A Hobbit in All but Size

January 3, 1892

One hundred and twenty-one years ago.  That was the day on which a little boy named John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born.  Even today, years after he has died, people remember him and celebrate his birthday.  They remember the man who created Middle Earth.

I've been a Tolkien fan as long as I can remember.  There were car trips when I was little on which we listened to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings on audio book and I fell in love with them.  I don't remember now if this was before or after I saw the Lord of the Rings movies for the first time.  It doesn't matter.  What does matter is that those movies and those stories had a huge impact on me growing up.  I loved Middle Earth. I loved the places and I loved the people.  They were so real to me that I talked about them with my siblings as though we were the best of friends.

As I grew up I began to learn more about the man who created this wonderful world.  He lived in England during the time of the World Wars.  He was a professor at Oxford University.  He was a philologist, he loved Gothic and Anglo Saxon and just words in general.  He had fought in the Battle of the Somme in World War One.  He knew C. S. Lewis and indeed was one of his best friends. But the more I researched him the more I discovered and the more amazed I became.  He created his own languages and then created a history and a people and a culture to go with them.  He paid attention to every detail in his stories, making sure dates and distance and even the phases of the moon were exactly correct.  He worked on the Lord of the Rings for more than ten years.  He worked on the Silmarillion his whole life.

This past year Tolkien has come back into the spotlight because of the Hobbit movie.  He will always be compared to other authors, and there will always be different opinions, but for me he will always be the best.  His stories are not only the best works of fantasy I have ever read, but the world he created is so precise, so consistent, so brilliantly crafted, that it will always be a real place for me.  A real place full of real people; real struggles and hardships and heroes and triumphs and beauties.  Tolkien once said that he was a hobbit in all but size, but I think maybe he was more like the elves because he crafted such beautiful and wonderful stories and songs.

What can I say about this man that hasn't already been said?  He was a professor, he was a philologist, he was a soldier, he was an orphan, he was a husband, he was a father, he was an author and he was a hobbit.  And to this day he remains my hero and the only reason I've ever had for wishing to live in the '40s and '50s and '60s.