The origin of The Hobbit is almost a fantasy story in itself. Tolkien graded School Certificate exams in the summers to supplement his rather meager faculty salary. It was boring work, and one day, finding a blank page in one of the exam booklets, he wrote impulsively, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Nothing much happened to that sentence for several years; Tolkien continued to tell stories to his own children, to write poems, and to do scholarly work. In the early 1930s, he began to write down much of what he had been telling his children in an effort to integrate it with his more intellectual interest in mythology, and it became the book that is now known as The Hobbit. It was published by the British firm of Allen & Unwin in 1937 with eight of his own illustrations. To a remarkable degree, the tale of the hobbit does constitute a kind of mythology of the English people, whose history Tolkien knew well as a scholar and as an Englishman of his generation. He once said, "I've always been impressed that we are here, surviving, because of the indomitable courage of quite small people against impossible odds."
The Hobbit was quite successful as a children's book, and for the next twelve years, Tolkien worked on The Lord of the Rings trilogy in an effort to create an epic-scale context for the adventures recounted in The Hobbit. Allen & Unwin had rejected The Silmarillion, which hurt Tolkien, because he found the work deeply meaningful; when The Lord of the Rings was finished in 1949, he toyed with the idea of finding a different publisher for it. Ultimately, however, the trilogy was published in 1954 (The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers) and 1955 (The Return of the King) by Allen & Unwin. It became an astonishing international bestseller, and Tolkien achieved world renown as a literary figure. He retired from teaching in 1959 and began to revise The Silmarillion. In 1968, he and Edith moved to Bournemouth, a middle-class British resort town. Edith died in 1971 from complications of gall-bladder illness, and Tolkien moved back to Oxford, where he died in 1973.
