Ronald Tolkien grew up an orphan in a Birmingham suburb, went to Oxford on a scholarship, married his childhood sweetheart, then fought on the Somme. For 40 years, he was a university professor of philology.He ran a successful department at Leeds, but at Oxford presided over his subject’s slow but terminal decline. Some of this was Tolkien’s fault. Yes, he was underpaid and chronically overworked: world expert in his field, he had to lecture on basics even then usually taught by graduate students, and, to pay doctors’ bills and school fees, mark endless wearying exam papers. But he was also, as C.S. Lewis said, “dilatory and unmethodical”. Only Lewis’ persistent badgering made him finish The Lord of the Rings; none of his other major works was finished