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
Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien Languages constructed by J. R. R. Tolkien The philologist and author J. R. R. Tolkien created a number of constructed languages, including languages devised for fictional settings. Inventing languages (called "glossopoeia" by Tolkien, from Greek γλῶσσα glôssa, "language, tongue" and ποιῶ poiô, "to make" paralleling his idea of "mythopoeia" or myth-making) was a lifelong occupation for Tolkien, starting in his teens. An early project of Tolkien was the reconstruction of an unrecorded early Germanic language which might have been spoken by the people of "Beowulf" in the Germanic heroic age. The most-developed project of Tolkien was his Elvish languages. He