J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Lord of the Rings in twelve years. He was a professor at Oxford the entire time, teaching Anglo-Saxon and later English Language and Literature, grading hundreds of student examination papers per term (they were called "scripts"), sitting on committees, giving lectures, and raising four children with his wife Edith. The book didn't get a cleared schedule or dedicated hours. It got what was left over, which was mostly late evenings after the house went quiet.
That fact is worth sitting with. The most-read fantasy novel in history was written in the margins of a full academic life, without a daily word count target, without a writing room set aside for the purpose, and with stretches during term where weeks passed and Tolkien touched the manuscript not at all. Writers who feel guilty about their interrupted schedules should know this. The book got finished anyway.
The Routine at a Glance
- Wake Time
- No consistent time. During term, he was up for 8 a.m. lectures. In academic vacation, when the fiction actually got written, he could work late into the night and rise later.
- Writing Location
- His study at 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford (from 1930 to 1947), later 76 Sandfield Road, Headington. The study was small and perpetually cluttered with stacked papers, student scripts, maps, and reference books. He never described it as comfortable or orderly.
- Daily Output
- No fixed quota, no consistent output. Some weeks produced many pages. During term, sometimes nothing on the fiction at all. He considered a single good paragraph a productive session.
- Tools
- Fountain pen for drafting (preferred), typewriter for fair copies. He also drew illustrations and maps as part of the creative work. The images weren't separate from the writing.
- Famous Ritual
- Reading drafts aloud to the Inklings at the Eagle and Child pub, Oxford, Tuesday mornings. The group's response shaped his revisions. C.S. Lewis was his most important early reader.
- Books Written This Way
- The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, much of The Silmarillion, and thousands of pages of unpublished mythology.
The Professor Who Wrote at Night
Oxford in the 1930s and 1940s ran on a tutorial system that was demanding in a particular way: it was never really off. Tolkien's academic duties didn't concentrate themselves into weekday business hours and leave the evenings free. There were student scripts to grade at home, tutorial preparation, committees, correspondence, and the grinding work of his scholarly writing, which included the essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," now considered one of the most important pieces of Old English scholarship of the twentieth century. He wrote that in the same years he was drafting the chapters of The Lord of the Rings.
What this meant in practice was that fiction lived at the edge of the day. He'd write after the family was in bed, sometimes past midnight, sometimes through to the early hours. In letters to his son Christopher (who was stationed abroad during the Second World War and to whom Tolkien sent instalments of the manuscript as it was written), he describes the rhythm as genuinely fragmented. A few good pages one week, nothing the next, a burst during the long vacation in summer. He wasn't protecting a daily writing hour because there was no daily writing hour to protect. There was only the time that remained after everything else had been attended to.
He also wrote letters obsessively. The published collection edited by Humphrey Carpenter runs to 354 letters and represents only a fraction of what he actually produced. Letter-writing was its own daily practice for Tolkien, a kind of ongoing exercise in articulating his ideas about mythology, language, and his own creative process. Many of the letters to Christopher and to his publishers are miniature essays about the nature of subcreation and the particular logic of Middle-earth. He was, in a sense, writing about the book constantly, even when he wasn't advancing the manuscript.
The Inklings as Accountability
Every Thursday evening and Tuesday morning, a group of Oxford academics gathered at the Eagle and Child pub on St Giles' Street to read their work aloud and hear each other's responses. The group called themselves the Inklings. C.S. Lewis was there, and Charles Williams, and various others at different times. Tolkien was a founding member.
What Tolkien got from these sessions was closer to an informal publication deadline than workshop critique. If he was going to read at Tuesday's meeting, he needed something to read. Lewis, in particular, was an enthusiastic audience for the Lord of the Rings chapters as they arrived, and his response was part of what kept Tolkien moving forward through years when the book might otherwise have stalled permanently. Tolkien wrote about this directly in his letters. He acknowledged that without Lewis's persistent enthusiasm, the book might never have been completed.
This is the part of Tolkien's routine that most writers overlook, probably because it doesn't fit the image of the solitary professor building a mythology alone in his study. The Inklings weren't a writing group in the formal sense, but they served the function that writing groups serve at their best: they made the work social, which made it harder to abandon. When you've been reading a chapter aloud to people who are waiting for the next one, you tend to write the next one. The accountability is relational rather than contractual, which turns out to be stronger.