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{"id":2433,"date":"2012-09-21T18:53:00","date_gmt":"2012-09-21T18:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2012\/09\/in-a-hole-in-the-ground-there-lived-a-story.html"},"modified":"2012-09-21T18:53:00","modified_gmt":"2012-09-21T18:53:00","slug":"in-a-hole-in-the-ground-there-lived-a-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/daffeythoughts\/2012\/09\/in-a-hole-in-the-ground-there-lived-a-story.html","title":{"rendered":"In a hole in the ground there lived a story"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>\n\n\n\n

<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

The first paperback version I read<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

And what a story it was. \u00a075 years ago this very day, a publishing company released a children\u2019s book by an English professor named \u2018The Hobbit<\/i>.\u2019<\/a> \u00a0It was a cute little thing, based partly on the bedside stories the professor told his children, and interwoven with a fictional myth he was working on and a new bread of characters that he had invented once while\u00a0monitoring\u00a0exams \u2013 hobbits. \u00a0The book was a children\u2019s book for a more\u00a0literate\u00a0age. \u00a0If more people read today, the reading level of those who do, I\u2019m convinced, is much lower than those days. \u00a0Maybe fewer people could read, but those who could had a reading ability far beyond ours today. \u00a0I say this because I\u2019ve heard young people who began reading at the feet of J.K. Rowling and her boy wizard who then attempted\u00a0The Hobbit<\/i>, come away shocked at its difficulty and depth.<\/p>\n

Still, The Hobbit<\/i> was merely the pregame warm-up for that epic\u00a0masterpiece\u00a0that our little British professor named J.R.R. Tolkien would pen as a sequel: The Lord of the Rings<\/i>. \u00a0Though I\u2019m not a fan of fantasy, and I\u2019ve never really \u2018loved\u2019 The Hobbit<\/i>, I appreciate it for its role in the overall Middle-Earth corpus. \u00a0And it all started today. \u00a0Who would\u00a0have\u00a0known the love that Tolkien had for myth and legend, nature and languages, would be embraced by so many, and influence so many more. \u00a0So here\u2019s to you Professor Tolkien, cheers and well met today, the\u00a0anniversary\u00a0of the book that started it all. <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"