moved with his brother Hilary to their aunt's home in Birmingham. He studied at Oxford from 1908 and was awarded a First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature in 1915. The following year Tolkien married Edith Bratt, whom he had met in 1908. During WW I Tolkien served in the army and saw action on the Somme. He returned home suffering from shell shock, and while convalescing he started to study early forms of language and began work on SILMARILLION (published 1977). For the rest of his life, Tolkien expanded the mythology of his fantasy worlds.

JRR Tolkien :
Author of the following books, stories and novels : A Middle English Vocabulary, The Hobbit, Farmer Gill of Ham, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, The Return of the King, The Tolkien Reader, Silmarillion, The History of Middle Earth, The Book of Lost Tales, The War of the Jewels, The Treason of Isengard, plus many other JKK Tolkien novels, stories and bestsellers.
 

Further reading: J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter (1977); The Tolkien Companion, by J.E.A. Tyler (1976); Tolkien: The Illustrated Encyclopaedia, by David Day (1991); The Inklings, by Humphrey Carpenter (1979); The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. by Humphrey Carpenter and Christopher Tolkien (1981); The Road to Middle-Earth by T.A. Shippey (1982); J.R.R. Tolkien: This Far Land, ed. by Robert Giddings (1983); J.R.R. Tolkien's Themes, Symbols, and Myths by David Harvey (1985); A Tolkien Thesaurus by Richard E. Blackwelder (1990); The Biography of J.R.R. Tolkien: Architect of Middle Earth by Daniel Grotta (1996); Defending Middle-Earth: Tolkien, Myth and Modernity by Patrick Curry (1997). - See also other fantasy worlds: Tove Jansson (The Moomintrolls), C.S. Lewis (Narnia). Tolkienīs influence can be seen in the works of Isaac Asimov, who considered The Ring Trilogy as an allegory of WWII. According to Asimov, the magical ring in the story is a symbol of the modern technology. - Films: Lord of the Rings, 1978, dir. by Ralph Bakshi .