Category: Fantasy/Science Fiction

Lifespan: (January 3,1892 –September 2, 1973)

Interesting & Unique Facts: Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford from 1925 to 1945, and Merton Professor of English language and literature from 1945 to 1959. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis and they were both members of the informal literary group, the Inklings.

Tolkien's son, Christopher, published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, which contains Middle-Earth.

Tolkien volunteered for military service during Word War I and was commissioned in the British Army as a Second Lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he worked primariy on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W.

The popularity of Tolkien's books has had a small but lasting effect on the use of language in fantasy literature in particular, and even on mainstream dictionaries, which today commonly accept Tolkien's idiosyncratic spellings dwarves and dwarvish (alongside dwarfs and dwarfish), which had been little used since the mid-1800s and earlier.

Tolkien created at least 10 languages, but only 2 have substantial vocabularies.



Author's work in order (with publication dates):

• The Silmarillion (1977) [published posthumously]
  
• The Hobbit (1937)
• The Lord of the Rings (1954)
  
• Unfinished Tales (1980) [an anthology of Tolkien works published posthumously]
• Farmer Giles of Ham (1949)
• The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962)
• Tree and Leaf (1964)
• The Tolkien Reader (1966) [an anthology of Tolkien works]
• Smith of Wootton Major (1967)
• The Father Christmas Letters (1976)
• Roverandom (1998) [published posthumously]