The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien was a professor, and part of a professor's life is marking. He was working through a stack of School Certificate papers when he came to one where a candidate had left a page blank.

For no reason he could ever explain, he wrote on it: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

He did not know what a hobbit was. The word arrived before the thing. Everything else — the Shire, the dwarves, the ring — was worked backwards from a sentence written on someone else's exam.

When the manuscript reached the publisher Stanley Unwin, it met an unusual editorial process.

Unwin believed children were the best judges of children's books. So he paid his own son Rayner one shilling per manuscript to read them and write a report.

Rayner Unwin was ten years old. He read The Hobbit, wrote his report, and recommended it. Allen & Unwin published it in 1937.

Rayner later said the shilling was "good money in those days" — and he had no idea, writing it, that he was making the call on one of the most successful books of the century. An entire genre now rests on the literary judgement of a primary-school child earning pocket money.

Tolkien's world reached its greatest screen recognition with Peter Jackson's adaptation of the sequel: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King won 11 Academy Awards on 29 February 2004 — every single category in which it was nominated.

It shares the record of 11 wins with Ben-Hur and Titanic, but neither of those swept every nomination. No film has done better since.