In 1937, he published the adventure story The Hobbit, and in the 1950s, the epic three-volume The Lord of the Rings. He created the mythology to express his “feeling about good, evil, fair, foul,” he said. He began dreaming up Middle-earth in 1914 as an Oxford undergraduate at the outbreak of World War I, in which he went on to fight as a British Army officer at the Battle of the Somme. And yet his lifeblood went into the books that have since almost eclipsed his academic reputation. In his day job, he was an Oxford professor, an esteemed scholar in Anglo-Saxon and related languages and cultures. Tolkien even invented languages for his elves and other characters to speak, drawing on elements of Northern European tongues such as Finnish and Welsh. Every work of fantasy that came later, from the Harry Potter novels and Star Wars movies to games like Dungeons and Dragons, owes a great debt to Tolkien’s astonishing imagination and pays homage to it. Tolkien mapped out elaborate geographies and built richly detailed civilizations. Middle-earth, where his famous stories take place, was meant to be a version of our own world in a forgotten past. No writer in the English language has ever created a more complete world than John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.
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