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Christopher Tolkien, Keeper of His Father’s Legacy, Dies at 95

As literary executor of the estate of his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, Mr. Tolkien compiled and edited such works as “The Silmarillion.”

By Katharine Q. Seelye and Alan Yuhas

Christopher Tolkien, the son of the writer J.R.R. Tolkien, who guarded his legacy and brought forth monumental posthumous works, like “The Silmarillion,” based on his father’s writings, died on Thursday in Provence, France. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by Daniel Klass, his brother-in-law.

For nearly 50 years after his father died in 1973 , Mr. Tolkien worked to keep alive the world he had created in “The Hobbit” (1937) and “The Lord of the Rings” (1949) — the spiders of Mirkwood, the Eye of Mordor, the elves of Rivendell and thousands of pages’ worth of other characters, places and plot twists. In all, he edited or oversaw the publication of two dozen editions of his father’s works, many of which became international best sellers.

Mr. Tolkien was his father’s literary executor but played a far more expansive role than that title usually implies. While the elder Tolkien was writing “The Lord of the Rings,” he was also creating a vast world of legends and mythologies that he hoped would accompany the book. But he was a notorious perfectionist and was never able to put this work in publishable form before he died.

His son spent four years organizing and compiling those myths and legends, publishing them in 1977 as “The Silmarillion.”

“This opened up a wealth and depth of Tolkien’s imaginative world that was breathtaking,” Corey Olsen, a Tolkien expert, said in an interview.

But Tolkien fans and scholars wondered how much of “The Silmarillion” was the work of the father and how much was the work of the son, said Mr. Olsen, the president of the American online university Signum, which specializes in Tolkien studies.

In response, Christopher produced the 12-volume “The History of Middle-earth” (1996), a compilation of drafts, fragments, rewrites, marginal notes and other writings culled from 70 boxes of unpublished material. It showed that virtually everything he had published had come from his father’s hand.

“Christopher showed how his father’s ideas grew and developed over time,” Mr. Olsen said. The volumes did not just reveal J.R.R. Tolkien’s mind at work, he said; they also provided a case study in the creative process.

Christopher Tolkien is also credited with creating the widely acclaimed 1954 map of Middle-earth, the land in which the sprawling stories were set; a copy is now held by the British Library .

“Without Christopher,” Thomas Shippey, a British professor who has been writing and lecturing on Tolkien for 50 years, said in an interview, “we would have very little knowledge of how Tolkien created his mythology and his own legendarium.”

Like his father, an Oxford linguist, Mr. Tolkien spent much of his life devoted to books, and surrounded by them. Both men were scholars of Old and Middle English, and both lectured at Oxford. But while the elder Tolkien was a specialist in Chaucer and Anglo-Saxon sagas, the younger was an authority, above all, on the reams of writing that his father produced.

“He has been treating this extraordinary archive as if it had been discovered in a sealed tomb,” the Houghton Mifflin editor Austin Olney said after meeting Mr. Tolkien at his home in England. By then, almost a million hardcover copies of “The Silmarillion” had been published, and several more books were about to emerge from the vault.

His brother-in-law, Mr. Klass, described Mr. Tolkien as extraordinarily disciplined. He said he would lock himself in his office early in the morning and not emerge until lunchtime.

“His life’s work was to convert this huge mass of material written on envelopes and napkins in his father’s unreadable handwriting,” Mr. Klass said.

Tolkien fans responded on social media to the news of Mr. Tolkien’s death with an outpouring of emotion.

“Takes a humble man to dedicate his life to someone else’s work,” one person wrote on Twitter. “I think of all the books that might never have been published without Christopher’s input. Some of those books define how we now view the professor’s legacy.”

Christopher Tolkien was born in Leeds, England, on Nov. 21, 1924, the third and youngest son of J.R.R. and Edith Mary (Bratt) Tolkien.

For a time he was a sickly child and often stayed at home, giving him and his father a chance to develop a close working relationship. The writer often read to his son, and the son offered encouragement and soon became his father’s assistant and one of his earliest readers.

Christopher Tolkien once said that he grew up in the world his father had created. “For me,” he said, “the cities of ‘The Silmarillion’ are more real than Babylon.”

During World War II, when Christopher was serving with the Royal Air Force in South Africa, his father mailed him parts of “The Lord of the Rings” for comment and editing.

Though the tales of Middle-earth waxed and waned in popularity, they were all but cemented in popular culture in the 2000s, with film adaptations that garnered Academy Awards and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenues. Those movies were not the first adaptations, but they helped bring the stories to a new audience. And their success has in part inspired a forthcoming series on Amazon — the rights to which reportedly cost $200 million.

Even as Mr. Tolkien burnished his father’s legacy and brought it into the 21st century, he could be intensely protective of it. In 2012, the Tolkien estate filed an $80 million lawsuit against Warner Bros. over the digital merchandising of characters from “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.” The suit accused the company of causing harm to the Tolkien legacy. It was eventually settled on undisclosed terms.

Last year, the Tolkien estate disavowed a film based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s life and experiences in World War I, saying the family did “not approve of, authorize or participate” in the project.

In his later years Mr. Tolkien became a French citizen and lived a private life with his second wife, Baillie Tolkien, in the foothills of the Alps in southeastern France.

In addition to Ms. Tolkien, survivors include his sister Priscilla and three children, Simon, Adam and Rachel.

Despite the voluminous amount of unpublished work that Mr. Tolkien brought to light, some Tolkien enthusiasts hoped there might still be more.

“While Tolkien was very poor at finishing things, he also never threw anything away, so we don’t know what’s still unpublished,” Mr. Shippey, the British scholar, said. “There may be some surprises yet.”

Emily S. Rueb contributed reporting, and Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

An earlier version of this obituary misstated the surname of Mr. Tolkien’s brother-in-law, who confirmed his death. He is Daniel Klass, not Kass.

An earlier version of this obituary, using information from the Tolkien Society, misstated the day Mr. Tolkien died. It was Thursday, Jan. 16 -- not Wednesday, Jan. 15.

How we handle corrections

Katharine Q. “Kit” Seelye has been the New England bureau chief, based in Boston, since 2012. She previously worked in the Washington bureau for 12 years, has covered six presidential campaigns and was a pioneer in The Times’s online coverage of politics. More about Katharine Q. Seelye

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Christopher Tolkien obituary

Christopher Tolkien, who has died aged 95, edited and published a huge body of writings left by his father, JRR Tolkien , extending the world of Middle-earth created in The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55), but also providing an unparallelled portrait of a creative life. Becoming literary executor upon his father’s death in 1973, Christopher took charge of 70 boxes of papers ranging from Oxford lectures to lexicons of invented Elvish.

