For many readers, the genre of modern fantasy begins with J.R.R. Tolkien’s 1937 children’s novel, The Hobbit, which famously opens with the sentence: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (3). According to the author, this sentence seemed to dance out of thin air as he was grading School Certificate papers:
[a candidate] had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it (which is the best thing that can possibly happen to an examiner) and I wrote on it…Names always generated a story in my mind. Eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits were like. (Shippey 2)
Though a captivating origin story, it leaves out a second, and much earlier text Tolkien may have scribbled on: George MacDonald’s 1872 children’s classic, The Princess and the Goblin. In...
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Citation: Grasso, Joshua. "The Princess and the Goblin". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 June 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=24712, accessed 09 June 2026.]
