

Humphrey Carpenter was given unrestricted access to all tolkien's papers, and interviewed his friends and family.

One day while grading essay papers he found himself writing 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' - and this sentence changed his and ours live for good. Lewis and the other writers known as The Inklings. Already during the war he returned to the academic life, achieving high repute as a scholar and university teacher, eventually becoming Merton Professor of English at Oxford where he was a close friend of C.S.

He served in the first World War, surviving the Battle of the Somme, where he lost almost all of his closest friends. He was orphaned as a child and brought up in near-poverty as a catholic. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa, Bloemfontein, on the 3th of January 1892. In the decades since his death in September 1973, millions have read The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion and become fascinated about the very private man, the creator, behind the books. The authorized biography of the creator of Middle-earth.
