jrr tolkien
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Best known for his children's book The Hobbit and popular trilogy The Lord of the Rings, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa to British parents. When his father died in 1896, Tolkien's mother took her two boys back to England where they settled near Birmingham. Soon after, Tolkien's mother converted to Roman Catholicism, a faith that significantly influenced Tolkien's life. When Tolkien was 12, his mother also passed away and he and his brother came under the guardianship of a Father Francis Morgan.
At the age of 19, Tolkien became a student at Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied English language and literature, graduating with a degree in 1915. In 1916, Tolkien married long-time love interest Edith Bratt; soon after, he was sent into the war as part of the Somme offensive. After just four months, he developed "trench fever," an infection similar to typhus, and was sent back to England.
Tolkien suffered recurring illness until 1918, at which point he began looking for academic positions. He spent a brief time on staff with The Oxford English Dictionary (called The New England Dictionary at the time) and then spent most of his professional life teaching English language and literature, particularly Old and Middle English. He wrote few but well-respected scholarly works, including a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and a lecture on Beowulf...