Bilbo Baggins, the titular protagonist of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, and his nephew Frodo Baggins, hero of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, shared a September 22nd birthdate. Accordingly, that day is annually celebrated as Hobbit Day, and the entire week is deemed to be “Tolkien Week”. In honor of this year’s festivities, Biblio.com just published my article “Beyond the Hobbit and the Rings – Five Other Works by Tolkien”. It was difficult to pick just five, because Tolkien wrote so many brilliant and quirky articles and essays during his lifetime. Does anyone have any other favorites that I had to leave out?
A Scholarly Skater 
It’s pathetically fusty of me, but I’d add “Beowulf, the Monsters and the Critics,” the 1930s lecture and essay that essentially declared “Beowulf” a work of literature rather than a bizarre historical source with inconvenient monsters in it. Not the lightest read, to be sure, but the essay forever changed literature classrooms on both sides of the Atlantic.