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"I never expected a money success," said Tolkien, pacing the room, as he does constantly when he speaks. "In fact, I never even thought of commercial publication when I wrote The Hobbit back in the Thirties.
"It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
The piece is a pleasant read about the greatest fantasy writer of all time.
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JRR Tolkien: 'I Never Expected a Money Success'
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Confess your sins to the Lord and you will be forgiven;
confess them to man and you will be laughed at.
-- Josh Billings
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday October 29 2015, @02:18AM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2, Informative) by Francis on Thursday October 29 2015, @03:20AM
How? You can't read what was never published and these books were incredibly hard to publish correctly. The Hobbit wasn't so bad, but the LOTR was a nightmark for editors and typesetters alike.
He might have been able to publish a bastardized version to Smashwords, but that's rather unlikely as the books violate the publishing standards there. And probably most other publishing houses as well with all the made up words and non-standard spellings in those works.
But, more to the point, where would he have gotten the funding to fix all the mistakes that the publishers and typesetters made with the works? That took most of his remaining years and still there were large numbers of uncorrected errors that had to be fixed later on.