J.R.R. Tolkien

Hello. My name is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, but my family always called me Ronald. I was born on January 3rd, 1892, in a sunny place called South Africa. When I was three years old, my mother, my brother, and I moved all the way to England. I loved the green English countryside, with its old trees and quiet fields. My mother was my very first teacher, and she showed me the magic of stories and languages. I loved words so much that I even started inventing my own secret languages, just for fun.

As I grew up, I went to school and then to the famous University of Oxford. I made wonderful friends there who also loved stories and art. I also met a wonderful woman named Edith Bratt, and we got married in 1916. Around that same time, a big war started, which is now known as World War I, and I served as a soldier. It was a very hard and sad time, but it taught me about courage and how important friendship is, even in the darkest moments. These big ideas would later pop up in the adventures I wrote.

After the war, I became a professor at Oxford. I loved teaching students about old stories and ancient languages. In my spare time, I kept working on my own secret world, which I called Middle-earth. It had its own maps, its own history, and even its own languages. I had a group of friends called the 'Inklings,' which included another writer you might know, C.S. Lewis. We would meet to share the stories we were writing. One day, while I was grading papers, I scribbled a sentence that started it all: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' This little idea, which I first told to my own children as a bedtime story, grew and grew until it became a book called 'The Hobbit,' which was published in 1937.

So many people loved my story about the hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, that my publisher asked for more adventures. I decided to write a much bigger and more epic story. It took me many, many years to write, but it became 'The Lord of the Rings.' It was published in two parts in the years 1954 and 1955. It’s a story about brave little hobbits, wise elves, and grumpy dwarves, and it tells of a great struggle between good and evil. It was my way of creating a special mythology for England, full of the things I loved: bravery, friendship, and a deep love for nature.

I lived to be 81 years old, and my whole life was filled with words and stories. Today, my books about Middle-earth have been read by millions of people all over the globe. The world I imagined is a place people can still visit through books and movies. I hope my tales remind everyone that even the smallest person can change the world and that there is always hope.