His family moved to England after his father died, and his mother taught him Latin and converted him to Catholicism. She died when he was twelve, and friends said he stayed a Catholic and continued to study languages in her memory. He taught himself Old Norse, and read the ancient sagas and stories of Northern Europe in their original languages. "Literature stops in the year 1100," he once said. "After that it's only books."
He arrived at Oxford as a scholar of philology, and he met C.S. Lewis there. With a number of other men, he formed The Inklings, a group of Christian writers who met to read aloud what they'd written every week. They talked late into the night about whether or not books could be "morally serious fantasy."
JRR was a major scholar of the English language, specialising in Old and Middle English. Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of the world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth. This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. It's a widely popular fantasy story that chronicles a magnificent battle between the forces of good and evil. Tolkien created his own geography, language, and mythology for The Hobbit and the trilogy The Lord of the Rings. He has regularly been condemned by the Eng. Lit. establishment, with honourable exceptions, but loved by literally millions of readers worldwide.
Hairy-footed creatures who inhabit the Middle-earth created in J. R. R. Tolkien�s fiction. Gentle, peace-loving, and only two to four feet tall, hobbits figure prominently in the struggle between the forces of good and evil in The Lord of the Rings.
Elves:
Often small, mischievous creatures thought to have magical powers. Although some elves are friendly to humans, others are spiteful and destructive. Elves have long been a staple of folklore, from Germanic mythology to J. R. R. Tolkien�s The Lord of the Rings, in which the elves speak a special language called Elvish.
Sauron the Great, the Dark Lord of the Mordor in JRR Tolkien's sequel the HOBBIT. Sauron's power depended on the possession of certain rings, especially the One RIng, the Ruling Ring, the Master Ring which he had lost many years ago and which he now sought to regain to give him the strength to cover the land in a second of darkness. This ring had eventually come into the hands of the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, who passed it on to Frod o Baggins, his adopted heir. If Sauron recovered it the Hobbits would be doomed and the only way to destroy the ring was to find the Cracks of Doom and cast it into the Firemountain. The saga essentially concerns Frodo's struggles, trials and adventures to achieve this.
