Girls

's great literature. In just fifty years' time, Tolkien's story has become a world classic listed with the Bible, Gulliver's travels and Shakespeare's plays. However, few of Tolkien's readers learned of his work from lists of required reading; most were introduced to his books by friends who had read them. The popularity of Tolkien's tales of dwarves, elves, wizards and ancient adventure is one of the great success stories in literature. Many are surprised to find that the author of these tales of grand adventure lived a quiet life as an Oxford university professor.

Born in South Africa in 1892, Tolkien embarked on his longest journey at the age of three to four, when his English parents decided to return to their homeland. Tolkien's mother brought him and his brother to England alone. His father was supposed to join them later on, but he died before he got the chance. Once in England, Tolkien never saw his father or South Africa again.

Later after moving back to England, Tolkien's mother later died. With no parents, Tolkien was raised by a priest and lived in a boarding house for orphans. He was versed in many languages. The languages he could speak, read or write in are Anglo-Saxon, Welsh, Finnish, Icelandic, German, Old German, and Gothic.

Leaving behind the heat of the Africa, Tolkien grew up around Birmingham, England. Birmingham is a big, industrial city in Warwickshire. There is beautiful country around Birmingham, the same place where Shakespeare grew up. He studied at Oxford, fought in the First World War, and then settled down to a teaching career. He was at Oxford as a professor of Anglo-Saxon. He stayed at Oxford for the rest of his life, except for a few years of retirement at Bournemouth, on the southern coast of England. When his wife died there in 1971, Tolkien returned to Oxford, where he lived until his death just two years later.

Since he lived such a quiet life, Tolkien relied more on his imagination than personal experience in writing his stories, thou the setting of the shire in which the Hobbits lived was based on the country side near Birmingham which Tolkien loved dearly. Imagination is the key to understanding Tolkien's fiction. His stories offer places of wonder, beauty and heroism that ask the reader to use his or her imagination to experience life in worlds that never were. However, those worlds are so stunning and convincing that many readers