The Hobbit Published: Tolkien's Fantasy Begins

A retired Oxford professor's bedtime story for his children became one of the most influential works of fiction ever written. On September 21, 1937, George Allen & Unwin published J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, launching a fantasy world that would reshape literature, cinema, and popular culture for nearly a century. Tolkien had been building the mythology of Middle-earth since the trenches of World War I, filling notebooks with invented languages, genealogies, and epic histories. The Hobbit began more casually: while grading student papers one summer, Tolkien scrawled on a blank page, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." The sentence intrigued him enough to build an entire novel around it, following the reluctant adventurer Bilbo Baggins on a quest with thirteen dwarves and the wizard Gandalf to reclaim treasure from the dragon Smaug. The publisher's ten-year-old son, Rayner Unwin, read the manuscript and gave it a favorable review, earning himself a shilling for his trouble. The first print run of 1,500 copies sold out by December. Reviews were enthusiastic, with W.H. Auden and C.S. Lewis among its admirers. Allen & Unwin immediately asked Tolkien for a sequel. That sequel took seventeen years. The Lord of the Rings, published in three volumes from 1954 to 1955, expanded The Hobbit's charming adventure into a sprawling epic of war, sacrifice, and the corruption of power. Together, the two works essentially invented modern high fantasy as a commercial genre and established conventions that Dungeons & Dragons, video games, and countless imitators would follow for decades. Tolkien's estate has earned billions from his creations. The hobbit hole that started as a throwaway line on a blank exam paper became the foundation of an entire industry.