My life would be a of a less enlightened nature if it weren’t for J.R.R. Tolkien.  Happy birthday to the architect of English mythology.

From today’s Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892. He’s the creator of a world called Middle Earth and its inhabitants, characters like hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, as well as dragons, trolls, elves, goblins, and other creatures. Educated at Oxford during the outbreak of WWI, he spent his free time writing poetry and inventing languages, until he was called to the Western Front and fought at the Battle of Somme—he fought in and out of the trenches for four months until he was hospitalized with trench fever. During his long recovery he wrote tales about elves and gnomes that later became The Silmarillion. But it wasn’t until about 1930 that he started his most famous works—as an English professor, he was grading papers one day and was bored, and in a fit of daydreaming he wrote on one of the papers’ pages, “In a hole in a ground there lived a hobbit….” The novel The Hobbit followed, published in 1937—and then came a sequel trilogy, The Lord of the Rings. From his introduction to the original edition of The Hobbit:

“If you care for journeys there and back, out of the comfortable Western world, over the edge of the Wild, and home again, and can take an interest in a humble hero (blessed with a little wisdom and a little courage and considerable good luck), here is a record of such a journey and such a traveler.”