Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937. It turned out to be quite a hit, and is remembered today as a beloved children’s story and the source material for a very unfortunate set of terrible films. At first glance, it is the “children’s story” part that is the most memorable and striking element of its writing. Explaining it as a children’s tale seems to describe not just its style and its structure, but even its content. We know what to expect when we hear those words, or at least we have a ballpark estimation on our hands. Fairy tales, trolls, dragons, treasure. Dwarves. Kings and heroes. And, perhaps, a diminutive protagonist.

Would that it were so simple. As one reads The Hobbit, it no doubt comes across as the sort of story one reads to his son beside the hearth. The narration is that of a confidant or a storyteller, whose polite condescension maintains a certain levity of style. And yet, certain details intuitively seem inappropriate to the dismissal of the work as a children’s story. Tolkien’s thoroughness with which he plots out the logistics of the trip to Erebor is one, as well as the treatment given to the royalty of Thorin Oakenshield. Most obviously un-childlike, however, will be noticed in the lead up to the climactic battle at the end of the book: a bargaining period intended to determine how the treasure under the Lonely Mountain would be divided according to how various parties had assisted the dwarves on their quest.

Perhaps this is simply not giving enough credit to the children of 1937, whose minds remained then unmolested by Adderall, television, and the internet. On the other hand, the measures Tolkien took to mark out The Hobbit’s scope should invite us to a deeper reading of the story he presented. Although it is written as a children’s story, marketed as one, and includes elements that we would expect to find in a children’s story, The Hobbit is nonetheless the work of a mature writer expecting a sensible audience, not exclusively a childlike one. We could think of it then not specifically as a children’s story as such, but as a story whose bar for entry, so to speak, remains low enough for children to access it.

One frequently-derided characteristic of Tolkien’s writing is the exacting measures he takes in background information, as that background information is what adds to the realism of the stories he wrote. Modern readers may interpret this as ‘world building’, but it’s nothing quite so simple as merely drawing up some maps and peppering a fictional environment with superfluous details. It’s based fundamentally on the narrative: what is the story that is being told here, and how does it realistically—i.e., reasonably—come to a believable end?

Questions such as “why can’t this event occur?” or “why couldn’t the characters do this other thing instead?” are ones best answered by readers when there’s some subtle but reasonable set of circumstances already alluded to in the narrative. Moreover, there’s a positive aspect to this as well, rather than simply a negative or prohibitive aspect. In the case mentioned above, regarding the spoils under the Lonely Mountain, Tolkien invited the reader into his own mode of thinking: “what would happen if a known treasure store suddenly had its dragon disappear and was only then occupied by thirteen dwarves?” The answer, of course, is an obvious one, and it’s exactly what he wrote. Interested parties would convene. Politics would occur, if not outright violence.

The Hobbit, in this respect, is held quite tightly together. Tolkien accomplishes a fulfilling tale that is packaged up within a world that he allows us only the barest glimpse of, dropping hints of grander stories or settings (the swords of Gandalf and Thorin, for instance, explicitly tied to the story about the fall of Gondolin, which by 1937 Tolkien had already attempted twice to put to words) without ever deviating from what The Hobbit is about.

So what, exactly is The Hobbit about, if it is more than simply a children’s story?

The Hobbit

The Hobbit presents the portrait of a man living what Tolkien and many of his readers would have considered an ideal life. Bilbo lives in a comfortable house surrounded by comfortable amenities in a comfortable, bucolic village on the outskirts of civilization. He has what every middle-aged bachelor wants: stability and comfort, a place to grill, and a good pipe to smoke. Although far from a humble person, as he despised seeing his life turned upside down by the meddling efforts of a great wizard, he lived nonetheless a humble life.

Although presented within a style of a children’s tale, what is communicated then is a very adult and masculine romance for simplicity. The hobbit’s life is a simple life, unencumbered by things like great dooms or great fates. True, it lacks the bravado of great heroism, too, at least insofar as the average hobbit may be concerned. The hobbit’s aspirations are the simple aspirations for a comfortable bed, a warm hearth, and a good meal. These creatures are not elves or men, whose fates and triumphs can be positioned upon some great moral scale. They are, in a word, simple folk. The introduction to Tolkien’s most famous work goes over all of this in great detail.

