Just as J.R.R. Tolkien’s influence extended beyond his years, so did production of his writings. Working with six decades of notes and collected papers, his son Christopher ensured Middle-earth’s exploits continued to see print.

According to the Tolkien Society in England website, Christoper began editing his father’s unfinished writings into about a dozen additional stories in 1977, four years after his father’s death. He started with The Silmarillion.

“There’s quite an industry that has built up around his work,” says Bruce Edwards, English professor and associate dean of distance learning. Tolkien’s estate still produces guides, readers and anthologies related to his work, as well as illustrations he had done throughout his life.

Edwards points out that Christopher is now in his 70s, and if his father were still alive, he would be celebrating his 110th birthday next year.

According to the Tolkien website, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892 to English parents. At age three, he went to England to live with his mother and younger brother Hilary, and so was exposed to one of many themes prevalent in his writing, the rural countryside. Both of his parents died soon after, leaving the two boys under the care of a priest.

The fact that Tolkien and his brother had been brought up Catholic since their mother joined the church in 1900 is visible in his work, says Tom Wymer, English department chair.

Another element Tolkien used can be found in linguistic training, where he tackled languages such as old Welsh, Gothic and Finnish after mastering Latin and Greek. He already began creating his own languages at an early age just for fun.

Tolkien attended Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied classic language and literature. He received his degree after changing his areas of study to English and literature.

Using his invented languages and inspirations from his college years, Tolkien wrote his earliest stories after many of his friends were killed in World War I. He had served only a short time before contracting a form of typhus and returning home. These became the Book of Lost Tales 1 and 2, which Christopher published in the early 1980s.

His first professorship was in English at the University of Leeds. He continued work on his languages and Lost Tales, then returned to Oxford as a professor.

During this time, Tolkien produced a number of highly regarded scholarly works, such as his lecture “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics.”

Many of these works endure, still read and admired today.

“People say they’re disappointed he was not more productive as a scholar,” says Simon Morgan-Russell, assistant chair of the English department.

But it is Tolkien’s fiction that has always seen more exposure, and his first major work of fantasy, The Hobbit, was published in 1937. When asked to submit a sequel, he presented an early version of The Silmarillion, but it wasn’t considered a good commercial prospect at the time. Instead, his writing over the next 16 years came to print as The Lord of the Rings, published in three parts in 1954 and 1955.

The rest, one might say, is the stuff of legend.