The fabulous fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien discarded his mortal frame on September 2, 1973 in Bournemouth, England at the age of 81. What made Tolkien unusual was that he didn’t simply write fantasy stories—he constructed an entire mythology, complete with invented languages, histories, genealogies, legends, peoples, and cultures. He was also a serious philologist and medievalist, and his knowledge of Old English, Old Norse, Welsh, Finnish, and other languages strongly shaped his fantasy world, being a professor of Anglo-Saxon and later English Language and Literature at Oxford.
Tolkien famously defended fantasy as serious literature. In his essay “On Fairy-Stories,” he argued that fairy stories can provide what he called “recovery, escape, consolation”—a way of seeing the world afresh rather than merely escaping from it.
One of his most famous observations was: “Not all those who wander are lost.”
