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Fun Facts about Hobbits:
– Hobbits first appeared in the novel The Hobbit, whose titular hobbit is the protagonist Bilbo Baggins.
– In 1969 Tolkien sold movie rights, plus rights to tie-in products, for The Hobbit and LoTR to United Artists for £100,000.
– Tolkien was born on 3rd January, in 1892, in Bloemfontein, Orange Free State, South Africa.
– Tolkien’s mother Mabel home schooled her children. Tolkien had a natural aptitude for art, botany and languages.
– Tolkien could read and write fluently by the age of four.
– The first language Tolkien created by himself was Naffarin.
– Tolkien wrote The Hobbit (1937), The Fellowship of the Ring (1954) and The Two Towers (1954) while living at 20 Northmoor Road in North Oxford.
– During World War II, Tolkien he was earmarked as a codebreaker.
– Queen Elizabeth II gave Tolkien the Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1972.
– After Tolkien’s death, his son Christopher published many of his father’s works and manuscripts.
– The first signed edition of The Hobbit reportedly went for $85,000 at auction.
– In 2003, 25th March was announced as Tolkien Reading Day in schools.
– In 2001, director Peter Jackson began filming for the three The Lord of the Rings films in New Zealand.
– Tolkien was a professor at Oxford University from 1925 until 1959.
– To Tolkien, writing fantasy fiction was simply a hobby.
– “A single dream is worth more than a thousand realities.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
– The Lord of the Rings took Tolkien ten years to create and write, and were published in three volumes between 1954 and 1955.
– Tolkien delayed the publication of The Lord of the Rings because of a dispute over ink colors.
– During the war, Tolkien created his own secret code, which is no surprise, considering how many languages he spoke and created.
– Tolkien helped work on the Oxford English Dictionary, which had started in 1879.
– Tolkien was part of a group of writers who called themselves “The Inklings”.
– As of 2004, The Lord of the Rings had been translated into at least 25 different languages and had sold 100 million copies worldwide.
– The Hobbit author J.R.R. Tolkien made up the word “hobbit,” which proved difficult for foreign-language publishers to translate.
– The first onscreen version of The Hobbit was a 1977 stop-motion-animated TV special.
– British actor Benedict Cumberbatch provides the voice of the evil CGI dragon Smaug in the new trilogy of Hobbit films.
– The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children’s fantasy novel by English author J. R. R. Tolkien.
– The first authorized adaptation of The Hobbit appeared in March 1953, a stage production by St. Margaret’s School, Edinburgh.