John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic. He is best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word tollkühn, meaning “foolhardy”, and jokingly inserted himself as a “cameo” into The Notion Club Papers under the translated name Rashbold.
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John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic. He is best known as the author of the high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s immediate paternal ancestors were middle-class craftsmen who made and sold clocks, watches and pianos in London and Birmingham. Tolkien mistakenly believed his surname derived from the German word tollkühn, meaning “foolhardy”, and jokingly inserted himself as a “cameo” into The Notion Club Papers under the translated name Rashbold. According to Ryszard Derdziński the Tolkien name is of Low Prussian origin and probably means “sondescendant of Tolk” The Tolkien family originated in the East Prussian town Kreuzburg near Königsberg, which was founded during medieval German eastward expansion, where his earliest-known paternal ancestor Michel Tolkien was born around 1620. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who evacuated East Prussia in 1945, at the end of World War II. In 2008, The Times ranked him sixth on a list of \”The 50 greatest British writers since 1945\”. Forbes ranked him the fifth top-earning \”dead celebrity\” in 2009. As a child, Tolkien was bitten by a large baboon spider in the garden of his parents’ home in Bloemfontein, South Africa.
When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father died in South Africa of rheumatic fever the next morning. His younger brother Hilary Arthur Tolkien, who was born on 18 February 1894, was promoted to the post of head of the bank for which he worked, and he was promoted as well. He died in 1973 at the age of 48. His son Christopher published a series of works based on his father’s extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. He was a close friend of C.S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as The Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972. He had one sibling, Hilary Arthur Tolkien, who was born in 1894 and worked at the bank where his father had worked for many years. He also had a younger brother, John Reuel Tolkien, which he left when he left England to become a bank manager for the British bank for the South African state of Orange Free State. His wife Mabel, née Suffield, was also a banker for the Bank of England, and they had a son, John Reuel Suffield, who worked in the London office of the Royal Bank of Scotland.
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