J.R.R. Tolkien (1892–1973) was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, and is best known as the author of The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954–55). A scholar of Old and Middle English, he was a professor at Oxford University, where he was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Throughout his life he composed a large body of original poetry, much of it embedded in his fiction. His verse includes the poems of Middle-earth collected in The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962) and in the appendices of The Lord of the Rings. His posthumous collection The Fall of Arthur (2013) presents his unfinished verse retelling of Arthurian legend in alliterative metre.