The unknown Tolkien.

Not too many people have an inkling that J.R.R. Tolkien's birthday is January 3. Nor do many people know that 113 years ago the author of The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, and many other works of fantasy was born not in England but in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

There's a lot unknown about this world-famous author. Ask almost anyone what his first three initials stand for, and they won't have a clue that his full name is John Ronald Reuel Tolkien.

His was a rough, almost Dickensian, childhood. His father died when he was just 4 years old, so his mother moved with her two children back to England and settled in the Midlands. Passing coal trucks had destinations with such strange-sounding names as Nantyglo, Penrhiwceiber, and Senghenydd. Such an environment might well have been the initial stimulus of Tolkien's lifelong love of language and imaginative invention.

When Tolkien was just 8 years old, his mother decided the family should be received into the Roman Catholic Church, a decision that estranged them from both sides of their extended family. Four years later his mother died of diabetes.

At 16 he fell in love with Edith Bratt, three years his senior; and Father Francis, who was responsible for the Tolkien family's conversion, forbade him to see or write her until he was 21. He obeyed. They again took up the relationship in 1913 and were married in 1916 right before he was sent off to war. He was only at war four months when he came back to England with "trench fever," which would reoccur over the next few years.

After his brief war service he became an assistant lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary, the last word on the English language. Then he became a professor at the University of Leeds and eventually at Oxford, the last word on higher education.

There Tolkien was a founding member of the Inkings, a group of Oxfordians who had similar literary interests. This group prided itself on having no bylaws, no elections, no officers, and no agendas. They met on Thursday evenings in Tolkien's or C.S. Lewis' room, sharing manuscripts, gossip, and spirits.

Tolkien spent 16 years of his life writing The Lord of the Rings. The publication of this trilogy in the mid-1950s moved fantasy stories from a peripheral genre into the mainstream of literature.

But perhaps most unknown about Tolkien is that he was an editor of The Jerusalem Bible, published in 1966 just after the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council. He is listed as one of 27 "principal collaborators in translation and literary revision." This translation of the Bible worked hard to merge scholarly accuracy with appealing rhetoric.

Tolkien's main part was the translation of the Book of Jonah into contemporary English from its original Hebrew. This Old Testament book, entirely narrative, both amuses and instructs through its cast of characters: pagan sailors, a monarch, citizens, and even animals--a perfect world for Tolkien. Regretfully he had to resign prematurely from the Jerusalem Bible project and in one letter referred to his listing as a principal collaborator as an "undeserved courtesy."

Few people realize when they sit in church or are at prayer, and a selection from the prophetic Book of Jonah is heard or read, they might be listening to Tolkien's translation. These words, like all of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's work, reflect more than an inkling of wizardry! INN

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.