A collection of the primary legends of Middle-earth , The Silmarillion, eagerly anticipated by legions of fans, had been worked and reworked since 1917, with constant evolutions in style, names and plot. Successive drafts, mostly unfinished, had been left in disorder. Christopher began a scholarly edition with variants and notes, but then he decided to publish a single narrative without commentary, eliminating discrepancies including any with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

On a banquet-sized table in the barn of his home in West Hanney, Vale of White Horse, Oxfordshire, he scrutinised drafts, made selections, and harmonised details before typing it all up on his father’s old machine. He had the assistance of Guy Gavriel Kay , a young Canadian who is now a fantasy novelist. Though it contained “a great deal of my own personal literary judgment”, Christopher said, editorial insertions were minimal, confined to links filling gaps in the sources.

Published in 1977, The Silmarillion sold in millions. Though many reviewers and readers felt it too austere, and missed the down-to-earth hobbits, it quickly established itself as a devotees’ favourite and deeply enriches the Middle-earth canon. Yet regret over the extent of editorial intrusion spurred Christopher to publish further books detailing his father’s development of the stories, producing an unparallelled case study in literary creativity.

Christopher was born in Leeds, the third son of Edith (nee Bratt) and John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, professor of English language at the university there. His father’s imagination struck such a chord with him that Christopher once said he grew up in Middle-earth and found the cities of The Silmarillion “more real than Babylon”.

Even at four or five, listening to his father read The Hobbit in draft, he would point out continuity errors. A kinship of spirit, not shared by his brothers, John and Michael, or younger sister, Priscilla, made him “intensely lovable” in his father’s eyes.

After his father became professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, Christopher went to the Dragon school there, and later to the Oratory school in Caversham, Berkshire. Three years off with an irregular heartbeat from 1938 coincided with early work on a sequel to The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, which was written partly to entertain him. He encouraged his father’s tendency to hobbit whimsy, only curbed at the urging of the Oxford don CS Lewis .

After undertaking an abbreviated undergraduate course at Trinity College, Oxford, at 17, Christopher trained in 1944-45 with the RAF in South Africa. His father sent him the chapters of Frodo and Sam’s journey to Mordor as they were written, including passages that read like messages to soothe or stiffen his spirits. Christopher responded with detailed, constructive critiques.

After the war he joined the Lewis–Tolkien circle, the Inklings, taking over readings of The Lord of the Rings in his crisp, sonorous tones. He completed an English degree at Trinity, then took a BLitt on the Old Norse saga of King Heidrek the Wise. A critical edition in 1960 shows, like his father’s work, an aptitude for medieval linguistic analysis and a fascination with the misty border between legend and history.

Christopher lectured at Oxford on Old and Middle English and Old Norse from 1954, and produced editions of three Canterbury Tales with Nevill Coghill. But in 1975 he resigned as fellow of New College to focus on his father’s literary legacy, without regrets. “My father’s invented languages,” he said, “are of more interest than the rather well-tramped field of Anglo-Saxon.”

But he never neglected the professor’s work on medieval language and literature, editing and publishing JRR’s translations of the Middle English Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (1975), a collection of his landmark lectures, The Monsters and the Critics (1983); and much later Beowulf: A Translation and Commentary (2014); plus two volumes of narrative poetry on The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún (2009) and The Fall of Arthur (2013). The Letters of JRR Tolkien (1981) was edited with his biographer Humphrey Carpenter .

As for Middle-earth, Pictures by JRR Tolkien (1979) and the bluntly titled Unfinished Tales (1980) were followed by The History of Middle-earth, in 12 volumes (1983-96), tracing how his father wrote The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings and much else. Christopher’s personal insight was vital in extracting and ordering this from mostly undated manuscripts ranging from calligraphic to catastrophic. Fans include the author Neil Gaiman , who says: “It feels like Christopher lets us in to his father’s mind: lets us walk the road as JRRT walked it.”

Much bigger successes commercially were The Children of Húrin (2007), woven from multiple texts, and two books following the evolution of a tale apiece, Beren and Lúthien (2017) and The Fall of Gondolin (2018). This, his 24th volume on his father’s work, was consciously his last.

For outstanding contribution to literature, in 2016 Christopher received the Bodley medal. Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s librarian, said: “I can’t think of another example where father and son worked in such a way together and then the son carried on the baton.”

Christopher remained effective custodian of his father’s papers after lodging them at the Bodleian Library in Oxford in 1979, overseeing access by other scholars, whose work he read closely before publication, offering detailed comments in fax messages that were often acerbic and funny but scrupulously polite. He loathed the computer and vowed never to use email unless it were made illegal not to.

Controversies over the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings and Hobbit movies were an unwelcome intrusion. “For him, his father’s works started and ended as books,” said David Brawn of his UK publisher, HarperCollins. Only after his retirement from the Tolkien Estate board in 2017 did it agree to work with HarperCollins and Amazon Prime on the upcoming Lord of the Rings prequel TV adaptation.

Christopher married the sculptor Faith Faulconbridge in 1951. In 1967 they divorced and he married Baillie Knapheis, nee Klass, who had worked some time before as his father’s secretary. After moving to the south of France in 1975, the couple lived comfortably but modestly first in La Garde-Freinet and then near Aups, giving much of the income from “the Tolkien business” to charities humanitarian or cultural.

He read copiously, mostly classics such as Walter Scott; wrote long and beautifully crafted letters; and enjoyed local wine, good food and convivial conversation with regular visitors from Britain. Terrifically funny, he was a gifted mimic of others’ eccentricities.

Despite some minor physical infirmity in his 90s, his prodigious memory remained intact, and he was still in touch with HarperCollins editors weeks before his death.

He is survived by Baillie and their children, Adam and Rachel, and by Simon, the son of his first marriage.

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Christopher Tolkien, Son of J.R.R. Tolkien and ‘First Scholar’ of Middle-Earth, Dies at 95

Following his father’s death in 1973, Christopher began editing and publishing the “Lord of the Rings” author’s unseen writings

Theresa Machemer

Correspondent

As the youngest son of beloved fantasy author J.R.R. Tolkien, Christopher Tolkien was raised hearing fantastical tales of Bilbo Baggins and Middle-earth. When his father died in 1973, the younger Tolkien became his literary executor. Over the next 47 years, Christopher sorted through 70 boxes of Tolkien’s unpublished work; ultimately, he compiled and edited 24 editions of poems, histories, translations and stories centered on his father’s expansive fantasy world.

Christopher died Wednesday in Provence, France, report Katharine Q. Seelye and Alan Yuhas for the New York Times . He was 95.

