J.R.R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, in present-day South Africa, on 3 January 1892 and died in Bournemouth on 2 September 1973. He worked at Oxford for decades: Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon from 1925 to 1945, then Merton Professor of English Language and Literature until 1959. His 1936 British Academy lecture on Beowulf, "The Monsters and the Critics," is still treated as a landmark in the study of that poem.

He wrote fantasy as a scholar of old languages and old stories would. Britannica calls his two best-known books richly inventive fantasy epics, and the genre label that fits The Silmarillion best is mythopoeia, the deliberate making of a mythology. The Silmarillion is not a novel. It is a set of legendary tales set in Arda, his invented world.

The Hobbit appeared in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954 and 1955. Peter Jackson's film versions of the second began in 2001 and ended in 2003. Tolkien never finished The Silmarillion in his lifetime. His son Christopher edited it, with help from Guy Gavriel Kay, who later became a fantasy novelist, and it was published on 15 September 1977.

A new reader should begin with The Hobbit, which is the shortest and most direct way into Middle-earth, and then go on to The Lord of the Rings. The Silmarillion is best saved for the point where you want more of the world's history and are happy to read a chronicle of myths. It rewards that patience.