Tolkien maintained, however, that it wasn't intended as an allegory. I don't like allegories. The trilogy was written, he recalled, to illustrate a 1938 lecture of his at the University of Glasgow on fairy stories. He admitted that fairy stories were something of an escape, but didn't see why there should not be an escape from the world of factories, machine-guns and bombs. Then hobbits began to take shape.
Hobbits have no beards.
There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off. He settled these protected innocents in a land called Shire, patterned after the English countryside he had discovered as a child of 4 arriving from his birthplace in South Africa, and he sent some of them off on perilous adventures. Most of them, however, he conceived as friendly and industrious but slightly dull, which occasioned his scribble on that fortuitous exam paper. His trilogy was filled with his knowledge of botany and geology. Both parents had come from Birmingham, and when the boy's father died, his mother took him and his brother home to the English Midlands.