by J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien’s literary reputation rests almost entirely on a single work, his massive novel The Lord of the Rings. His novel The Hobbit (1937; also in Literature and Its Times), a short, equally popular novel intended mainly for children, is a prelude to the longer work. Born in 1892 in Bloemfontein, South Africa, but reared (from the age of 4) in Birmingham, England, Tolkien was a scholar of the Anglo-Saxon language by trade. His work on The Lord of the Rings took more than a decade, not least because of his time-consuming duties at Oxford University, where he was Professor of English Language and Literature. Although his fiction was influenced by the northern traditions of epic and saga, it was also profoundly shaped by twentieth-century events: World War I, in which he fought, and the...