The Hobbit Flashcards
In the early 1930s, the story of the hobbit became one that he shared with his three sons during what he called their “winter reads.”
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
By 1932, Tolkien had completed a manuscript that he shared with his Oxford friends, but most of those scholars saw the book as merely a children’s story.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
Tolkien later worked on another revision of The Hobbit, in which he tried to alter the narrative voice, the avuncular tone of which he, and a number of readers, had come to see as occasionally condescending and intrusive. Certain passages are clearly imagined as narrated by an older figure addressing children; for example, in the chapter “Barrels Out of Bond,” in which Bilbo comes up with the plan of how to save the dwarves, the narrator makes these comments:
It was just at this moment that Bilbo suddenly discovered the weak point in his plan. Most likely you saw it some time ago and have been laughing at him; but I don’t suppose you would have done half so well yourselves in his place. (Hobbit 177)
This is undoubtedly the kind of passage Tolkien had in mind when he wrote to Auden that the novel “was unhappily really meant, as far as I was conscious, as a ‘children’s story’, and as I had not learned sense then, and my children were not quite old enough to correct me, it has some of the sillinesses of manner caught unthinkingly from the kind of stuff I had had served to me”
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
The Hobbit has sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into more than 40 different languages, making it not only one of Tolkien’s most popular works, but one of the most popular children’s books of all time.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
The Hobbit may be considered in a number of different ways. It is, as Tolkien intended, a fairy story for children, and Bilbo, as a small person leaving home for the larger world, is in some ways a typical fairy-tale hero.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
The novel also can be seen as a bildungsroman, a “novel of education” or “formation novel” that traces the development of a young person from childhood or adolescence into maturity in a kind of quest for identity…
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
“Of course, Bilbo is only young in experience, but he, too, must mature; in fact, many” fairy tales “are stories of a maturing hero on a quest for identity.”
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again
The Hobbit is a story for children about the stealing of a dragon’s hoard by some dwarves with the reluctant aid of a little hobbit. The Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, stretches the adult imagination with its account of a world in peril. Each work has virtues proper to its kind, but they had better be read independently of each other as contrasting, if related, specimens of the fantasy writer’s art.
Master of Middle-earth
The beginning of wisdom in understanding The Hobbit is to think of Tolkien, or another adult, in a chair by the fireside telling the story to a semicircle of children sitting on the floor facing him. From the opening paragraphs hardly a page goes by in which the narrator does not address the children directly in the first person singular. Since the breed of hobbits has just sprung freshly minted from his brain, he loses no time in telling his young listeners about how they look and behave, notably their shyness “when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along,” and he ends his description by, “Now you know enough to go on with. As I was saying . . .”1 Sometimes he uses the direct address technique to create anticipation, as in introducing Gandalf: “Gandalf! If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about him, and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale.” Sometimes his remarks to the child audience take on a genial, joking tone, as in pointing out the flaw in Bilbo’s plan for freeing the captive dwarves by putting them into barrels (his inability to put himself into one): “Most likely you saw it some time ago and have been laughing at him; but I don’t suppose you would have done half as well yourselves in his place.” Then, there are jocular interjections of no special moment, but aimed at maintaining a playful intimacy: “If you want to know what cram is, I can only say that I don’t know the recipe; but it is biscuitish…”
Master of Middle-earth
Tolkien also makes the technique work for him expositorily in making clear to the youngsters important shifts in the plot sequence. Normally he describes every scene from Bilbo’s point of view, and describes none in which Bilbo himself is not present… Tolkien opens the chapter with the sentence: “Now if you wish, like the dwarves, to hear news of Smaug, you must go back again to the evening when he smashed the door and flew off in a rage, two days before.” Incidentally, this careful score-keeping of days elapsed at every stage of his tale is typical of Tolkien. Having narrated events at Lake-town he steers his young audience back to their hero with the words, “Now we will return to Bilbo and the dwarves.” And, on occasion, in order to remind them of an important fact, already explained some time before, which they may have forgotten, he repeats it. Thus when the Master in Lake-town judges Thorin’s claim to the treasure by inheritance to be a fraud Tolkien reiterates what Gandalf and Elrond acknowledged earlier: “He was wrong. Thorin, of course, was really the grandson of the king under the Mountain…” This care in keeping the plot crystal clear is adapted to the possible squirmings and short attentiveness of the children he is speaking to.
Master of Middle-earth
Another minor but persistent device in the manner of its telling likewise is meant to delight childish ears. The prose is full of sound effects, which the eye of the reader might miss but the hearing of the listener would not. Bilbo’s doorbell rings ding-dong-a-ling-dang; Gandalf’s smoke rings go pop!; the fire from his wand explodes with a poof; Bombur falls out of a tree plop onto the ground; Bilbo falls splash! into the water, and so on at every turn. Nor are these sound effects limited to the prose. Many of the poems are designed more for onomatopoeic purposes than for content. One prime example is the song of the goblins underground after their capture of Bilbo and the dwarves, with its Clash! crash! Crush, smash! and Swish, smack! Whip crack and Ho, ho, my lad. The elves’ barrel-rolling song has all the appropriate noises, from roll-roll-rolling to splash plump! and down they bump! Tolkien knows that up to a certain age children like their stories to be highly audible.
Master of Middle-earth
The children listening to its recital must be young enough not to resent the genial fatherliness of the I-You technique, the encapsulated expositions, sound effects, and the rest, yet old enough to be able to cope with the fairly stiff vocabulary used on many occasions and to make at least something of the maturer elements that keep cropping up in what they hear. For, although The Hobbit is predominantly juvenile fiction, it is not all of a piece.
Master of Middle-earth
in The Hobbit the whole episode is one more example of Tolkien’s writing at the same time both for children and for the parents who will often be reading them the tale. A fair enough practice, provided it can be so managed as not to confuse or irritate both parties.
Master of Middle-earth
For the most part Tolkien manages to keep unobtrusive these “unbidden” incursions of serious historical matter not properly germane to a children’s story, but they do color the tale and perhaps help to account for those graver, more adult touches we have been discussing. Contrariwise, the writing of The Hobbit may well have served to crystallize Tolkien’s thoughts about the historical materials, and particularly seems to have supplied a number of ideas that found their way, transformed, into his epic.
Master of Middle-earth
The Ring, therefore, is the link that inseparably binds the later epic to the earlier children’s story.
Master of Middle-earth
