John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL ( 3 January 1892 – 2
September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic, who is
best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord
of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.
He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of
Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and
Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton
College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S.
Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as
the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British
Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a
series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts,
including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the
Rings, form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented
languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and
Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and
1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these
writings.
While many other authors had published works of fantasy
before Tolkien, the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led
directly to a popular resurgence of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be
popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or,
more precisely, of high fantasy.In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list
of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945". Forbes ranked him
the 5th top-earning "dead celebrity" in 2009.
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