How do stories begin?

A surreal day, an Oxford professor cleaning his office was suddenly confronted with an exquisitely blank sheet of paper, glorious and unwrinkled, ready to say something. Pinching a pen, he mused the following words...

"In a hole in the ground there lived a Hobbit."

After inventing this creature on a whim, the Oxford professor decided to discover what a Hobbit exactly was. And that's how it started.

Middle Earth between two ears, as the Earth between two poles. A world within a world.