Which city is J.R.R. Tolkien’s birthplace?

J.R.R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, on 3 January 1892.

His parents, Arthur Tolkien and Mabel Tolkien, were living in Bloemfontein while Arthur worked in a bank. Tolkien spent his earliest years there before moving to England with his mother and younger brother, Hilary, after his father died in 1896. The family eventually settled in the Birmingham area, where the young Tolkien developed interests in languages, landscapes, and medieval literature.

Tolkien is strongly associated with Oxford because he studied and taught there for much of his career, but Oxford was not his birthplace. Birmingham also played an important role in his childhood and influenced details of his imaginative writing, including landscapes and industrial settings. Bloemfontein is now in South Africa, although Tolkien’s birth took place before the modern Union of South Africa was formed in 1910.