The Hobbit

J. R. R. Tolkien (Unwin, 1937)

We were raised by Puffins. With three TV channels and no internet, for long stretches of our lives reading was the best (and sometimes, the only) way to pass the time. Here we return to the books that made us and analyse what makes them great.

In a hole in the ground there lives a hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, who is tricked by the wizard Gandalf into going on an adventure with a group of dwarves [sic] who want to retrieve their treasure from the dragon Smaug. On the way they meet trolls and goblins, wolves and giant spiders, elves, eagles, and a man who can turn into a bear. And, in a deep cave under a mountain, a creature called Gollum, from whom Bilbo steals a magic ring. (But that’s another, much longer story.)

There…

I do not remember when, precisely, the wise old man Gandalf first knocked on the door of my cosy home and tricked me into an adventure that would change my life.

Memory suggests a connection with Oxford, but that seems too fitting to be true. We went often to Oxford to have our feet x-rayed in the Start-Rite concession on the Broad (this was the ‘70s, when it was customary to irradiate children in shoe shops). Tottering past on our now glowing feet, someone probably pointed out The Eagle and Child – the pub frequented by the authors of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Hobbit – and the association stuck.

I suspect, in truth, I simply read my father’s copy at home – or, more probably, he read it to me. It’s a terrific book for reading aloud. Tolkien is a very present, informal, avuncular narrator, leading the unsuspecting child into a world of monsters and marvels just as Gandalf inveigles Bilbo into joining an adventure. At one point early on he interrupts himself to ask: 'What is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare and shy of the Big People, as they call us.' With that ‘us’, the reader (or listener) is welcomed into his confidence and made part of the story.

I was already a child much given to fantasy, daydreaming about King Arthur and dinosaurs and Doctor Who. These fantastical worlds, these alternatives to reality, are not appealing to everyone; but for people like me, the escapism is a part of their appeal and as Tolkien pointed out, this taste grows with age.

They are a secret tunnel under the prison camp of the everyday. They offer two equal and contradictory consolations. One is the unfettered wonder of the fantastic world in contrast to the tedious mundane. At the same time, though, it is a fictional world bound by the predictable laws of story, safe from the random tragedies of reality.

But these stories are also full of the real world; how could they be otherwise? They enable confrontation and engagement under laboratory conditions, safely contained within fictional isolation. They also provide the reassurance of a happy ending. Tolkien called this the ‘eucatastrophe’, the surprise of joy.

---

---

Bilbo Baggins begins the story as if a child, cosseted by the independently wealthy lifestyle of the early twentieth century English bourgeoisie. His life was quite similar to the life of a bourgeois English child of the later twentieth century: few responsibilities, small duties, and an awful lot of comforting food. In the same way children hear about bosses and taxes and commuter trains, Bilbo has heard about dragons and treasure and wild woods, but doesn’t yet know anything about them.

Then, like a bourgeois child from a wealthy family, Bilbo is plucked from his comfortable home and forced out into the unpredictable wider world. Not long after reading The Hobbit I went away to boarding school, where I slept in unruly dormitories with boisterous rugby-playing dwarves who sang incomprehensible songs and made me take part in their adventures. In the first half of the book Tolkien carefully documents Bilbo’s homesickness, mentioning it in almost every chapter; then, equally precisely, he shows that it has worn off. In Chapter 10, just over halfway through the book, Bilbo is hiding out alone in the Elf King’s palace, surviving on scrounged food and somewhat at a loss; but he does not think of his home once. Without noticing, he has habituated to his changing world.

Beyond the thrilling adventures, beyond Tolkien’s skill at hustling the reader onward, this treasure of metaphor and example is one of The Hobbit’s great, enduring gifts.

…and back again

But there is another great treasure hidden in The Hobbit. The magic ring that Bilbo steals from Gollum is going to prove considerably more important than even the wizard Gandalf suspects. It will result in three long books, three very long films, and – more importantly – a whole subculture of lore and nerdery.

