ohhhhhhhh I get it now

I absolutely love it. 4 stars because it made me sad about Thorins (and Killi&Fillis) death.

<i>The Hobbit, or There and Back Again</i> J.R.R. Tolkien 1937 - George Allen & Unwin Well…what can you say about a classic? <i>The Hobbit</i> is one of those stories that is engraved in my bones. I probably heard the story <i>in utero</i>, knowing my father and his love for Middle-Earth, and have grown up with it as much as I have grown up with <i>Star Wars</i>. Both George Lucas’ sci-fi opera (which has more than a little Tolkien influence) and the animated Rankin & Bass version of <i>The Hobbit</i> came out the same year I did, so these are fixtures in my life. Nothing terrified me more than Gollum, hiding in the caves beneath the Misty Mountains, ranting about his lost ring. As a child, those scenes scared the hell out of me! This is a story I come back to again and again. Unlike <i>The Lord of the Rings</i> and <i>The Silmarillion</i> (or any of the plethora of edited papers Christopher Tolkien has published since his father’s death), <i>The Hobbit</i> is a simple children’s story, made up by Professor Tolkien while he was bored and grading papers. As a professor myself, I totally get it, John! He imagined a hobbit who lived in a hole in the ground. From there, a whole world was revealed to the reader, a window that peeked inside the rich, deep, and ancient universe of Tolkien’s imagination. The hobbit in question is, of course, Bilbo Baggins, a very respectable hobbit of the Shire, where live the race of half-sized people living an idyllic country existence. The Bagginses, in particular, are known for being quiet folk who cause no trouble and never have adventures, but Bilbo is only half-Baggins. His mother is a Took, from Tookland, and they are known for all sorts of shenanigans (see Pippin Took in <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>), and it is this “Tookishness” that Gandalf, the Grey Wizard, is betting on when he mysteriously shows up on Bilbo’s doorstep one day. Unbeknownst to Bilbo is that Gandalf is recruiting the comfortably settled hobbit into a party of dwarves, led by their deposed prince, Thorin Oakenshield. They are off on a quest to reclaim their ancestral kingdom under the Lonely Mountain, far to the east and north, and they need the services of Bilbo, or so they claim. Bilbo, who likes his pipe tobacco, his tea, and his comfortable hobbit hole all very much, thank you, declines. He’s no burglar! But when he randomly decides to travel with Thorin’s company anyway, Bilbo is off on an experience that will change his life forever! The charm of <i>The Hobbit</i> is that it is a tale as old as time - a person breaks out of the comfort of the world they have always known and is forced to deal with the new, different, scary, and fantastical. It is what Joseph Campbell terms the “hero’s journey,” which, as imperfect as his thesis can be, has become deeply entrenched in our modern storytelling. Everyone from Luke Skywalker of <i>Star Wars</i>, to <i>Harry Potter</i>, to <i>Percy Jackson</i> have employed the trope, and Tolkien by far is not the first to do it. It is a story that goes back to our most ancient tales, and as a professor of languages and medieval literature at Oxford, Tolkien was very aware of how these stories worked in our most ancient civilizations. The story feels like a fair tale, a cosy adventure, in which we get to feel scared with the characters, to laugh at their foibles, and also to feel sad at their failures. There is a reason I loved this story as a child, and why I still love it now. Even today, I prefer to listen to it rather than read it (the Andy Serkis version available on Audible is spectacular, by the way, most notably, of course, his Gollum). There is something about this story that makes me want to curl up under a blanket fort and hug a pillow as I listen to it on a rainy day. The main conceit of this book, for all of you who know your Tolkien lore, is that this is actually a story being written by Bilbo about his adventures. I don’t know if it was always intended to be thus, Tolkien notoriously shifted things in <i>The Hobbit</i> to fit it more in line with the rest of his Legendarium, but that knowledge added a special aspect to the story for me this go around. Knowing that Bilbo, for all his grumbling, whining, and flaws, is being portrayed this way by himself gives this a sly, self-reflective angle to it, as if Bilbo is looking back at the younger version of himself with both wry amusement and the self-awareness and wisdom of age, perhaps longing for one last adventure. Bilbo’s younger self is of course very relatable to most of us. I know I am a creature of habit, who loves the comfort of my hobbit hole and the way I do things, and I hate being changed