John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa and died on 2 September 1973 in Bournemouth, Hampshire, England. He is best known as the author of the high fantasy classic works: Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

From 1911 to 1915 Tolkien was studying English Language and Literature in Oxford. After finishing his degrees, Tolkien was recruted to army during the First World War. He even participated in the famous battle at the Somme, but his battalion was almost completely wiped out, after which he returned to England.

After the end of the war, Tolkien started to work at the University of Leeds, becoming the youngest member of the academic staff there. 1925 he took the position on Oxford as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford from 1925 to 1945. Later on, from 1945 to 1959, he worked as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford.

In private, Tolkien amused himself by writing an elaborate series of fantasy tales, often dark and sorrowful, set in a world of his own creation. Inspired mostly by Old and Middle English language and literature (which was Tolkien's specialiation), he created his own “legendarium”, which eventually became The Silmarillion, partly to provide a setting in which “Elvish” languages he had invented could exist. But his tales of 'Arda' and 'Middle-earth' also grew from a desire to tell stories, influenced by his love for myths and legends.

The longest and most important of those stories, begun about 1930, was The Hobbit. It was published in 1937, with illustrations made by Tolkien himself, and was so popular that its publisher asked for a sequel.

The result, 17 years later, was Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, a modern version of the heroic epic, which consists of three books: The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King.