The Monsters and the Critics

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,... Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature there from 1945 to 1959. 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. After his death, Tolkien's son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings form a connected body of tales, poems, fictional histories, invented languages, and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda, and Middle-earth within it. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings.
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Christopher Reuel Tolkien is the third and youngest son of the author J. R. R. Tolkien , and is best known as the editor of much of his father's posthumously published work. He drew the original maps for his father's The Lord of the Rings, which he signed C. J. R. T. The J. stands... for John, a baptismal name that he does not ordinarily use. Christopher Tolkien was born in Leeds, England, the third and youngest son of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. He was educated at the Dragon School in Oxford and then at the Oratory School. He was commissioned into the Royal Air Force in March 1945 and briefly served as a pilot, reaching the rank of Flying Officer, after which he read English at Oxford University. He had long been part of the critical audience for his father's fiction, first as a child listening to tales of Bilbo Baggins , and then as a teenager and young adult offering much feedback on The Lord of the Rings during its 15-year gestation.
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