J. R. R. Tolkien
He served as the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1925 to 1945 and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, from 1945 to 1959. He was at one time a close friend of C. S. Lewis—they were both members of the informal literary discussion group known as the Inklings. Tolkien was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II on 28 March 1972.
Themes of The Lord of the Rings
Since the publications of J. R. R. Tolkien's "The Lord of the Rings", "The Hobbit" and "The Silmarillion", a wealth of secondary literature has been published discussing the literary themes and archetypes present in the stories. Tolkien also wrote about the themes of his books in letters to friends, family and fans, and often within the books themselves. In his Foreword to the Second Edition of "The Lord of the Rings", Tolkien said that he "disliked allegory in all its forms" (using the word "applicability" instead), and told those claiming the story was a metaphor for World War II to remember that he had lost "all but one" of his close friends in World War I.