Per the Times , Christopher’s first editing project was a tome of myths and legends from the world of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings . Building on a 12-volume compilation of drafts and rewrites left by his father, he published The Silmarillion in 1977.

“This opened up a wealth and depth of Tolkien’s imaginative world that was breathtaking,” Tolkien expert Corey Olsen tells the Times .

In total, three-quarters of Tolkien’s works were published posthumously. Of these post-1973 collections, around three-quarters were edited by his son. The most recent addition to the author’s oeuvre, The Fall of Gondolin , was published in August 2018 but originally written more than a century earlier, when Tolkien was recovering from trench fever in 1917.

The tale, which served as a template for the author’s later works, features a reluctant hero whose quest culminates in a battle with Middle-earth monsters like orcs and balrogs. The 2018 edition includes not just one story, but all of Tolkien’s many rewrites, accompanied by historical notes and explanations penned by his son.

“[Christopher] gave us a window into Tolkien’s creative process, and he provided scholarly commentary that enriched our understanding of Middle-earth,” says Tolkien scholar Dimitra Fimi in a statement . “He was Middle-earth’s cartographer and first scholar.”

The third son of J.R.R. and Edith Tolkien, Christopher was born in Leeds, England, on November 21, 1924. He spent his childhood in Oxford, where his father was a professor, and joined the Royal Air Force during World War II. Stationed in South Africa, he regularly corresponded with his father, who was then writing The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien often sent draft chapters to his son.

Christopher made small interventions when his father sought advice, he told the Guardian ’s Alison Flood via fax in 2009.

Referencing Samwise Gamgee, a Hobbit who accompanies Frodo Baggins on his journey, Christopher said, “[My father] wrote to me in May 1944 that he would change the name Gamgee to Goodchild ‘if I thought you would let me,’ ‘since Hobbits of that class have very Saxon names as a rule.’”

The younger Tolkien replied “that I wouldn't at all like to see Sam Gamgee changed to Sam Goodchild; and Sam Gamgee remained.”

After the war, Christopher became a lecturer in Old and Middle English, as well as Old Icelandic, at Oxford University. He drew many of the original maps that accompanied his father’s first editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy in the 1950s, in addition to revised maps in the 1970s editions.

Later in life, Christopher moved to France with his second wife, Baillie Tolkien. He became a French citizen and lived at the foothills of the Alps. In 2016, he received the Bodley Medal in recognition of his contributions to culture and literature.

“Christopher’s commitment to his father’s works [has] seen dozens of publications released, and his own work as an academic in Oxford demonstrates his ability and skill as a scholar,” says Tolkien Society Chair Shaun Gunner in a statement . “Millions of people around the world will be forever grateful to Christopher for bringing us The Silmarillion , The Children of Húrin , The History of Middle-earth series and many others. We have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed.”

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Theresa Machemer is a freelance writer based in Washington DC. Her work has also appeared in National Geographic and SciShow. Website: tkmach.com

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Christopher Tolkien

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Christopher Tolkien in 1996

Christopher Reuel Tolkien ( November 21 , 1924 - January 16 , 2020) was the son of author J.R.R. Tolkien , and editor of much of his father's posthumously published work. He drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings (which he signed C. J. R. T. - the J. for John, a baptismal name).

On August 31st, 2017, he resigned as long-time owner and a director of the Tolkien Estate Limited [1] [2] , but remained his father's literary executor until his death in early 2020.

• 1 Biography
• 2 Audiobooks
• 3 Portrayal in film
• 4 References

Biography [ ]

Chistopher Tolkien was born in Leeds , England , the third son of J.R.R. Tolkien. He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and then at the Oratory School . In World War II , he served as a pilot in the Royal Air Force, after which he read English at Oxford University .

Young Christopher had long been part of the critical audience for his father's fiction, first as a child listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins , and then as a teenager and young adult offering much feedback on The Lord of the Rings during its fifteen-year gestation. Christopher himself had the task of interpreting his father's sometimes self-contradictory maps of Middle-earth in order to produce the versions used in the books. Christopher re-drew the main map in the late 1970's to clarify the lettering and correct some errors and omissions. He appointed Stephen Raw to assist in the map presentation for one of the releases of the trilogy.

He followed in his father's footsteps in academia, becoming a lecturer and tutor in English language at New College, Oxford in 1964, until 1975.

His father had written a great deal of material on Middle-earth mythos that was not published in his lifetime; although he had originally intended to publish The Silmarillion along with The Lord of the Rings , and parts of it were in a finished state - he died in 1973 with the project unfinished. And so, Christopher then embarked on organizing the masses of his father's notes, some of them written on odd scraps of paper a half-century earlier. Much of the material was handwritten, frequently a fair draft was written over a half-erased first draft, and names of characters routinely changed between the beginning and end of the same draft. Deciphering this was an arduous task, and perhaps only someone with personal experience of J.R.R. and the evolution of his stories could have made any sense of it; even so, Christopher has admitted to having to occasionally guess at what his father intended.

Nevertheless, working with Guy Gavriel Kay , he was able to publish The Silmarillion in 1977 . This was followed by Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth in 1980 , and then the twelve volumes of The History of Middle-earth between 1983 and 1996 , and the three volumes of the Great Tales between 2007 and 2018 . He also compiled The Monsters and the Critics and other essays , of his father's significant academic lectures given from the 1930's to the 1960's, in 1983.

A year before his resignation in 2017, Christopher Tolkien was given the Bodley Medal for his extensive labors on his father's writings, by the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the home to the majority of J.R.R. Tolkien's manuscripts and effects. [3]

Christopher Tolkien in the 2010s

His second wife, Baillie Tolkien , edited J. R. R. Tolkien's Letters From Father Christmas for posthumous publication.

His eldest son (from his first wife Faith), Simon Tolkien , is a barrister and novelist. His other children include Adam Reuel Tolkien , and Rachel Clare Reuel Tolkien .

Christopher passed away in January 2020 at the age of 96. In his memory, many essays by Tolkien scholars concerning Christopher's work in his father's legendarium were published two years later in The Great Tales Never End , edited by Richard Ovenden , current head of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford .

Audiobooks [ ]

Christopher Tolkien has occasionally narrated portions of his father's literature.

