Читать книгу An A-Z of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit - Sarah Oliver - Страница 30

J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of The Hobbit, was an author, poet, university lecturer and philologist. His book, The Hobbit, is one of the world’s bestselling books of all time. Its full title is The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. It was first published on 21 September 1937 and all 1,500 copies from the initial print run had sold by the December. The following year, it was released in America. It was a big hit, winning a Best Juvenile Fiction award from the New York Tribune, as well as being nominated for a prestigious Carnegie Medal. Over the years, it has won lots of other awards, too.

The book was published by George Allen & Unwin, who asked Tolkien to write a sequel in the December of that year; he sent them a draft of The Silmarillion but they wanted a book about hobbits instead. He then wrote The Lord of the Rings between 1937 and 1949, but had to make changes to some aspects of The Hobbit, so a few more editions were published over the years. The Lord of the Rings books are less humorous and aimed at an older audience than The Hobbit.

Bravery, personal growth and war are the major themes in The Hobbit. Tolkien had experience of war having been a soldier in World War I. When writing The Hobbit, he was also influenced by fairy tales and Anglo-Saxon literature.

After leaving the army, he became a professor at Oxford University. Two of his poems were published; the first was called The Car and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked and the second was Goblin Feet.