Timeline Sunday 2 September 1973

Events on Sunday 2 September 1973 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.
• 1973 J.R.R. Tolkien dies in Bournemouth — aged 81 Tolkien dies on 2 September 1973 in Bournemouth, aged 81, from a chest infection and bleeding gastric ulcer. He is buried beside Edith at Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford; his gravestone bears the name 'Beren.' The Silmarillion — the mythology he had worked on for 56 years — remains unfinished. His son Christopher Tolkien devotes the next four decades to editing and publishing his father's posthumous writings: The Silmarillion (1977), Unfinished Tales (1980), and the twelve-volume History of Middle-earth (1983–1996). The world Tolkien created outlives him by a century.