Tolkien did not originally intend The Hobbit to have anything to do with his fictional world of Middle-earth. It is peppered with elements – dragons and elves and long songs about treasure – that recall his expertise in Anglo-Saxon literature. But it did not contain any of the more expansive mythology he was developing for his own amusement. Indeed, at first he barely intended to write The Hobbit at all. He told W. H. Auden that he was marking papers and turned over a sheet to discover that a student had left one page blank. In his relief at not having to read anything for a brief moment, he took his pen and wrote, at the top of that empty page: 'In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.' And there he was, in charge of a hobbit. Whatever that was.

Once The Hobbit had become a massive hit and he was asked for a sequel, he began to backfill some of the grander lore that would inform The Lord of the Rings. He used new editions of The Hobbit to adjust some of the story and bring it in line with his larger fictional world. Marvellously, he further insisted on folding these re-writings into the story. The Hobbit is presented as Tolkien’s own retelling and translation of Bilbo’s memoirs; in later editions Bilbo is discovered to have initially lied about how he came across the ring. This meta-narrative extends to The Lord of The Rings, presented as a translation of Frodo and Bilbo’s Red Book of Westmarch, a set of personal reminiscences set within the wider sweep of their history.

---

---

These hints of deeper lore only make The Hobbit more magical. Tolkien is wise enough not to overwhelm us with his fictional history; the reader is left to make guesses about this wider world. As his friend C. S. Lewis said, 'The Professor has the air of inventing nothing'. Lewis, the inventor of Narnia, knew a thing or two about ‘secondary world’ fiction; but Tolkien’s was saga and Lewis’s was fairy tale.

In a fairy tale everything is magical, and anything can happen: a lamp-post can stand in the middle of a forest, a lion can be a thinly veiled allegory for Jesus, Father Christmas can show up unexpectedly. The Hobbit begins as a fairy tale, a story of dwarves and dragons, but it later turns out to be a crucial event in a saga of kings and wars and the fate of the world. Tolkien’s careful lore imposes consistency; magic has to follow rules, and legend has a history.

In this transition from fairy tale to saga it forms a pair with a book published one year later, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone (1938). The story of the young King Arthur’s education by Merlin, The Sword in the Stone is very much a children's book. But White is retelling Malory, and throughout the sequel The Once And Future King the story grows increasingly dark and adult. (Both White and Tolkien began writing their series in the late 1930s, as the real world became unavoidably grave.) This means that the fictional worlds age with the readers. I moved on from The Hobbit to reading Lord of the Rings at school, and to wrestling with the history of Middle-earth as laid out in The Silmarillion as a young adult. From being a book I remembered fondly from childhood, it became a part of my adult life.

This only works because Tolkien is a deceptively good writer, capable of moving between registers almost unnoticed. He prosaically describes the goblins knowing the way through their tunnels 'as well as you do to the nearest post-office'. Then, in the next chapter, Gandalf speaks to the King of the Eagles in high, epic tones: 'May the wind under your wings bear you where the sun sails and the moon walks.' The whole of Lord of the Rings follows this register shift, from something very like the informal chatter of The Hobbit in the early chapters into a formal, heroic mode for the grand clashes of civilisations at the end of Return of the King.

It is The Hobbit that allows The Lord of the Rings to work so well. Mr Bilbo Baggins – that sudden interruption onto a blank exam page – injects humanity and reality into Tolkien’s legends. This humanity, which proves pivotal to the plot, comes in the form of hobbits; the small, overlooked, ordinary people who save the world. The fundamental importance of humanity is one of The Hobbit's prevailing themes. Thorin Oakenshield is brought down by ‘the dragon-sickness’, a lust for heroism and legend. Tolkien shows Bilbo’s desire for peace and companionship as being far worthier. He further valorises the joy of making over the greed for having; he praises the jewels created by the dwarves even as he condemns the avarice that wishes to hide them away. Craft should be celebrated, and can only be celebrated by being shared. And this is, perhaps, the great and lasting joy of The Hobbit: its fantastical world is a work of craft, a gift from Professor Tolkien to a child reader, an unexpected present more extraordinary and sustaining than any magic ring.

---

We’ve written before about the appeal of fantasy worlds and of books with maps in the front: