The Road to Middle-Earth The Road to Middle-Earth The Road to Middle-Earth: How J. R. R. Tolkien Created a New Mythology is a scholarly study of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien written by Tom Shippey. In Great Britain it was first published by Allen & Unwin in 1982, with a second edition published in 1993 by Harper Collins and a revised and expanded third edition published in 2003. It is currently published by Houghton Mifflin in the United States. The book discusses the sources of Tolkien's inspiration in creating the world of Middle-earth and the writing of works including "The Hobbit", "The
J. R. R. Tolkien this origin of the name has not been proven. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State (now Free State Province in South Africa) to Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896), an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel, "née" Suffield (1870–1904). The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel Tolkien, who was born on 17 February 1894. As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider