We puzzled about how you put that on film.” — director John Boorman on his proposed adaptation “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” With these words, impulsively scribbled on a piece of paper by thirty-eight year-old Oxford languages professor John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, the greatest fantasy epic in the history of literature was born. Although The Hobbit, as the resulting story would eventually be titled, was written largely for Tolkien’s own children, it found its way to publisher Allen & Unwin, and appeared in 1937. It sold well; well enough that Allen & Unwin asked for a sequel. Thirteen years later, ‘J.R.R.’ Tolkien, renowned as a perfectionist and self-professed procrastinator, was ready to deliver it. “My work has escaped from my control,” he wrote to his publisher in 1950, “and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and rather terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” Its title was The Lord of the Rings.
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