John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was an English author and translator who lived from 1892 to 1973. He was born in South Africa, which was a colony of Great Britain at the time, but his family relocated back to England in 1896 after the death of Tolkien’s father. Tolkien was raised and educated by his mother, Mabel Tolkien, until her premature death in 1904 due to diabetes. Tolkien’s mother was influential in inspiring his love of languages, plants, and his Catholic faith after her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1900.

After her death, Tolkien and his brother, Hilary, were placed under the guardianship of a priest, Father Francis Xavier Morgan, who oversaw their education. Tolkien met his future wife, Edith, as a teenager, and the couple became engaged in 1913. Edith was the inspiration for the character of Lúthien Tinúviel, an Elven maiden who falls in love with the mortal man Beren, and the names Lúthien and Beren are inscribed upon the Tolkiens’ respective tombstones. The couple married in 1916 and had four children.

Tolkien fought in World War I from 1915 to 1918, contracting trench fever at the Battle of the Somme due to the conditions on the battlefront. Many of his friends were killed in World War I, and his experiences would continue to inform his view of warfare and inspire the visual depiction of the land of Mordor.