J.R.R. Tolkien’s first hobbit would rule them all, including Game of Thrones

Eighty years ago today a work of fantasy unlike any before it hit the bookstores

Actor Martin Freeman plays hobbit Bilbo Baggins in a scene from Peter Jackson’s 2012 film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

THE Oxford professor was engaged in the laborious task of marking high school English exam papers when he suddenly came across a blank page on one student’s answer book.

He later said he nearly gave the student extra marks because of the relief of having nothing to read. But a moment of inspiration possessed him. “So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’.”

That one line grew to become the novel The Hobbit, published for the first time on September 21, 1937, 80 years ago today. Professor J.R.R.Tolkien’s book became a bestseller, a classic of the genre and one of the most influential works of fantasy.

Tolkien himself drew on a multitude of sources for his book. Born John Ronald Reuel Tolkien in Bloemfontein, South Africa, in 1892, his English father was a bank clerk. When his father died in 1896 the family returned to England to live in the West Midlands around Birmingham.

British author J.R.R. Tolkien in an undated photo.

At school Tolkien showed a gift for languages. Initially studying classics, he became fascinated by English literature, Old English and Germanic languages that influenced his native tongue.

He graduated from Oxford in 1915, served in the army in World War I and, in 1925, became professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. Tolkien’s research into literature from the Middle Ages inspired him to create his own medieval world, and even the dialects spoken by the people and creatures that inhabited it. This fantasy realm was the basis of stories he told his children. He also developed a rich history for his land, borrowing from Nordic and Germanic myth and legend.

The original 1936 dust jacket apecs for The Hobbit as designed by author J.R.R. Tolkien.

For years he tried to turn this material into a novel, even contemplating having people from our world magically transported to his land, which he dismissed. But it was idly scribbling the line on an exam paper in the early ’30s that gave him his start. When he wrote the word “hobbit” even he didn’t know what that creature was, why it lived in a hole or what its story would be. But out of curiosity to find out, he created a more detailed story to tell his children.

He built on it and in 1936 a publisher read his incomplete manuscript, urging Tolkien to finish it. The Hobbit was published in 1937 and quickly sold out the first print run of 1500 books and more editions went into production. As early as December 1937 the publisher was already asking for a sequel but for various reasons the sequel, The Lord of Rings, would not be published until the 1950s, but by then his influence was already being felt.

Martin Freeman (as hobbit Bilbo Baggins) in a scene from the 2013 film The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Other writers had created their own worlds; Jonathan Swift’s imaginary lands in Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and L. Frank Baum’s Oz in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). But Tolkien’s land (which he named Middle-earth in The Lord Of The Rings) had a richness and depth unlike any other.

It could even be argued that it was the first important work in a new genre — literature set in an indefinite medieval era with an element of magic. Some reviewers dubbed it a “fairy tale” but it was far more than that. When T.H. White’s story of King Arthur as a boy and the wizard Merlin in The Sword In The Stone was released in 1938, one reviewer used the term “phantasy” to describe it. The term “epic fantasy” would later be used for books with a similar scale and breadth to those of Tolkien.

The final book cover of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, first published in 1937.

The cover of the revised edition of The Hobbit in 2006.

In the ’40s Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, while lacking overt magic, was a fantasy series set in an imaginary medieval castle and realm, written with a similar depth and gravity.

Tolkien’s close friend C.S. Lewis was influenced by The Hobbit. While Tolkien struggled to complete The Lord Of The Rings, Lewis published the 1950 children’s novel The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, set in a parallel magical world called Narnia. Tolkien disliked the book, seeing Narnia as a pale imitation of Middle-earth, and had a falling-out with his friend.

Other authors created rich fantasy worlds using Tolkienesque elements. Ursula Le Guin’s island world of Earthsea made its debut in stories in the 1960s along with Anne McCaffrey’s dragon-infested planet of Pern. Tolkien died in 1973 but the genre lived on in books such as Terry Brooks’ best-selling 1977 novel Sword Of Shannara and its sequels, set in Four Lands, a future world reduced to medieval simplicity by a nuclear holocaust. Some complained it used too many elements from Tolkien’s novels. Stephen Donaldson’s fantasy epic The Chronicles Of Thomas Covenant debuted the same year, but was written for an adult audience.

In 1983 Terry Pratchett published the first of his Discworld novels, parodying the fantasy genre, set on a disc-shaped planet carried on the back of a tortoise where magic is an everyday thing.

In the ’90s the fantasy novels of J.K. Rowling and her wizarding world and George R.R. Martin’s seven kingdoms gave us new rich alternative worlds to revel in. All of them owing a debt to Tolkien’s scribbling about a hobbit.