JRR Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father managed a bank. The father died of rheumatic fever when Ronald was four; his mother, Mabel, had already taken the boys home to England.

In 1900 Mabel became a Roman Catholic. Her family cut off their support because of it. She raised two sons in poverty in the Birmingham suburbs, taught Ronald Latin and botany and the shapes of letters, and died of diabetes in 1904, at thirty-four, before insulin existed. Tolkien was twelve. He believed for the rest of his life that his mother had died for her faith, and he never left the church she had joined.

He and his brother were made wards of Father Francis Morgan, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory, who paid for their schooling. At sixteen Tolkien fell in love with Edith Bratt; Father Morgan forbade contact until he turned twenty-one. On the evening of his twenty-first birthday he wrote to her. They married in 1916 and were together fifty-five years.

He went to the Somme that same year as a signals officer, fought in the fighting around Thiepval, came down with trench fever, and was invalided home. Of the small circle of school friends he had called the TCBS, all but one were dead by the end of the war. He wrote later that the first pages of his invented mythology were set down in army huts and hospital wards.

His profession was language. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, taught at Leeds, and in 1925 became Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, then Merton Professor of English Language and Literature until 1959. His 1936 lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" changed how scholars read the poem. He invented languages first and wrote stories to give them somewhere to live.

On the evening of September 19, 1931, he walked along Addison's Walk at Magdalen College with Hugo Dyson and C. S. Lewis, then an atheist. They argued about myth. Lewis said myths were lies breathed through silver. Tolkien answered that the story of Christ was a myth that had actually happened, a true myth, the pattern behind all the others, working itself out in the real world with real blood. Lewis dated his own conversion to the days immediately after that walk.

The Hobbit was published in 1937, after Tolkien scribbled its first line on a blank page of an exam script he was marking. The Lord of the Rings took another sixteen years and appeared in three volumes in 1954 and 1955. He called it "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" with the religion absorbed into the story rather than stated on the surface. He went to Mass constantly, often daily, and taught his children the Lord's Prayer in Latin.

Edith died in 1971. Tolkien died on September 2, 1973. On their shared grave at Wolvercote he had the names Beren and Lúthien cut beneath their own.

Sources: Humphrey Carpenter, J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography; The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien; Tolkien"On Fairy-Stories"; Alister McGrath, C. S. Lewis: A Life.