J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English philologist who taught Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, then English Language and Literature until his retirement in 1959. He published The Hobbit in 1937, followed by The Lord of the Rings between 1954 and 1955. A devout Catholic and close friend of C. S. Lewis, he spent decades constructing a connected body of tales, poems, invented languages, and fictional histories set in a world called Arda and its continent Middle-earth—work he termed his legendarium. After his death on 2 September 1973, his son Christopher published The Silmarillion and o…