On the 3rd of January 1892, in a dusty town in South Africa called Bloemfontein, a baby boy named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born. As a toddler he was bitten by a giant baboon spider in the garden, which his mum had to fight off - a memory that would crawl back into his stories years later. When his father died, his mother took him and his little brother home to the green English countryside, and he fell in love with rolling hills, mossy trees, and small cosy villages.
Tolkien grew up to be a quiet Oxford professor who studied ancient languages. He loved them so much that he started inventing his own - Elvish tongues with their own grammar, alphabets, and history. One day, marking exam papers, he scribbled a strange sentence on a blank page: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' He had no idea what a hobbit was yet. He had to write a whole book, The Hobbit, to find out.
That book led to The Lord of the Rings, which took him another twelve years to finish. Middle-earth grew into a world with maps, calendars, songs, and thousands of years of made-up history. Today Tolkien's books have sold over 600 million copies, his stories have become huge films, and nearly every fantasy world with elves, dwarves, and a quest - from Dungeons and Dragons to modern video games - owes something to the shy professor who invented languages for fun.
