John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, creator of Middle-earth and author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion was born in the town of Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, where his father, Arthur, had moved to take up a position with a bank. In early 1895 his mother, Mabel, returned to England with Ronald and his younger brother, Hilary, exhausted by the climate. After Arthur's death from rheumatic fever, the family made their home at Sarehole, near Birmingham. This beautiful rural area made a great impression on the young Ronald, and its effect can be seen in his later writing and his pictures.

Mabel died in 1904, leaving the boys to the care of Father Francis Morgan, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory. At King Edward's School, Ronald was taught Classics, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. He had great linguistic talent, and after studying old Welsh and Finnish he started to invent his own 'Elvish' languages.

1914 saw the outbreak of the First World War. Ronald was in his final year at Exeter College, Oxford: he graduated the following year with a First in English Language and Literature and at once took up his commission as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers. Before embarking for France in June 1916, he married his childhood sweetheart Edith Bratt. Tolkien survived the Battle of the Somme, where two of his three closest friends were killed, but later that year he was struck down by trench fever and invalided back to England.

The years after the Great War were devoted to his work as academic: as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, where he was soon to prove himself one of the finest philologists in the world. He had already started to write a great cycle of the myths and legends of Middle-earth which was to become The Silmarillion. He and Edith had four children and it was for them that he first told the tale of The Hobbit, published in 1937 by Sir Stanley Unwin. The Hobbit proved to be so successful that Sir Stanley was soon asking for a sequel: but it was not until 1954, when Tolkien was approaching retirement, that the first volume of his great masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, was published, and its terrific success took him by surprise.

After retirement Ronald and Edith moved to Bournemouth but when Edith died in 1971, Ronald returned to Oxford. He died after a brief illness on 2nd September 1973, leaving his great mythological work, The Silmarillion, to be edited for publication by his son, Christopher.