• 1977 -  J.R.R. Tolkien: The Silmarillion: Of Beren and Lúthien , of the chapter " Of Beren and Lúthien ", distributed by New York: Caedmon Records (TC 1564)
• 1978 -  J.R.R. Tolkien: Of the Darkening of Valinor, and Of the Flight of the Ñoldor, from The Silmarillion , dist. New York: Caedmon Records (TC 1579)
• 1992 - The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son , read by him and his father, dist. HarperCollins Audiobooks
• 2007:  The Children of Húrin Audiobook, Preface and Introduction (story read by Christopher Lee ), dist. HarperCollins Audiobooks

Portrayal in film [ ]

In the 2019 biographical film Tolkien , a young Christopher Tolkien is portrayed by English actor Jack Riley .

References [ ]

• ↑ https://beta.companieshouse.gov.uk/company/07842430/officers (last entry on page)
• ↑ http://www.theonering.net/torwp/2017/11/15/104426-in-historic-move-christopher-tolkien-resigns-as-director-of-tolkien-estate/
• ↑ https://www.tolkiensociety.org/2016/10/christopher-tolkien-awarded-bodley-medal/
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'First Middle-earth scholar' Christopher Tolkien dies

• Published 16 January 2020

Christopher Tolkien, who edited and published the posthumous works of his father, Lord of the Rings writer JRR Tolkien, has died aged 95.

The news was confirmed by the Tolkien Society, which described him as "Middle-earth's first scholar".

After his father's death in 1973, Mr Tolkien published the acclaimed work The Silmarillion.

Scholar Dr Dimitra Fimi said the study of JRR Tolkien "would never be what it is today" without his input.

Christopher Tolkien was born in Leeds, and grew up in Oxford.

After serving in the RAF during World War Two he became a lecturer in Old and Middle English and Old Icelandic at Oxford University.

He drew the original maps of Middle-earth seen in The Lord of the Rings books released in the 1950s.

He later became the literary executor of the Tolkien Estate, completing several books set in the world of Middle-earth using his father's material from 70 boxes of unpublished work.

Tolkien Society chairman Shaun Gunner said: "Christopher's commitment to his father's works has seen dozens of publications released... we have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed."

Dr Fimi said: "From editing The Silmarillion to the mammoth task of giving us The History Of Middle-earth series, he revealed his father's grand vision of a rich and complex mythology.

"He gave us a window into Tolkien's creative process, and he provided scholarly commentary that enriched our understanding of Middle-earth."

Charlie Redmayne, HarperCollins UK CEO, described him as a "devoted curator of his father's work" who spent decades "bringing Middle-earth to generations of readers".

More on this story

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• Published 11 April 2018

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• Published 1 June 2017

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British book editor, son of j. r. r. tolkien / from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, dear wikiwand ai, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:.

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Summarize this article for a 10 year old

Christopher John Reuel Tolkien (21 November 1924   – 16 January 2020) was an English and naturalised French academic editor. [1] The son of author and academic J. R. R. Tolkien , Christopher Tolkien edited much of his father's posthumously published work, including The Silmarillion and the 12-volume (plus one volume of indices) series The History of Middle-Earth . Tolkien also drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings .

Outside his father's unfinished works, Christopher Tolkien edited three tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (with Nevill Coghill ) and his father's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight .

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Christopher tolkien, 'middle-earth's first scholar,' dies at 95.

Colin Dwyer

Christopher Tolkien, who for decades preserved and extended the beloved literary fantasies of his father, J.R.R. Tolkien, has died at the age of 95. The son's death, announced Thursday by the Tolkien Society, ends a distinguished career devoted to his father's legacy and the world he crafted in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings .

As the literary executor of the elder Tolkien's estate, Christopher edited and published a trove of works that had been left unfinished at the time of his father's death in 1973 — beginning in 1977 with The Silmarillion , a compendium of creation myths from Middle-earth, and continuing through the publication of the love story Beren and Lúthien in 2017.

But Christopher Tolkien, who grew up in Oxford, U.K., listening to tales of the Bagginses and their adventures, set to work as his father's editor far earlier than that.

Christopher Tolkien has died at the age of 95. The Tolkien Society sends its deepest condolences to Baillie, Simon, Adam, Rachel and the whole Tolkien family. pic.twitter.com/X83PTx4b7x — Tolkien Society (@TolkienSociety) January 16, 2020

"Christopher was an editor from the age of 5, catching inconsistencies in his father's bedtime tales, and was promised tuppence by his father for every mistake he noticed in The Hobbit ," HarperCollins UK said in a statement released Thursday .

"As a young man he was typing up manuscripts and drawing maps of Middle-earth and around the time he was commissioned an officer in the [Royal Air Force] in 1945, his father was already calling him 'my chief critic and collaborator.' "

He was also responsible for composing the original map of Middle-earth included with the The Lord of the Rings series when it was first published in the mid-1950s.

"Christopher's commitment to his father's works have seen dozens of publications released, and his own work as an academic in Oxford demonstrates his ability and skill as a scholar," Shaun Gunner , chairman of the Tolkien Society, said in a statement released Thursday .

"Millions of people around the world will be forever grateful to Christopher for bringing us The Silmarillion , The Children of Húrin , The History of Middle-earth series and many others. We have lost a titan and he will be sorely missed."

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'beren and lúthien' reflects tolkien's real life love story.

The organization described the younger Tolkien as "Middle-earth's first scholar."

Yet he was also an accomplished scholar in matters independent of hobbits and orcs. He served as a lecturer in Old English at Oxford, where his father once taught, and in 2017 earned the famed Bodleian Libraries' highest honor for his contributions as a teacher, editor and all-around scholar.

"One of the great privileges of my life was to know Christopher Tolkien," the library's senior executive, Richard Ovenden, said Thursday on Twitter .

"A great scholar & writer, his literary relationship with his father was unique in the world of letters. Like Thorin Oakenshield, he goes 'to the halls of waiting, to sit beside my fathers.' "

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J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biographical Sketch By David Doughan MBE

Who was tolkien.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of our world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide.

In the 1960s he was taken up by many members of the nascent “counter-culture” largely because of his concern with environmental issues. In 1997 he came top of three British polls, organised respectively by Channel 4 / Waterstone’s, the Folio Society, and SFX, the UK’s leading science fiction media magazine, amongst discerning readers asked to vote for the greatest book of the 20th century. Please note also that his name is spelt Tolkien (there is no “Tolkein”).

Childhood and Youth

The name “Tolkien” (pron.: Tol-keen; equal stress on both syllables) was believed by the family (including Tolkien himself) to be of German origin; Toll-kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever—hence the pseudonym “Oxymore” which he occasionally used; however, this quite probably was a German rationalisation of an originally Baltic Tolkyn, or Tolkīn. In any case, his great-great grandfather John (Johann) Benjamin Tolkien came to Britain with his brother Daniel from Gdańsk in about 1772 and rapidly became thoroughly Anglicised. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890s for better prospects of promotion. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial. So John Ronald (“Ronald” to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on 3 January 1892. His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent; slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England — or more particularly, the West Midlands.

