As we mentioned earlier, he had four children, and he used to write down stories for his kids to enjoy Tolkien then collected these tales into the novel we know and love today. In fact, The Hobbit began in a small way, as a means to amuse Tolkien's kids. By the time The Hobbit was published, Tolkien had only just begun to conceive of the scope of his creative project. The term 'Middle-earth' doesn't even appear in The Hobbit, though the novel is clearly an essential part of Tolkien's larger mythology. In fact, Tolkien should give hope to obsessive nerds everywhere: you can sit around reading Icelandic sagas and making up your own languages (as Tolkien did with Quenya, his invented language of the elves) and it can lead to worldwide fame and respect.īut it took an enormous amount of time for all of that stuff Tolkien had imagined to develop into the coherent world of Middle-earth. Through all this, though, Tolkien kept thinking over his hobbits, wizards, elves, and orcs.īy the time it was published, The Hobbit was really a culmination of about twenty years of imagining. He then went off to fight in the trenches of France in World War I, settled down to his various professorships, and continued his study of the languages of Old English, Old Norse, and Middle English. Actually, Tolkien wrote his first contribution to Middle-earth – 'The Voyage of Eärendel the Evening Star,' based on 'Crist,' an Anglo-Saxon poem by Cynewulf – in September 1914, when he was just 22 (source: 'Introduction,' The Annotated Hobbit: Revised and Expanded Edition, pg. Of course, just because The Hobbit appeared in 1937 doesn't mean that Tolkien only started thinking about it the year he turned 45. So he was pretty well settled into an ordinary life by the time he completed The Hobbit for publication in 1937 and changed the world of fantasy forever. He was also married and had four children: John, Michael, Christopher, and Priscilla. He had published some important contributions to the study of Middle English literature, most notably an edition of the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in 1926.

Tolkien was a hugely respected scholar of early Germanic languages and medieval literature, first at Leeds University and then at Oxford, in England.

And we can't help but notice a similar trajectory in the life of author J(ohn) R(onald) R(euel) Tolkien. In fact, adventure finds him when he is 'about fifty years old or so he had in fact apparently settled down immovably' (1.5). The hero of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, is not a young guy when he starts adventuring. The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again Introduction

The hobbit part 1 book