Lord Of The Rings (J.R.R.Tolkien)(1892-1973)

Professor of literature and English, who became famous with his novel THE LORD OF THE RINGS (1954-55). From the mid-1960s Tolkien's work started its world-wide triumph. Especially it appealed to young people. Tolkien's friend C.S. Lewis at University of Oxford also achieved fame as fantasy writer with hisNarnia series.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born of British parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but moved with his mother, Mabel Tolkien, to England, at the age of was three. Tolkien lost his father when he was very young. In 1904 Tolkien's mother died, and the young John Ronald Reuel moved with his brother Hilary to aunt's home in Birmingham. From 1908 Tolkien studied at Oxford. In 1915 he was awarded First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature. Next 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 returened home suffering from shell shock, and while convalescing he started to study early forms of language and work on SILMARILLION (published 1977). For the rest of his life, Tolkien expanded the mythology of his fantasy worlds.
In 1918 Tolkien joined the staff of New English Dictionary and in 1919 he was a freelance tutor in Oxford. Tolkien then worked as a teacher and professor at the University of Leeds. In 1925 he became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. He was appointed Merton Professor of English at Oxford in 1945, retiring in 1959. His scholarly works included studies on Chaucher (1934) and an edition of Beowulf (1937). He was also interested in the Finnish national epos Kalevala, from which he found ideas for his imaginary language Quenya and which influenced several of his stories. The tragic figure of Kullervo from Kalevala partly inspired Tolkien's posthumously published work, Children of Húrin (2007), in which Túrin Turambar, like Kullervo and Roland, speaks to his own sword. Most of the inhabitants of Tolkien's imaginary Middle-Earth were derived from English folklore and mythology, or from an idealized Anglo-Saxon past.

http://www.esnips.com/doc/0ab4fbc3-04e7-45b7-8c07-e59bd319459a/JRR-Tolkien---Lord-of-the-Rings-Series