MIDDLE-EARTH TIMELINE
There and Back Again: J.R.R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit is a study by Mark Atherton, lecturer in English language and literature at Regent's Park College, Oxford. It was first published by I.B. Tauris in London in September 2012, with a paperback in 2014.
Atherton looks at the main influences behind The Hobbit: Tolkien's childhood in the West Midlands, the landscapes and seascapes that shaped his mythology, his experience of the First World War, his interest in Scandinavian myth, and his friendships. He shows how these threads came together in the story of Bilbo and in the larger world it opened.
The places, books, myths and friendships that came together in The Hobbit, traced by an Oxford lecturer.