On September 21, 1937, The Hobbit first went on sale in England. It was the first novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, an unknown author, and was so compelling and entertaining that the entire 1,500 title print run was sold out by December.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was not trained as a writer. His interests, since he was a child, lay in mythology, language, and poetry, which shine through in The Hobbit and his other works. He’d studied language and literature at Oxford, with special attention paid to Old Norse and Old and Middle English, which would later form the basis of his career as a language expert. He first worked for the Oxford English Dictionary where he was responsible for research into the origins of words, and later became a professor and began producing modern translations of Old English works like Sir Gawain and the Green Night and Beowulf.
While it takes place in his manufactured world of Middle Earth, Tolkien’s life and language experience had strong influences on the characters and locations in The Hobbit. He has specifically mentioned that Bilbo’s journey over the Misty Mountains was inspired by a hiking excursion he made into the Alps as a teenager, and that the pastoral Shire, particularly Bilbo’s house at Bag End, were representations of his Aunt’s farm that he had visited as a child. Smaug the dragon bears striking resemblance to the dragon antagonist from Beowulf, a work Tolkien knew very well from his time as a translator.
And while old languages, like runic norse, served as inspiration, even more important to the book were the languages Tolkien created himself. Since he was a child and was introduced to the concept of manufactured language by his cousins, Tolkien had been intrigued. His first created language was called Naffarin. In his life, he put his language skills to good use, using them to create a code with which he could overcome the postal censors and report his location to his wife while serving in the trenches of the First World War. Throughout his life, Tolkien was creating new languages for his world of Middle Earth, many of which were published posthumously in The Silmarillion, the encyclopedic narrative description of the world and peoples of Middle Earth.
After its successful release, publishers implored Tolkien to write a sequel to The Hobbit. He started almost immediately, but given his detailed writing style and the fact that he was creating a new world as he went, it took him over a decade and morphed into something much larger than a simple sequel. The Lord of the Rings, his most famous work, was published in 1954 and took a much darker, less whimsical view of Middle Earth, but also cemented Tolkien’s place as the father of fantasy writing.
