Who was J.R.R. Tolkien?

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (January 3, 1892 - September 1, 1973) was a British author, best known for writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

Here are a bunch of interesting facts about the man behind The Hobbit!

• Tolkien was decorated as a CBE – Commander of the British Empire, a prestigious honor, just short of full knighthood (KBE or GBE).
• The Tolkien family has its roots in the German Kingdom of Saxony, but inhabited England starting in the 18th century.
• Tolkien's maternal ancestry, was Baptists who lived in Birmingham and owned a shop in the city center.
• Tolkien himself was a devout Roman Catholic.
• Tolkien was educated at King Edward’s School in Birmingham.
• Tolkien met Edith Mary Blatt at age 16. At 21, he asked her to marry him. She was three years older than him.
• Tolkien served in the British Army as a Second Lieutenant during the First World War. He was invalided in 1916, no longer able to serve. By 1918 all but one of his close friends was dead. Critics and analysts have found many parallels of Tolkien’s frustrations and embitterment with the war in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
• Following the war, Tolkien worked at the Oxford English Dictionary, studying words mostly Germanic in origin.
• In 1925 he began teaching at Pembroke College (a constituent of Oxford University) where he taught English. He wrote The Hobbit during his years teaching at Pembroke and the first sentence of the book was written in the margin of a student’s essay he was grading.
• Tolkien did not expect to ever publish his stories, having only written academic essays and other serious intellectual examinations, but The Hobbit was brought to the attention of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing company Allen and Unwin. She persuaded him to submit it for publication. It attracted a huge reading audience and the publishers soon asked him to write a sequel.
• Tolkien was not excited by this prospect but nevertheless it led to his greatest work: The Lord of the Rings.
• Tolkien's devout religious beliefs led to good friend C.S. Lewis' eventual conversion to Christianity.