![]() ![]() Having idly come up with the idea of a creature living in a hill, Tolkien found himself needing a world and a story to put him in and so Bilbo Baggins, the wizard Gandalf and the first pieces of the Middle Earth puzzle were realised in The Hobbit. Some of Tolkien’s earliest stories began life as tales for his children, including The Pocket Roverandom, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and Farmer Giles of Ham, alongside his treasured Letter from Father Christmas. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ Gordon collaborated on their translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and then at Oxford, where he wrote his version of Beowulf. Returning from the front, he began a career in academia, first in Leeds where he and his colleague E.V. ![]() ![]() During active service in the First World War, having lost all but one of his close friends, he started to pull together stories ‘in huts full of blasphemy and smut, or by candle light in bell-tents’, a collection which later became the posthumously published Book of Lost Tales. The childhood landscape that influenced Tolkien’s later fantasy world was a mixture of the gentle, rolling countryside of the West Midlands, the industrial hub of Birmingham, and the wilder hills of the Welsh borders.Ī keen linguist, Tolkien showed an early proficiency in Latin, Greek and Finnish, as well as making up his own languages for fun. ![]()
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