Happy Birthday, Mr. Tolkien

Today is the birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, born in Bloemfontein, South Africa (1892). He studied classics, language, and literature at Oxford. In 1925, Tolkien returned to Oxford University as a professor. One day, while grading exams, he discovered that a student had left one whole page in his examination booklet blank. Tolkien, for reasons unknown even to him, wrote on the page, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." This single line turned into a bedtime story that he told his children, and from there, a book: The Hobbit (1937).

You have a movie in the theaters now. Hope to see you at a screening. ;-)

(Courtesy The Writer's Almanac)