J.R.R. Tolkien: The Life Story Behind the Middle-earth Creator

J.R.R. Tolkien invented a world, and then he invented the languages for that world, and then he invented the history for that world, and then, almost as an afterthought, he wrote a story about a small person, a hobbit, who leaves his comfortable home, who goes on a journey, and who, in the end, saves the world, not by being strong, but by being kind, by being loyal, and by refusing to give up. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are now among the most read books in the world, they have been made into films that have been seen by billions of people, and Middle-earth, the world Tolkien invented, has become, for many readers, a second home, a place they return to again and again, a place that feels, in a strange way, more real than the real world.

Tolkien was not, in his lifetime, a celebrity in the modern sense. He was an Oxford professor, a scholar of Old English, a man who taught, who wrote academic books, who was shy, who was private, who loved languages, who loved trees, who loved his wife Edith, and who wrote, slowly, over many years, books that he did not expect to be famous, and that he did not, for a long time, expect to be published. He was born in South Africa, he lost his parents young, he fought in the First World War, he lost many of his closest friends in that war, he married the woman he loved, he had four children, and he died, in 1973, at the age of eighty-one, having seen his books become famous, having seen them loved by millions, and having, in many ways, been surprised by that fame, because he had written them, first and foremost, for himself, and for his children, and for the love of language itself.

This is the story of a man who built a world out of words, who believed that a story could be true even if it never happened, and who, in doing so, changed the way we think about fantasy, about heroism, and about what it means to be small in a large, dangerous world.

Bloemfontein, Birmingham and a Boy Who Lost His Parents

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, in South Africa, where his father, Arthur Tolkien, worked as a bank manager, and his mother, Mabel Tolkien, had come from England to join him. When John was three, his mother took him and his younger brother, Hilary, back to England, to Birmingham, for a holiday, and while they were there, his father died in South Africa, of rheumatic fever, and the family never returned. John grew up in Birmingham, in a city that was, at the time, industrial, smoky, full of factories, and full, also, of countryside on its edges, of trees, of fields, of a rural England that Tolkien loved, and that would become, in his books, the Shire, the home of the hobbits, a place of green hills, of gardens, of quiet, ordinary life.

His mother, Mabel, was a strong, intelligent, devout woman, who taught her sons at home, who read to them, who encouraged John’s love of languages, and who, in 1900, converted to Catholicism, a decision that caused a rift with her family, who were Protestant, and that left her, and her sons, without financial support from relatives. She died in 1904, when John was twelve, of diabetes, a disease that, at the time, could not be treated, and John and Hilary were left orphans, to be raised by a priest, Father Francis Morgan, a kind, generous man who became, in many ways, their second father, and who supported John’s education, his love of languages, and his ambition to go to Oxford.

John was, from an early age, a brilliant student of languages. He learned Latin, Greek, French, German, and, later, Old English, Old Norse, Welsh, Finnish, and other languages, and he began, as a teenager, to invent his own languages, to make up words, to make up grammars, to create, in his notebooks, whole systems of language that had never existed, but that felt, to him, real. It was not a game, though it began as a game. It was a serious, passionate interest, a love of the sound of words, of the way a language can feel, of the way a word can contain a whole history, and it would become, in time, the foundation of Middle-earth, because Tolkien did not, as most writers do, invent a world and then invent languages for it. He invented languages first, and then he invented a world in which those languages could be spoken, a world with a history, with peoples, with stories, and with a geography that matched the languages he had made.

He went to King Edward’s School in Birmingham, where he met three friends, Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Smith and Christopher Wiseman, who, with Tolkien, formed a group they called the T.C.B.S., the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, a group of young men who met to talk about literature, about art, about the future, and who promised each other that they would change the world, that they would make great art, that they would be, in their own way, heroes. It was a romantic, idealistic promise, made by teenagers, and it would be tested, terribly, by the First World War, in which two of the four would die, and in which Tolkien himself would fight, and survive, and carry the loss for the rest of his life.

