January 3rd JRR Tolkien

3rd January is JRR Tolkien's birthday

Today is the anniversary of the birth of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, born 3 January 1892, in South Africa. Here are 10 things you may not know about him.

1.  The name Tolkien is derived from the German word tollkühn, meaning "foolhardy".
2. Early dates with his wife Edith (they met when he was 16) involved sitting on the balcony of a Birmingham tea house and throwing sugarlumps into the hats of passers by.
3. True love didn't always run smoothly for him. As their relationship got serious, Tokien's guardian banned him from seeing or corresponding with Edith until he was 21. Not only was she a distraction from his studies, she was a Protestant and he a Catholic. Tolkien obeyed the order, and the day before his 21st birthday, wrote to Edith asking her to marry him. Assuming that he had forgotten her, she was engaged to someone else - but as soon as they met again, she broke off her engagement, converted to Catholicism and married Tolkien. They stayed married for the rest of their lives. Their shared gravestone has the names "Beren" and "Luthien" engraved on it,a reference to a pair of lovers in one of his stories.
4. He was a friend of CS Lewis who wrote the Narnia books. They both belonged to a literary group called the Inklings. They were so close for a time that Edith was reportedly jealous of their relationship. Tolkien was instrumental in Lewis's conversion to Christianity; Lewis nominated his friend for the 1961 Nobel Prize in Literature (but he was rejected because one of the selection panel thought his work "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality”). However, they did not always see eye to eye on religion - Lewis chose to join the Church of England rather than the Catholic Church, and Tolkien was not a fan of the Narnia tales.
5. Tolkien was one of the cadets from his school's Officers Training Corps who lined the route for the coronation parade of King George V.
6. Bag End was the name of his aunt Jane's farm.
7. Tolkien was a veteran of the first world war. He and Edith developed a secret code, so that his letters home would not be censored.
8. Tolkien's first civilian job after the War was at the Oxford English Dictionary, where he was somewhat of a specialist: working on the history and etymology of words of Germanic origin beginning with the letter W. Today, the Oxford Dictionary lists eight words brought into English by Tolkien including hobbit and warg.
9. He trained as a codebreaker before World War II, but never actually served as one.
10. In 1982 he published a children's storybook, which he illustrated himself, called Mr. Bliss. It tells the story of Mr. Bliss and his first ride in his new car, in which he experiences encounters with bears, angry neighbours and shopkeepers, and several crashes. It was based on his own experiences when learning to drive. He much preferred cycling and travelling by train.