THE STORY OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN.: On this day in 1973: J.R.R. Tolkien died aged 81.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (1892–1973) was a significant scholar of the English language, specialized in Old and Middle English.
Twice Professor of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) at the University of Oxford, he also wrote a number of stories, including most famously The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), which are set in a pre-historic era in an invented version of our world which he called by the Middle English name of Middle-earth.This was peopled by Men (and women), Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Orcs (or Goblins) and of course Hobbits. He has repeatedly been vilified by the Eng. Lit. elite, with honourable exceptions, but adored by literally millions of readers worldwide.In the 1960s he was taken up by many members of the developing “counter-culture” partly because of his concern with environmental concerns. In 1997 he came top of three British surveys, held separately by Channel 4 / Waterstone’s, the Folio Society, and SFX, the UK’s major science fiction media magazine, amongst discriminating readers invited to vote for the finest book of the 20th century. Please notice too that his name is spelled Tolkien (there is no “Tolkein”).From 1925 until 1945, Tolkien was the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and a Fellow of Pembroke College, both at the University of Oxford.He subsequently moved inside the same institution, to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, posts he held from 1945 until his retirement in 1959. Tolkien was a close friend of C. S. Lewis, a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. He was awarded a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a succession of writings based on his father's copious notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion. These, combined with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, create a linked collection of tales, poems, fictitious histories, invented languages, and literary studies about a mythical realm called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth. Between 1951 and 1955, Tolkien used the term legendarium to the greater portion of these works.While many other writers had produced works of fantasy before Tolkien, the immense popularity of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings led directly to a popular rebirth of the genre. This has caused Tolkien to be popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature—or, more precisely, of high fantasy.