J.R.R. Tolkien dead at 81 years old.

LONDON — J. R. R Tolkien, hero, scholar and author of “The Lord of the Rings,” died in Bournemouth. He was 81 years old. Three sons and a daughter survive as reported by the NY Times.

A great man was taken from us too soon. He touched countless lives with his amazing story telling and we hope he is up in heaven smiling down at his inspired minds all over the world.

The NY Times shared this in a touching editorial:

Young Tolkien attended King Edward’s Grammar School and went on to Exeter College, Oxford, on scholarship. He received his B.A. in 1915. But World War I had begun, and, at 23, he began service in the Lancashire Fusilieri. A year later he married Miss Edith Bratt.

The war was said by his friends to have profoundly affected him. The writer C. S. Lewis insisted that it was reflected in some of the more sinister aspects of his writing and in his heroes’ joy in comradeship. Tolkien’s regiment suffered heavy casualties and when the war ended, only one of his close friends was still alive.

Invalided out of the Fusiliers, Tolkien decided in the hospital that the study of language was to be his métier. He returned to Oxford to receive his M.A. in 1919, and to work as an assistant on the Oxford Dictionary. Two years later he began his teaching career at the University of Leeds.

In 1954 “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first volume of the trilogy, appeared. “The Two Towers” and “The Return of the King” were the second and third part. The work, which has a 104‐page appendix and which took 14 years to write, is filled with verbal jokes, strange alphabets, names from the Norse, Anglo‐Saxon and Welsh. For its story, it calls, among others, on the legend of “The Ring of the Nibelung” and the early Scandinavian classic, the “Elder Edda.”

Meanwhile, Tolkien was also busy with scholarly writings, which included “Chaucer as Philologist,” “Beowulf, the Monster and the Critics” and “The Ancrene Wisse,” a guide for medieval anchoresses.

After retirement, he lived on in the Oxford suburb of Headington, “working like hell,” he said, goaded to resume his writing on a myth of the Creation and Fall called “The Silmarillion,” which he had begun even before his trilogy. As he said in an interview a few years ago, “A pen is to me as a beak is to a hen.”

God speed sir. God speed.