The Hobbit was written by J.R.R. Tolkien, an English writer and scholar. He began writing the story in the early 1930s, initially as a tale to entertain his children, and it was published in 1937. The novel is set in Tolkien's fictional world of Middle-earth and follows the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, a hobbit

. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and English language and literature at the University of Oxford and was deeply influenced by ancient heroic epics and his scholarly knowledge of languages and mythology. The Hobbit was his first published work and gained wide critical acclaim, eventually leading to his later famous work, The Lord of the Rings