About J. R. R. Tolkien
 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born of British parents in Bloemfontein, South Africa in January of 1892, but moved with his mother, Mabel Tolkien, to England, at the age of 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 his aunt's home in England (the West Midlands).
Then they moved to the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. Mabel and her children became estranged from both sides of the family in 1900 when she was received into the Roman Catholic Church. From then on, both Ronald and Hilary were brought up in the faith of Pio Nono, and remained devout Catholics throughout their lives. The parish priest who visited the family regularly was the half-Spanish half-Welsh Father Francis Morgan. In 1904 Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, incurable at that time. She died on 15 October of that year leaving the two orphaned boys effectively destitute. At this point Father Francis took over, and made sure of the boys' material as well as spiritual welfare, although in the short term they were boarded with an unsympathetic aunt-by-marriage, Beatrice Suffield, and then with a Mrs Faulkner.
In 1908 Tolkien attended 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 returned 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 became 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. Most of the inhabitants of Tolkien's imaginary Middle-Earth are derived from English folklore and mythology, or from an idealized Anglo-Saxon past.
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