John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the philologist and author of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion, died 50 years ago in Bournemouth on 2nd September 1973. aged 81.
His wife, Edith, loved Bournemouth's bourgeois placidity. She was tired of intellectuals, having lived in Oxford for 40 years. In 1968, when he was 76 and she 79, she persuaded him to move there.
He re turned to Oxford when Edith died in 1971, but he was visiting Bournemouth to see the doctor who had treated her before her death.
It was his penultimate journey. He is buried with Edith in Wolvercote Cemetery, four miles north of Oxford. On the gravestone, the names Beren and Lúthien are engraved: characters who repeatedly appear in his most treasured works – the love tale