J. R. R. Tolkien did not have any significant publication success in fantasy literature until late middle age. For most of his life, he was a university teacher at Oxford. Specifically, he was a graduate school teacher, and quite a good one at that, as measured by the number of his students who eventually became university teachers themselves. When he needed more money, he got a supplemental job grading college entrance exam papers, the way academics teach summer school for extra money nowadays. He was a philologist, who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary, but who was best known for his annotated edition of the medieval poem, _Sir Gawain and the Green Knight_. Oxford was and is a government-supported institution, so he was, for practical purposes, a government employee. What he was paid for, in day-to-day terms, was conducting tutorials, helping (graduate) students solve problems with their own work.

The hobbit material seems to have begun as bedtime stories while his children were growing up, and it was considered strange enough that publishers were not interested for a long time. He was able to pursue it because it was his spare-time occupation. At the same time, the hobbit books were based on Tolkien’s deep knowledge of medieval literature and linguistics, the product of his “real” occupation. However, it was about thirty years before the hobbit books made him any appreciable sum of money. Many people have attempted to imitate Tolkien, the most recent being J. K. Rowling, but their work is generally second-rate because they are impostors. They are not really medievalists, they know no dead languages, they have made no contributions to the scholarship of the middle ages, and they are not really steeped in the requisite background.

(See: Daniel Grotta-Kurska, _J.R.R. Tolkien, Architect of Middle Earth_, 1976. )

In a very real sense, Tolkien was an amateur novelist. He worked at a level where no professional could have afforded to work. A professional writer would have needed to put something out, quick and dirty, to pay the bills. Granted, Tolkien had the advantage of timing. He survived the First World War, and about ninety percent of his contemporaries, the class of 1914, did not. Tolkien’s war experiences formed a major element in his novels, of course. If the war had not come along, he might have wound up taking a job teaching in a good secondary school instead of a university. In that case, he might have spent a lot of time doing things like coaching sports. This would probably not have altered his underlying interests very much. At that date, there were lots of serious scholars who taught at secondary schools. He would inevitably have worked, first, on serious work, such as translating old manuscripts, building up dictionaries of dead languages, etc. The “playful” writing he did after that was done might have gone in different directions than it did.

A lot of the people here seem to want a short cut. They want the kind of literary or artistic success Tolkien achieved at the age of sixty, only they want it at the age of twenty. They don’t want the kind of literary or artistic success which is a distant byproduct of mastering some high profession or other. They want a literary or artistic success which means that they do not have to be good at anything else.