Cold Open

It’s the night of July 14th, 1916, in northern France in the middle of World War One.

The Battle of the Somme has been raging for three weeks. Near the tiny French village of La Boiselle, British troops have punched a hole through the German lines and are in a desperate fight to take control of a nearby hill.

Waiting in reserve, ready to support the attack, are soldiers from the 11th Battalion of the Lancashire Fusiliers. A sudden explosion lights up the night sky ahead, illuminating the pale face of a slender and smooth-skinned British lieutenant. The 24-year-old officer crouches in a trench beside his men, waiting for orders to join the attack.

All around him is an eerie land of unnatural shadows, of deep craters, shattered trees, and the bloated bodies of the dead. There’s a whistle... and the lieutenant knows its time for him and his men to advance; to take the hill, or die trying.

Prior to the Battle of the Somme, the British generals hoped the engagement would provide the breakthrough they needed to win the war against Germany. But the offensive fails miserably. For the cost of almost half a million British casualties, the Germans are pushed back only six miles.

The young British Lieutenant, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, survives the battle, but several of his close friends die in the fighting. Then, in October 1916, J.R.R. Tolkien falls severely ill with a disease caused by lice, known as trench fever. The following month, Tolkien is sent home to England to recuperate. He doesn’t see action for the rest of World War One.

But Tolkien never forgets the terrible things he saw, the friendships he made in the trenches, or those he lost.

Years later, his experiences will inspire him in the creation of an epic novel, unlike any written before. Long after the Battle of the Somme, the first volume of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy will become one of the bestselling books of all time and change English literature forever following its publication on July 29th, 1954. 

Intro

From Noiser and Airship, I’m Lindsay Graham and this is History Daily.

History is made every day. On this podcast—every day—we tell the true stories of the people and events that shaped our world.

Today is July 29th, 1954: The Publication of The Lord of the Rings.

Act One: Inklings

It’s a Tuesday morning in England, sometime in the early 1930s, more than twenty years before the publication of The Lord of the Rings.

At the Bird and Baby pub in central Oxford, J.R.R. Tolkien settles himself down in a chair by the fireplace. He’s now in his early forties and is a professor at the University of Oxford. He takes a sip from his glass of beer and glances at his watch. His friends are running late, so Tolkien takes the opportunity to prepare his pipe. In a few moments’ time, he’s happily puffing away, a wreath of smoke rising above his head.

After Tolkien left the British Army in 1920, he embarked on an academic career. He was enrolled at Oxford before the war and returned there as a Professor of Anglo-Saxon studies in 1925.

But amid his research and teaching responsibilities at the university, Tolkien had another interest: writing. While he was serving in the trenches during the war, he began to construct a fantasy world in his mind. It was called Middle-earth. After leaving the army, Tolkien began expanding this world and writing stories about it.

He was encouraged by another academic, a man named Clive Staples Lewis. C.S. Lewis will later find fame as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia books. But in the 1920s, he was just another young Oxford academic who shared Tolkien’s interest in writing. Since their first meeting in 1926, the two men have become friends and are now the leading members of a literary discussion group, an informal club of Oxford men who call themselves the ‘Inklings’. They meet twice a week to read and discuss each other’s latest poems and stories.

Today, Tolkien has something he wants to share with the group. He looks up from his table by the fire as C.S. Lewis bundles into the room, followed by two other members of the Inklings.

The three late arrivals jostle in around Tolkien’s table with their drinks, apologizing for their tardiness. The academics quickly fall into familiar, easy conversation. They talk about their work, their students, or the latest university politics, until finally, Lewis cuts them off, saying: “Well, has nobody got anything to read to us?”

Tolkien smiles and reaches for a leather satchel by his feet. Flipping open its clasps, he removes a handwritten manuscript.

The others move their beers aside, making room on the table.

And then, in a low voice, little more than a mutter, Tolkien begins to read the first page: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit….”

***

It’s October 8th, 1937, a few years after Tolkien first shared a story called The Hobbit with his friends.

Tolkien now sits in his office at Pembroke College at the University of Oxford, reading his morning copy of The Times newspaper. Halfway down page twenty, a short column catches his eye.

It’s a review of a newly published book. It begins: “All who love that kind of children’s book which can be read and re-read by adults should take note that a new star has appeared in that constellation.”

