Tolkien's The Hobbit

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again was published by George Allen and Unwin in London on September 21, 1937. It tells how Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable hobbit, is drawn by the wizard Gandalf into a quest with thirteen dwarves to recover their mountain treasure from the dragon Smaug. On the way Bilbo meets trolls, goblins, elves and a creature called Gollum, from whom he wins a magic ring in a riddle contest.¹²

J. R. R. Tolkien was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon, a scholar of Beowulf and of Norse and medieval languages and legends. He began the story in the early 1930s to amuse his children, supposedly after writing the sentence 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit' on a blank exam paper he was marking. Its dragon, its hoard and its hero's burglary echo Beowulf and the Norse sagas. Tolkien drew its maps and illustrations himself. The publisher accepted it after the ten-year-old son of Stanley Unwin, Rayner, reviewed the manuscript favorably.¹

The first printing, around 1,500 copies, sold out by Christmas, and the publisher asked for a sequel. Tolkien began what became The Lord of the Rings, which appeared in 1954 and 1955, and he revised The Hobbit's Gollum chapter so that the ring became the dangerous object of the later work. The book is among the best-selling novels ever published, with well over 100 million copies sold, and its influence runs through modern fantasy, from role-playing games to film, including Peter Jackson's films of 2012 to 2014.²