One day, when Tolkien was marking examination papers, he discovered that one candidate had left one page of an answer-book blank and here he wrote “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit“.

After that he decided to find out what a Hobbit was, what sort of a hole it lived in, why it lived in a hole, etc. From this investigation a story was born. In 1936 an incomplete typescript of it attived in the hands of Susan Dagnall, an employee of the publishing firm of George Allen and Unwin.

She asked Tolkien to finish it, and presented the complete story to Stanley Unwin, Chairman of the firm. He read it to his son, who wrote an approving report, and it was published as The Hobbit in 1937.