Philology--literally the love of words or language--is the study of the construction of languages and their relationship to one another. His academic work, teaching English language and literature at Leeds and later at Oxford, heavily influenced his fiction. Tolkien himself wrote in a letter to his American publishers in 1955 that "a primary 'fact' about my work [is] that it is all of a piece, and
fundamentally linguistic in inspiration." Humphrey Carpenter declared in
Tolkien: A Biography, "There were not two Tolkiens, one an academic and the other a writer. They were the same man, and the two sides of him overlapped so that they were indistinguishable--or rather they were not two sides at all, but different expressions of the same mind, the same imagination."
Tolkien's Early Life
Tolkien was born early in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father, Arthur Reuel Tolkien, worked as a bank manager. In 1894, however, the child's health began to fail. His mother, Mabel Suffield Tolkien, took him and his younger brother Hilary back to England early the next year, where they settled near Birmingham. Arthur Tolkien, who had stayed behind in Africa, planned to join his family in a year or so, but he contracted rheumatic fever and died early in 1896.
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