The Hobbit

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hobbit, or There and Back Again begins with a sentence Tolkien wrote on a blank exam paper one day in the early 1930s: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He had no idea what the word meant. He would spend the rest of the decade finding out. By the time George Allen and Unwin published the finished book on the 21st of September 1937, that single improvised line had grown into a children's novel that sold out its entire first printing of 1,500 copies by December. Over the decades that followed, the book would cross 100 million copies sold, enter the canon of classic children's literature, and spawn a sequel that permanently reshaped the fantasy genre. What kind of story could carry that weight? And how did an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon, marking school papers on an ordinary afternoon, stumble into writing it?

• 2. The Man Behind the Hobbit

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  In the early 1930s, Tolkien held the Rawlinson and Bosworth Professorship of Anglo-Saxon at the University of Oxford, with a fellowship at Pembroke College. His creative life outside the lecture hall was sprawling and largely private. He had been writing illustrated letters from Father Christmas to his children, featuring warring gnomes and goblins and a helpful polar bear. He had been constructing elven languages and an attendant mythology, a body of work begun as early as 1917 that would be published only after his death as The Book of Lost Tales. A handful of poems had appeared in magazines and small collections. None of it suggested that a breakthrough was close.

  The manuscript he finished by late 1932 passed through the hands of C. S. Lewis and a student named Elaine Griffiths before it reached a publisher. In 1936, Griffiths was visited in Oxford by Susan Dagnall, a staff member at George Allen and Unwin. She came away with the manuscript, impressed enough to show it to her boss, Stanley Unwin. Unwin's method of deciding was straightforward: he handed the book to his 10-year-old son Rayner to review. Rayner's favourable comments settled the question. The firm agreed to publish.

• 3. Building the Book

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  Tolkien did not simply write the story. He drew it, mapped it, and argued about every element with his publishers in letters that Rayner Unwin later described in his publishing memoir as "detailed, fluent, often pungent, but infinitely polite and exasperatingly precise." In 1937 alone, Tolkien wrote 26 letters to George Allen and Unwin about the book. Rayner added that he doubted any author, however famous, would receive such scrupulous attention today.

  The maps alone generated debate. Tolkien originally proposed five. He wanted Thror's Map tipped in at its first mention in the text, with moon-letter runes on the reverse that could be read by holding the page up to the light. The cost proved prohibitive. The final design settled on two maps as endpapers, both printed in black and red on cream paper.

  The illustrations came about by accident. Allen and Unwin had planned to include only the maps, but Tolkien's early sketches so delighted the publisher's staff that they agreed to include them without raising the book's price. The first edition carried ten black-and-white illustrations plus the two endpaper maps. The dust jacket went through many iterations, Tolkien always writing self-deprecatingly about his ability to draw. His final jacket design used four colours; the publisher, minding costs, removed the red from the sun, leaving black, blue, and green ink on white stock. The runic inscription around the jacket's edges is a phonetic transliteration of English giving the title, author, and publisher.

• 4. Bilbo's Long Ancestry

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  Tolkien's scholarly knowledge of Norse and Old English literature did not merely colour the story. It structured it from the inside out. The dwarf-names Fili, Kili, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, Dori, Nori, Dwalin, Balin, Dain, Nain, and Thorin Oakenshield all derive from the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. Even the name Gandalf was originally a dwarf-name in Norse sources. Tom Shippey, the Tolkien scholar, has argued that the juxtaposition of old and new styles of expression is one of the major themes the book explores.

  From Old English literature, and especially from Beowulf, Tolkien drew the figure of the intelligent, personality-driven dragon. He had delivered his landmark lecture "Beowulf: the Monsters and the Critics" in 1936, the year before publication, and counted the epic among his "most valued sources." The cup-theft scene, in which Bilbo steals a drinking vessel from Smaug's hoard and rouses the dragon to fury, mirrors an incident in Beowulf so closely that Tolkien himself noted it was difficult to imagine conducting the story any other way at that point. He credited the narrative pattern, not his own invention.

  The dwarves' portrayal drew on a different source. Tolkien's reading of medieval texts about Jewish history shaped their character: a people dispossessed of their ancient homeland, living among other groups while retaining their own culture, and warlike in a way derived from accounts in the Hebrew Bible. The Dwarvish calendar he invented reflects the Jewish calendar, which begins in late autumn. The novelist George MacDonald contributed the goblins; his fantasy works also helped Tolkien think through the role of fantasy within his Christian faith. Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth supplied structural parallels, including a hidden runic message and a celestial alignment that directs adventurers to their goal.

