J.R.R. Tolkien’s first son was John Tolkien, who later became a Catholic priest.
John Francis Reuel Tolkien was born in 1917, the first of J.R.R. Tolkien and Edith Tolkien’s four children. He studied at Oxford and was ordained as a Catholic priest in 1946. He later served in parishes and was involved in Catholic education and pastoral work.
John’s career reflected the Tolkien family’s strong Roman Catholic identity. J.R.R. Tolkien had converted to Catholicism with his mother’s influence and remained a committed Catholic throughout his life, an element often discussed in relation to the moral and spiritual dimensions of his fiction.
John Tolkien is sometimes confused with his younger brother Christopher, who edited The Silmarillion and The History of Middle-earth. Christopher was the family member most directly associated with preparing J.R.R. Tolkien’s unpublished writings for print.