John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892-2 September 1973) was an English writer and academic who was best known for writing The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which created an imagined prehistory of Earth in the form of the fantasy realm of Middle Earth. Born in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State to British parents, he was raised in rural Worcestershire after his father's death, and, when his mother died when he was twelve, he was raised by a Roman Catholic priest. Tolkien served in the British Army's Lancashire Fusiliers during World War I, reaching the rank of Lieutenant and receiving an injury while capturing the Regina Trench during the Battle of the Somme. Tolkien was demobilized in 1920 and worked as a linguist for the Oxford English Dictionary before becoming an English professor at the University of Leeds and then at the University of Oxford. Tolkien translated Beowulf in 1926 and published The Hobbit in 1937 to wide critical acclaim; after serving as a codebreaker during World War II, Tolkien went on to publish The Lord of the Rings in three volumes: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers in 1954 and The Return of the King in 1955. Tolkien called his fantasy works the "Legendarium", in which he claimed to be writing an alternate prehistory of the world set around 6,000 years before the trilogy's publications; he drew heavily on Norse mythology and Anglo-Saxon poetry when reimagining the Norse realm of Midgard as "Middle Earth" and prehistoric Earth as "Arda". Tolkien died in 1973 before he could publish his last major work, The Silmarillion, which he had begun writing in 1914 to explain the origins of English history and culture.
Tolkien was religiously a Catholic and politically an anarchist, specifying that he supported the abolition of control and not "whiskered men with bombs", and adding that not one in a million men was fit to boss others around, and least of all those who sought the opportunity. However, he supported Francisco Franco's Nationalist faction during the Spanish Civil War after hearing of the massacres of Catholic priests and nuns and the destruction of churches by the Second Spanish Republic.