The Day The Hobbit First Reached Readers

Picture a bookshop in London in the autumn of 1937. On the counter sits a slim green book with a strange title: The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. Nobody browsing that day could have guessed that the small creature inside its pages — a comfort-loving, breakfast-obsessed homebody named Bilbo Baggins — was about to change the world's imagination forever.

Its author, J.R.R. Tolkien, was a 45-year-old Oxford professor, not a celebrity. For years he had been inventing stories to entertain his four children — tales of elves and goblins and dragons, told at bedtime and scribbled down afterwards. The whole adventure began, by his own account, with a single sentence that popped into his head while he was grading exam papers: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

When the finished manuscript reached the London publisher George Allen & Unwin in 1936, its chairman, Stanley Unwin, wasn't sure what to make of it. So he handed it to his toughest critic: his ten-year-old son, Rayner. The boy read it and reported back: "It is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of five and nine." That was recommendation enough.

On September 21, 1937, the first edition went on sale — a print run of only 1,500 copies, illustrated in black and white by Tolkien himself, right down to the dust jacket design. Readers fell for Bilbo's journey from his cozy hobbit-hole to a mountain of dragon-guarded gold. By December, every copy was gone. A second printing rushed out later that year, and an American edition followed early the next. The reviews glowed; the book was nominated for the Carnegie Medal and won the New York Herald Tribune's prize for the best juvenile fiction of 1938.

Tolkien never set out to invent a genre. But The Hobbit's map-filled world of Middle-earth — its riddles, its rings, its thirteen dwarves and one very grumpy dragon, Smaug — became the blueprint for modern fantasy. When the author published his long-promised sequel, The Lord of the Rings, in the 1950s, readers discovered that the humble hobbit's tale was merely the doorway to something enormous.

Nearly ninety years later, The Hobbit has never been out of print. It has been translated into more than sixty languages, read to children at bedtime in every corner of the globe, and carried into cinemas by generations who first met Bilbo on the page. All of it traces back to one September day, one small print run, and one ten-year-old's glowing review — proof that the biggest adventures often begin in the smallest holes in the ground.

Photo: Jackie.lck, CC BY 2.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).