I first read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1954–1955, UK) in the early 1980s. It was the paperback omnibus edition with a still from Ralph Bakshi’s animated film adaptation as the cover art — the 1978 Unwin tie-in edition, apparently. I think I’ve reread The Lord of the Rings once, although I’ve always promised myself I would tackle it again one day.
I had always assumed I’d read The Hobbit (1937, UK), too. I knew the story, how Bilbo Baggins stole the One Ring from Gollum, and helped some dwarves defeat the dragon Smaug. If I was hazy on the details, well, I’d read it a long time ago. But last year I watched the Peter Jackson movie adaptation(s), and while it had stretched the book out to three films, a lot of the story was unfamiliar. So perhaps I’d never read it, after all.
That happens sometimes, especially with books that have become part of a common cultural experience. You know so much about the story and characters and setting you assume you must have read the book at some point in the past.
Now I have definitely read The Hobbit. And I didn’t much care for it.
Yes, it’s a book written for children, and written almost 85 years ago, when the world was a very different place. The Great War had ended nearly two decades before, and a new conflict with Hitler’s Germany seemed inevitable. Books, especially children’s books, from that time I’ve read seemed to be set in an England that only existed for some, although I suspect it was familiar to those who could actually afford the books. The Hobbit, for example, cost seven shillings and sixpence on original publication, around £25.00 in 2021 Pound Sterling. However, the three biggest sectors of employment in 1935 were agriculture, industry and service, and average weekly wages in those professions varied from £1 10s to £1 15s, making a copy of The Hobbit worth about a quarter to a third of a worker’s take home pay. The average salary in the UK in 2021 is £29,600, or £570 per week, or £460 after tax. So a copy of The Hobbit would actually cost something like… £150.
I hadn’t intended to go down that rabbit-hole, but it certainly illustrates that the world — invented or not — depicted in children’s books of the time was not one shared by everyone. I remember as a kid reading Swallows & Amazons (1930, UK) by Arthur Ransome, as well as various books by Enid Blyton, and while I may have spent most of my childhood in the Middle East, the England they depicted was not the one I experienced when visiting relatives in an East Midlands town, where both of my parents had come from families involved in coal mining for at least three or four generations.
There’s something about The Hobbit that has that “and afterwards they all went home for tea” feel. It’s actually explicit, as Tolkien regularly addresses the reader in a sort of jocular patronising tone. These comments not only break the fourth wall but many are blatantly anachronistic — one even mentions “pop-guns”. Even as a child, I would probably have found them irritating.
And then there’s the naming. The character names, with a few notable exceptions, seem pitched to appeal to six-year-olds, and most of the geography has blindingly unimaginative names — Long Lake, Lonely Mountain, Forest River, the Misty Mountains, the Last Homely House… Yes, there are glimpses of the legendarium Tolkien had been working on for decades and which would later appear in The Lord of the Rings, but Bilbo Baggins’s journey mostly involves walking from one generic name to another.
And there’s so much food! All of which is plentiful, no matter what the circumstances. Everyone eats and drinks their fill, and often more than that. (Gluttony seems to be a feature of English children’s books in the first half of last century, possibly a consequence of the two world wars.) No one actually shops, of course. Although animals provide the food — as in “cater”, not as in being the actual food — when Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves stay over at Beorn’s hall before entering Mirkwood.
I shouldn’t need to describe the plot of The Hobbit, which is a string of seemingly major jeopardies, followed by near-miraculous escapes, as Bilbo, Gandalf and the dwarves make their way from the Shire to Lonely Mountain, with the intention of ousting Smaug from the dwarven halls beneath the mountain so the leader of the dwarves, Thorin Oakenshield, great-grandson of the last dwarven king of the Kingdom Under the Mountain. After Bilbo tricks the Ring out of Gollum, it becomes the maguffin that saves the adventurers every time they get into trouble.
It was somewhat odd reading The Hobbit after first seeing the films. The movies are not really pitched at children, but the book very much is. The films also feature a great deal more spectacle — the Battle of the Five Armies, a handful of pages in the book, fills almost the entire length of the third film. The reduction in scope and vision from films to book makes the novel feel parochial, a feeling only heightened by its twee Englishness.
There’s an expression I use to describe films and television programmes that show an England of village greens and thatched cottages and no brown people, the sort of England that has never existed outside of tourist brochures. I call it “chocolate box England”. Midsomer Murders, despite at least one person being, well, murdered each episode, is a good example. There are no inner cities, the only working class people are gruff peasants, everywhere is 99.9% white, and you won’t hear any accent native to parts of the country north of Watford…
Obviously, The Hobbit is set in Middle Earth, not England, “chocolate box” or otherwise, although the Shire certainly leans in that direction; and some of the Hobbit families, like the Sackvilles, would probably not appear out of place in Causton or Midsomer Wellow. But The Hobbit is the germinal work in a particular type of fantasy, one that has proven hugely successful since the 1960s. There’s no getting past that.
Except… that’s a perspective informed by reading The Lord of the Rings first, and then watching Peter Jackson’s three movies, before reading the book which started the whole cultural phenomenon (an industry in its own right, pretty much). And yet… had I read The Hobbit at the intended age for its audience (probably earlier, to be fair, as I was reading well ahead of my age group), unaware of The Lord of the Rings and everything after… I still think I would have disliked it. I don’t like its sensibilities, even though I know they’re the product of a different time. I don’t think its story is particularly well-constructed, and I find most of the characters irritating. Not to mention many of them are characterised by “quirks”, a practice still common in fantasy novels today.
Having said all that, there are tiny glimpses of Tolkien’s legendarium, and they’re sort of fascinating. Unfortunately, that’s undoubtedly post facto. I know the legendarium exists because it led to The Lord of the Rings, and has been copiously documented since in other books by Tolkien, and the Tolkien estate…
Would it be fair to worship Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902, UK) because of the existence of Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972, UK)?
I think not.
