After the war he pursued an academic career teaching Old and Middle English. He graduated from the University of Oxford in 1915 and saw active service in France during the First World War before being invalided home. He came to England aged three and was brought up in and around Birmingham. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892 to English parents. His illuminating lectures on works such as the Old English epic poem, Beowulf, illustrate his deep knowledge of ancient languages and at the same time provide new insights into peoples and legends from a remote past. Tolkien was a professor at the Universities of Leeds and Oxford for almost forty years, teaching Old and Middle English, as well as Old Norse and Gothic. He illustrated many scenes from The Silmarillion, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, sometimes drawing or painting as he was writing in order to visualize the imagined scene more clearly. He excelled at landscapes and often drew inspiration from his own stories.

Tolkien was an accomplished amateur artist who painted for pleasure and relaxation. Through this secondary world Tolkien writes perceptively of universal human concerns – love and loss, courage and betrayal, humility and pride – giving his books a wide and enduring appeal.

Tolkien’s most popular works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are set in Middle-earth, an imagined world with strangely familiar settings inhabited by ancient and extraordinary peoples. His creativity, confined to his spare time, found its outlet in fantasy works, stories for children, poetry, illustration and invented languages and alphabets. Known to millions around the world as the author of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien spent most of his life teaching at the University of Oxford where he was a distinguished academic in the fields of Old and Middle English and Old Norse. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien: writer, artist, scholar, linguist.

The silmarillion martin shaw