The West Midlands in Tolkien’s childhood were a complex mixture of the grimly industrial Birmingham conurbation, and the quintessentially rural stereotype of England, Worcestershire and surrounding areas: Severn country, the land of the composers Elgar, Vaughan Williams and Gurney, and more distantly the poet A. E. Housman (it is also just across the border from Wales). Tolkien’s life was split between these two: the then very rural hamlet of Sarehole, with its mill, just south of Birmingham; and darkly urban Birmingham itself, where he was eventually sent to King Edward’s School. By then the family had moved to King’s Heath, where the house backed onto a railway line — young Ronald’s developing linguistic imagination was engaged by the sight of coal trucks going to and from South Wales bearing destinations like” Nantyglo”,” Penrhiwceiber” and “Senghenydd”.

Then they moved to the somewhat more pleasant Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. However, in the meantime, something of profound significance had occurred, which estranged Mabel and her children from both sides of the family: in 1900, together with her sister May, 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.

Tolkien family life was generally lived on the genteel side of poverty. However, the situation worsened in 1904, when Mabel Tolkien was diagnosed as having diabetes, usually fatal in those pre-insulin days. She died on 14 November 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.

By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek which was the staple fare of an arts education at that time, and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish. He was already busy making up his own languages, purely for fun. He had also made a number of close friends at King Edward’s; in his later years at school they met regularly after hours as the “T. C. B. S.” (Tea Club, Barrovian Society, named after their meeting place at the Barrow Stores) and they continued to correspond closely and exchange and criticise each other’s literary work until 1916.

However, another complication had arisen. Amongst the lodgers at Mrs Faulkner’s boarding house was a young woman called Edith Bratt. When Ronald was 16, and she 19, they struck up a friendship, which gradually deepened. Eventually Father Francis took a hand, and forbade Ronald to see or even correspond with Edith for three years, until he was 21. Ronald stoically obeyed this injunction to the letter. In the summer of 1911, he was invited to join a party on a walking holiday in Switzerland, which may have inspired his descriptions of the Misty Mountains, and of Rivendell. In the autumn of that year he went up to Exeter College, Oxford where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, the Germanic languages (especially Gothic), Welsh and Finnish, until 1913, when he swiftly though not without difficulty picked up the threads of his relationship with Edith. He then obtained a disappointing second class degree in Honour Moderations, the “midway” stage of a 4-year Oxford “Greats” (i.e. Classics) course, although with an “alpha plus” in philology. As a result of this he changed his school from Classics to the more congenial English Language and Literature. One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf — he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet:

Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast Ofer middangeard monnum sended

Which translates as:

Hail Earendel brightest of angels, over Middle Earth sent to men.

(“ Middangeard ” was an ancient expression for the everyday world between Heaven above and Hell below.)

This inspired some of his very early and inchoate attempts at realising a world of ancient beauty in his versifying.

In the summer of 1913 he took a job as tutor and escort to two Mexican boys in Dinard, France, a job which ended in tragedy. Though no fault of Ronald’s, it did nothing to counter his apparent predisposition against France and things French.

Meanwhile the relationship with Edith was going more smoothly. She converted to Catholicism and moved to Warwick, which with its spectacular castle and beautiful surrounding countryside made a great impression on Ronald. However, as the pair were becoming ever closer, the nations were striving ever more furiously together, and war eventually broke out in August 1914.

War, Lost Tales and Academia

Unlike so many of his contemporaries, Tolkien did not rush to join up immediately on the outbreak of war, but returned to Oxford, where he worked hard and finally achieved a first-class degree in June 1915. At this time he was also working on various poetic attempts, and on his invented languages, especially one that he came to call Qenya [ sic ], which was heavily influenced by Finnish — but he still felt the lack of a connecting thread to bring his vivid but disparate imaginings together. Tolkien finally enlisted as a second lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers whilst working on ideas of Earendel [ sic ] the Mariner, who became a star, and his journeyings. For many months Tolkien was kept in boring suspense in England, mainly in Staffordshire. Finally it appeared that he must soon embark for France, and he and Edith married in Warwick on 22 March 1916.

Eventually he was indeed sent to active duty on the Western Front, just in time for the Somme offensive. After four months in and out of the trenches, he succumbed to “trench fever”, a form of typhus-like infection common in the insanitary conditions, and in early November was sent back to England, where he spent the next month in hospital in Birmingham. By Christmas he had recovered sufficiently to stay with Edith at Great Haywood in Staffordshire.

During these last few months, all but one of his close friends of the “T. C. B. S.” had been killed in action. Partly as an act of piety to their memory, but also stirred by reaction against his war experiences, he had already begun to put his stories into shape, “ … in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents, even some down in dugouts under shell fire ” [ Letters 66]. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales (not published in his lifetime), in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form: tales of the Elves and the “Gnomes”, (i. e. Deep Elves, the later Noldor), with their languages Qenya and Goldogrin. Here are found the first recorded versions of the wars against Morgoth, the siege and fall of Gondolin and Nargothrond, and the tales of Túrin and of Beren and Lúthien.

Throughout 1917 and 1918 his illness kept recurring, although periods of remission enabled him to do home service at various camps sufficiently well to be promoted to lieutenant. It was when he was stationed in the Hull area that he and Edith went walking in the woods at nearby Roos, and there in a grove thick with hemlock Edith danced for him. This was the inspiration for the tale of Beren and Lúthien, a recurrent theme in his “Legendarium”. He came to think of Edith as “Lúthien” and himself as “Beren”. Their first son, John Francis Reuel (later Father John Tolkien) had already been born on 16 November 1917.

When the Armistice was signed on 11 November 1918, Tolkien had already been putting out feelers to obtain academic employment, and by the time he was demobilised he had been appointed Assistant Lexicographer on the New English Dictionary (the “Oxford English Dictionary”), then in preparation. While doing the serious philological work involved in this, he also gave one of his Lost Tales its first public airing — he read The Fall of Gondolin to the Exeter College Essay Club, where it was well received by an audience which included Neville Coghill and Hugo Dyson, two future “Inklings”. However, Tolkien did not stay in this job for long. In the summer of 1920 he applied for the quite senior post of Reader (approximately, Associate Professor) in English Language at the University of Leeds, and to his surprise was appointed.

