From an early age, Tolkien pursued an active life of the imagination. In childhood, he and his brother Hilary would play at vanquishing evil dragons, and Tolkien added to his early mastery of Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Finnish, a talent for inventing languages of his own. As a young man, he tried his hand at poetry, going so far as to publish a few pieces, but by the time he returned from the War, he had begun an ambitious collection of loosely connected stories, poems, and songs that told the history and legends of the elves, eventually known as The Silmarillion. After his children were born, he began enthusiastically telling them stories, many of which he wrote down. For many years, he carefully composed and illustrated letters for his children from Father Christmas, detailing life and adventures in the frozen north.
Then, while he was grading exam papers during the summer holiday to supplement his professor’s salary, Tolkien wrote on a fortuitously blank page what became one of the most well-known opening sentences in English literature: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” In trying to answer, for himself, the question of what exactly a hobbit might be, Tolkien composed the delightful story of Bilbo Baggins, a stay-at-home little hobbit who goes off on an adventure and comes back with both greater maturity and a magic ring. In 1937, the story was published by Allen and Unwin as The Hobbit.
Much to Tolkien’s surprise, The Hobbit became a successful children’s book, receiving favorable reviews on both sides of the Atlantic. Naturally, the publisher requested a follow up. To their dismay, it took Tolkien seventeen years to produce the requested sequel (with another world war intervening), and the result was not another delightful children’s story, but an epic saga of heroic struggle against evil that was over a thousand pages long. Nevertheless, The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955. The books received mixed reviews, ranging from the glowing words of C.S. Lewis and W.H. Auden to a complete dismissal by Edmund Wilson.
The books sold well, but neither the publisher nor the professor was prepared for the cultural phenomenon that The Lord of the Rings became. When a pirated Ace paperback edition in 1965 propelled the novels to cult status, the 73-year-old Tolkien found himself in the remarkable position of being both a retired Oxford professor and a hero of the counterculture. Until his death on September 2, 1973, Tolkien remained both flattered and puzzled by the adulation of his fans.
