Verlyn Flieger on the late addition of Tolkien’s most iconic characters: Hobbits were no part of Tolkien’s original plan. They entered rather late and through a side door, as the unexpected central characters in a children’s story, The Hobbit which Tolkien invented for his own children but which found an immediate and lasting worldwide audience. And of which The Lord of the Rings was the commissioned, longed-awaited and trebly successful sequel. ...
For those who don’t know me, I’m a demographer. I study population. And my first love in fantasy was, of course, Middle Earth. How many people live in Middle Earth? Being a demographer, I was mainly interested in the data side of things. Tolkien is frustratingly vague about population. He almost never gives us estimates of settlement sizes, and many of the larger metropolises of Middle Earth (like Pelargir) never actually appear on the page. Sizable armies make frequent appearances, yet because his adventurers almost exclusively traverse the wilds of Middle Earth, we rarely see where those soldiers are coming from. ...