The Hobbit
Chapter 1- An Unexpected Party


John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in Blomfontein, South Africa, where his father was a branch bank manager. At the age of three, Ronald's health caused him, his mother, and his brother Hilary to return to England, where they settled in Sarehole, a county village on the outskirts of Birmingham. His father died soon after and his mother when he was twelve. His early education was at King Edward's School in Birmingham, where he showed promise in languages and Old English literature. During his last years at St. Edward's, he fell in love with Edith Bratt, also an orphan, and formed close friendships--and an informal literary society--with several of his schoolfellows. In 1911, he entered Exeter College, Oxford, and received a First Class Honours degree in English in 1915. Immediately after graduation he entered the army. In 1916, he married Edith and was shipped to France. After four months on the front lines, he was stricken with trench fever and sent home. After the war, he joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary (writing entries in the W's), taught at Leeds University for a while, and was elected to a chair in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. "And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon for twenty-years, was then elected Merton Professor of English Language and Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of eighty-one...And that would be that--apart from the strange fact that during these years when "nothing happened" he wrote two books which have become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and influenced the thinking of several million readers." Tolkien often made up stories for his children, and in about 1930, he began a story with "In a whole in the ground there lived a hobbit," which became more and more involved as Tolkien defined hobbits and created adventure for one particular hobbit. Gradually it became clear to Tolkien that Bilbo Baggins' adventures took place in the same Middle-earth as his high heroic tales, but at a much later age. After six years of intermittent composition, The Hobbit was published as a children's book to critical and popular acclaim. Immediately Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954-55 after years of painstaking revision. In many ways a reworking of the plot of The Hobbit, the length, intensity and complex theses of the Rings trilogy make it the adult epic Tolkien desired to create. Although its reputation was slow to grow, the paperback publication of the trilogy in the mid-sixties established the enormous fame of Middle-earth and its creator.