Between the Ages of 5 and 9

Most people who have read The Hobbit can finish its first sentence without looking. In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Hardly anyone knows that the decision to print it was taken by a ten-year-old boy, for a fee of one shilling, in a handwritten report that spelled lonely with the e in the wrong place.

The boy was Rayner Unwin. He turns up twice in this story, at the two points where it could most easily have stopped.

A story for his own children

Tolkien never knew where the sentence came from. He was an Oxford professor with four children, and he topped up his salary by marking School Certificate exam scripts, "the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children," as he told the poet W. H. Auden in 1955. "On a blank leaf I scrawled: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' I did not and do not know why."

The Tolkien scholar John Rateliff dates that to the summer of 1930. Tolkien remembered sitting "in a chair near the front window of my study in 20 Northmoor Road", the house in the photograph above. In the early drafts the wizard is called Bladorthin and the dragon Pryftan. He wrote in bursts during the vacations and reached the end in January 1933.

Then for three and a half years he did nothing with it, except read it to his children and lend it out. One borrower was the Mother Superior of a local convent, who had it when she was down with flu. Another was a former pupil, Elaine Griffiths, and in the summer of 1936 she told Susan Dagnall, who worked for the London publisher George Allen & Unwin, that the professor had written something "frightfully good". Dagnall borrowed it and liked it, and in October 1936 it went to the firm.

Tolkien was clear about what got it there. It was published, he told Auden, "not because of my own children's enthusiasm (though they liked it well enough)".

The reader's report

Stanley Unwin, who ran the firm, had a cheap way of testing children's books. He gave them to a child. "He believed that children were the best judges of children's books, and I needed pocket money," Rayner wrote half a century later. The fee was a shilling a report.

On 30 October 1936 the ten-year-old handed in his verdict. The first paragraph rattles through the plot: Bilbo, who "never went for adventures", is talked into one by "Gandalf the wizard and his dwarves", the dragon at "the lonley mountain" is killed, and Bilbo comes home "rich!" The second paragraph is the ruling.

This book, with the help of maps, does not need any illustrations it is good and should appeal to all children between the ages of 5 and 9.

In Rateliff's words, "Rayner Unwin's enthusiasm decided the matter." There was no advance, though Stanley Unwin volunteered £25 just before publication, when the booksellers' orders began to look promising.

Getting it printed

Tolkien painted the dust jacket himself, and the firm dropped his red to save money. The Hobbit came out on 21 September 1937 in a first printing of 1,500 copies, and C. S. Lewis reviewed it, anonymously, in the Times Literary Supplement.

On 13 December the children's writer Arthur Ransome wrote to Tolkien from a nursing home in Norwich, as "a humble hobbit-fancier (and one certain that your book will be many times reprinted)", to point out a couple of slips. Tolkien replied on 15 December, promising a corrected copy "if there is a reprint (sales are not very great)". On the same day Stanley Unwin was writing to tell him that the first printing had sold out.

A second impression of 2,300 copies, now with four of Tolkien's colour paintings, was ready within days. In America, Houghton Mifflin had wanted pictures "by good American artists", and Tolkien did not object, "as long as it was possible to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all of whose works I have a heartfelt loathing)". They used his paintings instead.

At home, sales seem to have slowed. Unbound sheets of the second impression were still at the binders when it was bombed in 1940, and 423 copies were lost.

A sequel nobody planned

Success brought the obvious request. Tolkien first offered the mythology that would much later become The Silmarillion, and a publisher's reader found it, in Tolkien's paraphrase, "too full of the kind of Celtic beauty that maddened Anglo-Saxons in a large dose."

"A sequel or successor to The Hobbit is called for," he conceded to Unwin on 16 December 1937. Bilbo, he added, "began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent Grimm's fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it, so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge." Three months after publication he wrote to say he had finished the first chapter of a new story about hobbits, "a long expected party". Stanley Unwin pencilled "Three cheers" beside it.

It took him well over a decade, and it was not another children's book. "I was not prepared to write a 'sequel', in the sense of another children's story," he told Auden.

Rewriting Gollum

The sequel broke the original. In the 1937 Hobbit, Gollum offers Bilbo a present if he wins the riddle game, meaning the ring. When Bilbo wins, Gollum finds he has lost it, apologises over and over, and shows Bilbo the way out instead. Once the ring had become the Ring of Power, a Gollum who would cheerfully give it away made no sense.

