The Hobbit

The Hobbit, fantasy novel by J.R.R. Tolkien, published in 1937. The novel introduced Tolkien’s richly imagined world of Middle Earth in its Third Age and served as a prologue to his The Lord of the Rings.

Summary

Hobbits, a race of small humanlike creatures, characteristically value peace, simplicity, and cozy homes yet are capable of incredible feats of courage and resourcefulness. The unwilling hero of The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, is persuaded by the wizard Gandalf to leave his village, Hobbiton, and join Thorin and his 12 dwarfs to recover their stolen treasure, which is being guarded by the dragon Smaug. During the expedition, Bilbo finds a magical ring that renders the wearer invisible, which figures prominently in The Lord of the Rings, a novel originally published in three parts that followed in 1954−55. When Bilbo and Gandalf return to Hobbiton, Bilbo is no longer accepted, his adventurous behavior being deemed unhobbitlike. The Hobbit is the story of Bilbo’s maturing from a seeker of warmth and comforts to a fighter, however humble, for the greater good. He proves to be an unlikely hero who achieves metamorphosis through pools of inner strength he did not know he possessed.

Analysis

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” originally scribbled on a blank page in a student examination booklet, is one of the best-known opening lines in modern literature. Although it stemmed from stories, later published as The Silmarillion, that he had been writing about his fictional world, Middle Earth, for a decade, The Hobbit was the outgrowth of bedtime stories that he told to his children, improvised night after night. He began to compose the story formally sometime between 1926 and 1930, presenting it to his “Inkling” literary colleagues, foremost among them C.S. Lewis, in 1933.

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The Hobbit was Tolkien’s first published work. It was greeted with generally strong critical approval—a Times Literary Supplement reviewer likened it to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows—and gratifying sales, which led the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to encourage Tolkien to write more. The Hobbit was accordingly followed, over a decade later, by its sequel, The Lord of the Rings. The plot and characters combined the ancient heroic Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian epics Tolkien studied and taught at Oxford University with the middle-class rural England in which he lived and felt comfortable.

When Bilbo meets the tormented Gollum in The Hobbit, he finds himself the bearer of a magic ring that makes the wearer disappear; the importance of that ring to The Lord of the Rings cycle caused Tolkien to revise The Hobbit to foreshadow its role in the later work more explicitly, and he made many smaller changes (altering “tomatoes” to “pickles,” for example) that collectors and students of Tolkien have long delighted in discovering.

Some critics have tried to read metaphors for England’s heroism during World War II or the inherent evil in some nationalities. But Tolkien was known to dislike allegory, and it is more likely simply the heroic story of a small, charming person who has no idea how resourceful he is until his abilities are put to the test.

Adaptations

The Hobbit has been adapted in various forms, notably as an animated television movie (1977) and as a series of live-action films (2012, 2013) helmed by New Zealand director Peter Jackson. Jackson’s earlier cinematic renderings of The Lord of the Rings (2001, 2002, 2003) were widely regarded as masterful.

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