While the Lord of the Rings is the most popular of Tolkien’s works, this is a book he never intended to write. He was first and always a philologist, and it was languages that fascinated him. He began to make up and create languages as a teenager, and it was the urge to give these languages a people, a culture, and a history, that drove him to create an entire mythology, which eventually became The Silmarillion.
He began working on his mythology as early as 1917. He added to it over the years, building a rich and magnificent world, with characters and legends to match. This was a project he cared deeply about, and hoped one day to publish. But Tolkien couldn't devote as much time to his writing as he would have liked. He was an Oxford don with a busy social life, and four active kids who kept him occupied. He wrote in his spare time, usually at night, sitting by the stove in his study after the rest of the family had gone to bed.
The Hobbit marked an unexpected turn in his writing life. By his telling, the inspiration for this book came to him one afternoon when was sitting in his study, laboriously marking school certificate exam papers, and perhaps, feeling rather bored. When he came across a blank page in one of the exam papers, the Professor was inspired to write the words, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” He had no idea who or what hobbits were, but he thought he'd like to find out.
Tolkien started writing The Hobbit for his own, and for his children's, amusement. Interesting as Bilbo’s adventures were, they didn’t mean much to him in the beginning, because it was just a fun little story for children, unrelated to what he thought of as his real work as a writer, which was The Silmarillion. Hobbits didn't figured anywhere in that series of epic tales.
But dwarves did, and as the story progressed, Tolkien found that he was drawing on some of the legends and histories that he’d created for the dwarves, as he wrote about their adventures with Bilbo Baggins. And when the Necromancer came up in the course of the story, it became obvious to him that what he'd been thinking of as an unrelated tale, was being played out in the same world that he’d created in The Silmarillion.
Once the book was finished, he sent it off to his publishers. The Hobbit, Or There and Back Again, complete with illustrations by Tolkien, was published in 1937. It sold out its first print run in just six weeks. Tolkien had not expected the book to be such a success. He was surprised when his publisher wrote to him asking for a sequel because the reading public wanted more stories about hobbits. He was initially resistant, He thought he had said everything he wanted to say about hobbits. He wanted to get back to working on The Silmarillion and publish that, instead.
But his publishers weren’t interested. They could see that The Silmarillion was a brilliant work, but it was a loosely-held-together collection of epic tales, not a single, straightforward narrative, and it was definitely not an adventure story in the style of The Hobbit, which is what the public was in the mood for. Tolkien had no idea what kind of adventure came next, but he began to think about it. He briefly considered writing another story about Bilbo Baggins, but he quickly dismissed the idea. He decided that he needed a new main character, and that the ring had to come into it somehow.
He started the story in the same, light-hearted tone that he'd used in The Hobbit, but things started to get a bit darker as he wrote. A black rider appeared entirely out of nowhere. He was looking for the hobbit, and he seemed significant, so Tolkien kept the character and tried to figure out his motive. He had no idea where the story was going, exactly. He didn't have a clear plan with all the details of plot, story, and character laid out. He was discovering the story as he was writing it, and the tale as they say, grew in the telling.
He spent the next seventeen years working on the Lord of the Rings. The story became more and more complicated as he went along, with new characters, motivations, and plot threads suggesting themselves as he wrote. He laboured to get all the details right, the geography, the language, and the history that the Lord of the Rings was grounded in, now that it was clear that it was all linking back to his original mythology.
He made elaborate charts to keep track of events in the story. He was painstaking to a fault, and he often got so absorbed in working on his languages and writing background stories and histories for his characters, that he would neglect the story that he was supposed to be working on, the book that his publisher was waiting to print for an eager audience. And if he took it into his head to revise something, everything else would stop until he’d re-written whatever it was, to his satisfaction.
When he finished, the book turned out to be more than a half million words long. The publisher decided to bring it out in three volumes. The first volume, The Fellowship of the Ring, was published in 1954. The 3,500 copies that made up the first printing were sold out in less than two months. The book turned out to be incredibly popular. The Two Towers came out later that year, followed by The Return of the King, in 1955. The three books together have sold more than 150 million copies around the world, and they continue to be popular, as every new generation finds its way to the magic of Middle Earth.
Once the Lord of the Rings was published and sent out into the world, Tolkien’s thoughts turned once again to The Silmarillion. And this time, both his readers and publishers were on board. The wealth of detail that Tolkien had provided in the appendices to the Lord of the Rings, had whetted their appetite, and created a desire to know more about the world of Middle Earth, to read about the characters and legends from an earlier age that are only hinted at in the Lord of the Rings.
The professor got to work, but he didn’t make much progress. Tolkien had been working on his mythology for decades at this point, and while it was a mostly finished work, there were a few gaps in the narrative, and with all the additions and re-writings over the years, the manuscript had turned into this huge, unwieldy mass of notes, with multiple renderings of several stories that had changed and grown over the years. Despite his best attempts, he could not get the text organised into a coherent narrative in his lifetime.
Fortunately for him, the professor had a champion. His son, Christopher Tolkien, made it his life's work to preserve his father's legacy. He worked through the manuscript of The Silmarillion, read through all of his father’s edits and rewrites, wrote some of the text to fill in a few gaps in the larger story, based on Tolkien’s notes and diaries, and organised the narrative into the form that we know today. The Silmarillion was published in 1977, four years after Tolkien's death, and sixty years after he’d started working on it.
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