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the authors background John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father was a bank manager. After his father’s death, Ronald, then aged four, his mother, and younger brother moved to the English village of Sarehole, in the West Midlands. Thereafter, Tolkien always retained an idealized image of the Sarehole Mill, its old mill pool and overhanging willow tree, a tempting nearby mushroom patch, and the local clusters of cottages—all of which figured in his picture of Hobbiton. At this time young Ronald was already discovering two interests that were to shape his life: languages and stories about imaginary places. When his mother moved the family to Birmingham, the urban atmosphere with its trains and factories was much more forbidding and he later encouraged people to escape from such environments through imaginative literature. the background of this fiction 1 During his years at King Edwards school in Birmingham and later at Oxford University, Tolkien concentrated on philology, moving from languages such as Latin, Greek, German, and French, to Old and Middle English, Gothic, Old Norse, Welsh, and Finnish. During his childhood Tolkien had started making up languages and as an undergraduate at Oxford he continued this practice, evolving from Finnish and Welsh what eventually became the languages of the elves in Middle Earth. His work with the signal corps of the British army from 1916 to 1918 during World War I stretched his linguistic talents in a different direction. As a child Tolkien had loved dragon stories and the anonymous Anglo-Saxon Beowulf-poet created one of the greatest dragons of literature, a model for Tolkiens treasure-loving dragons in The Hobbit and Farmer Giles of Ham, as well as his creation of malice and terror, Glaurung of The Silmarillion. the background of this fiction 2 Throughout his life, Tolkien was drawn to the challenge of creating an imagined world and mythology. In the 1920s, while h