J.R.R. Tolkien's full name was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien. He was the author of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I have read many fantasy books as a result of getting hooked on his writings at an early age. He was born in South Africa and as a child was bitten by a baboon spider. The doctor that treated him for this bite probably served as the model for Gandalf in his later writings. He later moved to England, graduated from the University of Oxford and fought for the British in WWI. He contracted trench fever during the war, which a bacterial infection carried by lice. Isn't war a noble enterprise? His first civilian job was with the Oxford English Dictionary where he worked on words of Germanic origin that began with the letter W. He would have killed in that category on Jeopardy. He later worked in academia and during this time he wrote the works for which he is famous. He disliked automobiles and rode a bike for most of his life. He died in 1973.
Thank you for your work J.R.R. or John Ronald or John Ronald Reuel, whatever you would have liked to have been called. You expanded my horizons.
What did we do before Wikipedia?
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