"In a hole in the ground there lived . . . ."

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

So begins J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, which was published 75 years ago today, on Sept. 21, 1937. Tolkien wrote a sequel, The Lord of the Rings, between 1937 and 1949. It finally appeared in print in 1954 and 1955. The Tolkien Society describes The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as "two of the most well-known and best-loved books of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."

Although The Hobbit had been in print for some 30 years when I started college in 1968 and Rings was more than a decade old, I remember that a mania for Tolkien swept through Boston and Cambridge during my college years. Large posters were plastered in bookstore windows throughout both cities, and it seemed as if every other car sported a "Frodo Lives" bumper sticker.

It was as if Tolkien's works, which had been around for quite a while even then, were a new publishing sensation. And in a sense, they were. Wikipedia reports that Ballantine Books won a publishing war with Ace Books in the early 1960s for the rights to reprint Tolkien in paperback, which probably explains why all things hobbit were such a rage in the late 1960s. 

Fast forward to 2012. Fans of The Hobbit are gearing up for this year's release of An Unexpected Journey, the first of three upcoming films directed by Peter Jackson of Rings fame. The other movies in the hobbit trilogy are The Desolation of Smaug (2013) and There and Back Again (2014).