And yet, what Tolkien presents to us in The Hobbit, which he later revisits in greater detail in The Lord of the Rings, is that this simplicity does not mean that one is uninvolved in the providential turning of history. Everything has its place in the divine plan, and every person, every moral agent, has an important and indispensable role to play in the bringing about of this ultimate reality. It was not elves or men who saved the world in The Lord of the Rings, nor was it an elf that found the Ring after all those centuries of it being presumed lost. But it was also not hobbits who defended the West against the armies of the enemy during the grueling interregnum. Everyone had the parts they were supposed to play.

In The Silmarillion, this notion is understood with regard to the great extremes of the mortal condition: characters of great good are plagued by dooms cast about their fates which were set into motion either by oath or by malice. The sons of Feanor grow corrupted in the fulfillment of their oaths, while Turin’s story was haunted by the curse against his father’s line. And yet the divine will turns these great evils toward good in the end, whether the agents themselves see it or are simply used as instruments toward the fulfillment of this purpose. But the tales of Tolkien’s First Age are all tales of great men, whose stories are larger than life and are written in a mythopoeic form. We are meant to understand them in something of an esoteric sense, but their removal from a sort of common sense is exactly what elevates their struggles to the realm of legends.

Bilbo and the dwarves, and in fact, most of the other characters in The Hobbit are presented without this sense of grand narrative. Tolkien’s use of framing The Hobbit within a children’s story grabs what belongs to the legendary and places it within the common’s grasp. Bilbo is a common man. The dwarves come across as common people, depicted as such despite their privileged status as friends of Thorin. Thorin’s royalty, although recognized and magnified at various points in the book, is translated most often in their encounters as the haughtiness of a man who takes himself very seriously—and sometimes rambles when he speaks. That these other twelve dwarves are the personal attendants of the king would almost escape the reader’s notice entirely. To the reader, as to Bilbo, who knows little of kings and courts, these men are fellow adventurers united in common purpose, not exiles of a great kingdom and heirs or owners of an immense, unreachable fortune. Even when he encounters this treasure himself, Bilbo seems to consider the treasure as something almost otherworldly, a piece of the landscape, something that can’t totally concern him even when he is owed, by rights, a fourteenth of the share. The magnitude of its importance only seems to become relevant to him on the eve of the battle that concludes the story.

Keep in mind that this is not to say that the story of The Hobbit lacks these grander legendary elements. One can easily imagine the story of Thorin’s quest told in a manner resembling Tolkien’s First Age material, with a greater focus on Thorin or perhaps Balin. Bilbo’s part would take on an important but altogether differently-framed presence. Rather than comparatively humble everyman, Bilbo would be presented as a mysterious halfling with many secrets, one full of tricks and yet one who pulls through, every time, in a pinch. He disappears during the calamity under Goblin Town only to reappear, with flimsy explanation, hours later and in complete safety. He disappears when the dwarves are captured by the wood elves only to reappear weeks later in their dungeons with intimate knowledge of the fortress and the keys to free his companions. And most impressively, perhaps, he escapes the glare of a dragon in an enclosed hall not once, but twice, and even manages to burgle something from the treasure horde.

If the story were Thorin’s rather than Bilbo’s, one cannot but imagine Bilbo as a creature resembling a gnome¹, or a fae. He certainly would not be the down-to-earth bachelor who seemed to have been plucked quite deliberately out of the home comforts of the English countryside. He’d be tricky, crafty, mysterious. Dangerous, even, given the apparent contradiction between his demeanor and his actions. But Thorin’s account of the tale to retake the mountain—or the story about Thorin, more accurately, as he dies after grasping victory—would be written in the grand styles of royal histories that grow into myth.

The Hobbit contains the same elements of these grand stories and yet Tolkien’s deliberate use of a ‘lower’ style, a children’s style, completely changes how Bilbo is understood. Moreover, this characterization of Bilbo implies to us certain things about Tolkien’s view of the great mythic tragedies, as well. But before those dots should be connected, we should contrast The Hobbit with the other tale in Tolkien’s legendarium that resembles, if only quite distantly, Bilbo’s adventure.

Narrative Space

Although the comparison may come across as outlandish at first, The Children of Hurin bears consideration in our approach. Like The Hobbit, Hurin deals with the death of an evil dragon who took over a mountain kingdom, a magic sword, dealings with dwarves in remote dungeons and elves in dense forested realms, and the seemingly ever-present threat of danger around every turn. They are both also unlike, say, The Lord of the Rings, short and succinct, with their narratives leaving much to the imagination even as they move quickly along from one event to the next.

