J.R.R. Tolkien
- schlesadv
- 5 days ago
- 1 min read
The opening of The Hobbit apparently came to him unexpectedly. While marking examination papers, Tolkien encountered a blank page and wrote the now-famous sentence: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He later said he didn't initially know why he'd written it—or even exactly what a hobbit was.
He originally wrote The Hobbit largely for his children. The story circulated privately before reaching a publisher and becoming a major success in 1937.
His publisher wanted another Hobbit book. That request eventually produced something dramatically larger and darker: The Lord of the Rings, which took Tolkien roughly a dozen years to complete.
Tolkien didn't regard The Lord of the Rings as a trilogy. He conceived it as one continuous novel. Its division into three volumes—The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King—was primarily a publishing decision.
He disliked the title The Return of the King. Tolkien felt the title revealed too much about the ending.
He strongly disliked allegory. In the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien famously expressed his dislike of "allegory in all its manifestations." He preferred what he called applicability—allowing readers to find meanings rather than having the author impose a single coded interpretation.
The One Ring was not simply an allegory for the atomic bomb. Tolkien specifically resisted interpretations that reduced the Ring to nuclear weapons or the story to World War II.
Comments