Last week, we started a retrospective on Tolkien’s rise to superstardom, which began with a left-wing movement in the 1970s appropriating his work, and has slowly migrated over time to people realizing how right-wing and Christian Lord of the Rings is. Now, we continue
An Oxford Don Goes to Paperback
On a blank examination paper sometime in the early 1930s, an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon wrote a single sentence: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
J.R.R. Tolkien had no idea what a hobbit was. He had no plot, no outline, and no plan. He had a sentence that arrived unbidden while he was grading School Certificate papers, the kind of tedious academic labor that paid his bills and consumed his time. The sentence sat in a drawer for years before he built anything around it.
When he did, the result was The Hobbit, a children’s adventure story published by George Allen & Unwin on September 21, 1937. The firm’s decision to publish came down to a ten-year-old boy. Stanley Unwin, the company’s chairman, had a policy of paying children a shilling to review manuscripts. His son Rayner, age ten, read Tolkien’s manuscript and rendered his verdict: “This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations. It is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.”
Allen & Unwin published the book. It sold out its first printing before Christmas.
Rayner Unwin later recalled, in his publishing memoir, that Tolkien sent twenty-six letters to George Allen & Unwin in 1937 alone, calling them “detailed, fluent, often pungent, but infinitely polite and exasperatingly precise.” Tolkien fussed over every element of the book’s design: illustrations, maps, endpapers, dust jacket. He had originally proposed five maps. He wanted Thror’s Map tipped in at first mention in the text, with the moon-letter runes printed on the reverse so they could be seen when held up to the light. Cost constraints reduced his five maps to two.
This was the man publishers were dealing with. He was meticulous, stubborn, exacting, brilliant, and slow.
The Hobbit sold well in England and better in America. The New York Herald Tribune awarded it best children’s book of 1938, with a prize of $250. Stanley Unwin wrote to Tolkien with the obvious request: Could he produce a sequel?
