Kels the Mod

The man who invented modern fantasy didn't publish his first novel until he was forty-five. By that age, J.R.R. Tolkien had already built a respectable life. He was an Oxford professor, an expert in ancient languages, with a wife and four children and a settled academic career. He was exactly the kind of man who might reasonably have decided that the shape of his life was already fixed. The work he would be remembered for, he had not yet even begun... The story, which Tolkien told himself, is that one summer he was grading examination papers, when he turned a page and found that a student had left it blank. Without quite knowing why, he wrote a single sentence on it: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He did not know what a hobbit was. He had spent years inventing languages and mythologies as a private passion, and telling stories to his own children, never imagining any of it would reach the world. But that one line began to grow. It became a story, and then a book, and in 1937, at the age of forty-five, Tolkien published The Hobbit. It was a success, and his publisher asked for a sequel. Tolkien warned them it might take some time. It took 17 years... He wrote it in the margins of a demanding full-time job, revising endlessly, doubting it often. When The Lord of the Rings was finally published, in 1954 and 1955, he was in his early sixties. That book, begun as a middle-aged professor's private side project, went on to sell well over a hundred million copies, to invent modern fantasy as we know it, and to reshape the imagination of the entire world. Tolkien already had a full and respectable life behind him. And still, the thing he is remembered for, the thing that outlived him and reached hundreds of millions of people, was something he began at forty-five, at an age when it would have been the easiest thing in the world to tell himself he had already missed his chance. He didn't. It's never as late as it feels.