J.R.R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien CBE FRSL (/ruːl ˈtɒlkiːn/; 3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English writer, poet, philologist, and academic. He was the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.

His lecture Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics is a seminal work on the understanding of Beowulf, in which he argued that the monster episodes are the most important parts of the narrative.

It is widely believed that the description of Bilbo Baggins entering the dragon's cave in The Hobbit is based on a similar passage in Beowulf.