J. R. R. Tolkien J. R. R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, (; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor who is best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works "The Hobbit", "The Lord of the Rings", and "The Silmarillion". He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon 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
The Lord of the Rings the 'good' characters have darker sides that feature in the story, and likewise some of the villains have "good impulses". Therefore the categorization of characters as either 'protagonists' or 'antagonists' below indicates their "general" role in the story. "The Lord of the Rings" started as a sequel to J. R. R. Tolkien's work "The Hobbit," published in 1937. The popularity of "The Hobbit" had led George Allen & Unwin, the publishers, to request a sequel. Tolkien warned them that he wrote quite slowly, and responded with several stories he had already developed. Having rejected his contemporary drafts for "The Silmarillion",