John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on 3 January 1892 in Bloemfontein in the now Free State Province to Arthur Reuel Tolkien, an English bank manager, and his wife Mabel. The couple had left England when Arthur was promoted to head the Bloemfontein office of the British bank for which he worked. Tolkien had one sibling, his younger brother, Hilary Arthur Reuel.
When he was three, he went to England with his mother and brother on what was intended to be a lengthy family visit. His father, however, died in South Africa of rheumatic fever before he could join them. This left the family without an income, so Tolkien's mother took him to live with her parents in Birmingham.
Mabel Tolkien taught her two children at home. Ronald, as he was known in the family, was a keen pupil. She taught him a great deal of botany and awakened in him the enjoyment of the look and feel of plants. Young Tolkien liked to draw landscapes and trees, but his favourite lessons were those concerning languages, and his mother taught him the rudiments of Latin very early. He could read by the age of four and could write fluently soon afterwards. His mother then allowed him to read many books.
At the age of 16, J.R.R. Tolkien met Edith Mary Bratt, who was three years his senior, when he and his brother Hilary moved into the boarding house where she lived. On the evening of his 21st birthday, Tolkien wrote to Edith, who was living with a family friend, and declared that he had never ceased to love her and asked her to marry him.
His first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English Dictionary and in the run-up to the Second World War Tolkien was earmarked as a codebreaker. After World War II Tolkien moved to Oxford becoming a Professor of English Language and Literature. A post in which post he remained until his retirement in 1959.
He passed away on 2 September 1973 at the age of 81 in Bournemouth, Dorset, England.
SOURCE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._R._R._Tolkien