3 january 1892 — 2 september1973

The basic facts are easy: he was born in 1892 in South Africa, both his parents of English origin. When he was still a child, he was brought back to Birmingham whose industrial ugliness made him a sworn enemy of modern civilization for the rest of his life.

In 1922 he published his two major scholarly works, A Middle-English Vocabulary and a critical edition of medieval poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. His knowledge of medieval literature stood him in good stead later when he began writing his fantasy novels which are, in many ways, idealized images of the Middle Ages as they never were: the Middle Ages without dirt, ugliness, fear, religious intolerance, leprosy and plague, but with ever-green fields, virtuous knights, marvellous creatures, spectacular magic and easy demarcation between good and evil

In 1937 he published The Hobbit, essentially a children's book, and already in 1936 he began working on The Lord of the Rings that was finished in 1949. The trilogy was originally published in England in 1954, with good reviews but indistinguishible sales. However, once it crossed the ocean, the flower generation of the 1960s made The Lord of the Rings their Bible. And since then, Gandalf and Mordor and Frodo and Bilbo have become household words in every human tongue.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was died in

the second of September in 1973 at the age of 82