Tolkien and Tiny But Mature Children

[The Squatter of Amon Rûdh]

And naturally I to you.

For the sake of completeness, here's the extract from letter #163 (to W.H. Auden), in which Tolkien describes the beginning of his first published story:

All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror's map. But it became The Hobbit in the early 1930s, and was eventually published not because of my own children's enthusiasm (though they liked it well enough*), but because I lent it to the then Rev. Mother of Cherwell Edge when she had flu, and it was seen by a former student who was at that time in the office of Allen and Unwin.

[He continues in a footnote]

*Not any better I think than The Marvellous Land of Snergs, Wyke-Smith, Ernest Benn 1927. Seing the date, I should say that this was probably an unconscious source-book! for the hobbits, not of anything else.

It would appear that my dating is not as far out as I had imagined, since C.S. Lewis read an incomplete text in late 1932. It seems that the book was long in the making.

<font size=1 color=339966>[ 6:02 PM February 01, 2004: Message edited by: The Squatter of Amon Rûdh ]