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London, England
89 years ago

The Hobbit was published in London by George Allen and Unwin on September 21, 1937, in a first printing of fifteen hundred copies. They were gone by December. Its author, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford who had written the book for his own children and had not particularly intended to publish it. The manuscript reached the publisher through a former student, and the decision to accept it was influenced by a favourable report written by the chairman's ten-year-old son, who was paid a shilling for the review.

Tolkien later said the story began with a sentence he wrote on a blank page while marking examination papers, without knowing what a hobbit was or why one lived in a hole. He worked outward from there, drawing on the Norse and Old English literature he taught, on the invented languages he had been building since his student years, and on the mythology of Middle-earth he had been privately writing since the First World War, in which he had served on the Somme and lost most of his closest friends.

The book itself is modest in scope: a comfortable, unadventurous householder is bundled out of his door by a wizard and thirteen dwarves and taken on a long journey to recover treasure from a dragon. What gave it weight was the sense, unusual in children's books, that the world extended far beyond the edges of the story. Names, songs, ruins, and half-explained histories pointed outward to a much larger body of material that Tolkien had in fact already written and would spend the rest of his life revising.

Allen and Unwin wanted a sequel. Tolkien offered them the mythological material he cared most about, which they declined as unsuitable, and instead began another hobbit story. It grew for twelve years into something that was not a children's book at all. The Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes in 1954 and 1955, and Tolkien went back and revised a chapter of The Hobbit to fit the darker significance the ring had acquired in the meantime.

The commercial explosion came later. Paperback editions in the 1960s, including an unauthorized American printing that provoked a campus-wide backlash in Tolkien's favour, made the books a phenomenon among student readers. The Hobbit has since sold well over a hundred million copies and been translated into dozens of languages. Together with its sequel it established the shape of modern fantasy: the invented world with its own languages and deep history, the quest across a mapped landscape, the small person who determines large events. Nearly every fantasy novel, film, and game of the past half century works in ground Tolkien cleared, including those written in reaction against him.

The Hobbit appeared on September 21, 1937, written for the author's children, endorsed by a publisher's ten-year-old son, and sold out before Christmas. The sequel his publisher asked for took twelve years and turned into The Lord of the Rings. Modern fantasy has been working inside the shape of those two books ever since.

How much do you know about the publication of The Hobbit, how Tolkien began writing it, the ten-year-old who reviewed it, and the sequel his publisher requested?