Make no mistake, the tale of Turin and the tale of Bilbo are not the same tale by any stretch of the imagination. Turin, as described in an earlier post on the subject, is a long-form adventure that follows the doom of a man cursed by the devil incarnate. Included in this doom is the tragic marriage to his sister, and their eventual suicides. Bilbo’s tale is altogether different, features neither marriage nor even any women at all, but this is not grounds for dismissing the comparison.

Hurin was considered in greater detail last month, in which its tragic themes were discussed within the context of divine providence. More specifically, the tale of Turin Turambar was governed by the curse of Morgoth upon his line; the cause of the siblings’ misfortune was exterior to them, and yet it informed their actions and bent their wills toward the doom that Morgoth had prepared. This gave a sense of complicity to their fates that weighed upon the narrative in a way that a more simplistic, modern tragedy—in which the characters are wholly responsible for their own actions, often out of stupidity or excesses of various vices—simply can’t depict.

This interaction and interrelation of agency and world event, of personal action and history that affects all, is built upward by Tolkien into a quiet and failing struggle of evil against the divine providential will as it is alive in history. All things eventually come to be in their proper places, but the influence of evil upon the world might distort the paths by which they arrived there.

As was mentioned in that piece on Hurin, this is a deeply Catholic belief of providence, and one that only someone as religiously devout and informed as Tolkien would have been capable of putting to paper. How it was presented in the tale, however, is more our consideration here: Turin’s story, again, is framed and presented in high prose. It walks a line between fairy tale, high adventure, and mythologic encounter, keeping the characters at a distance while animating and elevating their struggles against what seems like fate.

The style inserts a distance between Turin and the audience that acts as an immediate but unnoticed respect for status. When Turin is acting according to his royal station or as a trusted and elite member of the guard, this sense of space is an elevation. The reader intuitively grasps that Turin’s character is above his own on a social hierarchy, distant in manner not unlike its real world analogue. When he acts according to the stations of outlaws and renegades, this space serves the reverse purpose. Fewer things are as distasteful as a great man who embraces squalor, and yet the distance placed between the reader and the character grants the reader the room to reflect on Turin and to relate, as the reader is able, the character’s struggles to his own. Again, Turin made some wrong decisions, but when judged against his great deeds, the reader cannot but ask: under such circumstances, would I have done any better? Wouldn’t I have fared far worse?

And so Turin’s characterization relies heavily on the style in which The Children of Hurin was written. The same must be admitted for The Hobbit, though it manifests in the opposite way. As alluded to above, Bilbo’s characterization is intimately tied to the ‘lower’ manner of the tale’s style. The reader is thrust into an intimate relation with Bilbo’s character, being afforded much less space between Bilbo and his own thoughts. The informality with which the narrator, too, deals with the audience—interjecting with asides or analogies with not-infrequent regularity—further erodes any sense of intuitive space between the reader and Bilbo specifically. This does not happen in the same way with the dwarves, however, as the dwarves are treated almost as a single unit with only sporadic aspects of distinction between them. Only Balin and Thorin, for the most part, seem to be immune to this rule, but even they are afforded much greater distance to the reader than Bilbo is. This space preserves the regality of Thorin and some part of the legendary aspects of the dwarves altogether, despite some of the more ignoble circumstances they periodically find themselves in.

One could explain away this emphasis on narrative space as mere descriptions of differences in style, but there is more here to be considered. As evidenced from the volumes of notes and commentary made available to the public by Christopher Tolkien, his father’s approach to storytelling was as multi-dimensional as we can presume from this excursus on style. He was keenly aware that narrative style dramatically altered the reader’s intuition of narrative content, which explains why he originally sought his ultimate and unrealized version of The Silmarillion to have been a collection of works of various fictive modes and different styles. The lore of the Eldar Days was intended to have been viewed, as The Lord of the Rings was written explicitly, as recovered documents written by an interlocutor at some unknown point in the past. The entire drama, then, from the creation story of the Ainur’s Music all the way through the last appendices of The Return of the King, was to be understood in a meta-fictional framework. The most obvious traces of this exist in the Book of Lost Tales that he never finished, but it is written there explicitly in The Lord of the Rings as it is referred to by its fictional name: the Red Book of Westmarch. In other words, Tolkien’s legendarium is itself a lengthy meditation on history, fiction, myth, and narrative.

