Timeline Sunday 3 January 1892

Events on Sunday 3 January 1892 3

• 1892 – 1973 J. R. R. Tolkien English fantasy writer Tolkien created The Lord of the Rings, defining modern epic fantasy literature and world-building.
• 1892 – 1973 J.R.R. Tolkien John Ronald Reuel Tolkien (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) was an English author, philologist and academic whose creation of Middle-earth — its languages, histories, myths and peoples — constitutes one of the most sustained acts of world-building in literary history. A professor of Anglo-Saxon and later English Language and Literature at Oxford, Tolkien spent forty years constructing a mythology he called 'a mythology for England,' rooted in Old English, Norse and Finnish literary traditions. The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55) transformed fantasy literature and have sold over 600 million copies combined. He died before completing The Silmarillion, which his son Christopher edited and published posthumously in 1977.
• 1892 J.R.R. Tolkien born in Bloemfontein, South Africa John Ronald Reuel Tolkien is born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State (now South Africa), where his father Arthur Tolkien is a bank manager. The family is English; Bloemfontein is a colonial outpost of the British Empire. Ronald — as he is always called — finds the South African climate harsh and the landscape alien. He returns to England with his mother Mabel and brother Hilary in 1895 when Ronald is three, while Arthur remains in Bloemfontein. Arthur Tolkien dies of rheumatic fever in February 1896 before the family can return.