Edith Bratt, Oxford and a Love That Waited

While he was still a teenager, Tolkien met Edith Bratt, a young woman who lived in the same boarding house as him in Birmingham, who was three years older than he was, who was beautiful, who played the piano, who was, in many ways, the first love of his life. They fell in love, they walked together, they talked, they shared secrets, and Father Francis, who was Tolkien’s guardian, forbade the relationship, because Tolkien was too young, because he needed to concentrate on his studies, because Edith was Protestant and Tolkien was Catholic, and because, in Father Francis’s view, the romance would ruin Tolkien’s chances of going to Oxford. Tolkien obeyed, for three years, he did not see Edith, he did not write to her, and on his twenty-first birthday, in 1913, the day he became an adult, he wrote to her, he proposed, and she, who had, in the meantime, become engaged to another man, broke that engagement, and married Tolkien, in 1916, just before he went to war.

Edith was, for Tolkien, the centre of his life, the woman he loved for sixty years, the mother of his four children, and the inspiration, in part, for Luthien, the elven princess in his stories, a beautiful, immortal woman who gives up her immortality for love of a mortal man, Beren. Tolkien himself said, in later life, that the story of Beren and Luthien was, in many ways, his own story, and Edith’s, a story of a love that waited, that survived separation, that survived war, and that lasted, in the end, a lifetime. He was buried, after his death, beside Edith, and on their gravestone, under their names, are the names Beren and Luthien, a final, quiet tribute to a love that had shaped his whole life, and his whole work.

He went to Oxford, to Exeter College, where he studied English language and literature, where he was, by all accounts, a brilliant student, where he learned Old English, where he read Beowulf, the great Anglo-Saxon poem, where he studied the sagas of Iceland, and where he began, in earnest, to think about the languages he had invented, about the stories that could be told in those languages, and about the world that could contain them. He graduated in 1915, with a first-class degree, and he joined the army, as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, and he went, in 1916, to France, to the Somme, to one of the bloodiest battles of the First World War.

The Somme, Loss and the Birth of Middle-earth

The Battle of the Somme, in the summer of 1916, was one of the worst battles in British history, a battle in which, on the first day alone, tens of thousands of British soldiers were killed or wounded, a battle that lasted for months, that turned fields into mud, that destroyed a generation, and that Tolkien survived, though many of his friends did not. He was in the trenches, he saw men die, he saw the mud, the rain, the rats, the fear, and he was, after a few months, sent back to England with trench fever, a disease caused by lice, that left him weak, ill, and, in many ways, lucky to be alive. Two of his closest friends from the T.C.B.S., Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, were killed in the war, and Tolkien, who had promised, with them, to change the world, was left, at twenty-four, with a sense of loss, of guilt, of survivor’s guilt, and of a duty to live, and to write, for those who had died.

It was during the war, and in the years immediately after it, that Tolkien began to write the stories that would become The Silmarillion, the great history of Middle-earth, the book that tells the story of the creation of the world, of the elves, of the wars against Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, and of Beren and Luthien, of Turin, of the fall of Gondolin, stories that are, in many ways, darker, sadder, and more tragic than The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, stories about loss, about pride, about love, and about the way even the greatest heroes can fail. He wrote them in notebooks, in trenches, in hospitals, in the quiet years after the war, when he was working as a lexicographer on the Oxford English Dictionary, and later, as a professor at Leeds and then at Oxford, and he kept writing them, revising them, for the rest of his life, never finishing them, never publishing them in his lifetime, because they were, in his mind, too large, too complex, too unfinished, to be a book.

The war shaped his work in deep ways. The Dead Marshes in The Lord of the Rings, a place where dead soldiers lie under the water, their faces looking up, is, many readers believe, a memory of the Somme, of the mud, of the dead, of a landscape that Tolkien never forgot. The Shire, the peaceful home of the hobbits, is, in many ways, the England Tolkien had lost, the rural England of his childhood, before the war, before the factories, before the modern world, and the journey of Frodo, a small person who leaves home, who goes to war, who returns, changed, and who finds that home is no longer quite home, is, in many ways, Tolkien’s own journey, and the journey of his generation, a generation that went to war as boys and came home as men, if they came home at all.

