If you're on this side of the internet and a fan of Lord of the Rings, you've probably wondered before: What was John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's ancestry? Where does his surname come from, what was his haplogroup?

Let's find out!

(First, a shoutout for the source of materials I'm presenting: most of what I'm presenting here is work of Ryszard Derdziński @Galadhorn posted on his blog http://tolkniety.blogspot.com )

From biography we can learn that J.R.R. Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein in South Africa, where his father Arthur Reuel Tolkien (1857–1896) worked as the head of local bank office.

Tracing back the genealogy, we arrive at J.R.R.'s great-great-grandfather John Benjamin Tolkien (1752–1819), a watchmaker (Gravell & Tolkien), who moved to England in the 1770s along with his older brother Daniel Gottlieb from Danzig.

Going back three generations further we arrive at the earliest known direct ancestor: Michel Tolkien, born in the 1620s, who lived in Kreuzburg in Prussia (today named Slavskoe in Russian).

J.R.R. Tolkien himself explained his surname as a respelling of German Tollkühn – meaning "foolhardy". However there's no evidence of his surname ever being spelled as such.

Not far from Kreuzburg there was also a locality called Tollkeim, today part of village of Berëzovka.

In medieval sources, we can find Heinrich Tolkin (fl. 1306), a negotiator and translator of the bishop of Warmia, and his son Johann Tolkyn (fl. 1339).

The father of Heinrich is given as Bernhard von Markelingerode, said to be a Saxon, who served as a knight to Miligedo during the 1260 siege of Bartenstein (today Bartoszyce in Poland, also not far away from previous locations).

This was the time of the 2nd Prussian Uprising, which resulted in genocide of majority of local pagan Baltic population – those who were already Christian were forcefully resettled into Sambia while most of the survivors fled as refugees to then still pagan Lithuania.

It is likely (but there is no proof) that those men are ancestors of J.R.R. Tolkien!

But were they really Saxons, or were they Prussian converts? Note that Heinrich was a translator – he spoke the local languages – and interestingly, the word "tołkun" in Polish specifically refers to the interpreters in service of Germans in Prussia.

In Elbing-Preußisches Wörterbuch, a dictionary of Old Prussian, we find the word: "Tallokinikis". It's said to mean a freeman – a land-owning peasant. The balticist Vytautas Mažiulis reconstructs that as "talkinīķs". Tolkien?

So, what do the haplogroups say? Is his paternal lineage genetically more typically Baltic, or Germanic? We do not have genetic information on any member of his immediate family – but, Galadhorn managed to obtain info from one descendant of aforementioned Daniel Gottlieb Tolkien.

Charles Embury Tolkien, who was tested in 2010 at http://ancestry.com , carries paternal lineage belonging to the R1a-Z92 haplogroup, more precisely YP351 subgroup. Very typically West Baltic!

It is, therefore, very likely that J.R.R. Tolkien's paternal ancestors were indeed of Baltic Prussian roots.