Next week, moviegoers will catch up with their favorite diminutive adventurer Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. This is the second installment in director Peter Jackson’s strange experiment of creating a screen adaptation that will take longer to watch than it does to read the slim novel upon which the film trilogy is based. The movies are presented in 3D and shot in a high frame rate format that’s revolutionary and realistic to some, and disorienting and unattractive to others.

Whether the movies are a worthy follow-up to Jackson’s beloved Lord of the Rings trilogy can be left to the audience, and the evolution of the movie industry will dictate whether the weird format is a breakthrough or a gimmick. For a more measured approach to the movies and their source material, consider checking out Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, the author who created the universe of Rings and The Hobbit in his original high fantasy novels.

Born in South Africa, Tolkien was orphaned at a young age. He fought in World War I, and upon discharge faced uncertainty, as did much of the world. But he managed to land a job at the Oxford English Dictionary and eventually settled into a tweedy life as an academic, achieving a certain amount of repute as a scholar at Oxford hanging out with C.S. Lewis.

That was just the beginning, as one day while grading papers he found himself writing, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” This was how Bilbo Baggins was born, the expansive universe of Middle Earth originated, a series of books for zealous nerds got its start, and a new genre called high fantasy came into being.

Of course, most of the creative process is not so charmed and accidental, and that little semi-legendary moment didn't exactly come out of nowhere. Carpenter’s book covers the painstaking process of creating all the stories and characters that make up Tolkien’s world. In one of the book’s most laudatory chapters, “The Storyteller,” Carpenter covers the progression of tales that would become timeless best-sellers from their origin as stories for Tolkien’s kids. He created a character named Tom Bombadil, based on a doll that belonged to his son John, who “looked very splendid with the feather in his hat.” Tolkien published a poem about the character, and Tom’s journeys would find their way into The Lord of the Rings. This all came after the doll was rescued from a perilous fate: little John didn’t like the doll very much and tried to stuff it down the toilet.

With little details like this, Carpenter gives readers an intimate view of Tolkien. For readers who might want to play along with the Hobbit hubbub but aren’t as likely to laud the heights of high fantasy, this is a more comfortable, real-world entry point. For superfans, this biography is a great resource, offering insight into the way these great works were created, and the quotidian life of the father of such fantastic fiction.