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Interesting Questions, Facts and Information
- There are a total of 30 general entries.
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 Interesting Questions, Facts, and Information
 Tolkien, J.R.R.
January 3, 1892. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, of British parents.
1895. He went to England the same year his father died in South Africa.
1895. His father was named Arthur Tolkien.
1916. The same year he went to war in France.
1920/1924. His fourth child, Priscilla, was born in 1929.
1937. In the same year, Tolkien began his work on "The Lord of the Rings."
1954/1955. He had completed the book in 1948.
September 2, 1973. His wife Edith had died two years before him. On the gravestone it says "Beren and Luthien."
Bloemfontien, South Africa. Tolkien was born there because his mother and father moved there a few months before he was born. Tolkien's father was a banker, and the promotional opportunities were too good to pass up.
Edith. Priscilla is the name of Tolkien's daughter.
Diabetes. Before she died, Tolkien's mother converted to the Catholic church, and JRR and Hilary were taken care of by their priest for a period of their childhood.
C.S. Lewis. Tolkien and Lewis were part of a group that got together every Tuesday morning to drink beer and go over some of their works together.
Oxford. Tolkien also studied there, and the way Tolkien came up with the idea for the Hobbit was that he was marking some exams when he came across a blank one, and for no particular reason, wrote down the famous line: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit.'
1937. The only reason 'The Hobbit' got published was because the son of one of the men that worked at the publishing company gave it a great review. Without that review, we may never have gotten to read 'The Hobbit', or 'The Lord of the Rings', the novel's sequel.
1973. Tolkien's wife passed on two years before he did. He spent the last two years in a small dwelling in a seaside town in England. They were buried beside one another, and on their tombstones underneath their names were 'Luthien' and 'Beren'.
Bloemfontein, South Africa. Yes, one of the greatest Britons was in fact from South Africa. He left the country in 1895, at the age of three, so he spent most of his life in the UK. He came 35 in the list of the greatest South Africans. He had few memories of South Africa, one of the clearest being an encounter with a giant spider ...
One brother, Hilary. Tolkien, Hilary and their mother Mabel left South Africa without his father Arthur, he planned to follow later. Unfortunately he died of a brain hemorrhage before he could do so, and Mabel never re-married.
John Ronald Reuel. His family and early friends called him Ronald.
King Edward's School, Birmingham, and Oxford. He seems to have enjoyed school, and formed a group of extremely close friends, who founded their own secret society the TCBS (Tea Club and Barrovian Society).
Edith Bratt. She was 3 years older than him, and his guardian Father Morgan refused to permit him to mary, or even see her until he was 21. He waited until his 21st birthday, and proposed to her, she accepted and they married in 1916.
| In 1915 Tolkien completed his degree (first class in English) and joined the army. In what regiment did he enlist? | The Life of JRR Tolkien
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11th Battalion Lancashire Fuisiliers. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant and served in the Battle of the Somme. Most of his friends died during the war, and many of the horrific experiances must have influenced his later work. Fortunately he developed trench fever in October 1916 and had to be shipped home to recover.
Leeds University. He became Reader in English language at Leeds in 1920. He later became professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. (In the English universities a "reader" ranks immediately below a full professor). For a brief period before going to Leeds he worked on the "Oxford English Dictionary".
No. Dickens died 25 years before Tolkien was born, however he was able to count CS Lewis and WH Auden amongst his circle of friends.
5. John, Christopher, Michael, Hilary and Priscilla (who all had two middle names, the second being Ruel in each case).
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