J.R.R. Tolkien fan Janko Tipsarevic, who took in a late-night premiere of The Hobbit last week, can thank his lucky stars (or at least his sport of choice) for the fact that he saw it on the silver screen at all. No idle hands here: Ben Rothenberg of The New York Times' Straight Sets blog has it that Tolkien was incapacitated by an injury acquired on the tennis court against an opponent 22 years his junior, and that the time he had to sit out, away from the game, propelled him into a creative streak that led to The Hobbit (published a few years later) and some of his work on The Lord of the Rings tales.



That on-court foe, Angus McIntosh, took great pride in his role in the formation of such seminal, fantastical stories: “He is said one day to have thrashed J.R.R. Tolkien at tennis, confining him to his rooms with an ankle injury. Thus marooned, with nothing better to do, Tolkien started sketching out ideas for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, works for which Angus would cheerfully accept blame.”



Now there's a literary-celebrity exhibition match that I'd like to see: J.R.R. Tolkien vs. C.S. Lewis. Middle-Earth vs. Narnia. Who knows, but that maybe they could play doubles with Gandalf and the White Witch. The sky's the limit when it comes to fantasy. Tennis was lucky to have Tolkien for a time. And Tolkien, in turn, was obviously given great joy over the decades when he embraced the sporting life.



[Thanks, @BenRothenberg, for the read.]



—Jonathan Scott (@jonscott9)