He married Edith in 1916, before going to France, they had four children, John, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla, and Tolkien, after the war, settled into academic life, teaching at Oxford, writing scholarly books about Beowulf, about Old English, about the languages he loved, and, in his spare time, telling stories to his children, stories about hobbits, about dragons, about a ring, stories that began, as he later said, on a blank page, with the sentence, In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit, a sentence that came to him, he said, while he was marking exam papers, and that became, in time, The Hobbit.

The Hobbit, a Children’s Story That Became a Classic

The Hobbit, published in 1937, is a children’s book, or so it seems at first. It tells the story of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit, a small, comfortable person who lives in a hole in the ground, who likes food, who likes his garden, who likes a quiet life, and who is, one morning, visited by Gandalf, a wizard, and by thirteen dwarves, who invite him, or rather, who tell him, that he is going on an adventure, to reclaim their treasure from a dragon, Smaug, who lives under a mountain. Bilbo does not want to go, he is frightened, he is comfortable, but he goes, and on the journey he meets trolls, goblins, spiders, elves, a man who can turn into a bear, and, in a cave under the mountains, a creature called Gollum, with whom he plays a game of riddles, and from whom he takes, or rather, finds, a ring, a small, gold ring that makes its wearer invisible, a ring that will, in time, become the most important object in all of Middle-earth.

The Hobbit was a success, it was loved by children, it was loved by adults, it was praised by critics, and it was, in many ways, a perfect book: funny, exciting, scary, and, underneath, serious, about a small person who discovers that he is braver than he thought, that he is cleverer than he thought, and that home, when he returns to it, is not quite the same, because he has changed. Tolkien wrote it for his children, he read it to them, he revised it, and he published it, at the encouragement of a publisher who had seen the manuscript, and who thought it was, in his words, a book that children would love. He was right, and The Hobbit has been read by millions of children, and adults, ever since, in many languages, in many countries, and it is still, today, one of the most loved children’s books ever written.

Tolkien himself was, by then, a professor at Oxford, a respected scholar, a man who was, in his academic life, serious, precise, and, in his private life, playful, inventive, and, in many ways, a child at heart, a man who loved to make up languages, to draw maps, to tell stories, and to share those stories with his children. He did not expect The Hobbit to make him famous, and he did not expect his readers to ask for a sequel, but they did, and his publisher did, and Tolkien, who had, in his notebooks, a whole history of Middle-earth, a whole world that was far larger and darker than The Hobbit, began, slowly, to write a sequel, a book that would take him seventeen years to finish, and that would become The Lord of the Rings.

The Lord of the Rings and Seventeen Years of Writing

The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, is not, as many people think, a trilogy. It is a single novel, divided, for practical reasons, into three books, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King, and it tells the story of Frodo Baggins, Bilbo’s nephew, who inherits the ring, who learns that it is not a simple magic ring, but the One Ring, made by Sauron, the Dark Lord, to control all other rings, and all peoples, and who must take the Ring to Mount Doom, in Mordor, the land of Sauron, and destroy it, in the fire where it was made, before Sauron can get it back and conquer Middle-earth.

Frodo does not go alone. He is joined by Sam, his gardener, his friend, his loyal companion, who, in many ways, is the true hero of the book, a man who carries Frodo, literally, up a mountain, who never gives up, who believes, even when Frodo cannot, that there is good in the world, and that it is worth fighting for. He is joined by Gandalf, by Aragorn, by Legolas, by Gimli, by Merry and Pippin, by Boromir, and by many others, in a fellowship that is, in the end, broken, but that, in its breaking, shows the strength of friendship, of loyalty, of sacrifice. The book is long, it is detailed, it is full of songs, of poems, of histories, of languages, of maps, and it is, for many readers, a book that takes time, that demands patience, and that repays that patience with a world that feels real, with characters who feel real, and with a story that is, in the end, about the smallest person doing the hardest thing, and succeeding, not because he is strong, but because he is good.

