Everyone knows JRR Tolkien. Creator of the Arda legendarium which contains, among other things, one of the most popular books of the twentieth century, the Lord of the Rings. One striking thing about him is that, despite working on the legendarium for the best part of sixty years - producing enough to fill a room - relatively little was published in his lifetime.
Let’s change that. Let’s make Tolkien more inclined to finish things, more focused on publishing – and roughly an order of magnitude more productive.
There will be very little difference at first. Tolkien’s academic career continues roughly as in otl. The Book of Lost Tales is completed, but fails to find a publisher. Tolkien writes reams of poetry in the twenties, including complete versions of the Lay of Leithian and the Children of Hurin. Some of it is published, in obscure journals. Things really begin to diverge in the late twenties, when Tolkien finds a blank sheet of paper, and writes on it the words "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."
Inspired, he finishes The Hobbit in five months, and the story is published in 1930, by Allen & Unwin, and is greeted with some degree of popularity. Tolkien immediately begins work on a sequel, the Lord of the Rings, completed in eighteen months in a form comparable to otl, with some minor differences - the languages are somewhat less developed, and the appendices a little beefier – which is published in three parts in 1933-4. The work is just as popular as in our world, but tweny years early.
So. Now what? This atl Tolkien has produced his otl major works – and more besides - relatively early in life, with around another thity-five years to do more. What does he do in that time, bearing in mind he is much more focused on actually publishing than the perfectionist we know and love?