The Hobbit

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, is an award-winning fantasy novel and children's book by J. R. R. Tolkien, written in the tradition of the fairy tale. Tolkien wrote the story in the early 1930s to amuse his three sons. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. More recently, The Hobbit has been recognized as the "Most Important 20th-Century Novel (for Older Readers)" by the children's book magazine Books for Keeps. The book has sold an estimated 100 million copies worldwide since first publication. On 18th March 2008 a 1937 first edition of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit sold at auction for £60,000 - twice what it was expected to reach.

The Hobbit is set in a time "Between the Dawn of Færie and the Dominion of Men", some 60 years before the action portrayed in "The Lord of the Rings". Twenty-five years after this adventure, Bilbo's cousin and heir Frodo is born, and he becomes the chief protagonist in "The Lord of the Rings." The Hobbit follows the quest of home-loving Bilbo Baggins (the titular "Hobbit") to win his share of the treasure guarded by the dragon, Smaug. His journey takes him from light-hearted, rural surroundings into darker, deeper territory, meeting diverse denizens of the Wilderland along the way. By accepting the disreputable, romantic, fey and adventurous side of his nature (the "Tookish" side) and applying his wits and common sense, Bilbo develops a new level of maturity, competence and wisdom.

The story is told in the form of an episodic quest: most chapters introduce a specific creature, or type of creature, of Tolkien's Wilderland. The prose adventure is interspersed with songs and poetry, many of which serve to lighten the tone of otherwise frightening or dramatic scenes. The final chapters deal with the climactic Battle of Five Armies, where many of the characters and creatures from earlier chapters re-emerge to engage in conflict. Critics have drawn parallels with Tolkien's own experiences and the themes of other writers who fought in World War I.

The work has never been out of print since the paper shortages of the Second World War. Its ongoing legacy encompasses many adaptations for stage, screen, radio, and gaming, both board and video games. Some of these adaptations have received critical recognition of their own, including a video game that won the Golden Joystick Award, a scenario of a war game that won an Origins Award, and an animated picture nominated for a Hugo Award.

In the early 1930s J. R. R. Tolkien was pursuing an academic career at Oxford as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon, with a fellowship at Pembroke College. He had had two poems published in small collections: Goblin Feet and The Cat and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked, a reworking of the nursery rhyme Hey Diddle Diddle. His creative endeavours at this time also included letters from Father Christmas to his children – illustrated manuscripts that featured warring gnomes and goblins, and a helpful polar bear – alongside the development of elven languages and an attendant mythology, which he had been developing since 1917. These works all saw posthumous publication.

In a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien recollects that he began work on The Hobbit one day early in the 1930s, when he was marking School Certificate papers. He found a blank page. Suddenly inspired, he wrote the words, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." By late 1932 he had finished the story and then lent the manuscript to several friends, including C. S. Lewis and a student of Tolkien's named Elaine Griffiths.

In 1936, when Griffiths was visited in Oxford by Susan Dagnall, a staff member of the publisher George Allen & Unwin, she is reported to have either lent Dagnall the book or suggested she borrow it from Tolkien. In any event, Miss Dagnall was impressed by it, and showed the book to Stanley Unwin, who then asked his 10-year-old son Rayner to review it. After Rayner wrote a short piece about the book, it was published by Allen & Unwin.

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Tolkien's correspondence and publisher's records show that Tolkien was involved in the design and illustration of the entire book. All elements were the subject of considerable correspondence and fussing over by Tolkien. Rayner Unwin, in his publishing memoir, comments:

In 1937 alone Tolkien wrote 26 letters to George Allen & Unwin... detailed, fluent, often pungent, but infinitely polite and exasperatingly precise... "I doubt any author today, however famous, would get such scrupulous attention."

Runes and the English letter values assigned to them by Tolkien, used in several of his original illustrations and designs for the The Hobbit.

Even the maps of which Tolkien originally proposed five, were considered and debated. He wished Thror's map to be tipped in (that is, glued in after the book has been bound) at first mention in the text, and with the moon-letters (Anglo-Saxon runes) on the reverse so they could be seen when held up to the light. In the end the cost, as well as the shading of the maps, which would be difficult to reproduce, resulted in the final design of two maps as endpapers, Thror's map, and the Map of the Wilderland, both printed in black and red on the paper's cream background.

Originally Allen & Unwin planned to illustrate the book only with the endpaper maps, but Tolkien's first tendered sketches so charmed the publisher's staff that they opted to include them without raising the book's price despite the extra cost. Thus encouraged, Tolkien supplied a second batch of illustrations. The publisher accepted all of these as well, giving the first edition ten black-and-white illustrations plus the two endpaper maps. The illustrated scenes were: The Hill: Hobbiton across the Water, The Trolls, The Mountain Path, The Misty Mountains looking West from the Eyrie towards Goblin Gate, Beorn's Hall, Mirkwood, The Elvenking's Gate, Lake Town, and the Front Gate. All but one of the illustrations were a full page, and one, the Mirkwood illustration, required a separate plate.

Satisfied with his skills, the publishers thence asked Tolkien to design a dust jacket. This project, too, became the subject of many iterations and much correspondence, with Tolkien always writing disparagingly of his own ability to draw. The runic inscription around the edges of the illustration are a phonetic transliteration of English, giving the title of the book and details of the author and publisher. The original jacket design contained several shades of several colours, but Tolkien redrew it several times using fewer colours each time. His final design consisted of four colours. The publishers, mindful of the cost, removed the red from the sun to end up with only black, blue, and green ink on white stock.