Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, to Arthur Reuel and Mabel Suffield Tolkien. He received B.A. (1915) and M.A. (1919) degrees from Exeter College, Oxford. In March 1916 he married Edith Mary Bratt; they had four children: John, Christopher, Michael, and Priscilla. Among the honors for his scholarship and writing, Tolkien was named a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1957, and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972. He died on 2 September 1973 in Bournemouth, England.
The "reality" of Tolkien's stories is an obvious starting point for understanding not only why such tales were created but who created them. In his famous essay "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien spells out a little of his literary intention:
Probably every writer making a secondary world, a fantasy, every sub-creator, wishes in some measure to be a real maker, or hopes that he is drawing on reality: hopes that the peculiar quality of this secondary world (if not all the details) are derived from Reality, or are flowing into it.
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