J.R.R. Tolkien, a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford University, didn't set out to write a bestselling novel. The inspiration for 'The Hobbit' came while he was grading student exams on a hot summer afternoon. Finding a blank page in an exam booklet, he suddenly felt compelled to write the sentence: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' At the time, he didn't even know what a hobbit was. This single, spontaneous line grew into an entire mythology, drawing on his deep knowledge of philology and Norse folklore. Tolkien initially told the story to his children as a bedtime tale before it was eventually published in 1937. The success of this 'children's book' paved the way for the much more complex and darker 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, forever changing the landscape of high fantasy literature.