Throwaway lines that became franchies of their own?

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**Kid_Kyoto**

trexmeyer wrote:
Lord of the Rings was born from a mysterious magical ring and the Necromancer that Gandalf fights off-screen. All because the publishers asked for more stories about Hobbits.

Persuaded by his publishers, he started "a new Hobbit" in December 1937.[10] After several false starts, the story of the One Ring emerged.

The most significant work of modern fantasy and its best known MacGuffin began by chance.

Even more than that...

By Tolkien's own account, the coining of the name hobbit was a spontaneous flash of intuition. When he was busy grading examination papers, the word popped into his mind, not in isolation but as part of an entire sentence, which was to become the incipit of The Hobbit, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(word)

Man I hope some BS I scribble in my margin totally alters western literature.

**LunarSol**

trexmeyer wrote:
Lord of the Rings was born from a mysterious magical ring and the Necromancer that Gandalf fights off-screen. All because the publishers asked for more stories about Hobbits.

Persuaded by his publishers, he started "a new Hobbit" in December 1937.[10] After several false starts, the story of the One Ring emerged.

The most significant work of modern fantasy and its best known MacGuffin began by chance.

And the Hobbit itself began because his son paid too much attention to the details of his random bedtime stories and it all had to be written down to maintain continuity.