About J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa on January 3, 1892. His father died when he was only 4, so his mother took him and his siblings back to England. He began to study Greek and Old English in 1903, which is when he started getting into literature and language. A year later, his mother passed away. He went to World War I and afterwards became a professor of English Language at Leeds University. In 1926, he and C.S. Lewis (author of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe") became good friends, which helped encourage Tolkien to write. In 1972, he receive a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) from the Queen. He passed away a year later on September 2, 1973.
Professor Life
From 1925 to 1959 he was a professor at Oxford, ultimately Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and a fellow of Merton College. He was somewhat bemused by the acclaim his extracurricular fantasy received-at the endless interpretations that variously called it a great Christian allegory, the last literary masterpiece of the Middle Ages and a philological game. Tolkien maintained, however, that it wasn't intended as an allegory. "I don't like allegories. I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me," he said.
Start of his Writing Career
After J.R.R. Tolkien formed "The Inklings" (A writing group) with C.S. Lewis, he got encouraged to write books for his children. He soon came up with the idea of Middle Earth and got the idea of Hobbits (a race in Middle Earth) from one of his students. He started on the book, and finished it six years later. Up until that point of time, he never thought we would become an author, and never had any intention to become one. It wasn't until after a publisher found one of his books (with the help of C.S. Lewis) that he started getting serious about writing. Soon, "The Hobbit" was published, and with it a great legacy.
"The Lord of the Rings"
Tolkien never expected his book "The Hobbit" to become a success, as he made it for his children to get them into reading. Soon after the publishment of "The Hobbit" however, parents from all over started sending him mail, begging him to create a sequel to the book. He admitted that the book was a linguistic esthetics as well as an illustration of his theory on fairy tales. Then the story itself captured him. To write all 3 books of "The Lord of the Rings" (which originally were 6 books), it took Tolkien 14 years. The work had a 104-page appendix and is filled with verbal jokes, strange alphabets, names from the Norse, Anglo-Saxon and Welsh.
Retirement and Death
After Tolkien completed "The Lord of the Rings" he became busy with scholarly writing, which included "Chaucer As a Philologist," "Beowulf, the Monster and the Critics" and "The Ancrene Wisse," a guide for the medieval anchoresses. Soon after that, he went into retirement, where he planned on working "working like hell," he said, goaded to resume his writing on a myth of the Creation and Fall called "The Silmarillion," which was created before "The Lord of the Rings" was even thought of. He said once in an interview, "A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen."