Tolkien had a lot of influence from religion, mythology and geography as mentioned here to create what seems like an entire literary universe. It's also not uncommon for authors to be influenced by certain people they know or meet.
Is there a character(s) in the Tolkien universe who was based on a real-life person (eg. family member, close friend etc)?
Answer
Beren and Lúthien
Beren and Lúthien's story, from the Silmarillion, was based on Tolkien's wife Edith dancing for him in the woods near the military hospital where he was recovering after he was invalided out of WWI. She was Lúthien, he was Beren.
The Tale of Beren and Lúthien was regarded as the central part of his legendarium by Tolkien. The story and the characters reflect the love of Tolkien and his wife Edith. Particularly, the event when Edith danced for him in a glade with flowering hemlocks seems to have inspired his vision of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien. Also some sources indicate that Edith's family disapproved of Tolkien originally, due to his being a Catholic. On Tolkien's grave, J. R. R. Tolkien is referred to as Beren and Edith is referred to as Lúthien.
- Wikipedia
And:
Lúthien was largely inspired from Edith Bratt and Tolkien often referred to Edith as "my Lúthien." It is mentioned that around 1917, while Tolkien and Bratt went walking in the woods at Roos, Edith began to dance for him in a clearing among the flowering hemlock. This incident inspired the account of the meeting of Beren and Lúthien.
- Tolkien Gateway
And:
The Fall of Gondolin (and the birth of Eärendil) was written in hospital and on leave after surviving the Battle of the Somme in 1916. The kernel of the mythology, the matter of Lúthien Tinúviel and Beren, arose from a small woodland glade filled with 'hemlocks' (or other white umbellifers) near Roos on the Holderness peninsula – to which I occasionally went when free from regimental duties while in the Humber Garrison in 1918.
- The Letters of JRR Tolkien, Letter #165
And:
I have at last got busy about Mummy's grave. .... The inscription I should like is:
EDITH MARY TOLKIEN
1889-1971
Lúthien
: brief and jejune, except for L̼thien, which says for me more than a multitude of words: for she was (and knew she was) my L̼thien.July 13. Say what you feel, without reservation, about this addition. I began this under the stress of great emotion & regret Рand in any case I am afflicted from time to time (increasingly) with an overwhelming sense of bereavement. I need advice. Yet I hope none of my children will feel that the use of this name is a sentimental fancy. It is at any rate not comparable to the quoting of pet names in obituaries. I never called Edith L̼thien Рbut she was the source of the story that in time became the chief part of the Silmarillion. It was first conceived in a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing Рand dance. But the story has gone crooked, & I am left, and I cannot plead before the inexorable Mandos...
For ever (especially when alone) we still met in the woodland glade, and went hand in hand many times to escape the shadow of imminent death before our last parting.
- The Letters of JRR Tolkien, Letter #340, to his son shortly after his wife's death. Emphasis in the original.
Their shared headstone features the names Beren and Lúthien:
Samwise Gamgee
Samwise Gamgee was modeled on the batmen Tolkien knew in WWI.
My ‘Samwise’ is indeed (as you note) largely a reflexion of the English soldier ...the memory of the privates and my batmen that I knew in the 1914 War, and recognized as so far superior to myself.
― Unpublished letter from JRR Tolkien to H. Cotton Minchin
The Sandymans
For those who don't recall, the Sandymans, Ted and his father, were the millers of Hobbiton, who conspired with Sharkey. According to Tolkien Gateway:
It is possible J.R.R. Tolkien was inspired by the miller's son at Sarehole mill, Warwickshire, England.
Humphrey Carpenter wrote in his biography of Tolkien:
There were two millers [at Sarehole Mill, near Tolkien's childhood home], father and son. The old man had a black beard, but it was the son who frightened the boys with his white dusty clothes and sharp-eyed face. [Tolkien] named him 'the White Ogre'. When he yelled at them to clear off they would scamper away from the yard...
― J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, by Humphrey Carpenter, quoted on Tolkien Gateway
And Tolkien himself wrote:
I never liked the looks of the Young miller, but his father, the Old miller, had a black beard, and he was not named Sandyman.
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, "Foreword to the Second Edition"
The Dead Marshes
Not a character, obviously, but worth mentioning - Tolkien fought in the disastrous Somme Campaign in WWI, and this nightmarish, shattered landscape of mud and corpses formed the basis of The Lord of the Rings' Dead Marshes.
Personally I do not think that either war (and of course not the atomic bomb) had any influence upon either the plot or the manner of its unfolding. Perhaps in landscape. The Dead Marshes and the approaches to the Morannon owe something to Northern France after the Battle of the Somme.
- The Letters of JRR Tolkien, Letter #226
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