J.R.R. Tolkien, fully John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, was born in South Africa on the 3rd of January 1892 to his English parents. In 1896, after the death of his father Arthur Reuel, he, his mother Mabel and his younger brother Hilary returned to England, where he lived for the rest of his life. He attended King Edward's School in Birmingham. In this period, Tolkien’s mother died and the two orphaned brothers went to live to their aunt. By this time Ronald was already showing remarkable linguistic gifts. He had mastered the Latin and Greek and was becoming more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient. He was busy making up his own languages, purely for fun.
Ronald went up to Exeter College, Oxford, in 1911, where he stayed, immersing himself in the Classics, Old English, and the Germanic languages - Welsh and Finnish. Then he changed his school from Classics to the English Language and Literature. He was working on various poetic attempts, and on his invented languages, especially one, that he came to call Qenya. He achieved a first-class degree in 1915. A year later he married Edith Bratt, his childhood sweetheart. They had four children, John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla. He worked on the Oxford English Dictionary. Then he took a job as Reader of the English Language, later rising to Professor of English Language at Leeds. In 1925, he became Rawlingson Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow at Pembroke College in Oxford. He received the Britannic Empire Cross from the hands of the Queen. He had begun to put his stories into shape. This ordering of his imagination developed into the Book of Lost Tales, in which most of the major stories of the Silmarillion appear in their first form. He started writing The Silmarillion, a project which lasted his entire lifetime.
To his other works belongs: The Lays of Beleriand, The Lost Road, The Return of the Shadow, The Treason of Isengard, Morgoth’s Ring, The War of the Ring, The War of the Jewels, Sauron Defeated, The People of Middle Earth, Smith of Wootton Major, Farmer Giles of Ham, The Father Christmas Letters, Tree and Leaf, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil, The Road Goes Ever On, The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and many others. Tolkien also made many drawings, some as illustrations to his books. Many of them can be seen in the book Pictures by J.R.R. Tolkien.
The Hobbit, a prequel to The Lord of the Rings, was his first published book.