This is indeed a special day to all mudders.
Today is the 30th anniversary of the death of JRR Tolkien. Here is a little biography on him taken from www.bbc.co.uk:
Considered by many to be the first 'fantasy' author, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, 1892-1973 (known to the world as JRR Tolkien)
set the current standard for swords and sorcery novels with his immortal Lord of the Rings trilogy. Born in South Africa to
English parents, he moved to England in his childhood, where he lived for the rest of his life. After attending King Edward's
School in Birmingham, Tolkien studied at Oxford University for eight years. He graduated with a first in English Language and
Literature, and married Edith Bratt (his childhood sweetheart) a year later. They had four children, John, Michael, Christopher,
and Priscilla.
Tolkien held many jobs throughout his career. He served in the military, fighting in the trenches of WWI. Although he always
denied the war's effect on his writing, many of the battle scenes and death experiences in his books were clearly based on
reality. After returning from the war with shell-shock in 1917, he worked on the Oxford English Dictionary for two years, as
an assistant. There, he began to write The Silmarillion, a project which lasted him his entire lifetime. He then took a job as
Reader of the English Language at Leeds, later rising to Professor of English Language at Leeds. In 1925, the family moved to
Oxford where he became Rawlingson Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow at Pembroke College, beginning a tenure of 24 years. It
was at this time (approx 1933) that he began telling his children bedtime stories about a funny little creature named Bilbo.
This story later evolved to become The Hobbit. In 1945, he became Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford,
a position which he held until he retired in 1959. It was during his tenure at Oxford that he wrote most of his novels.
It was also while he was at Oxford that Tolkien became one of the founding members of The Inklings. The Inklings were a group
of authors who met in an Oxford pub called The Eagle and Child (popularly known as 'The Bird and Baby') and critiqued each
other's writings. Other members of The Inklings included CS Lewis, Charles Williams, and Owen Barfield.