At Leeds as well as teaching he collaborated with E. V. Gordon on the famous edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , and continued writing and refining The Book of Lost Tales and his invented “Elvish” languages. In addition, he and Gordon founded a “Viking Club” for undergraduates devoted mainly to reading Old Norse sagas and drinking beer. It was for this club that he and Gordon originally wrote their Songs for the Philologists , a mixture of traditional songs and original verses translated into Old English, Old Norse and Gothic to fit traditional English tunes. Leeds also saw the birth of two more sons: Michael Hilary Reuel in October 1920, and Christopher Reuel in 1924. Then in 1925 the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford fell vacant; Tolkien successfully applied for the post.

Professor Tolkien, The Inklings and Hobbits

In a sense, in returning to Oxford as a Professor, Tolkien had come home. Although he had few illusions about the academic life as a haven of unworldly scholarship (see for example Letters 250), he was nevertheless by temperament a don’s don, and fitted extremely well into the largely male world of teaching, research, the comradely exchange of ideas and occasional publication. In fact, his academic publication record is very sparse, something that would have been frowned upon in these days of quantitative personnel evaluation.

However, his rare scholarly publications were often extremely influential, most notably his lecture “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics”. His seemingly almost throwaway comments have sometimes helped to transform the understanding of a particular field — for example, in his essay on “English and Welsh”, with its explanation of the origins of the term “Welsh” and its references to phonaesthetics (both these pieces are collected in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays , currently in print). His academic life was otherwise largely unremarkable. In 1945 he changed his chair to the Merton Professorship of English Language and Literature, which he retained until his retirement in 1959. Apart from all the above, he taught undergraduates, and played an important but unexceptional part in academic politics and administration.

His family life was equally straightforward. Edith bore their last child and only daughter, Priscilla, in 1929. Tolkien got into the habit of writing the children annual illustrated letters as if from Santa Claus, and a selection of these was published in 1976 as The Father Christmas Letters . He also told them numerous bedtime stories, of which more anon. In adulthood John entered the priesthood, Michael and Christopher both saw war service in the Royal Air Force. Afterwards Michael became a schoolmaster and Christopher a university lecturer, and Priscilla became a social worker. They lived quietly in North Oxford, and later Ronald and Edith lived in the suburb of Headington.

However, Tolkien’s social life was far from unremarkable. He soon became one of the founder members of a loose grouping of Oxford friends (by no means all at the University) with similar interests, known as “The Inklings”. The origins of the name were purely facetious—it had to do with writing, and sounded mildly Anglo-Saxon; there was no evidence that members of the group claimed to have an “inkling” of the Divine Nature, as is sometimes suggested. Other prominent members included the above—mentioned Messrs Coghill and Dyson, as well as Owen Barfield, Charles Williams, and above all C. S. Lewis, who became one of Tolkien’s closest friends, and for whose return to Christianity Tolkien was at least partly responsible. The Inklings regularly met for conversation, drink, and frequent reading from their work-in-progress.

The Storyteller

Meanwhile Tolkien continued developing his mythology and languages. As mentioned above, he told his children stories, some of which he developed into those published posthumously as Mr. Bliss , Roverandom , etc. However, according to his own account, one day when he was engaged in the soul-destroying task of marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank. On this page, moved by who knows what anarchic daemon, he wrote “ In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit “.

In typical Tolkien fashion, he then decided he needed to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation grew a tale that he told to his younger children, and even passed round. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it came into the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin (merged in 1990 with HarperCollins).

She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, the then Chairman of the firm. He tried it out on his 10-year old son Rayner, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in 1937. It immediately scored a success, and has not been out of children’s recommended reading lists ever since. It was so successful that Stanley Unwin asked if he had any more similar material available for publication.

By this time Tolkien had begun to make his Legendarium into what he believed to be a more presentable state, and as he later noted, hints of it had already made their way into The Hobbit . He was now calling the full account Quenta Silmarillion , or Silmarillion for short. He presented some of his “completed” tales to Unwin, who sent them to his reader. The reader’s reaction was mixed: dislike of the poetry and praise for the prose (the material was the story of Beren and Lúthien) but the overall decision at the time was that these were not commercially publishable. Unwin tactfully relayed this message to Tolkien, but asked him again if he was willing to write a sequel to The Hobbit . Tolkien was disappointed at the apparent failure of The Silmarillion , but agreed to take up the challenge of “The New Hobbit”.

This soon developed into something much more than a children’s story; for the highly complex 16-year history of what became The Lord of the Rings consult the works listed below. Suffice it to say that the now adult Rayner Unwin was deeply involved in the later stages of this opus, dealing magnificently with a dilatory and temperamental author who, at one stage, was offering the whole work to a commercial rival (which rapidly backed off when the scale and nature of the package became apparent). It is thanks to Rayner Unwin’s advocacy that we owe the fact that this book was published at all – Andave laituvalmes ! His father’s firm decided to incur the probable loss of £1,000 for the succès d’estime , and publish it under the title of The Lord of the Rings in three parts during 1954 and 1955, with USA rights going to Houghton Mifflin. It soon became apparent that both author and publishers had greatly underestimated the work’s public appeal.

The “Cult”

The Lord of the Rings rapidly came to public notice. It had mixed reviews, ranging from the ecstatic (W. H. Auden, C. S. Lewis) to the damning (E. Wilson, E. Muir, P. Toynbee) and just about everything in between. The BBC put on a drastically condensed radio adaptation in 12 episodes on the Third Programme. In 1956 radio was still a dominant medium in Britain, and the Third Programme was the “intellectual” channel. So far from losing money, sales so exceeded the break-even point as to make Tolkien regret that he had not taken early retirement. However, this was still based only upon hardback sales.

The really amazing moment was when The Lord of the Rings went into a pirated paperback version in 1965. Firstly, this put the book into the impulse-buying category; and secondly, the publicity generated by the copyright dispute alerted millions of American readers to the existence of something outside their previous experience, but which appeared to speak to their condition. By 1968 The Lord of the Rings had almost become the Bible of the “Alternative Society”.

This development produced mixed feelings in the author. On the one hand, he was extremely flattered, and to his amazement, became rather rich. On the other, he could only deplore those whose idea of a great trip was to ingest The Lord of the Rings and LSD simultaneously. Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick had similar experiences with 2001: A Space Odyssey . Fans were causing increasing problems; both those who came to gawp at his house and those, especially from California who telephoned at 7 p.m. (their time—3 a.m. his), to demand to know whether Frodo had succeeded or failed in the Quest, what was the preterite of Quenyan lanta -, or whether or not Balrogs had wings. So he changed addresses, his telephone number went ex-directory, and eventually he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, a pleasant but uninspiring South Coast resort (Hardy’s “Sandbourne”), noted for the number of its elderly well-to-do residents.