Tolkien wrote the book slowly, over seventeen years, from 1937 to 1949, with interruptions for the Second World War, for his teaching, for his family, for his health, and he revised it, again and again, in notebooks, in typescripts, in proofs, until, in 1954, it was published, first in Britain, then in America, where it became, in the 1960s, a cult book, a book loved by students, by hippies, by readers who saw, in Frodo’s journey, a metaphor for their own lives, for a world that was, in the 1960s, in turmoil, in Vietnam, in civil rights, in a generation that was questioning authority, and that found, in Tolkien, a story about resisting a dark power, about holding on to hope, about the value of ordinary people.

He was, by then, in his sixties, a famous writer, though he did not always enjoy fame, a man who was, in many ways, surprised by the success of his books, because he had written them for himself, for his children, for the love of language, and not for money, not for fame, not for a mass audience. He received letters from readers all over the world, he answered many of them, he was kind to his fans, he was, in his own way, grateful, but he was also, at times, tired, overwhelmed, and a little bewildered by the attention, by the questions, by the people who wanted to know more about Middle-earth than he had written, and who, in some cases, treated his books as if they were real history, rather than stories he had invented.

Oxford, the Inklings and a Life of Teaching

Tolkien’s academic life was, for him, as important as his writing life, and it is important to understand it, because it shaped his books in deep ways. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, from 1925 to 1945, and then a professor of English language and literature, from 1945 to 1959, and he taught, he lectured, he examined, he wrote scholarly articles, and he was, by all accounts, a brilliant teacher, a man who could make Beowulf, a poem written a thousand years ago, feel alive, who could make Old English, a language that most students find difficult, feel beautiful, and who inspired a generation of students to love language, to love literature, and to love the past.

He was a member of a group called the Inklings, a group of writers and scholars at Oxford who met in a pub, the Eagle and Child, to read their work to each other, to talk, to argue, to laugh, and to support each other. The most famous member, after Tolkien, was C.S. Lewis, the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, a man who was Tolkien’s close friend, who encouraged him to publish The Lord of the Rings, who listened to him read chapters aloud, and who, in many ways, was the person who made it possible for Tolkien to finish the book, because Lewis believed in it, and told Tolkien, again and again, that it was good, that it mattered, and that he should keep going. Lewis and Tolkien quarrelled, in later years, over religion, over literature, over many things, but their friendship, and their mutual encouragement, remains one of the great literary friendships of the twentieth century.

Tolkien retired from Oxford in 1959, he moved, with Edith, to Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, and then back to Oxford, and he lived, in his retirement, a quiet life, writing, revising, answering letters, and working, always, on The Silmarillion, the great history of Middle-earth that he had begun in the trenches, and that he never finished, and that would, after his death, be edited by his son Christopher, and published in 1977, four years after Tolkien’s death, as a book that, though unfinished, shows the full scope of Tolkien’s imagination, the full history of his world, from its creation to the end of the Third Age.

Edith died in 1971, at the age of eighty-two, and Tolkien, who had loved her for sixty years, was devastated. He lived for two more years, in Oxford, alone, writing, remembering, and, in his own words, feeling that he had lost the centre of his life. He died on 2 September 1973, at the age of eighty-one, in Bournemouth, after a short illness, and he was buried beside Edith, in Oxford, under a gravestone that bears, as I have said, the names Beren and Luthien, a final tribute to a love that had lasted a lifetime, and that had, in many ways, made Middle-earth possible.

Christopher Tolkien, The Silmarillion and the World After

After Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher, who had, as a child, listened to his father tell stories, who had, as a young man, helped his father with maps and with manuscripts, and who had, as an adult, become a scholar in his own right, took on the task of editing his father’s unpublished work, of sorting through thousands of pages of notes, of drafts, of revisions, and of publishing them, so that the world could see the full extent of Tolkien’s imagination. The Silmarillion, published in 1977, was the first of those books, and it was followed by Unfinished Tales, by The History of Middle-earth, a series of twelve volumes, and by other books, all edited by Christopher, who devoted his life, in many ways, to his father’s work, and who died, himself, in 2020, at the age of ninety-five, having completed a task that no other son has ever completed for a father.

