The Lord Of The Rings, Behind The Scenes

Writing was slow, due to Tolkien having a full-time academic position, and needing to earn further money as a university examiner. Tolkien abandoned The Lord of the Rings during most of 1943 and only re-started it in April 1944, as a serial for his son Christopher Tolkien, who was sent chapters as they were written while he was serving in South Africa with the Royal Air Force. Tolkien made another concerted effort in 1946, and showed the manuscript to his publishers in 1947. The story was effectively finished the next year, but Tolkien did not complete the revision of earlier parts of the work until 1949.
Influences
The Lord of the Rings developed as a personal exploration by Tolkien of his interests in philology, religion (particularly Roman Catholicism), fairy tales, Norse and general Germanic mythology, and also Celtic and Finnish mythology. Tolkien acknowledged, and external critics have verified the influences of William Morris and the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf. The question of a direct influence of Wagner's The Ring Cycle on Tolkien's work is often debated by critics.