Happy birthday, fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien

It is the birthday of English writer J.R.R. Tolkien (1892), who is best remembered for his classic fantasies The Hobbit (1937) and the three-volume sequel, The Lord of the Rings (1954-1955).  As a youngster, he made up languages with his cousins, and a hike across Switzerland when he was 18 years old inspired Bilbo Baggins' journey in The Hobbit. He served as a young officer in France during World War I. After the war, he worked for Oxford English Dictionary researching the etymology of words, and later, taught at Oxford's Pembroke College. That is where he wrote The Hobbit and the first two volumes of The Lord of the Rings, which is the second best-selling novel ever written, after Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. The Hobbit is sixth.

H. Rider Haggard wrote African adventures

It is the birthday of Victorian English writer H. Rider Haggard (1856), who is best remembered for his novel King Solomon's Mines (1885) and its sequel, Allan Quatermain (1887), among the first English adventure novels set in Africa. Quatermain is a professional big game hunter and an excellent marksman. Haggard wrote numerous sequels, and is generally credited with creating the Lost World literary genre. He is said to have influenced Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rudyard Kipling, Henry Miller, Graham Greene, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Margaret Atwood. Haggard also wrote She (1887),  Eric Brighteyes (1891) and Nada the Lily (1892).

Mary Norton wrote The Borrowers series

Mary Norton

It is the birthday of English writer Mary Norton (1903), who is best remembered for her children's fantasy series The Borrowers (first published 1952), about a family of little people who live in the floors and walls of a Georgian English house and "borrow" what they need to survive from the big people in the house. Norton's first book, The Magic Bed Knob: or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons (1943), was the basis of a 1971 Disney movie, Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Norton, whose father was a physician, grew up in Leighton Buzzard, a small town in Bedfordshire, England, about 50 miles northwest of London. The family lived in a house called The Cedars, which is said to be the original setting for The Borrowers. She graduated from a convent school in London and studied to be an actress at the Old Vic Shakespeare Company. During World War II, she worked for the British Purchasing Commission in the United States. Her first book was published while she lived in New York.

After the war, she returned to London and wrote a sequel, Bonfires and Broomsticks (1947). The two stories told of three children and their adventures with an amateur witch. They were published as a single volume, Bed-Knob and Broomstick in 1957. The 1971 Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks starred Angela Lansbury, David Tomlinson, and Roddy McDowall.

Now a children's classic, The Borrowers told the story of Pod and Homily Clock and their adventurous teenaged daughter, Arrietty. The Clocks are a race of tiny people, no bigger than six inches tall, who survive by "borrowing" items from the "human beans" (big people) who also live in the house. It is a perilous existence with the Borrowers constantly in danger of being discovered. After the Clock family is chased out of their home, their adventures continue in four sequels, including, The Borrowers Afield  (1955), The Borrowers Afloat (1959), The Borrowers Aloft (1961), and The Borrowers Avenged (1982).

The Borrowers was adapted as a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie in 1971 and a film starring Tom Fenton, John Goodman, and Jim Broadbent in 1997, as well as several BBC productions. Norton received the Carnegie Medal, a British award for outstanding literature, in 1952. She has been compared with such creative writers as Lewis Carroll, J.R.R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis.