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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa in 1892. His early and barely memorable years were spent divided between the city and the country. His father, an English banker, was making efforts to establish a bank in the South Africa. His family moved from South Africa to a small English village because of the hot and dusty living conditions. Many of Tolkien's early memories of South Africa have influenced his later works.( JRR Tolkien encyclopedia of World. )

He left South Africa to go to England with his mother and his brother, Hilary. His father, Arthur, was supposed also to return to England within the next few months. However, Arthur Tolkien died of rheumatic fever while still in South Africa. This left the grieving family in relatively dire straights and on a very limited income. ( J.R.R. Tolkien uxl)

They soon moved to Birmingham, England, so that young Tolkien could attend King Edward VI school. His mother, Mabel, converted to Catholicism and the religion would have a long lasting effect on young Tolkien. An avid reader, Tolkien was influenced by some of the great writers of his day including G.K. Chesterton and H.G. Wells. It was during this of financial hardshipof schooling that Tolkien suffered the loss of his devoted mother. She succumbed to diabetes in 1904 when Tolkien was only 12 years of age.

After her death Father Morgan took over as his guardian, placing him first with an aunt and then at a boarding house for orphans. It was at this boarding house, at the age of 16 that he would meet and fall in love with Edith Bratt. Edith became somewhat of an obsession for Tolkien his relationship was interfering with Tolkien's studies and leaving him unprepared to take exams for his college acceptance. He realized this when he was not accepted into college on his first try. Tolkien temporarily swore off the love of his life an buckled down to the work at hand. On his second try he succeeded in obtaining a scholarship to Oxford.

Throughout his life, Tolkien had cultivated a love of language, especially ancient languages. At Oxford he majored in philology, which is the study of words and language, and was much influenced by Iceland, Norse, and Gothic mythology. Some of the names of characters and places he would later put in his books would be written from the names from ancient sagas. The forest of Mirkwood, which played a prominent roll in both "The Hobbit" and in "The Lord of the Rings", was borrowed from Iceland mythology. Many of the dwarves name in "The Hobbit" were actual names of places in the myths. ( J.R.R. Tolkien uxl Discovering Authers)

Having reached the age of maturity in 1914, while still attending college, he looked up his lost love, Edith Bratt, and proposed marriage. She had accepted a proposal from another quarter, but in the end was persuaded to return to Tolkien. They would marry in 1916. World War I, the war to end all wars, came in 1914. Tolkien lost many of his friends in the war, and he himself would serve as an officer on the front lines at the Battle of the Somme. He caught trench fever in 1917 and was sent back to England to recuperate.

Throughout his schooldays he had been a determined poet and scholar. His interest in language was such that he had even developed his own languages based loosely on Finnish and Welsh. It was while recuperating in Birmingham, with his wife at his side, that he began to create a mythology behind his languages. This work would one day result in his famous books.

It was about this time that Tolkien was blessed with the first of his four children. After the war he was