He then moved within the same university to become the Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College , and held these positions from until his retirement in Tolkien was a close friend of C. Lewis , a co-member of the informal literary discussion group The Inklings. After Tolkien's death, his son Christopher published a series of works based on his father's extensive notes and unpublished manuscripts, including The Silmarillion.
These, together with The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , form a connected body of tales, poems , fictional histories, invented languages , and literary essays about a fantasy world called Arda and, within it, Middle-earth.
Between and , Tolkien applied the term legendarium to the larger part of these writings. While many other authors had published works of fantasy before Tolkien, the tremendous success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings ignited a profound interest in the fantasy genre and ultimately precipitated an avalanche of new fantasy books and authors.
As a result, he has been popularly identified as the "father" of modern fantasy literature and is widely regarded as one of the most influential authors of all time. Tolkien was English, and thought of himself as such. Michel's son Christianus Tolkien — was a wealthy miller in Kreuzburg. Tolkien's second great-grandfather. Daniel Gottlieb obtained British citizenship in , but John Benjamin apparently never became a British citizen.
Other German relatives joined the two brothers in London. Several people with the surname Tolkien or similar spelling, some of them members of the same family as J. Tolkien, live in northern Germany, but most of them are descendants of people who were evacuated from East Prussia in , at the end of World War II. Tolkien was aware of his family's German origin, his knowledge of the family's history was limited because he was "early isolated from the family of his prematurely deceased father".