The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit have, since Tolkien’s death, become even more famous, through films, through television, through games, through merchandise, through a whole industry that Tolkien himself would have found bewildering, and, in many ways, would have disliked, because he was a man who loved books, who loved language, who loved the quiet of Oxford, and who did not seek fame, or money, or a mass audience. Yet the films, directed by Peter Jackson, have brought Middle-earth to billions of people who have never read the books, and they have, in many ways, been faithful to Tolkien’s vision, to his world, to his characters, and to his belief that a small person can change the world.

Today, Tolkien is read in schools, in universities, in book clubs, and by ordinary readers who find, in his books, a world that is both escapist and serious, a world that is about good and evil, about friendship, about loyalty, about sacrifice, and about the hope that, even in the darkest times, there is light, and that light is worth fighting for. His books are still, today, among the most read in the world, and his name, J.R.R. Tolkien, is still, today, one of the most loved names in literature, a name that means, to millions of people, Middle-earth, hobbits, elves, dwarves, wizards, and a story about a ring, a journey, and a small person who saved the world.

My Take:

I think J.R.R. Tolkien is the writer who taught me that a story can be a place, and that a place can be a home, and I do not mean that in a vague way. I mean that when I read The Lord of the Rings, I feel as if I have been to the Shire, as if I have walked through Rivendell, as if I have stood on the slopes of Mount Doom, and that feeling, that sense of having travelled, is not something I get from most books. Most books tell me a story. Tolkien gives me a world, a world with languages, with histories, with maps, with songs, with a past that feels as real as my own past, and that is a remarkable achievement, one that no other writer, in my experience, has quite matched.

What I admire most about Tolkien is his patience. He spent seventeen years writing The Lord of the Rings, he spent fifty years writing The Silmarillion, he spent a lifetime inventing languages, and he did it, for the most part, without fame, without money, without an audience, because he loved the work itself. That is a kind of patience that is hard to understand in a world that wants everything fast, that wants a book in a year, that wants success overnight. Tolkien did not work fast. He worked slowly, carefully, revising, rewriting, thinking, and he produced, in the end, books that have lasted for seventy years, and that will, I think, last for hundreds more, because they were made slowly, with care, and with love. That is a lesson for anyone who wants to make something good: do not rush, do not settle, take your time, and make it as true as you can.

I also think about his war, and about how it shaped him, because it is easy to forget, when you read about hobbits and elves, that Tolkien was a soldier, that he fought at the Somme, that he saw men die, that he lost his closest friends, and that he carried that loss for the rest of his life. The Dead Marshes, in The Lord of the Rings, where dead soldiers lie under the water, is, I believe, a memory of the Somme, and Frodo’s return to the Shire, where he finds that home is no longer home, that he has changed, that the world has changed, is, I believe, a memory of coming home from war, of being a different person, of not fitting in anymore. That is a sad, true story, and it is one that many soldiers know, and Tolkien told it, not in a memoir, not in a war novel, but in a fantasy, in a story about a hobbit, and that, I think, is why the story works: because fantasy, at its best, can tell the truth about war, about loss, about trauma, in a way that realism sometimes cannot.

His love for Edith is the part of his life I find most moving, because it is a love story that lasted sixty years, that survived separation, that survived war, that survived poverty, that survived fame, and that ended, in the end, with Tolkien burying Edith, and then being buried beside her, under the names Beren and Luthien. That is a beautiful ending, and it is a true ending, because Beren and Luthien, in Tolkien’s stories, are a mortal man and an immortal elf who give up everything for love, and Tolkien and Edith, in their lives, gave up a great deal for love, too: they waited three years, they defied a guardian, they married in wartime, they raised four children, they lived, in many ways, an ordinary life, and they loved each other, for sixty years, in a way that is rare, and that is, I think, the real foundation of Middle-earth. Without Edith, there would be no Luthien, and without Luthien, there would be no Lord of the Rings as we know it. That is a reminder that behind many great books there is a great love, and that love deserves to be remembered.

