On January the 3rd 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, Arthur and Mabel Tolkien gave birth to their first son. He was christened John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in the Bloemfontein Cathedral on January 31st 1892.

His younger brother Hilary Arthur Reuel was born in February 17th 1894.

When John was only three, in April 1895, his brother Hilary, their mother and he boarded the SS Guelph, and moved back to Birmingham, England, where both Arthur and Mabel had been brought up.

It was shortly after this move, that news reached them that his father, Arthur Tolkien, working at the time as a bank manager, had passed away on February 15th 1896.

The family then moved to Sarehole, at the time a small village, just outside Birmingham, where they spent the next four years. He was later to see this as the most formative and happy time of his life, and many believe that Sarehole, with it's mill, was most likely his inspiration for 'Hobbiton' the starting point for two of the most famous books he would later write; 'The Hobbit' and 'The Lord of the Rings'.

This was the beginning of a series of moves, all within the Birmingham area.

Not long after the move to Sarehole, Mabel began to teach her sons handwriting, painting, drawing, Latin, French, and German.

In the autumn of 1899, at the age of 7, J.R.R. took the entrance exam for King Edward's School, but failed to obtain a place.

In June 1900, Mabel became Catholic, also converting her sons. Later that same year, in September, John re-took his entrance exam for King Edward's School, and was accepted. It was so as to be closer to the school that the family moved again, at the end of 1900, to Moseley. Moseley Bog, a prominent feature of this area, may once again have inspired him in the books he was to write.

In 1901, the Tolkien's moved again, from Moseley to a small villa behind King's Heath Station.

Then in early 1902 Mabel Tolkien again moved her family, from King's Heath to a house in Edgbaston, next door to the Birmingham Oratory, and to save money, Mabel removed the boys from King Edwards and enrolled them in the nearby St. Phillip's Grammar School.

John returned to King Edward's in 1903 having won a Foundation Scholarship there. There his study of ancient languages continued, and after studying numerous other "dead" languages, he began to create his own grammatical structures and histories, including Nevbosh (New Nonsense). Medieval and Anglo-Saxon tales of dragons and knights read at school also influenced his writing.

On the 14th of November 1904 Mabel died, aged only 34, and Ronald, still only 12 years old, and Hilary were orphaned. His interest in the language of the medieval poets, believed to be close to the dialect of the West Midlands, is believed to have stemmed from his deep attachment to the memory of his mother.

First staying with an aunt, Beatrice Suffield, they were later moved to a boarding house, where their guardianship is taken over by Father Francis Xavier Morgan, a priest of the Birmingham Oratory.

The boarding house was also where he first met Edith Bratt, 3 years his elder, whom he would later marry. In fact, Ronald was forbidden by his guardian to see or even write to Edith until he was 21. He obeyed this harsh injunction, but it could not stop the course of true love.

In early 1908 John & Hilary move to 37 Duchess Road, behind the Birmingham Oratory, into a room let by a Mrs. Faulkner. At the same time John begins his first term at Oxford.

In 1910, on the 17th of December, John is awarded an Open Classical Exhibition to Exeter College, which he attended, focusing on various topics, but eventually settling on English, with an emphasis in philology.

It was whilst he was at Oxford that he began inventing a language based on Finnish. This language emerged in his stories as Quenya or High-elven. He was awarded First Class Honours degree in English Language and Literature in 1915.

He married Edith Bratt on March 22nd, 1916.

Only a month later, he was commissioned into the Lancaster Fusiliers and left to fight in France during the First World War, and saw action on the Somme as a second Lieutenant, but was sent home with "trench fever" later in the year.

It was while convalescing that he started to study early forms of language and work on The Silmarillion. For the rest of his life, Tolkien expanded the mythology of his fantasy worlds. It is to this experience that critics link some of the grotesque war-zone landscapes in his books to these memories. 

In 1917, his first son, John, was born.

Upon returning home from the First World War, in 1918, Tolkien joined the staff of New English Dictionary, which was later to be come the Oxfrod English dictionary, where he worked for two years. In his first weeks he researched the origins of 'warm', 'wasp', 'water', 'wick' and 'winter'.

Then in 1919 he became a freelance tutor in Oxford. Tolkien then worked as a teacher and as a professor of English Language at the University of Leeds.

In 1920, his second son, Michael, was born, followed by Christopher who was born in 1924 and Priscilla, his only daughter, who was born in 1929.

In 1925 he had become Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University. It was during this time that he wrote "The Hobbit", mainly to amuse his four children, but it was eventually published in 1937.

With C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and other friends, Tolkien had formed an informal literary group called The Inklings, which took shape in the 1930s. They all had an interest in storytelling and their Tuesday lunchtime sessions in the Bird and Baby pub became well known part of Oxford social life. At their meetings the Inklings read aloud drafts of fiction and other work. Williams died in 1945 and the meetings faded out in 1949. - Other members of the club included Christopher Tolkien, J.R.R. Tolkien's son, and Owen Barfield.

He had been appointed Merton Professor of English at Oxford in 1945, and continued in this post until he retired in 1959.

His scholarly works included studies on Chaucer (1934) and an edition of Beowulf (1937). He was also interested in the Finnish national epos Kalevala, from which he found ideas for his imaginary language guenya and which influenced several of his stories. Most of the inhabitants of Tolkien's imaginary Middle-earth are derived from English folklore and mythology, or from an idealised Anglo-Saxon past.

In the mid-1960s American paperback editions of The Lord of the Rings started to gain cult fame. The Tolkien's moved in 1968 to Poole near Bournemouth but after the death of his wife in 1971, Tolkien returned to Oxford. In 1972 he received CBE from the Queen.

He died on 2 September 1973 at the age of 81.

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