The Hobbit (novel)

Before you even know my name, you can feel the adventure waiting inside me. I start with a whisper of a cozy, round door in the side of a hill. I smell of old paper, ink, and the promise of a journey to faraway lands with misty mountains and deep, dark forests. Within my pages, a small hero with hairy feet, who loves nothing more than a good meal and a warm fireplace, is about to have his quiet life turned completely upside down. Can you imagine finding a wizard and thirteen dwarves having a party in your dining room. There are songs of forgotten gold, a map with a secret message, and the rumbling snores of a greedy dragon named Smaug. I am a world of brave elves, grumpy dwarves, and sneaky goblins waiting to be discovered. I am the book called 'The Hobbit'.

I wasn't born in a workshop or a studio. I was born in the mind of a clever and kind professor in Oxford, England, named J.R.R. Tolkien. He loved ancient stories, myths, and making up his own languages. Most of all, he loved his four children. Sometime around the year 1930, while he was grading a very boring school paper, he found a lovely blank page. Quite suddenly, a single sentence popped into his head, and he scribbled it down: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' He didn't even know what a 'hobbit' was yet. But he was curious, so he started imagining. Who was this hobbit. What was his name. What did his home look like. He told the story of this hobbit's great adventure to his children as a bedtime story. He drew beautiful maps of my world, wrote poems for my characters to sing, and imagined every single detail, from the shiny buttons on Bilbo's waistcoat to the scary, rustling sounds of Mirkwood forest.

For a few years, I was just a secret story for the Tolkien family. But the adventure was too exciting to keep to themselves. A friend of the professor read my pages and insisted he share me with a publisher in London. The publisher wasn't sure if children would like me, so they did something very clever. They gave my story to the chairman's 10-year-old son, a boy named Rayner Unwin, and paid him one shilling to read me. Rayner wrote a report that said my story was exciting and that other children would love it. Because of him, I was finally made into a real book. On September 21st, 1937, I appeared in bookstores for the first time, with a beautiful blue, black, and green cover drawn by Professor Tolkien himself. People, both young and old, fell in love with my tale of courage and friendship. They wanted more stories about my world, which they learned was called Middle-earth. Their excitement is what led my creator to write an even bigger, more epic story: 'The Lord of the Rings'.

For over eighty years, I have been a doorway to magic for readers all over the planet. I have been read in cozy chairs and on grand adventures, translated into more than 50 languages. My story of Bilbo Baggins has inspired wonderful movies, exciting games, and countless other books filled with fantasy and wonder. But my true magic isn't just about a powerful dragon or a magic ring that makes you invisible. It’s a reminder that even the smallest person can be the bravest hero. I show that the world is full of amazing things if you're just willing to step out of your comfortable hobbit-hole. And every time a new reader opens my first page, the adventure begins all over again.