The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien, 1937 ★★★★

A Tall Tale that Gets Bigger and Bigger

A quaint, bucolic story about a little fellow who meets with big adventures, The Hobbit is the kind of book one expects to read to a young person over the course of several lazy Sunday afternoons. Is anyone else surprised it became the foundation stone for one of modern culture's most popular mythologies?

What struck me recently reading The Hobbit was the small-ball stuff, its readability and charm. Yes, its greatest legacy by far lies with it being the forerunner of fantasy fiction's greatest trilogy, a trilogy that does much more than The Hobbit giving life and breadth to its fantasy setting of Middle Earth. But what strikes me is not how meticulous a myth-maker author J. R. R. Tolkien was, but how instinctual his pacing and craft seemed to be.

In fact, you might be surprised as I was reading The Hobbit how little it anticipates the Main Event of the trilogy to follow. It's its own self-contained story, of gentler sensibilities and more modest ambitions.

The story takes us to Middle Earth and the quaint settlement of Bag-End, where a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins lives a life of quiet luxury. This is rudely disturbed by the wizard Gandalf, who appears at Bilbo's door and leaves marks outside it to summon 13 rather gruff dwarves on a mysterious quest. Gandalf explains that he would like Bilbo's help on this enterprise. The dwarves are initially suspicious of bringing along a hobbit (which is even smaller than a dwarf, and of less use in battle), but Gandalf makes clear to them that they'll find Bilbo useful, as indeed they do:

"Just let anyone say I chose the wrong man or the wrong house, and you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal." Gandalf intimates that Bilbo may be of some use as a "burglar," though what this means is not made clear.

The pleasure of The Hobbit is that rather whimsical sense of adventure, a kind of pastoral odyssey that is only occasionally interrupted, most memorably early on by a trio of menacing trolls named Bert, William, and Tom. It's hard to see the clever confrontation of wits that ensues between doughty Bilbo and the monsters who intend to eat him and think of war-wracked Helm's Deep from the Peter Jackson films. If there's a movie connection here, it's more akin to the Three Stooges.

There's nothing wrong with this, of course. It's just different. The Hobbit is written in a humorous vein, especially at the beginning, so much so it's almost distracting for an older reader like me coming at it with heavy preconceptions. Bilbo's longing for home is played up over and over for chuckles, as is the continued grumbling of Bilbo's dwarven companions, until Bilbo demonstrates his worth as a first-class sneak when the dwarves are waylaid by giant spiders. The whole Bilbo-dwarf tension is one that will be familiar to any little brother. Tolkien was writing for younger readers, here it seems more than in anything he did later involving Middle Earth, and it gets rather twee.

Tolkien's narrative tone is almost apologetically patronizing at points: "Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway."

When Bilbo finds a magical ring belonging to a nasty critter named Gollum, it's just a neat magic device here, without the malignant associations that became attached to the ring in later installments. Gollum and Bilbo square off with a guessing game involving a series of riddles, such as the identity of an object that is:

Alive without breath,

As cold as death;

Never thirsty, ever drinking,

All in mail never clinking...

Bilbo's up against it only for a moment, then he has the answer, and it's Gollum's turn to guess. It's rather pleasant badinage, hardly the stuff of an epic struggle at the cracks of Mount Doom. Gollum is a sore loser, sure, and hisses a good deal, but he lacks the malevolence with which we associate him today.

According to Wikipedia, this episode, which would become the fulcrum of the Lord Of The Rings cycle to follow, was initially written by Tolkien as a kind of cheerful game between Bilbo and Gollum where the ring was not yet The Ring. Gollum then wasn't even too upset at losing the ring. Apparently it was only when Tolkien started work on his follow-up trilogy that he decided upon the ring having a more sinister nature, and retrofitted The Hobbit accordingly. But he could only go so far in that direction without violating the unique fabric of that earlier book.

In addition to writing The Hobbit, Tolkien also illustrated the novel in the same quaintly distinctive style that makes the novel the unique experience it is. Image from TheGuardian.com

The story doesn't really take off as a gripping adventure until Bilbo and his companions arrive at the black forest of Mirkwood. Tolkien's imagery here is wonderfully bleak and evocative: "The entrance to the path was like a sort of arch leading into a gloomy tunnel made by two great trees that leant together, too old and strangled with ivy and hung with lichen to bear more than a few blackened leaves."

The novel maintains this slightly more serious pitch right up to the end, crammed with exciting incident and winding up in a big battle, maybe not akin to the more satisfyingly epic ones Lord Of The Rings deliver but in the same vein. Instead of the rich nomenclature of odd names that festoon Lord Of The Rings, you get strangely generic names here, like "Lake-town," "Master," and "Bard," none of which I recall appearing in the later works. It's almost as if Tolkien dropped them as too simplistic for the deeper story he wanted to tell, of the Ring and Bilbo's nephew Frodo. There's no Mordor here, either. Instead, the most evil and immediate menace is a dragon named Smaug, and the resolution of this plot element is dealt with in such offhand fashion it's rather detrimental to the overall experience.

To be fair, there's a good side in the way The Hobbit maintains a simpler, clearer tone. Children will find it easy to follow, as well as adults not normally attuned to the more recondite aspects of fantasy fiction. It's not exactly crammed with backstory or political intrigue the way Lord Of The Rings is, and Tolkien's narrative approach aims for inclusiveness over complexity at every turn.

Tolkien's Middle Earth as presented here is a fantasy world of color and life, and Bilbo's emergence as a resourceful hero is this novel's most satisfying element. A child of any age will find him a character to identify with and be inspired by. The Hobbit works both as a stand-alone book and a deceptively quaint first step into a larger world.