Meanwhile the cult, not just of Tolkien, but of the fantasy literature that he had revived, if not actually inspired (to his dismay), was really taking off—but that is another story, to be told in another place.

Other Writings

Despite all the fuss over The Lord of the Rings , between 1925 and his death Tolkien did write and publish a number of other articles, including a range of scholarly essays, many reprinted in The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays (see above); one Middle-earth related work, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil ; editions and translations of Middle English works such as the Ancrene Wisse , Sir Gawain , Sir Orfeo and The Pearl , and some stories independent of the Legendarium, such as the Imram , The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son , The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun —and, especially, Farmer Giles of Ham , Leaf by Niggle , and Smith of Wootton Major .

The flow of publications was only temporarily slowed by Tolkien’s death. The long-awaited Silmarillion , edited by Christopher Tolkien, appeared in 1977. In 1980 Christopher also published a selection of his father’s incomplete writings from his later years under the title of Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth . In the introduction to this work Christopher Tolkien referred in passing to The Book of Lost Tales , “itself a very substantial work, of the utmost interest to one concerned with the origins of Middle-earth, but requiring to be presented in a lengthy and complex study, if at all” ( Unfinished Tales , p. 6, paragraph 1).

The sales of The Silmarillion had rather taken George Allen & Unwin by surprise, and those of Unfinished Tales even more so. Obviously, there was a market even for this relatively abstruse material and they decided to risk embarking on this “lengthy and complex study”. Even more lengthy and complex than expected, the resulting 12 volumes of the History of Middle-earth , under Christopher’s editorship, proved to be a successful enterprise. (Tolkien’s publishers had changed hands, and names, several times between the start of the enterprise in 1983 and the appearance of the paperback edition of Volume 12, The Peoples of Middle-earth , in 1997.) Over time, other posthumous publications emerged including Roverandom (1998), The Children of Húrin (2007), Beowulf (2014), Beren and Lúthien (2017), and most recently The Fall of Gondolin (2018).

After his retirement in 1959 Edith and Ronald moved to Bournemouth. On 29 November 1971 Edith died, and Ronald soon returned to Oxford, to rooms provided by Merton College. Ronald died on 2 September 1973. He and Edith are buried together in a single grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of Oxford. (The grave is well signposted from the entrance.) The legend on the headstone reads:

Edith Mary Tolkien, Lúthien, 1889–1971 John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, Beren, 1892–1973

Last Updated 05/02/2024

Further Reading

J.R.R. Tolkien Timeline . The Tolkien Society. Online, 2014.

Tolkien: A Biography . Humphrey Carpenter. Allen and Unwin, London, 1977.

Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien . Ed. Humphrey Carpenter with Christopher Tolkien. George Allen and Unwin, London, 1981.

The Tolkien Family Album . John Tolkien and Priscilla Tolkien. HarperCollins, London, 1992.

Tolkien and the Great War . John Garth. HarperCollins, London, 2002.

Tolkien at Exeter College . John Garth. Exeter College, Oxford, 2014.

“ On J.R.R. Tolkien’s Roots in Gdańsk “. Ryszard Derdzinski . 2017.

“ Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel (1892–1973). ” T. A. Shippey. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , Oxford University Press. Print 2004. Online 2006. (Also available as a podcast .)

The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide . Wayne G. Hammond and Christina Scull. 2nd edn. HarperCollins, London, 2017. 3 vols.

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• Tolkien Studies

Christopher Tolkien, 1924–2020

• Wayne G. Hammond , Christina Scull
• West Virginia University Press
• Volume 17, 2020
• 10.1353/tks.2020.0001
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Christopher, Priscilla, Michael, Edith and JRRT, on holiday in Weston-super-Mare, April 1940.

Explore the timeline

Arthur Reuel Tolkien, manager of the Bank of Africa in Bloemfontein, with his dog, Meg, 1892.

Gracewell Road, Sarehole, c .1900. Tolkien lived here with his mother and younger brother for four years, between the ages of four and eight.

King Edward’s School, New Street, Birmingham, c .1900. Tolkien attended the school, 1900-1901, and returned to complete his schooling with the aid of a scholarship, 1903-1911.

Father Francis Xavier Morgan (1857-1935) was appointed by Mabel Tolkien to be the guardian of her two young sons on her death in 1904. He became a second father to the boys and, in time, a grandfather to their own children.

Duchess Road, Edgbaston where Tolkien and his brother, Hilary, lived in lodgings, 1908-1909. It was here that Tolkien met and fell in love with Edith Bratt, a fellow lodger.

Tolkien (seated, centre) enjoying a walking holiday in Switzerland in 1911, shortly before he started university. The group included his brother Hilary, and his aunt Jane Neave.

View of Exeter College, Oxford, from the corner of Turl Street and Brasenose Lane, 1913. Tolkien lived in the college as a student for three years. He has marked his bedroom window with a cross.

Tolkien served in the Lancashire Fusiliers during World War 1. This photograph was taken in Birmingham before he was sent to France for the Battle of the Somme, 1916.

Soldiers digging a communication trench, through Delville wood, Somme battlefield, 13 July 1916.

Edith holding her first child, John Francis, who was born in Cheltenham in 1917. Tolkien was in hospital in Hull recovering from recurring bouts of trench fever and was not able to see his newborn son until several days after the birth.

The University of Leeds, 1913. Tolkien took up his first academic position at Leeds in 1920 as Reader in English Language and was promoted to Professor in 1924.

Michael and John photographed in Leeds in December 1921, aged one and four.

Quad and porter’s lodge, Pembroke College, Oxford, c .1894. Tolkien was a Fellow of the College from 1925 to 1945.

C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) photographed by Hans Wild in 1946. Tolkien met Lewis in the 1920s at the University of Oxford where they both taught English. They quickly became friends and formed the nucleus of the literary group known as the Inklings.

Christopher, Michael (in foreground), John, Edith holding Priscilla and the au pair (Tolkien was taking the photograph), 26 March 1930.

Tolkien and his four children, at home in Oxford, July 1936, a year before The Hobbit was published. His three sons were the first to hear the story read aloud.

Tolkien and his wife Edith, at 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford, c .1936. They bought the house from the publisher, Basil Blackwell and it was their family home for seventeen years.

Stanley Unwin (1884-1968), photographed by Walter Stoneman in 1946. Unwin was the head of the publishing firm, George Allen & Unwin, and took the decision in 1936 to publish The Hobbit . It was the start of a long and fruitful relationship with Tolkien.

Tolkien working in his study at home, 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford, c .1937.

Michael Tolkien outside 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford, March 1940. He was at Trinity College, Oxford, studying history but would shortly be called up for military service.

