John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was marking school exam papers in the 1920s, when a sudden bout of inspiration came to him. Knowing he needed to save it somewhere, the Professor of Anglo-Saxon quickly flipped over one of the papers and wrote the now famous line, “In a hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit.”
It would be another ten years or so before he would actually start writing The Hobbit. Before then, he’d been making up bedtime stories about it for his children, immersing them in a world of fantasy. The problem was that he’d sometimes forget a few details, or maybe add a few new ones. His eldest son, Christopher, often picked up the discrepancies.
“One occasion I interrupted: 'Last time, you said Bilbo's front door was blue, and you said Thorin had a golden tassel on his hood, but you've just said that Bilbo's front door was green and that Thorin's hood was silver'; at which point my father muttered 'Damn the boy,' and then 'strode across the room' to his desk to make a note,” relayed Christopher Tolkien in the foreword to The Hobbit.
It’s thanks to the little boy’s sharp memory and yearning for consistency that The Hobbit was turned into a book. Tolkien initially wrote the story down as he told it, so he could keep track of all the details. And avoid interruptions from his young son.
Every time he told the story, he would add to the plot. He’d then grab his pen and make notes. After a while, he had the earliest drafts of the book millions eventually came to know and love.
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London’s George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. published the first edition of The Hobbit on 21 September 1937. Tolkien drew some black-and-white illustrations to add to the book. Only 1,500 copies were originally printed. They sold out by mid-December that year. Further copies were released in America and Britain later, with new color illustrations included.
Tolkien’s vision of Middle-earth first began in 1914, when he was called to fight in World War I. He has in the past said that he created the mythology to express his “feeling about good, evil, fair, foul.” We can understand how wars could make someone think deeply about right and wrong. And how the fantasy world of Mordor, Frodo Baggins, Sam Gamgee, Gandalf the Grey, Dragons, Mining Dwarves and Gollum grew from those thoughts of the literary great.
You might be surprised to know that while he spent most of his life in the U.K., JRR Tolkien was actually born in South Africa. In a place called Bloemfontein to be precise. Back then, it was the capital of an independent country called the Republic of the Orange Free State.
Tolkien’s British parents had moved to South Africa in the 1880s, and got married in Cape Town in 1889. His mother took him to Britain at the age of 3. But he had an eventful life in S.A. before then.
"Quite by accident, I have a very vivid child's view, which was the result of being taken away from one country and put in another hemisphere-the place where I belonged but which was totally novel and strange,” reads this 1967 archived article. Tolkien told the writer that despite many tragedies, his child was not an unhappy one.
