J.R.R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE 3 January 1892  2 September 1973 was an English writer poet philologist and university professor best known as the author of the classic highfantasy works The Hobbit The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of AngloSaxon and Fellow of Pembroke College Oxford from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College Oxford from 1945 to 1959 He was at one time a close friend of C S Lewis  they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972 After Tolkiens death his son Christopher published a series of works based on his fathers extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts including The Silmarillion These together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales poems fictional histories invented languages and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and Middleearth within it Between 1951 and 1955 Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings   While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien the great success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular resurgence of the genre This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the father of modern fantasy literature  or more precisely of high fantasy In 2008 The Times ranked him sixth on a list of The 50 greatest British writers since 1945 Forbes ranked him the 5th topearning dead celebrity in 2009 Wikipedia