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A long time ago, in a shire far, far away… before Harry Potter rode a broomstick, before Luke Skywalker lifted a light saber, Frodo Baggins inherited a ring. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 at Bloemfontein in the Orange Free State, but at the age of four, his mother, Mary Suffield, took him together with his younger brother, Hilary, back to England for 'home leave'. After his father's death from rheumatic fever, the family made their home at Sarehole, on the southeastern edge of Birmingham. Ronald spent a happy childhood in the Sarehole countryside, and his sensibility to the rural landscape can clearly be seen both in his writings and in his pictures. After his mother's death, when Ronald was twelve, he and Hilary became wards of a kindly priest at the Birmingham Oratory. They both attended King Edward's School, Birmingham, where Ronald achieved distinction in Classics, and encountered Anglo-Saxon and Middle English. At this time also, he began to develop his linguistics abilities by inventing languages, which he related to 'fairy' or 'elvish' people. After taking a First in English Language and Literature at Exeter College, Oxford, Tolkien married Edith Bratt, with whom he had formed an attachment when