About the author

     The biography John Ronald Ruela Tolkiena's Long life (1892–1973) has
ended – has ended, instead of has broken! – one and a half ten years
ago. It became a threshold of its posthumous existence on the earth,
the end to which is not expected yet. If to look for similarity for
this life most of all it, perhaps, is similar on spacious, but not so
huge, simply big office, it house library, in ancient, that is only
Victorian, the house; on the right a fireplace with a marble board, an
armchair at a fireplace, engravings, carved этажерочки with wonders –
between racks. Much everyone (most of all books though it is not
enough of them), but anything, strangely enough, the superfluous.
     And the owner as if now only left and just about will return – left
not through a door (through a door we have entered), and through
shining and really a huge window in other end of an office. And its
life-at all room, but it then – представима only in bright and pure
light. To leave it, of course, left, from death anywhere you will not
get to, but left to remain with us. Also remained, for nothing that it
till in an office like and is not present; well as is not present,
there is it, and even without the especial mysticism – the inveterate
materialist lord Bertran Russell spoke: how much we know, suddenly
tables behind our back turn to a kangaroo? Such it is not necessary to
us, we will do without the Australian marsupials, and here John Ronald
Ruel, certainly, is present behind our back, and trees without which
he in any way did not think of a life grow behind it, they were for it
main жизнетворным the beginning. And it is a lot of that else to
strangeness of the acquaintance we will find out in reality diligence
of J. R.R.Tolkiena, accidentally having looked back.
     But we do not look back – will be was in time; we slowly look round
left to us on a review a long life. And outlines of an imagined office
blur: in the last years of life professors Tolkiena its modest library
took places in were гаражике, attached to a standard modern small
house on suburb of Oxford. This extension, by the way, served at the
same time as an office where the world famous author of an epopee
"Lord Kolets" accepted visitors including English writer Hamfri
Carpenter who subsequently, in 1977, has published its biography, a
real well of the facts – scoop will not take out. We will scoop. We
will be transferred from the life end to its beginning and we will
imagine times almost not representable, though not such and far.
     John Ronald Ruel Tolkien (and John, and in particular Ruel – names
family, for the time being, and at friends always he was called simply
Ronald) was born on January, 3rd, 1892 in the city of Bloemfontein,
capital of the South African Orange Republic, for seven hundred with
superfluous kilometres to the northeast from Cape Town, in the middle
of equal, dusty, naked steppe – вельда. In seven years has raged
excited all world and the English-burskaja war which has opened the
XX-th century, everywhere have started singing «Transvaal, Transvaal,
the country washing, you all burn on fire», and the name of pity small
town has started gleaming in front reports on the first pages of
newspapers. But while it was such solitude... Such most in which was
then it is accepted to send young Englishmen – that showed and proved