J.R.R. Tolkien

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-08-10

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, in what was then the Orange Free State, and moved to England with his family after his father's death in 1895, settling near Birmingham. He attended King Edward's School in Birmingham and then Exeter College, Oxford, graduating in 1915 with first-class honors after switching from classics to English language and literature. After working on the Oxford English Dictionary from 1918 to 1919, he held the Reader in English Language post at the University of Leeds from 1920 to 1925, then returned to Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College from 1925 to 1945, and finally as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Merton College from 1945 to 1959. His scholarly work on medieval literature and philology ran alongside his fiction, which includes The Hobbit (1937), The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955), and the posthumously published Silmarillion (1977). He was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972 and was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1961. He died on September 2, 1973, in Bournemouth, England, at the age of 81.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Hobbit (1937) · Middle-earth Core Canon
• The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) · Middle-earth Core Canon
• The Two Towers (1954) · Middle-earth Core Canon
• The Return of the King (1955) · Middle-earth Core Canon
• The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Other Verses from the Red Book (1962) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Road Goes Ever On: A Song Cycle (1967) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• Bilbo's Last Song (1974) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Silmarillion (1977) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth (1980) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Book of Lost Tales: Part One (1983) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Book of Lost Tales: Part Two (1984) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Lays of Beleriand (1985) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Shaping of Middle-earth (1986) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Lost Road and Other Writings (1987) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Return of the Shadow (1988) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Treason of Isengard (1989) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The War of the Ring (1990) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• Sauron Defeated (1992) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• Morgoth's Ring (1993) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The War of the Jewels (1994) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Peoples of Middle-earth (1996) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Children of Húrin (2007) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The History of The Hobbit (2007) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• Beren and Lúthien (2017) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Fall of Gondolin (2018) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Nature of Middle-earth (2021) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Fall of Númenor and Other Tales from the Second Age of Middle-earth (2022) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon
• The Collected Poems of J.R.R. Tolkien (2024) · Middle-earth Expanded Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 4 books
• Award recognitions across all universes: 3 (2 won, 1 honor mention)

← All authors