Tolkien smiles, it's a review of his book.

Set in his fantastical world of Middle-earth, The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo Baggins. His adventures with a group of dwarves take him from his comfortable, underground home to distant forests and mountains, where Bilbo does battle with a fiendish dragon named Smaug.

The book made it into print almost by chance. Tolkien had abandoned The Hobbit unfinished in the mid-1930s. But several friends had already read it. Among them was a young woman named Elaine Griffith. She was a former pupil of Tolkien. And in 1936, she was working on a revised translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, Beowulf when she remembered her old professor’s book.

Elaine recommended it to her publishers, Allen & Unwin; one of the top publishing companies in the country. Its founder, Stanley Unwin, passed the manuscript to his ten-year-old son Rayner who loved it. On the back of the boy’s recommendation, the publishing house asked Tolkien to finish the story so they could publish it. Tolkien got to work and by mid-August 1936, his book was finally ready. The following year, The Hobbit was released.

Now, in his university office, Tolkien carefully folds up The Times newspaper. He thinks to himself that he must thank the man who wrote the review; his dear friend, C.S. Lewis.

But it’s far from the only glowing response the book gets. Sales for The Hobbit exceed all expectations. By Christmas 1937, Tolkien’s publishers are rushing a second edition off the presses after selling every copy of the first. And it isn’t long before there’s talk of a sequel. In a letter to Tolkien, his publisher writes: “A large public will be clamoring next year to hear more from you about hobbits!”

Tolkien starts work almost immediately. But the sequel to The Hobbit will take him many years to complete. When Tolkien is finally finished, a very different kind of book will emerge; one that will change the face of literature and sear J.R.R. Tolkien’s legacy into the ages.

Act Two: Writings

It’s August 1943, eleven years before the publication of the first book in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings.

In his home in Oxford, Tolkien pushes back from his writing desk in frustration. He pulls his pipe from his jacket pocket and chews on it as he walks across his book-lined office toward the doors out to the backyard. It’s late and the gardens are dark. But Tolkien needs the fresh air.

He’s been working on the sequel to The Hobbit for five years. The early chapters had come to him quickly. They continued in the style of The Hobbit, with Bilbo Baggins and his nephew Frodo as the main characters. But the more Tolkien wrote, the darker, grander, and more complicated the story became.

Tolkien has written more than thirty chapters of The Lord of the Rings, but he’s hardly halfway through the story and lately, progress has ground to a halt. He’s been distracted by his academic commitments and his family life, and by World War II, which has been raging for almost four years. But the biggest cause of the delay has been Tolkien’s perfectionism. He has an obsessive need to revise and rework what he’s written, making sure every detail of his fictional world fits perfectly together.

Walking in his garden at night helps. The sun-parched lawn glows silver in the moonlight, and Tolkien’s thoughts wander more freely through the still darkness to his land of wizards, dwarves, orcs, and hobbits.

Before long, a light goes on in the house behind him. Tolkien turns to see his wife silhouetted against the doorway. She calls telling him it’s time for bed. And wearily, he heads inside.

Tolkien’s struggles continue for six more years; until finally, in the autumn of 1949, his great epic is complete. But no sooner does Tolkien finish the book than he falls into a dispute with his publishers that makes Tolkien lose hope that The Lord of the Rings will ever reach the public.

***

It’s September 19th, 1952. Three years have passed since Tolkien finished The Lord of the Rings and the one copy of his epic masterpiece sits in a drawer at his home in Oxford.

Tolkien is at his desk, writing, when the doorbell rings. The now 60-year-old professor gets up, crosses his office, and heads for the door.

Outside is a young man in his mid-twenties: Rayner Unwin; the boy who first read The Hobbit in 1936 and convinced his father’s company to publish it. Now, he works for that company, and he’s come to Oxford to secure the sequel to The Hobbit. Tolkien invites the young man in for a cup of tea.

By the time Tolkien finished The Lord of the Rings, his relationship with Allen & Unwin was strained. Years earlier, after the success of The Hobbit, Tolkien offered the company another book he’d written. The Silmarillion. It was a collection of stories, myths, and poems about Middle-earth that Tolkien had begun writing in 1917. As he worked on The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien became convinced that for readers to properly understand Middle-earth, The Silmarillion needed to be published alongside his new book. But Allen & Unwin turned it down.