• 5. The Riddle of Genre

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  When The Hobbit appeared in October 1937, reviewers almost unanimously called it a fairy story. C. S. Lewis, writing in The Times, placed it alongside Alice in Wonderland, Flatland, Phantastes, and The Wind in the Willows, praising what he called the professor's air of "inventing nothing" and describing him as someone who had studied trolls and dragons at first hand. W. H. Auden, writing later in his review of The Lord of the Rings, called The Hobbit "one of the best children's stories of this century."

  What genre it actually belongs to has been argued over since. The book is popularly marketed as a fantasy novel, but scholars class it primarily as children's literature, like Peter Pan and Wendy by J. M. Barrie and The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald, both of which influenced Tolkien. The scholar Lois R. Kuznets identifies the intrusive narrator, who addresses the reader directly, as part of a standard "rhetoric of childhood." C. W. Sullivan III connects this device to medieval texts, suggesting Tolkien may have taken the idea of an intrusive narrator from Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

  Tolkien himself said the book was not specifically written for children, but had grown from his interest in mythology and legend. Emer O'Sullivan, in her Comparative Children's Literature, lists The Hobbit among a handful of children's books accepted into mainstream literature, alongside Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World, published in 1991, and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, published between 1997 and 2007. Jane Chance takes a different view, arguing the book is a children's novel only in the sense that it appeals to the child within an adult reader.

• 6. Revisions and the Ring

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  In December 1937, Stanley Unwin asked Tolkien for a sequel. Tolkien first offered drafts of The Silmarillion, but the editors turned them down, believing the public wanted "more about hobbits." He began work on what he initially called The New Hobbit, a project that eventually became The Lord of the Rings and that would force him to go back and change what he had already published.

  The most significant change concerned Gollum. In the first edition, Gollum willingly bets his magic ring on the riddle game and parts with Bilbo amicably when he loses. In the second edition, to fit the new concept of the One Ring and its corrupting power, Tolkien made Gollum desperate and aggressive, ending their encounter with the curse: "Thief! Thief, Thief, Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!" Tolkien sent this revised chapter as a sample of the changes needed. He heard nothing back for years. When galley proofs of a new edition arrived, he was surprised to find his sample had been incorporated. The revised text became the second edition, published in 1951 in both the United Kingdom and the United States.

  A third round of changes came in 1966, triggered by an unauthorized paperback edition of The Lord of the Rings from Ace Books. Houghton Mifflin and Ballantine Books asked Tolkien to revise the text of The Hobbit to renew the United States copyright. He used the opportunity to adjust terminology that had become awkward. The word "gnomes," used in earlier editions to refer to the High Elves known as the Noldor, was replaced because of its association with garden gnomes. The history of Erebor was also revised, introducing a distant ancestor named Thrain I to resolve a contradiction on the map.

• 7. A Book That Would Not Sit Still

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  Reliable global sales figures for The Hobbit are difficult to confirm, but estimates since 1937 range between 35 and 100 million copies. In the United Kingdom, the book has not left the top 5,000 bestselling titles measured by Nielsen BookScan since the index began in 1998. Between 2000 and 2003 it reached a three-year sales peak, rising from 33,084 copies in 2000 to 142,541 in 2001, then 126,771 in 2002. A first printing of the first English-language edition now sells at auction for between 6,000 and 20,000 pounds; a signed first edition has reached over 60,000 pounds.

  The book has been adapted for stage, screen, radio, board games, and video games across many decades. The first stage production was mounted in March 1953 by St. Margaret's School, Edinburgh. Gene Deitch produced a 1966 short film of cartoon stills. BBC Radio 4 broadcast an eight-part radio drama in 1968. Nicol Williamson recorded an abridged version on four long-playing records for the Argo Records label in 1974. Rankin and Bass produced an animated film in 1977, and Romeo Muller won a Peabody Award for his teleplay the following year, despite critics calling it execrable and confusing. Peter Jackson's three-part live-action film version ran between 2012 and 2014. During the COVID-19 lockdown, Andy Serkis read the whole book aloud to raise money for charity, and then recorded it again as an audiobook with cover art by Alan Lee.

  C. W. Sullivan credits the first publication of The Hobbit as a decisive step in the development of high fantasy, and credits the 1960s paperback debuts of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as essential to creating a mass market for fiction of this kind. Whether approached as a children's classic, a work of high fantasy, or a picaresque rooted in Germanic legend, the book that Tolkien wrote on a blank exam page has not been out of print since 1937.