I think about his languages a lot, because they are, for me, the most extraordinary part of his work. Most writers invent a world and then invent a few words for it. Tolkien invented languages first, whole languages, with grammars, with histories, with sounds that felt, to him, beautiful, and then he invented a world in which those languages could be spoken. That is backwards, in a way, and it is also, in a way, the most honest way to invent a world, because a language is, in itself, a world, a way of seeing, a way of thinking, and Tolkien understood that, deeply, as a scholar of Old English, as a man who loved words, who loved the sound of Welsh, of Finnish, of Old Norse. His languages, Quenya, Sindarin, Khuzdul, Black Speech, are not just decoration. They are the heart of Middle-earth, and they are the reason Middle-earth feels real, because a world with its own languages feels like a world that existed before the story began, and that will exist after the story ends.

His friendship with C.S. Lewis is another part of his life I admire, because it shows what friendship can do for a writer. Lewis listened to Tolkien read The Lord of the Rings aloud, chapter by chapter, in a pub in Oxford, and he told Tolkien, again and again, that it was good, that he should keep going, that it mattered. Without Lewis, Tolkien might never have finished the book, because seventeen years is a long time to work on a book alone, without encouragement, without a reader, without a friend who believes in you. That is a lesson for all of us: that a writer, an artist, a person who is making something hard, needs a friend who will listen, who will encourage, who will say, keep going, it is good. Lewis was that friend for Tolkien, and Tolkien was, in turn, that friend for Lewis, encouraging him to write Narnia, to write about faith, to write about imagination. That mutual encouragement is, I think, one of the great literary friendships, and it is a model for how friends should treat each other’s work.

I do not think Tolkien is a perfect writer, and I do not think he wanted to be one. His books are long, they are slow in places, they have songs and poems that some readers skip, they have descriptions of landscapes that go on for pages, they have few women in central roles, and they have, in the view of some critics, a view of good and evil that is too simple, too black and white. I think those criticisms have some truth in them, and I think it is important to say so, because admiring Tolkien does not mean pretending his books are perfect. They are not perfect, but they are great, and their greatness lies not in their perfection but in their ambition, in their scope, in their belief that a story can contain a whole world, and that a small person can change that world, not by being strong, but by being good.

Sam Gamgee is the character I love most in The Lord of the Rings, and I love him for a simple reason: he is ordinary, he is a gardener, he is loyal, he is brave, and he carries Frodo up a mountain when Frodo cannot walk anymore. That image, of Sam carrying Frodo, is, for me, the heart of the book, because it says, plainly, that heroism is not about being the chosen one, not about being strong, not about being clever, but about being loyal, about not giving up on a friend, about carrying them when they cannot carry themselves. That is a lesson I think about often, in my own life, when I am tired, when a friend is tired, when the mountain seems too high. Sam teaches me to keep going, to carry, to believe, even when Frodo cannot believe, and that is a lesson that is worth more than any magic ring, any sword, any wizard.

Frodo himself is a hero I find both inspiring and sad, because he succeeds, he destroys the Ring, he saves Middle-earth, and he is, in the end, wounded, he cannot stay in the Shire, he cannot be happy, he must leave, he must sail to the West, to a place of healing. That is a sad ending, and it is also a true ending, because some wounds do not heal, some journeys change you so much that you cannot go home again, and Tolkien, who had been to war, who had lost friends, who had come home changed, understood that, and he wrote it, honestly, without a happy ending that would have been a lie. Frodo’s departure is, in many ways, the most moving part of the book, because it says that saving the world does not always save you, and that is a hard truth, but it is a true one.

If I could show one Tolkien book to a person who had never read him, I would show The Hobbit, because it is short, because it is funny, because it is exciting, and because it shows, in a single story, what Tolkien could do: take a small, comfortable person, send him on a journey, and bring him home changed, braver, wiser, and a little sadder. Then, if that person loved The Hobbit, I would show them The Lord of the Rings, slowly, without rushing, and I would tell them to be patient, to let the world grow on them, to let the songs and the landscapes and the histories sink in, because the reward, in the end, is a world that will stay with them for the rest of their lives, a world they can return to, again and again, as I have returned to it, and as millions of readers have returned to it.

I think about Christopher Tolkien a lot, and about the work he did after his father’s death, editing The Silmarillion, editing twelve volumes of history, devoting his life to his father’s unfinished work. That is a remarkable act of love, and it is also a remarkable act of scholarship, because Christopher did not only publish his father’s notes, he organised them, he explained them, he made them readable, and he gave the world a fuller picture of Middle-earth than Tolkien himself ever published. Without Christopher, we would have The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and we would not have The Silmarillion, and Middle-earth would be a smaller place. I am grateful to Christopher, and I think the world should be grateful to him, for a son’s love that became a life’s work.

