Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. Other German relatives also joined the two brothers in London. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in 1794, but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen. In 1792, John Benjamin Tolkien and William Gravell took over the Erdley Norton manufacture in London, which from then on sold clocks and watches under the name Gravell & Tolkien.

His son, Christian Tolkien (1706–1791), moved from Kreuzburg to nearby Danzig, and his two sons Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien (1747–1813) and Johann (later known as John) Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819) emigrated to London in the 1770s and became the ancestors of the English family the younger brother was J. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien (1663–1746) was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg. The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town of Kreuzburg near Königsberg, which had been founded during the medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Tolkien's immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and Birmingham. This has caused him to be popularly identified as the 'father' of modern fantasy literature-or, more precisely, of high fantasy. 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. Between 19, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings. 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, within it, Middle-earth. He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.Īfter Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings.

He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, and held these positions from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. He was the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.įrom 1925 to 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL ( / ˈ r uː l ˈ t ɒ l k iː n/, ROOL TOL-keen 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer and philologist.

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