Tolkien rewrote "Riddles in the Dark" and in September 1947 sent the draft to the firm for comment. He heard nothing, assumed they didn't like it, and carried on writing the sequel around the old version. In the summer of 1950 the proofs of a new edition arrived with his rewritten chapter already in them. The second edition, with the darker Gollum every reader now knows, came out in 1951.

He then made the discrepancy part of the plot. In The Lord of the Rings, Gandalf tells Frodo that Bilbo's original account was a lie, told because the ring already had a hold on him.

The boy, grown up

By the time the new book was finished, Rayner was in his twenties and had joined his father's firm. The typescript was enormous and would cost a great deal to print. Rayner cabled his father, who was abroad selling books, that it deserved publishing but might lose £1,000. The reply became famous: "If you believe it is a work of genius, then you may lose a thousand pounds."

The terms were old-fashioned even then, and Rayner later set them out. "No advance is paid; the publisher recovers the costs of production and promotion as a first charge against earnings; and thereafter the author and publisher share the results equally. If the book is a failure, the author gets nothing and the publisher is out of pocket." It was a deal, he said, for a book whose merit was not in doubt but whose sales were. The firm split it into three volumes, and The Fellowship of the Ring came out on 29 July 1954 in a printing of 3,000 copies.

Tolkien knew whom to thank. The Hobbit, he wrote, "was I believe tried out on Rayner Unwin; but for whom when grown up I think I should never have got the Trilogy published."

In 1987, as chairman of what the firm had become, Rayner reprinted his report in The Bookseller for the fiftieth anniversary. "I wince a bit at the shilling's worth of opinion that started it all off," he wrote. "The spelling was original, the literary perception minimal and the superiority of a 10 year old in defining the likely readership was egregious. All the same it did the trick. I've never made a better judgement since."

Sources

• The Tolkien Estate, "Letter to the poet, W.H. Auden, 7 Jun 1955" (the exam papers and the first sentence; the Reverend Mother with flu; publication not owing to his children's enthusiasm; the reader on "Celtic beauty"; no second children's story; "but for whom when grown up").
• The Tolkien Estate, "John D. Rateliff, 'The Hobbit'" (summer 1930; the study at 20 Northmoor Road; Bladorthin and Pryftan; completion in January 1933; the years of reading and lending; Griffiths and Dagnall; submission in October 1936; "decided the matter").
• Rayner Unwin, "The Hobbit 50th Anniversary", Books for Keeps, 1987, reprinted from The Bookseller (his father's method and the shilling; the report; the £25; the jacket and the dropped red; Lewis's review; the Disney veto; the bombed warehouse; "a long expected party" and "Three cheers"; "I wince a bit").
• Tolkien Library, "How Bilbo Baggins Got His Start: An interview with Rayner Unwin" (Rayner's age, the fee, and the handwritten report dated 30 October 1936, source of the spellings quoted).
• The Tolkien Estate, "Letter to Stanley Unwin, his publisher, 16 Dec 1937" (a sequel "called for", and Sauron peeping over the edge).
• Alaric Hall and Samuli Kaislaniemi, "'You tempt me grievously to a mythological essay': J. R. R. Tolkien's correspondence with Arthur Ransome", University of Leeds, 2013 (Ransome's letter of 13 December 1937; Tolkien's reply of 15 December; Unwin's same-day news that the printing had sold out; the second impression ready within days).
• Peter Harrington, "Identifying & Collecting Tolkien First Editions" (1,500 copies sold out by 15 December 1937; the cost of printing the sequel, its three volumes and the deferred profits; 3,000 copies of The Fellowship of the Ring on 29 July 1954).
• Bonhams, "The Hobbit or There and Back Again, first edition, second impression, George Allen & Unwin, 1937" (2,300 copies with four colour plates, and 423 unbound copies destroyed in the Blitz).
• Corey Olsen, "Happy Birthday, 'The Hobbit': The History of J.R.R. Tolkien's Book", The Daily Beast, 2012 (the 1937 Gollum, the 1951 revision, and Gandalf's explanation of Bilbo's lie).
• TolkienGuide, "Letter from J.R.R. Tolkien to Allen & Unwin Ltd. (1 August 1950)" (the 1947 draft sent for comment, the silence, and the proofs of 1950 with it incorporated).
• Anthony Smith, "Rayner Unwin", The Guardian, 2000 (Rayner joining the firm in 1951, his cable to his father, and the reply).
• Rayner Unwin, "Publishing Tolkien", Mallorn 29, 1992 (the profit-sharing terms in his words, and when they were used).
• Country Life, "The Oxford house where JRR Tolkien wrote The Hobbit hits the market" (the family at 20 Northmoor Road from 1930 to 1947, and the four children).