Baillie Tolkien

The Tolkien family is an English family whose best-known member is J. R. R. Tolkien, Oxford academic and author of the fantasy books The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. According to J. R. R. Tolkien, the family emigrated from Lower Saxony in Germany to England in the 18th century. The Tolkien name, with different spellings, is also still found in Germany. The name was possibly derived from the village of Tolkynen near Rastenburg, East Prussia (now in Poland and known as Tołkiny).

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English philologist, writer and professor of Oxford University.

He was a devout Roman Catholic.

Much of Tolkien's published fiction is a connected body of tales, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about an imagined world called Arda, and Middle-earth (derived from the Old English word middangeard, the lands inhabitable by humans) in particular, loosely identified as an "alternative" remote past of our own world. Tolkien applied the word legendarium to the totality of these writings. Most of the "legendarium" was edited and posthumously published by his son Christopher.

While Tolkien was preceded by other fantasy authors, his enduringly popular and successful works have had a remarkable influence on the genre. Thus he has been popularly identified as the "father of modern fantasy literature", or to be precise, high fantasy.L. Sprague de Camp and others consider him the father of modern fantasy together with sword and sorcery author Robert E. Howard (creator of Conan the Barbarian).

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