Christopher (standing, centre) with his RAF squadron in Kroonstadt, South Africa, July 1944, where he was training to be a fighter pilot.

Christopher and his father in 1945, taken in the garden at 20 Northmoor Road. Christopher had qualified as a fighter pilot, as shown by the ‘wings’ above his left breast pocket.

View of Merton College, Oxford from Christ Church meadow. Tolkien was appointed Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford in 1945.

‘The Laughing Philosopher’, taken at the Garden House Hotel, Cambridge, August 1952. Tolkien was visiting the library at Corpus Christi College to work on the Middle English text, Ancrene Wisse .

W.H. Auden photographed at Christ Church, Oxford, 1972 by Billett Potter. He wrote very positive reviews of The Lord of the Rings on its publication in 1954 and 1955.

Tolkien leaving Pembroke College, Oxford, 1960s.

Tolkien at the Hotel Miramar, Bournemouth, July 1965. He and Edith took many holidays at the hotel in their later years.

Tolkien at home in Poole, Dorset, August 1968. He had moved from Oxford earlier in the year, partly to escape from the intrusions on his personal life which followed the success of his books.

Tolkien and Edith at home in Poole, Dorset, July 1969. Edith was very happy in her new home with its modern conveniences and its proximity to the sea.

Tolkien in his flat on Merton Street, Oxford, 1972. Photographed by Billett Potter. After Edith’s death in 1971, Tolkien returned to Oxford where he was close to family and friends.

Tolkien holding his C.B.E. outside Buckingham Palace with his son, John and daughter, Priscilla, March 1972.

This is the last photograph of Tolkien. It was taken in the Botanic Garden, Oxford, 9 August 1973 by his eldest grandchild, Michael George Tolkien. He is leaning against the trunk of a large black pine (Pinus nigra), one of his favourite trees.

Christopher Tolkien photographed at home in 2016. He worked on his father’s papers for over forty years and by the end of his life he had edited and published twenty-four volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works.

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J.R.R. Tolkien

(1892-1973)

Who Was J.R.R. Tolkien?

J.R.R. Tolkien was an English fantasy author and academic. Tolkien settled in England as a child, going on to study at Exeter College. While teaching at Oxford University, he published the popular fantasy novels The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The works have had a devoted international fan base and been adapted into award-winning blockbuster films.

Early Life and Family

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, on January 3, 1892, to Arthur Tolkien and Mabel Suffield Tolkien. After Arthur died from complications of rheumatic fever, Mabel settled with four-year-old Tolkien and his younger brother, Hilary, in the country hamlet of Sarehole, in Birmingham, England.

Mabel died in 1904, and the Tolkien brothers were sent to live with a relative and in boarding homes, with a Catholic priest assuming guardianship in Birmingham. Tolkien went on to get his first-class degree at Exeter College, specializing in Anglo-Saxon and Germanic languages and classic literature.

World War I

Tolkien enlisted as a lieutenant in the Lancashire Fusiliers and served in World War I, making sure to continue writing as well. He fought in the Battle of the Somme, in which there were severe casualties, and was eventually released from duty due to illness. In the midst of his military service, he married Edith Bratt in 1916.

Books: 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings'

The award-winning fantasy novel The Hobbit — about the small, furry-footed Bilbo Baggins and his adventures — was published in 1937, and was regarded as a children’s book, though Tolkien would state the book wasn’t originally intended for children. He also created more than 100 drawings to support the narrative.

Over the years, while working on scholarly publications, Tolkien developed the work that would come to be regarded as his masterpiece — The Lord of the Rings series, partially inspired by ancient European myths, with its own sets of maps, lore and languages.

Tolkien released part one of the series, The Fellowship of the Ring in 1954; The Two Towers and The Return of the King followed in 1955, finishing up the trilogy. The books gave readers a rich literary trove populated by elves, goblins, talking trees and all manner of fantastic creatures, including characters like the wizard Gandalf and the dwarf Gimli.

While Rings had its share of critics, many reviewers and waves upon waves of general readers took to Tolkien’s world, causing the books to become global bestsellers, with fans forming Tolkien clubs and learning his fictional languages.

Tolkien retired from professorial duties in 1959, going on to publish an essay and poetry collection, Tree and Leaf , and the fantasy tale Smith of Wootton Major . His wife Edith died in 1971, and Tolkien died on September 2, 1973, at the age of 81. He was survived by four children.

Legacy and New Adaptations

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings series are grouped among the most popular books in the world, having sold tens of millions of copies. The Rings trilogy was also adapted by director Peter Jackson into a highly popular, award-winning trio of films starring Ian McKellen , Elijah Wood, Cate Blanchett and Viggo Mortensen , among others. Jackson also directed a three-part Hobbit movie adaptation starring Martin Freeman, which was released from 2012 to 2014.

Tolkien's son Christopher has edited several works that weren't completed at the time of his father's death, including The Silmarillion and The Children of Húrin , which were published posthumously. The Art of the Hobbit was published in 2012, celebrating the novel's 75th anniversary by presenting Tolkien's original illustrations.

Underscoring the enduring popularity of Tolkien's famed fantasy world, in November 2017, online retail and entertainment behemoth Amazon announced that it had acquired the TV rights for the book series. In its statement, the company revealed plans to "explore new storylines preceding Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring, " with the potential for a spinoff series, thereby exciting fans with the promise of a prequel to the familiar deeds of Bilbo Baggins, Gandalf and the rest.

The author's life was the subject of the 2019 feature Tolkien , a biopic starring Nicholas Hoult and steeped with references to The Lord of the Rings .

QUICK FACTS

• Name: John Ronald Ruel Tolkien
• Birth Year: 1892
• Birth date: January 3, 1892
• Birth City: Bloemfontein
• Birth Country: South Africa
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: J.R.R. Tolkien is an internationally renowned fantasy writer. He is best known for authoring 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings' trilogy.
• Writing and Publishing
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Capricorn
• Exeter College
• King Edward's School
• Death Year: 1973
• Death date: September 2, 1973
• Death City: Bournemouth, Dorset
• Death Country: England

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: J.R.R. Tolkien Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/authors-writers/jrr-tolkien
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: September 11, 2019
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• If you really want to know what Middle-earth is based on, it's my wonder and delight in the earth as it is, particularly the natural earth.
• Children aren't a class. They are merely human beings at different stages of maturity. All of them have a human intelligence which even at its lowest is a pretty wonderful thing, and the entire world in front of them.
• The hobbits are just what I should like to have been but never was—an entirely unmilitary people who always came up to scratch in a clinch.

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