A wise Englishman named JRR Tolkein created the fantasy novel about warlords, goblins, hobbits, dwarves, craftsman, and wisest of all humans, the Lord of the Rings, some 50 years ago.

Tolkein was born on January 3, 1892, in South Africa and his father was a bank manager. After his father’s death, Tolkein returned to England with his family at the age of four. At the village West Midlands, he could picturise the scenario of Sore Hill, tempting mushroom patch with clusters of cottage. This scenario inspired him to create image for his upcoming fantasy novel.

During his early days at King Edwards School in Birmingham and later at Oxford, he paid his attention to philosophy, literature and languages. He concentrated on classic and traditional languages like Finnish, Welsh, Latin and Greek. Tolkein worked as a staff for the preparation of Oxford English Dictionary, which helped him a lot in his language research. There he discovered the Finnish and Welsh was the language which was used by the elves in the middle earth period which we find in his novels.

Since childhood Tolkein was fond of creating fairy tales to entertain his friends. So part-by-part he was creating the story about a hobbit Bilbo and a magical ring.

Around 1937, he published this book named The Hobbit, which earned an enormous public response that inspired him to create a sequel for it.

In the fifties he started to write the first part of the hobbit sequel. He named his sequel The Lord of the Ring and is the first part of the Fellowship of the Ring.

In the first part, Fro Do Baggins (nephew of Bilbo) is given a task to destroy the powerful ring at the fires of Mount Doom. He is assisted by nine fellowships, which includes warriors such as Boromir, Aragorn, Gimli, Legolas, friends Sam, Merry, Pippin and a white wizard Gandalf. The second part is a continuation of this journey and struggling with the black powers of Dark Lord Sauron whose armies were resisting them.

In the third installment, The Return of the King, Tolkein ends his epic by concluding it with destruction of ring and the black powers.

The novel is regarded as one of the powerful bestsellers of world and has also been made into blockbusters. Director Peter Jackson collaborated with new line cinema to design the films — The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002), The Return of the King (2003). These three films were critical as well as box office successes. The Return of the King was awarded with 11 Academy Awards including Best picture in 2004.

Tolkein died in 1973.