What language was The Hobbit originally published in?

The Hobbit was originally published in English. J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the novel in English, and George Allen & Unwin published the first edition in the United Kingdom in 1937.

Tolkien’s language choices were shaped by his lifelong work as a philologist and professor of Anglo-Saxon. The story itself contains invented names, songs, riddles, and languages associated with Middle-earth, but those elements appear within an English-language narrative. That distinction can cause confusion: the presence of Elvish, dwarvish, or other fictional languages does not mean the book was originally published in one of them.

The novel later became an international publishing success. It has been translated into more than sixty languages, with some languages receiving multiple translated editions. Translations may adapt wordplay, poetry, and names differently, but they are versions of the English original. The book’s 1937 publication preceded Tolkien’s much larger mythology in The Lord of the Rings, whose development later prompted revisions to parts of The Hobbit.