Born on this date 121 years ago: J.R.R. Tolkien in S. Africa

from Writer's Almanac (American Public Media, Garrison Keillor):

January 3 is the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, born in Bloemfontein, South Africa (1892). He studied classics, language, and literature at Oxford. In 1925, Tolkien returned to Oxford University as a professor.
One day, while grading exams, he discovered that a student had left one whole page in his examination booklet blank. Tolkien, for reasons unknown even to him, wrote on the page, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." This single line turned into a bedtime story that he told his children, and from there, a book: The Hobbit (1937).