J. R. R. Tolkien. The Hobbit. 1937; Del Rey, 2020.

“There are no safe paths in this part of the world.” (138)

Yes, I recently re-read The Hobbit. I believe it is about the fourth or fifth time I have read it. The first was around 1965. The most recent was nearly 10 years ago when I reviewed a copy of The Annotated Hobbit. I also suspect that many of our readers have read this fantasy classic, too. This is, then, not going to be a typical review one might expect from the English Plus Language Blog. This mostly contains a few reactions from re-reading it after a long time.

First of all, The Hobbit is worth re-reading. One thing struck me right away in the first chapter: Tolkien was a really good writer. He has an engaging style. There are echoes of a fairy tale style—appropriate when considering that there are actual fairies in the story. The style is clear and direct, but like fairy tales with some asides and speculations that make it fun.

I also am currently wading through Tolkien’s Silmarillion. That is a very different book because it was not really written to be published. It consists of notes organized by Tolkien’s son Christopher. There is little narrative continuity or style in the book. Therefore, reading The Hobbit reminds this reader that when Tolkien is conscious of his audience, and not merely making notes, he knows how to tell a story.

I had forgotten, too, what a wild story it is. Right from the beginning Bilbo Baggins, the Hobbit protagonist, is more or less invaded or imposed upon by the wizard Gandalf and twelve dwarves.(I have to spell it dwarves, not dwarfs, since that it Tolkien’s way). They raucously eat and drink and joke as they get their quest underway. The story has an epic quality. One cannot help thinking of the beginning of The Odyssey with Penelope’s suitors dining and drinking raucously, though for very different reasons.

The Hobbit has an epic scope, too, because there is a long, historical grievance. As Telemachus in The Odyssey is being dispossessed by the suitors, so the dwarves have been dispossessed of their ancestral home by the dragon Smaug. Like other dragons in Nordic mythology, e.g., in Beowulf, the dragon guards a vast treasure, much of it here created and accumulated by the dwarves over centuries. The quest takes the fourteen adventurers through a variety of perils and alliances “there and back again.” It is truly an Odyssey or Argosy.

From reading The Hobbit, it appears Tolkien already had a few ideas for The Lord of the Rings. We know from his notes that he began thinking about such things as early as 1914, so the mythos of Middle Earth was already fairly well developed by the time The Hobbit came out in 1937. (Perhaps I should say the legendarium of Middle Earth since that is what Tolkien devotees call it.) For example, The Hobbit drops hints about Gollum’s background that an alert reading might pick up.

Yes, our narrator says about Gollum, “I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was” (71). But two pages later, we are told that Gollum has some vague childhood memories about sharing riddles.

Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before he had lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down, into the dark under the mountain. (73)

Funny creatures sitting in their holes? This reminiscence indeed echoes the novel’s very first sentence, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit” (1). Hmm.

Many people note that the creatures called goblins in The Hobbit are called orcs most of the time in The Lord of the Rings. However, there are hints that they are the same thing. The Dwarf King Thorin’s sword was called “Orcrist, Goblin-cleaver” (64). The tale also reminds us how Bilbo’s sword would earn its name of Sting.

One observation about the nature of the goblins suggests something about the nature of evil people everywhere.

They did not hate dwarves especially, no more than they hated everybody and everything, and particularly the orderly and the prosperous…(62)

They envy the orderly and prosperous… The Bible describes such motivation of envy:

“On that day, thoughts will come into your mind, and you will devise an evil scheme and say, ‘I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will fall upon the quiet people who dwell securely, all of them dwelling without walls, and having no bars or gates,’ to seize spoil and carry off plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places that are now inhabited, and the people who were gathered from the nations, who have acquired livestock and goods, who dwell at the center of the earth.” (Ezekiel 38:10-12)

Other adventures include hostile elves in Mirkwood, giant spiders, the distinctive Bear-Man Beorn, suspicious humans, greedy humans, and, of course, the dragon. It really is quite an adventure and fun to re-read. And, of course, Bilbo discovers the Ring. We know it is enchanted because it makes Bilbo invisible when he wears it, but we have no idea of its significance until The Fellowship of the Ring. Isn’t that the way some things are?

“…they all felt that the adventure was far more dangerous than they had thought, while all the time, even if they passed all the perils of the road, the dragon was waiting at the end” (133).

And, without meaning to make a spoiler, the end of the dragon is not the end of the conflict or the adventure. I had forgotten that there is more. After all Bilbo calls his adventure story There and Back Again. There is, then, a “back again” to tell as well.

N.B. I read this because I just happened to be on Amazon a few weeks ago when they had a one-day-only special on a four-volume boxed set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I could not pass up such a deal. Will I read the trilogy? Certainly, though probably not right away.