Tolkien stewed over the rejection for years. Then, not long after he finished The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien was contacted by one of Allen & Unwin’s rivals: Collins publishing company. The people at Collins were interested in both The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

Tolkien jumped at the opportunity. He refused to offer The Lord of the Rings to Allen & Unwin and began negotiations with Collins. But The Silmarillion was far from complete. Tolkien insisted he needed time and money to polish and refine the collection.

And hearing this, Collins got cold feet. In April 1952, they pulled out of negotiations. And suddenly, Tolkien was gripped with fear that neither of his books would be published by anyone.

So, he went back to Allen & Unwin, hat in hand. He wrote to the company: “I have rather modified my views – better something than nothing!”. He asked whether the company was still interested in publishing The Lord of the Rings on its own.

They very much were. As soon as he could, Rayner Unwin hurried to Oxford to meet with Professor Tolkien.

And now, over cups of tea, he and Tolkien discuss the book. Privately, Rayner thinks The Lord of the Rings is strange and worries that it won’t have the broad, mainstream appeal to children or adults that The Hobbit did. But he also thinks it’s a work of true genius and that even if the book makes no money at all, it deserves to be published.

At their meeting, Tolkien entrusts his one copy of the book to Rayner, who takes it back with him to London. It quickly becomes clear that publishing the book in a single volume is impossible – they just can’t make the finances work.

Reluctantly, Tolkien agrees to split The Lord of the Rings into three parts. The release date of the first, entitled The Fellowship of the Ring, is set for July 29th, 1954.

Allen & Unwin order an initial print run of just a few thousand copies. But what they don’t realize is that they are about to unleash a publishing phenomenon which will transform not just Tolkien’s life, but the future of popular culture around the globe.

Act Three: The Lord of the Rings

It’s the morning of July 29th, 1954, at a bookshop in Oxford.

The shop’s owner has just had a delivery of the latest releases. Among them is a book by a local author, a professor at the university off the road. It’s a handsome volume. There’s a striking motif on its white front cover - a circle, ringed with strange ornate text, surrounded by a single staring eye. Above it, in bold dark letters, is the title: The Fellowship of the Ring.

The bookseller checks the listed price inside the book – 21 shillings. That’s a lot, but the bookseller remembers reading the author’s previous book to his children many years ago, and how much they enjoyed it. The shop is quiet, so the man sits down behind the counter, flicks open the book, and reads the first few pages.

When the shop closes that evening, he takes the book home with him and finishes it as quickly as he can. The story grips him and leaves him hungry for more. The shopkeeper will have to wait.

The second volume of the story, The Two Towers, follows in November 1954, and then the final part comes nearly one year later, in October 1955. Almost twenty years after Tolkien began writing the epic story, the shopkeeper, and the rest of the world, can finally enjoy Tolkien’s fantasy masterpiece in full.

With each year that passes, sales of the book increase. By the mid-1960s, The Lord of the Rings is a cult phenomenon, especially on the campuses of American universities, where students proudly wear pins and badges declaring ‘Gandalf for President’ and ‘Frodo Lives’.

In the coming decades, The Lord of the Rings will be translated into roughly 50 languages and will go on to sell as many as 150 million copies, making it one of the best-selling books of all time; with popular film, television, and radio adaptations only furthering the book’s appeal. Yet, for all its success around the world, there remains something distinctly English in character about The Lord of the Rings.

The roots of the book lie in the ancient myths and languages which Tolkien loved, in the English countryside where he spent his childhood, and in the terrible war, which as a young soldier he barely survived.

Today, The Lord of the Rings still stands apart as an unsurpassed literary achievement, one which, after years of struggle and hard work by its author J.R.R. Tolkien, was finally revealed to the world for the first time on July 29th, 1954.

Outro

Next on History Daily: August 1st, 1774. English chemist Joseph Priestley changes the world forever when he discovers oxygen.

From Noiser and Airship, this is History Daily, hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham.
Audio editing by Mollie Baack.

Sound design by Derek Behrens. 

Music by Lindsay Graham.

This episode is written and researched by William Simpson.

Executive Producers are Steven Walters for Airship and Pascal Hughes for Noiser.