As a teenager, Tolkien took up inventing languages as his hobby

One of the interesting facts about J. R. R. Tolkien is that as a teenager, he made the invention of languages a hobby. Tolkien first saw Animalic, a constructed language created by his cousins Mary and Marjorie Incledon, while he was a teenager. He was studying Latin and Anglo-Saxon at the time. Animalic quickly lost their interest, but Mary and others among them Tolkien himself created a new, more sophisticated language they dubbed Nevbosh. He will develop his own language, Naffarin, as the next useful tool he uses. Before 1909, Tolkien learned Esperanto. He wrote "The Book of the Foxrook," a sixteen-page notebook that contains "the oldest example of one of the alphabets he devised," around June 10, 1909. Esperanto is the language used in the few texts in this manual.

Tolkien, together with three other pals from King Edward School named Rob Gilson, Geoffrey Bache Smith, and Christopher Wiseman, established the semi-secret organization known as TCBS in 1911. Tea Club and Barrovian Society are the initials, a nod to the tea-loving Barrow's Stores that are covertly located in the school library and nearby. The members kept in touch after they finished school, and in December 1914 they met in London at Wiseman's house to hold a council. This event left Tolkien with a solid commitment to poetry.