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How Does The Hobbit Change The World

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I have always loved to read. I love to escape from the drama and stress of real life by opening a book and getting sucked into a world drastically different from my own and stepping into a character’s shoes. This love made me want to create these stories on my own; I want to take my own ideas and create a world as vivid as the ones in my favorite books. My love for unreal worlds pulled me to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. He spent years weaving together different myths, languages, and traditions of all of the different races of people and creatures in his stories, and I wanted to be able to create a lore like that in my own books. Tolkien was one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century, and he almost …show more content…

However, Tolkien almost singlehandedly changed the minds of critics who thought this way when he wrote The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Through the depth and intensity of his fantasy, Tolkien changed the world’s perspective on the genre, clearing the way for future authors to write respected fantasy. Like all successful authors, he has a story of inspiration. As an Old English professor at Oxford, Tolkien would help read the School Certificate papers. One day, he turned to a page of one of the papers, and he found, “One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (Willett 5-6). Naturally, as a creative person, Tolkien wanted to find out what a hobbit was, and the seed that would grow into The Hobbit was born. Like a lot of authors, Tolkien didn’t write his story all at once; he took breaks. His first attempt didn’t even get past the first chapter! A few years later, he got all the way to the death of Smaug, but then he dropped it again. He would occasionally send it to friends, and one day, a former student of his asked for it, and she mentioned it to a member of the publishing staff at George Allen …show more content…

He used his personal experiences in his fiction, giving everyone who read his books a look into his past, and into the past of our world. Tolkien showed to those paying attention that his books were not just frivolous fantasy. If you look to his war experiences, you notice that Bilbo in The Hobbit, like Tolkien, was torn from his peaceful home and tossed into unfamiliar and dangerous new surroundings. In The Lord of the Rings, the way Sauron ravages Middle-earth is strikingly similar to that of Hitler in World War II (J.R.R. Tolkien). When reading The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, one would hopefully notice that The Lord of the Rings is much darker than its predecessor. However, The Hobbit can take on a deeper meaning when one considers that through Bilbo, we are connected to Tolkien’s personal experiences and emotions during war; it’s not just a silly children’s book. When The Lord of the Rings is connected to World War II as well, one may realize that all of Tolkien’s work is rooted in our world’s history, despite being fantasy (J.R.R. Tolkien). All of his books now have a much deeper meaning. Now, even in the twenty-first century, Tolkien’s work is still a favorite among all ages; maybe it’s because of its deeper meaning, or maybe it’s just the depth and mystery in his writing. Either way, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings have now sold over tens of millions of copies; they are classics (J.R.R.

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