The Hobbit (short review)
J.R.R. Tolkien. WWI veteran and philologist and professor. Roman Catholic and Nazi despiser. Nature lover and fierce critic of industrialization.
J.R.R. Tolkien, before he was an author of a classic fantasy series, once scribbled a note while grading his students’ papers. That little note said, “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”
“The Hobbit” began as a bedtime story for his children and became an epic tale of heroism and adventure. Then Tolkien spent seventeen years writing a sequel called “The Lord of the Rings.”
Later on, he updated some of his earlier writing in “The Hobbit” to make it more consistent with his overarching story.
His fictional universe is so deep because he built its framework on his mythopoeic texts, mainly the Silmarillion, in which the origin of Hobbits and Men and Elves and other creatures can all be derived from a creator God (Eru) that dwelled before the universe began.
Tolkien’s cosmological design is so in-depth that it permeates through all his texts, even though “The Hobbit” and “Lord of the Rings” are stories that happen on a short time scale, when compared with the entirety of his legendarium.
Much of Tolkien’s universe can be traced to his lifelong passions for Christianity, fairy tales, Norse Mythology, Eastern European literature, Germanic philology, and so on. He even created an entirely new language (Elvish) and new words (Hobbits) and new beings (Ents) for his stories. Hobbits and dwarves may seem like common tropes in modern fantasy, but Tolkien largely made what audiences take for granted.
While he did write fantasy, inspired from certain aspects in his life, such as Roman Catholicism and WWI, he never liked when critics made allegories out of his work.
As Tolkien himself said, “I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history — true or feigned — with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse applicability with allegory, but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.”
Despite the many attempts of readers to find underlying meanings in his world, he wrote “The Hobbit” with charm and straightforwardness. Many of his characters are introduced with joviality, interspersed with onomatopoeic songs and lighthearted description.
“The Hobbit” is a story of a quest. Bilbo Baggins, a scared hobbit with furry feet, must leave the safety of his shire, and travel into an unknown world.
Beginning his journey alienated from the members of his party, locked away in the comfort of his home, he has to transcend his fears and sacrifice his old self for the lives of strangers.
To be aware of himself and to grow, he must confront his shadow, the aspects of himself that he hides from, whether in the dark manifestations of Gollum, the one Ring, or the lightless forest of Mirkwood.
His quest is one of inner development, of discovering what is buried within himself. Only through struggle can he be revealed.
He is often confronted with moral dilemmas such as whether to succumb to trembling fear or to continue on, to steal what is not his or to give what he has to others, to help those in need or to help only himself.
During his adventure, as he listens to his inner voice, he develops his potential, before he returns back once again to where he began.
Transformed from his quest, Bilbo cares not only for himself (as he once did), but for the lives of strangers, who are closer to him now than friends.
“The Hobbit” reflects the stages of a hero’s journey. With the help of a guide (Gandalf), an unassuming protagonist discovers his inner potentialities when confronting his shadow in the unknown. He must grapple with the manifestations of greed (Smaug who hoards a treasure, Gollum who craves after the ring) and fear. (his desire to leave and return to the shire) and transcend his limitations (saving the dwarves, defending himself against evil) to be reborn.
Bilbo leaves a peaceful rural world and ventures into a wasteland. Down in the darkness of mountains, sinister beasts, such as Goblins and Orcs, make death weapons and ugly machinery. Dwarves who once held the mountains as kings, soon grew rich from their genius crafts, before corrupting themselves with greed and losing all that they called home. The hobbits, in contrast, live inside holes in the ground. They haven’t been corrupted by smoke-spilling machines, built down in darkness, heat, boiling steam, and fire.
There are many such interpretations of Tolkien’s work. Whether a reader views the hobbit’s quest as a parallel to a child marching blindly into war, only to lose who they are from exposure to violence and darkness and mechanistic progress; to a cyclical tale of spiritual development, of rebirth through killing old symbolic selves like a snake shedding its skin; to a conflict between meaning and nihilism; to a tale of Jungian individuation through confronting the shadow and integrating fully into life; to whatever else, depends on what the reader chooses to focus on and why and how much they can truly discover about themselves in the life of a little hobbit.
