It is generally well known, according to Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, that hobbit faces are "good-natured rather than beautiful...with mouths apt to laughter and to eating and drinking. They are fond of simple jests at all times and of six meals a day (when they could get them). Hobbits love peace and quiet and good tilled earth: a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside...They do not...understand or like machines more complicated than a forge bellows."

Once an interviewer remarked to Professor Tolkien on the apparent resemblance between himself and his hobbits. He was told, "I am in fact a hobbit in all but size."

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa. His father, Arthur Tolkien, was the oldest child of a large family, so he had stayed at home in England helping to support his younger siblings until the last one left the nest. Consequently, when Arthur Tolkien emigrated to the Orange Free State of South Africa to manage a bank he was fairly old. There he met and married Mabel Suffield, who had come to Africa as a missionary.

The Tolkien's had two sons, J.R.R. and Hilary, and both were frail sickly boys in their early years. Neither the climate of South Africa nor its wildlife seemed to agree with them. Tolkien was once stung by a tarantula and he hated spiders for the rest of his life--a dislike that manifested itself in his tale of the monster spider Shelob in The Lord of the Rings.

When Tolkien was three his mother decided that for her sons' health she must return with them to England; either the boys would become strong enough to eventually rejoin their father or he would leave his job at the bank and join them later in England. As Tolkien watched the family initials being painted on the steamer trunks he was overwhelmed by a poignant realization that he would never see his father again. And several months after he, his mother and brother became settled in England word came that his father had died of peritonitis.

Tolkien and his family settled in Sarehole, a rural town like many that had existed unchanged for centuries in England before World War I. The author recalled a "strange sense of coming home" upon his arrival in Sarehole. Later the people and the countryside of this town would become the hobbits and The Shire of Middle Earth.

J.R.R. Tolkien's life-long fascination with languages caused him to invent three or four languages of his own by the age of ten. His mother, Mabel, had been a governess before becoming a missionary, and she taught him Greek, Latin, mathematics and introduced him to novels and fairy tales. In 1903 Tolkien won a scholarship to the King Edward VI School in Birmingham, the best preparatory school in the area.

When Tolkien's mother died in 1904 the boy turned to his imagination to help ease the pain. The boys' guardian, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, took them on a trip to Wales where Tolkien fell in love with the beauty and cadence of the Welsh language. He began to invent his own languages again.

With the help of private tutors Tolkien mastered Latin, Greek and Anglo Saxon literature. In 1910 he won a scholarship to Oxford and here he began his serious study of philology. He also began creating and refining the Elvish language of his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Tolkien learned Finnish and Welsh along with the mythologies of those countries. His Elvish language would have its roots in Welsh and Finnish.

In 1914 and 1915 the student enrollment at Oxford dropped drastically as boys went to fight in World War I. After graduation Tolkien enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers and was automatically given an army commission as a graduate of Oxford. The author was moved by the courage of the common British soldiers; later Tolkien's hobbits would go to battle against incredible odds simply because it was their duty.

After surviving the battle of the Somme in which about 600,000 men were lost on each side, Tolkien came down with trench fever. During his months in the hospital the author began writing The Silmarillion which provided the mythology for his Elvish language. Tolkien decided on his career; he would return to the academic life and the study of languages.

J.R.R. Tolkien never collected the medals and ribbons he had won in the war and never applied for the disability check he could have received for contracting trench fever. It was as though he wanted no reminder of the experience. Critic Roger Sale said that "Tolkien has always spoken...as though only fools and madmen would contemplate the twentieth century without horror."

During the war, the author had taken leave to marry his childhood sweetheart, Edith Bratt, and in 1917 their first son, John, was born. Tolkien returned to the university and he and other scholars began work on compilation of the most comprehensive dictionary of the twentieth century, the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1919 he was granted the honorary title of M.A. but the work that first brought Tolkien international fame was his collaboration with E.V. Gordon on a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a fourteenth century work, and one which is still used in English and American universities.

Tolkien's scholarship and sense of humor made him a popular lecturer, although he mumbled and was difficult for students to understand. Still, one of his students wrote that Tolkien "could turn a lecture room into a mead hall."

From 1919 to 1929 three more children, Michael, Christopher and Priscilla were born to the Tolkiens. Each of them had the traditional name "Reuel" (meaning "friend of God" in Hebrew) in their middle names. Michael remembers first hearing about hobbits when he was seven but the manuscript was not to be written until years later.

One day in 1928 while he was correcting students' exam papers Tolkien found a blank sheet of paper in one of the exams. He wrote on it "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." At the time the author had no idea what a hobbit was but by the 1930s he had completed a hand written draft of the story and was giving it to friends to read. They urged him to submit it for publication but, being a shy man, Tolkien stuck it away in a drawer.

At last Tolkien was persuaded to allow the manuscript to be sent to George Allen and Unwin publishing house in London. Sir Stanley Unwin gave it to his ten-year-old son Rayner to read. The boy frequently read and reviewed children's books for his father. Rayner's report urged his father to publish The Hobbit, and in 1937 the book received excellent reviews.

Tolkien did not take criticism very well. When a publisher pointed out that "dwarves" should be spelled "dwarfs"' and used the Oxford English Dictionary for his source Tolkien refused to change it saying, "After all, I wrote the Oxford English Dictionary." But later he admitted that "of course, dwarves is originally a mistake in grammar and I tried to cover it up."

In 1937 Tolkien began work on Lord of the Rings but it was not completed for eleven years. During this time the author's literary friends encouraged him to keep writing and gave him hope--otherwise the manuscript might have been abandoned and never completed. In 1950 Tolkien submitted Lord of the Rings to George Allen and Unwin. Rayner Unwin was now a member of the firm but the manuscript unfortunately was read by a stranger and rejected. Tolkien was heartbroken; he stuck the manuscript away in a drawer and would not send it out again despite his friends' urgings.

Eventually Rayner Unwin heard of the rejection and he insisted that Tolkien submit the work to him personally. He received the manuscript and immediately saw that it was a work of genius, and published it. In 1957 Tolkien received his first literary award for Lord of the Rings.

The fantasy trilogy caused a furor in England and suddenly Tolkien was famous. But being a shy, reclusive man he was glad when the initial uproar died down. In 1965, however, the Americans discovered Lord of the Rings and the book became a favorite on campuses across the United States. By the end of 1968 more than 50 million people throughout the world had read Tolkien's book and the author had become a cult figure. In 1967 Lord of the Rings was being published in nine languages and the author's privacy was continually threatened.

In great quiet and secrecy the Tolkiens moved to Bournemouth where people did not know who they were, only that they were "famous." But after his wife Edith died in 1972 Tolkien, in his loneliness, returned to Merton College.

Tolkien's last work, The Silmarillion, was never completed. Late in the summer of 1973 the author boarded a train to visit friends in Bournemouth, saying, "I feel on top of the world." Five days later he died of pneumonia in a Bournemouth hospital.

Contrary to reviews by critics, Tolkien always denied that Lord of the Rings was an allegory, writing: "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." When discussing the trilogy in an interview Tolkien said, "It has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political." He said that his main interest was to tell "a cracking good story."