文档介绍：romance and integrity against cruelty and evil
the author's background
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Bloemfontein, South Africa, where his father was a bank manager. After his father’s death, Ronald, then aged four, his mother, and younger brother moved to the English village of Sarehole, in the West Midlands. Thereafter, Tolkien always retained an idealized image of the Sarehole Mill, its old mill pool and overhanging willow tree, a tempting nearby mushroom patch, and the local clusters of cottages—all of which figured in his picture of Hobbiton. At this time young Ronald was already discovering two interests that were to shape his life: languages and stories about imaginary places. When his mother moved the family to Birmingham, the urban atmosphere with its trains and factories was much more forbidding and he later encouraged people to "escape" from such environments through imaginative literature.
the background of this fiction 1
During his years at King Edward's school in Birmingham and later at Oxford University, Tolkien concentrated on philology, moving from languages such as Latin, Greek, German, and French, to Old and Middle English, Gothic, Old Norse, Welsh, and Finnish. During his childhood Tolkien had started "making up" languages and as an undergraduate at Oxford he continued this practice, evolving from Finnish and Welsh what eventu