His memories of Africa were slight but vivid, including a scary encounter with a large hairy spider, and influenced his later writing to some extent slight, because on 15 February 1896 his father died, and he, his mother and his younger brother Hilary returned to England -or more particularly, the West Midlands. So John Ronald (“Ronald” to family and early friends) was born in Bloemfontein, S.A., on 3 January 1892. There he was joined by his bride, Mabel Suffield, whose family were not only English through and through, but West Midlands since time immemorial. Arthur was a bank clerk, and went to South Africa in the 1890s for better prospects of promotion. Certainly his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, considered himself nothing if not English. In any case, his great-great grandfather John (Johann) Benjamin Tolkien came to Britain with his brother Daniel from Gdańsk in about 1772 and rapidly became thoroughly Anglicised. The name “Tolkien” (pron.: Tol-keen equal stress on both syllables) was believed by the family (including Tolkien himself) to be of German origin Toll-kühn: foolishly brave, or stupidly clever-hence the pseudonym “Oxymore” which he occasionally used however, this quite probably was a German rationalisation of an originally Baltic Tolkyn, or Tolkīn. Please note also that his name is spelt Tolkien (there is no “Tolkein”). In 1997 he came top of three British polls, organised respectively by Channel 4 / Waterstone’s, the Folio Society, and SFX, the UK’s leading science fiction media magazine, amongst discerning readers asked to vote for the greatest book of the 20th century. In the 1960s he was taken up by many members of the nascent “counter-culture” largely because of his concern with environmental issues. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of our world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. By David Doughan MBE Who was Tolkien? Photo by Pamela Chandler.

Tolkien lord of the rings