out of it. Many of us can perhaps connect to that, and it makes Bilbo, for all that he is a hobbit, a very relatable character. The dwarves are delightful in this story for all the good and bad they display through the adventure. They can be cowardly, selfish, and single-minded in their focus (not to mention occasionally lazy and not altogether bright). But they can also be kind-hearted, supportive, and appreciative, with a noble streak that makes them heroic at times. They are very human in this sense, even though they are dwarves, and their juxtaposition against the curmudgeonly and soft Bilbo is always fun to see, as they find themselves relying on Bilbo’s wits more often then they often care to think about. Most notable of all the dwarves, though, is Thorin Oakenshield, who is the clear leader of this group. Unlike in the films, where Thorin becomes the dwarven Aragorn (though I do adore Richard Armitage’s portrayal), Thorin in the books can be quick to frustration and anger, arrogant, and often makes the wrong call. But that doesn’t make him less noble of a king. It is the fact that he can be so noble that makes his arrogance and anger so utterly irritating. Thorin is imperfect, but that doesn’t make him a bad or evil king, just a very human one…err, dwarvish one? For all that is hubris leads to disaster, he is still noble enough to admit to Bilbo his error in this, and to apologize to the hobbit for not listening to Bilbo or for following his example. More than in <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, Gandalf in this text really does appear to be the wizard who helps push civilization in little ways to get it on the right track. He is there to advise and help, but not to lead. He is quietly directing all of them, notably Bilbo and, to a certain extent, Thorin, to be better people. Knowing what we know of what is going on in the background of the world at this time and what Gandalf is up to, it makes sense. Gandalf is setting up his chess pieces against Sauron, but in the book itself all this flitting off and vague answers to pointed questions makes Gandalf seem wise and mysterious and more than a bit whimsical. I loved Gandalf from the first as a child, and there has yet to be a wizard in fantasy literature who takes his place for me. If Tolkien’s work has a flaw for me (and this applies to all of his work), it is that he loves his songs and poetry. It absolutely makes sense, given his academic discipline, and I get it, but every time we turn around there is another song, poem, lay, chorus, something going on. Some of them are relevant, most are not, and I find myself tiring of yet another quaint song popping up in the text. There are a few I get down with, most notably <i>The Misty Mountains Cold</i>, but that could really be in part due to the spectacular Howard Shore arrangement from the first The Hobbit film (check it out if you haven’t heard it). After a while, though, I just wanted the plot to move on, and no more songs. I love music as much as anyone, but poetry without music falls flat for me, and it did not add to the narrative. Tolkien’s stories are all about journeys, from one place to another, and often he explains a LOT about one place or another. This is fine, but after a while, it does get rather dull. While Tolkien does do a good job of breaking up walking with adventure, after a while even I get bored with it. It is perhaps the one thing I can’t quite jive with, and it may be the difference between a Victorian gentleman who grew up with a love of nature and rambling, and a twenty-first century American girl who steps outside of her door and fries from the sunlight. It’s just not a part of the books I glory in, and while I love his descriptions of the landscape to help set the seen and visualize where our characters are, I don’t quite glory in the physical trek of the journey as much as Tolkien does. These are minor quibbles, overall, for what is a masterpiece. While <i>The Hobbit</i> lacks some of the epic scope of its sequel, <i>The Lord of the Rings</i>, the very intimacy and charm of the story is part of what makes this book so special for so many of us who grew up with it. We can see ourselves in Bilbo as he sets out for the first time on an adventure, into the unknown, without any idea of where this will lead. And for many of us children, unable to do that yet ourselves, we get to experience that as well, in the safety of a story filled with dwarves, elves, goblins, and noble eagles. It is a fairy story, but a very grown up fairy story, that doesn’t shy away from the uglier emotions and our own worst tendencies in situations, but is relatable to all of us. That is the joy of The Hobbit. All of us can see ourselves as Bilbo Baggins of the Shire, and we have all been in his shoeless footsteps.