Portal:Literature/Biography archive/2007, Week 1

J. R. R. Tolkien CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English philologist, writer and university professor who is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, as well as many other works. He was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon language (1925 to 1945) and English language and literature (1945 to 1959). He was an orthodox Roman Catholic. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis; they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings.

In addition to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien's published fiction includes The Silmarillion and other posthumously published books, which taken together is a connected body of tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth (derived from the Old English word middangeard, the lands inhabitable by humans) in particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our own world. Tolkien applied the word legendarium to the totality of these writings.