THE THRESHOLD 3: The Hobbit
If they slept, they woke still to darkness and to silence going on unbroken...
When you have read a book so many times, and loved it so much, it is hard to return to it with a critical eye. The Hobbit (and its sequel) are intimately entwined with who I am: they are not so much novels as lived experiences, as real to me as anything else that happened in the first 10 years of my life.
The Hobbit (Middle Earth #1)
J.R.R. Tolkien, 1952
Read in 1986, when I was seven
I adored the Hobbit when my parents read it to me, when I was too young to really follow it, my mind leaping from moment to moment, never grasping the full story, but loving the wild beauty of it all. And then a couple of years later, after I discovered The Lord of the Rings, I reread a bit of Tolkien almost every day for the next four years, until my copies of both novels fell apart.
I was worried, when I started reading it to my children, that returning to The Hobbit would spoil the intensity of my remembered experience. There is an idea out there that The Hobbit is LotR Lite, quasi-fantasy, the Diet Coke of Middle Earth: a superior children’s story, with a bit of The Wind in the Willows, and a little Enid Blyton, but not as interesting as Lord of the Rings .
I am pleased to report that the reread did not spoil my memories, and that the The Hobbit is definitely not an Embarrassing Early Work. It is a visceral, primal story about childhood fears and comforts, that works as powerfully on an adult mind as on a six-year old.
Bilbo’s adventure is, at its lowest points, a distillation of everything that a child knows to be the most terrifying experiences.
That night they ate their very last scraps and crumbs of food; and next morning the very first thing they noticed when they woke was that they were still gnawingly hungry
There is no more intense childhood experience than hunger without the immediate possibility of food, loneliness without the chance of comfort, to be lost in the dark without anyone to bring you light
Very slowly, he got up and groped about on all fours until he was touching the wall of the tunnel, but neither up nor down it could he find anything: no sign of goblins, no sign of dwarves… he did not go much further, but sat down on the floor and gave himself up to complete miserableness
And the deepest and most frequently expressed sentiment in the story is homesickness. A delight in the safe and familiar that was, at least for me, the central emotion of childhood. Again and again, our hero finds himself cold, lost, hungry, scared and wishing:
I wish I was in my nice home by the fire with the kettle just starting so sing…
He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs at home…
He was thinking once more of his comfortable chair by the fire...
Far, far away in the West , Bilbo knew there was his own comfortable land…
(And so on and so forth, every 10 pages for the rest of the book).
This remains a powerful pull as an adult reader - fantasy is a genre for those who yearn nostalgically for an ordered world that is out of reach, and nothing expresses this better than Bilbo’s desperation to go home.
Tolkien was no Maurice Sendak, with a coherent psychological theory of childhood behind his writing. What he did have, however, was a lived experience of the Somme to draw on. If The Lord of the Rings is an allegory for industrialized conflict, The Hobbit is a direct depiction of the lived experience of war: tiredness, hunger, discomfort, rain, sleep-deprivation, homesickness, fear and being lost in the dark.
Which is what makes it in so many ways, the perfect children’s story. These soldiers’ complaints are also children’s complaints. Nothing is more frightening to a child than being lost and far from home; nothing more familiarly unbearable as being cold and exhausted and told to keep on walking.
It is a story that is full of words and phrases its young readers could never hope to understand: lamenting; recompense; tidings; “I am by right descent the heir”; “you are more worthy to wear the armour of elf-princes than many who have looked more comely in it”. And yet my children did not stop to ask for an explanation: there is so much solidity to the characters, scenes and objects that meaning can still be absorbed, and the parts that are only partially understood remain thrilling in their misty vagueness. Francis Spufford beautifully describes the headlong sensation of following in Bilbo’s wake, catching clarity where one could:
There were holes in the text, corresponding to the parts I could not understand… But I could enjoy the heft in the sentences. They were obviously the special vocabulary that was apt for the slaying of dragons and the fighting of armies… I grabbed the gist and I sped on
The writing of course is so elegant that (apart from all the sodding songs) it is a joy to read aloud. The worldbuilding, on its platform of Norse and Celtic myth, is terrific. The suburban Englishman coming face to face with wizards, dragons, dwarves, and trolls is wildly funny.
But it is the sheer misery of Bilbo’s plight that held my children and I rapt. To lose ones friends, to be in a place without light or the hope of light, to have walked with strangers away from home, and not to know the way back. These came direct from Tolkien’s lived experience to the frightened heart of nervous, nerdy children everywhere. They immersed me utterly in Tolkien’s invented world, and kindled my lifelong love of fantasy.
Stray observations:
Why is there such an insane number of dwarves? I ended up giving each rhymed grouping (Dori, Nori, Ori, etc) a different British regional accent when I read this to my boys, just so I could half-distinguish between them.
“The last goblins were hunted from the Misty Mountains and a new peace came…” This cheerful celebration of genocide is pretty problematic. N.K.Jemsin writes about the problem of orcs and goblins better than I ever could: this will not be the least time I link to The Unbearable Baggage of Orcing from this reread.
“Not red light, as of fire, but a pale outdoors sort of light…” Tolkien’s writing is so immersive that I felt my whole body untense when I first saw daylight after being trapped for 40 pages in the goblin tunnels.
“Then he lay flat on the floor and kept calling out ‘Struck by lightning! Struck by lightning!’ and that was all they could get out of him for a long time” Is Bilbo the most extravagantly cowardly hero in all of children’s fiction?
I distinctly remember my sister and I telling off my dad for giving Gandalf a weedy old man voice, and my dad being hurt that we didn’t like his reading of the character. Anyway, it obviously stuck, as I found myself doing exactly the same voice for Gandalf.
I have not watched the films, and I don’t especially plan to. I got steadily diminishing returns from Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings (his Shire is great, his Gondor forgettable), and I don’t feel the need for another three movies of it. Let me know in the comments if you’ve watched them and I’m making a mistake.