Sometime in the late 1920s John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who taught Anglo-Saxon and philology at Oxford but was grading School Certificate examinations for some summer cash, idly wrote in a student’s exam book, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” It was the first sentence of a surprisingly successful fantasy novel for young readers, The Hobbit (1937). Tolkien’s publishers wanted more about the quaint, quirky, half-sized hobbits; but it was almost 20 years before the author published his sequel, the sprawling, complexly imagined The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955), a book that would inspire whole libraries of genre fantasy.

The Morgan Library’s Tolkien: Maker of Middle-earth, originating at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, tries to wrest Middle-earth back from the movies, toymakers, and game marketers to its source: J. R. R. Tolkien’s writing-desk. The exhibit is richest for those already familiar — perhaps deeply familiar — with Tolkien’s writings, for it studiously avoids acknowledging the endless adaptations of these works made since his death. It presents a selection of family photographs and correspondences; manuscripts, typescript pages, and working notes from The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion (the title under which Christopher Tolkien assembled and edited the central portion of his father’s long-labored-over, revised, but never completed “legendarium”); a number of the maps Tolkien drew, and endlessly revised and refined, of Middle-earth; some fascinating specimens of writing in Tolkien’s very elegant Elvish languages and scripts (each carefully distinguished one from another); and a great number of illustrations and decorative designs, most of them related to Middle-earth.

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