In the end, I think Tolkien’s life teaches a lesson about making things slowly, about loving language, about loving trees, about loving a person for sixty years, and about believing that a small person, a hobbit, a gardener, a professor in Oxford, can make a world, can change a world, can leave a world better than he found it. He was not a celebrity in the modern sense, he was not rich, he was not famous for most of his life, but he left behind books that are still read, still loved, still quoted, and a world, Middle-earth, that is still, today, a home for millions of readers. That is not a small legacy. It is, in fact, one of the largest a writer can leave, and it was built, not in a hurry, not for fame, but slowly, patiently, with love, over a lifetime, by a man who believed that stories matter, that languages matter, and that a small person, doing the right thing, can save the world.

I also think about Tolkien’s love of trees, and about how it appears in his books, because he loved trees, he was angry when trees were cut down, he wrote about Ents, tree-like beings who walk, who talk, who fight, and he made, in The Lord of the Rings, a story about the destruction of trees, about Saruman cutting down the forests of Fangorn, about the Shire being despoiled, about a world that is losing its green places, and about heroes who fight to protect them. That is a very modern story, a story about the environment, about conservation, about loving nature, and Tolkien wrote it in the 1940s and 1950s, long before environmentalism was a movement, because he loved trees, because he had grown up in a Birmingham that was losing its countryside to factories, and because he understood, deeply, that a world without trees is a poorer world. That love of trees is, I think, one of the most important parts of his legacy, and it is one that is still, today, urgently relevant.

There is a final image I want to leave, and it is the image of Tolkien in his study at Oxford, with a pipe, with a stack of papers, with a map of Middle-earth on the wall, writing, slowly, in pencil, a story about a hobbit, a ring, a journey, and a small person who saves the world. That image is, for me, the heart of Tolkien, a man who was, in many ways, ordinary, a professor, a husband, a father, a man who loved languages, who loved trees, who loved his wife, and who, in his spare time, in his study, made a world, a world that has, since his death, become a home for millions of readers, a world that will, I think, last as long as people read, as long as they love stories, as long as they believe that a small person can change the world.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is J.R.R. Tolkien best known for writing?

He is best known for The Hobbit from 1937, about Bilbo Baggins and a dragon, and The Lord of the Rings from 1954 to 1955, about Frodo Baggins and the One Ring, both set in Middle-earth, a world he invented with its own languages and history.

Was J.R.R. Tolkien a professor?

Yes, he was a professor at Oxford, teaching Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945 and then English language and literature until his retirement in 1959, and he was a scholar of Old English, Beowulf and medieval languages as well as a novelist.

Did J.R.R. Tolkien fight in the First World War?

Yes, he served as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers, fought at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, was sent home with trench fever, and lost two of his closest friends, Rob Gilson and Geoffrey Smith, in the war, an experience that shaped his writing.

Who was Edith Tolkien in his life?

Edith Bratt was the woman he met as a teenager in Birmingham, loved for sixty years, married in 1916, and with whom he had four children, and she was, in part, the inspiration for Luthien, the elf princess who gives up immortality for love in his stories.

What is The Silmarillion?

The Silmarillion is the history of Middle-earth from its creation, telling the stories of the elves, the first Dark Lord Morgoth, and Beren and Luthien, which Tolkien wrote over his lifetime but never finished, and which his son Christopher edited and published in 1977, four years after his death.

Who was C.S. Lewis to Tolkien?

C.S. Lewis was a fellow Oxford writer and member of the Inklings, a close friend who listened to Tolkien read The Lord of the Rings aloud, encouraged him to finish it, and wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, though they later quarrelled over religion and literature.

When did J.R.R. Tolkien die?

He died on 2 September 1973 in Bournemouth, at the age of eighty-one, two years after Edith died in 1971, and he was buried beside her in Oxford under a gravestone bearing the names Beren and Luthien.