J.R.R.
Tolkien was orphaned at age twelve but still was able to
write some of the best novels in history. This is his story.
Tolkien's full name is John Ronald Reul Tolkien, but Ronald
was the name that stuck, and that is the name I am going to
use. Ronald was born in Bloemfoitien, South Africa in 1892.
He had a brother named Hillary his father was named Arthur
and his mother was named Mabel. Tragically his father died
in 1896 when Ronald was four. After that he and his family
moved to Birmingham, England. In
Birmingham he attended King Edwards Grammar School in which
he did exceedingly well. Yet another tragedy occurred Mabel
Tolkien died on October 15, 1904 when Ronald was12. From
then on he and his brother were orphans. So they were
adopted by Father Morgan who could not provide lodging so
they stayed with their Aunt Beatrice. But soon they moved to
another house that was owned by Mrs. Faulkner, and there he
met Edith Bratt. When he met Edith he was sixteen, and she
was nineteen. Soon Father Morgan found out, and Ronald and
Hillary had to move out. Ronald and Edith kept in touch. In
1910 he received a Scholarship to Oxford, and by then he had
learned Finnish, Gothic, Latin, Greek, Anglo Saxon and
Norse. At Oxford he, like at King Edwards, did exceedingly
well. When he was twenty-one he proposed to Edith, and they
got married. During World War One he fought in France but
caught "Trench Fever" and got sent home. In the Hospital he
started The Book of Lost Tales later to be called the
Silmallarion. He and Edith had three children named Michael
Hillary who was born in 1920, Christopher Reuel in 1924, and
finally Pricilla in 1929. After that
he applied for a job at Merton College, Oxford University,
and he got it. At Oxford he met C.S. Lewis, and they founded
a group called the Inklings. They remained good friends at
Oxford. Once while he was grading papers a student had left
a page blank and the idea came to him "In a Hole in the
Ground Lived a Hobbit" and then he wrote The Hobbit in which
Bilbo Baggins the hobbit steals treasure from a dragon. His
book was published and sold millions of copies around the
world. His readers loved the book so much that he wrote a
sequel: The Lord of the Rings. There was a problem that the
book was too long. They decided to put it into three books
instead and which were called The Fellowship of the Ring,
The Two Towers, and The Return of the King. After he
published the Lord of the Rings trilogy he had enough money
to retire and he did. Then tragically Edith Tolkien died in
1971. Then two years later J.R.R. Tolkien died. He was
buried with Edith and on their gravestone it
says: John
Ronald Reul Tolkien: Beren Edith
Tolkien: Luthien Beren and
Luthien are characters from one of his shorter stories. It
is their favorite because it expresses their love for each
other. As a memorial to the death of Tolkien the word
"hobbit" an official word in the Oxford Dictionary which he
helped finish many years before. Along with William
Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, J.R.R. Tolkien is
considered the best authors of the era.