On a summer afternoon in the early 1930s, J.R.R. Tolkien looked up from the pile of student exams he was marking, gazed out the window and then, across a blank examination page, wrote the opening line of the book that was to bring him fame: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
What a "hobbit" was, Tolkien didn't know at the time. Years later, he would talk of how they had sprung from the "leaf-mould of memory" -- specifically, the four childhood years he had spent in Sarehole Mill, just outside Birmingham. He loved the Midlands, and saw the people of rural England -- the farmers and shopkeepers with whom he grew up and later went to war -- as the salt of Middle Earth ... FULL STORY »
