Tolkien's Biography

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892, in the country of the Zulus.  His father was a bank manager.  He left South Africa at the age of 3 to visit Birmingham and Suffield England, , the home of his mother’s parents.  Here his father died of rheumatic fever, so his mother settled in the village of Sarehole near Birmingham.

His mother, who was a member of the Anglican Church, died at the age of 34 when Tolkien was twelve.  He was left in the guardianship of Father Xavier Morgan, who found a home for Tolkien and his younger brother with the Faulkner family.

During his young adult life Tolkien finished King Edwards School, then entered Exeter college, Oxford in 1911.  In WWI he became an officer in the Lancashire Fusiliers and served in France in 1916.  During that point in his life he married Edith.  In 1918 the war ended and he and his wife with their son John returned to Oxford.

In 1925 Tolkien returned to Oxford University with his wife and three children: John, Michael, and Christopher where he was elected to the Rawlinson and Bosworth Chair of Anglo-Saxon.  During this point in his life he made friends with C.S. Lewis, Tollers, and Dyson.

In 1936 he delivered the lecture on Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics.  His children’s books The Hobbit, and The Inklings were published in 1937.  In 1945 he moved to Heading, England where he was elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford.

Tolkien retired from teaching in 1959.  In 1972 he received from the British Crown the C.B.E., Commander of the order of the British Empire and Oxford University conferred an honorary Doctorate of Letters upon him.  He died in August 1973.  He and his wife Edith are buried in Wolver Cote Cemetery near Oxford.  On their head stones are engraved the names Beren and Luthien.

Research information acquired from texts by Charles Moseley, and Deborah Webster Rogers and Ivor A. Rogers; both texts are entitled: J. R. R. Tolkien.

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