Before writing Lord of the Rings, the inspiration for an eagerly awaited film which has its world premiere in London on Monday, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was a university professor with a consuming passion for rare, historical languages.
The Fellowship of the Ring, the first installment in a trilogy which will be released on movie screens worldwide on December 19, is predicted to be one of the big successes of the year, competing with the massively popular "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" ("Sorcerer's Stone" in the United States).
The new film's fortunes will be boosted by legions of Tolkien fans devoted to works that have stirred the popular imagination for decades.
Lord of the Rings, starring Elijah Wood, Ian McKellen, Cate Blanchett, Christopher Lee and Liv Tyler, was filmed in New Zealand, the home of director Peter Jackson.
The trilogy was shot all in one go for a total sum of around 190 million dollars (214 million euros).
Born in 1892 in South Africa and brought up in Birmingham, central England, by his mother and then by a Catholic priest, the young Tolkien discovered early in life the intricate delights of ancient tongues.
After mastering Latin and Greek, the staple ingredients of an arts education at that time, he became more than competent in a number of other languages, both modern and ancient, notably Gothic, and later Finnish.
The logical development for someone blessed with Tolkien's vivid imagination and linguistic expertise was to make up new languages, something he continued to do for the rest of his life.
After gaining a first class degree from Oxford University -- where he helped compile the Oxford English dictionary -- Tolkien was named English Language professor at Leeds University, north England, in 1920.
Tolkien combined his lectures at Leeds, and at Oxford where he was named Anglo-Saxon professor in 1925, with the writing of books, some inspired by the tales that he would tell his own children.
These stories were full of myths and magic, of strange creatures, of dwarves, elves, goblins and wizards.
These all used languages invented by the author, including Quenya and Sindarin, both spoken by elves. They had up to 2,000 words and their own rules of grammar.
"Tolkien wanted to invent characters who spoke these languages and to invent a world in which these characters could evolve," Vincent Ferre, an expert on Tolkien, told AFP.
The Hobbit, published in 1937, was Tolkien's literary breakthrough.
The book sold so well that his publishing house asked immediately for more, similar material.
But they had to wait 16 years until Tolkien finished the colossal work The Lord of the Rings.
The book, published between 1954 and 1955 in three parts for commercial reasons, is considered by fans to be one of literature's most complex and imaginative masterpieces.
The Lord of the Rings became an international bestseller when it came out in paperback in the United States in 1965.
US campuses became gripped by Tolkien fever and a cult-like fan club spread his works to a worldwide audience.
After his retirement in 1969, Tolkien and his wife Edith moved to Bournemouth, southern England, but he returned to Oxford soon after Edith's death in 1971.
He died on September 2, 1973 and was buried with his wife in a grave in the Catholic section of Wolvercote cemetery in the northern suburbs of the city where he spent many of his most creative moments.
The second part in the trilogy, The Two Towers, will be released in December of next year, while fans of the enchanted world of Middle-earth and its inhabitants of humans, hobbits, elves, dwarves, wizards, trolls and orcs have to wait until the end of 2004 to catch the final part, The Return of the King -- AFP
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