Tolkien Took 17 Years to Write The Lord of the Rings
Quick answer: Tolkien took 17 years from starting The Lord of the Rings to publication, writing at night around a full professorship. The case for slow writing.
Somewhere around 1943, the most famous fantasy novel in the world was stuck at a tomb in the dark. J.R.R. Tolkien had written his hobbits into the Mines of Moria, to the tomb of Balin, and stopped. The story stood untouched for what he later described as about a year. He was in his early fifties, teaching a full load at Oxford, marking examination papers for extra income during wartime, and privately convinced that the vast sequel his publisher had asked for in 1937 might never be finished at all, let alone wanted.
The Fellowship of the Ring finally appeared in 1954, seventeen years after he wrote its first chapter. Nothing about that timeline was glamorous while it was happening: it was stalls, restarts, self-doubt and a demanding day job. Which is exactly why the story matters. Tolkien is the standing permission slip for every writer whose book is taking years longer than planned.
A sequel he did not want to write
The Hobbit, published in September 1937, was an immediate success, and his publisher, George Allen and Unwin, asked the obvious commercial question: more hobbits, please. Tolkien's heart was elsewhere. He offered them the mythological material he had been building since the First World War, the legends that became The Silmarillion, and the publisher gently declined it as unsuitable for the children's market The Hobbit had created.
So in December 1937 he began a sequel with no plan worth the name. Early drafts show him improvising: the character who became Strider started as a wandering hobbit called Trotter, and Tolkien did not yet know what the ring was or why it mattered. The story, as he later put it in the book's foreword, grew in the telling, darkening and deepening as it connected itself to his older mythology. What had been commissioned as a children's sequel was quietly becoming something else, and becoming it very slowly.
Written at night, around a full-time job
Throughout the entire composition, Tolkien held a demanding professorship at Oxford, first as Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon and later as Merton Professor of English Language and Literature. Lectures, tutorials, administration and examining came first; the novel was an evening and holiday project, written in longhand and typed by him with two fingers. During the war years he also took extra examination marking to supplement his income.
Two lifelines kept the book alive. The first was the Inklings, the circle of friends including C.S. Lewis who met to read work aloud; Lewis's encouragement, Tolkien said more than once, was a major reason he pushed on, since Lewis demanded the next chapter like a serial reader. The second was his son Christopher, posted to South Africa with the RAF in 1944, to whom Tolkien mailed new chapters and long letters about the book's progress. Those letters, later published, are a rare live record of a masterpiece being dragged forward a few pages at a time, complete with confessions of exhaustion and stretches where nothing was written at all.
Finished, then nearly derailed by publishing
Tolkien completed a full draft in the late 1940s, around 1948 and 1949, then spent further years on revision, appendices and maps. Even then the book's troubles were not over. Convinced it should be published together with The Silmarillion, he took the package to the publisher Collins around 1950 when Allen and Unwin hesitated. The Collins arrangement collapsed, and in 1952 he wrote to Rayner Unwin, who had championed The Hobbit as a child reader years earlier, and offered The Lord of the Rings on its own.
Postwar paper costs made a single enormous volume commercially frightening, so Allen and Unwin split the book into three volumes, published between July 1954 and October 1955, which is why the world wrongly calls it a trilogy. The firm expected a loss and signed Tolkien on a profit-sharing arrangement rather than conventional royalties: no money until the book covered its costs, then half the profits. It is widely reported that Rayner Unwin privately estimated the firm might lose a thousand pounds. The gamble instead produced one of the most profitable literary properties in publishing history, especially after the American paperback boom of the mid-1960s, sparked by an unauthorised Ace Books edition and the authorised Ballantine edition that followed, turned the book into a campus phenomenon.
Why the slowness was the method
It is tempting to read the seventeen years as wasted time redeemed at the end. The evidence points the other way: the delay is in the book. Tolkien's revisions layered the geography, languages and histories until Middle-earth acquired the depth of a real place, and readers can feel the years in every glancing reference to old kingdoms and older songs. A faster writer would have delivered the sequel Allen and Unwin actually asked for, and nobody would be reading it now.
Tolkien also worked the way a philologist works, from the inside out, inventing languages and letting stories grow from them. That method cannot be rushed, and he did not attempt to rush it. He fitted the work to the life he actually had, a professor's life with narrow margins of free time, and accepted the pace that implied. The lesson is not that slow is always better. It is that the pace should belong to the project, not to panic.
What a working writer can take from this
First, a day job is not the enemy of a major work; unmanaged despair is. Tolkien never had a free year to write, and the book got written in the hours around a full professional life, sustained by small accountable deadlines, a chapter for Lewis, a chapter for Christopher. Build yourself the same scaffolding: one trusted reader who expects pages, however slowly they come. For a poet, a monthly contest deadline can serve the same function as Tolkien's impatient friends, a recurring reason to finish something and hear back on it.
Second, permit the stall. The year at Balin's tomb did not kill the book, because Tolkien returned to it. Most abandoned projects are not ended by a decision; they are ended by the quiet shame of having stopped, which makes returning feel like admitting failure. Strike that shame off your books now. Returning after a year is not failure. It is the single most common feature of long projects that eventually get finished.
What to read, and what to notice
Read The Lord of the Rings itself with a maker's eye rather than a fan's: notice how songs and verse are threaded through the prose, doing the work of history and mood, and how restraint governs the magic. Then read a selection of Tolkien's letters, which form one of the best documented accounts in existence of a long project surviving its author's doubts. For the deep background, The Silmarillion, edited by Christopher Tolkien and published in 1977 after his father's death, shows the mythology the publisher first refused in 1937, another reminder that rejected work is often simply early.
What poets can take from this
- Measure a long project in returns, not streaks; the writer who comes back after a stall beats the writer who never stalls but quits.
- Recruit one impatient reader who asks for the next chapter or the next poem by name.
- Fit the writing to the life you actually have, in real recurring slots, rather than waiting for a free year that never comes.
- Keep your abandoned material; Tolkien's rejected mythology of 1937 fed the masterpiece of 1954.
- Let revision add depth, not just polish: each pass can layer in history, echo and connection.
- Set one external deadline a month so something always gets finished while the big project moves slowly.
Try it yourself
Write a poem about a task that took years longer than promised: a house half-built, a letter never sent, a garden replanted every spring. Let the passage of time appear through physical details that change, and end on the moment of picking the task up again.
Questions
How long did Tolkien take to write The Lord of the Rings?
He began the sequel to The Hobbit in December 1937 and The Fellowship of the Ring was published in July 1954, about seventeen years later. The main draft took roughly twelve years, with further years spent on revision, appendices and publishing negotiations.
Did Tolkien have a day job while writing it?
Yes, the entire book was written around a full academic career at Oxford, where he was a professor of Anglo-Saxon and later of English language and literature. He wrote mostly in the evenings and took extra exam marking during the war to supplement his income.
Why was The Lord of the Rings published in three volumes?
Tolkien wrote it as a single novel, but postwar paper costs made one huge volume too expensive a risk, so Allen and Unwin issued it in three volumes across 1954 and 1955. The publisher expected a loss and gave Tolkien a profit-sharing deal instead of standard royalties.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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