This is why it’s possible to consider The Hobbit’s content apart from the tale itself. The events of the story are recorded in other published writings of Tolkien without the element of the children’s narrative. Style and content are usually wedded together such as to be inseparable except in the cases where multiple stories are told about the same events. Most often, this occurs in history, but in the case of Tolkien’s legendarium, we can see it applied to fictional events, too—and across works.

Tolkien’s interest in creating a self-contained, realistic mythology is well-known, which explains why this is found across the entirety of his legendarium. But what this has to say about The Hobbit in particular, what we are supposed to come away from the book with, is our interest here.

The Answer to Turin

The Hobbit, obviously, does not strike one as a companion piece to the story of Turin Turambar at first glance. Nor, perhaps, even at a second one. But taken together, there remain things to consider about Tolkien’s approach to a life lived to its fullest glory. Turin was a tragic figure, but his tragedy was visible wholly according to the doom placed upon it; had that doom not been there, Turin would not have fallen as he did from the heights of his station, nor would the last moments of his life have been entombed with despair. Bilbo, by contrast, was not knowingly the victim of some great doom, but he unknowingly brought one upon himself as a result of finding the ring. The full extent of this is left detailed in The Lord of the Rings, and only with tangential impacts to be felt by Bilbo himself.

The link here is the role that providence plays in both tales. This was explored in greater depth as it related to Turin in last month’s piece. The role it plays in understanding The Hobbit is best approached when positioning The Hobbit alongside The Lord of the Rings, an endeavor which will not be done within the scope of our writing here. But even setting aside the element of the Ring, and of Bilbo’s acquiring of it (the providential significance of which is detailed at some length in the second chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring), Bilbo’s presence in Thorin’s company abounded in providential significance.

Moreover, The Hobbit’s superficial similarities to The Children of Hurin invite the question of what Tolkien was trying to say in either tale. In Hurin, the strikingly tragic end seems to serve as, taken most charitably, a warning against despair at the recognition of great doom. At several key points in the story, Turin succumbs to despair or mistakenly presumes the beliefs of others, each time tumbling him deeper into the doom prepared for him. On the other hand, as mentioned above, his doom so perfectly fit his character that it almost seems as though it was inescapable.

The Hobbit, however, was written without any overhanging doom draped over it from above. But that isn’t to say it wasn’t necessarily there: although Tolkien did some retroactive retooling of Bilbo’s encounter with Gollum when he wrote The Lord of the Rings, we can still see a certain element of sneakiness burrowing itself in Bilbo’s character the more he used the Ring. Also, too, should we consider how different the events of The Hobbit come across when placed into the greater context of the author’s legendarium. On multiple occasions, Gandalf made explicit reference to a great evil necromancer that resided in Mirkwood, the last of which included a passing reference to the creature’s expulsion. Allusions to other lands and times, other evils and heroes, each serve to highlight how The Hobbit is to be understood as a story taking place in a populated history. That it’s written as a children’s story is not to view it as dismissive of the broader tale that Tolkien had in mind; rather, the style itself must be taken as Bilbo’s characterization. What we are meant to take away from The Hobbit is what Tolkien believed to be the most sensible means of acting in impossible situations.

Great doom did, ultimately, hang about Bilbo, as great doom hung about the quest for Erebor. But Bilbo did not even recognize that it was there. This was an ignorance beyond the simple dismissal of presumed danger. He was too close to the earth (an amusing literary pun) to be bothered by it, and when events in the story threatened to elevate him into a position where that doom might be made visible to him—on the eve of the great battle after the death of the dragon—he simply put his hands up and tried to defuse the situation. Bilbo’s lowly innocence preserved for him any knowledge of great fates beyond what the content of The Hobbit described. Even the events of The Lord of the Rings made him a bystander, at best, to fates of the peoples and the world at large.

When we consider the great tragedy of Turin’s story, we consider a man made victim by an exterior curse to fail to live up to the station granted to him at birth. We consider a highfalutin character who carried with him the nobility of his birthright and the sorrows of his doom. And we consider him within the framework of a high-literary, mythopoeic tale which grants him a certain distance from the reader.

When we consider Bilbo’s story, we consider the opposites of each of these things, despite the tale remaining moored to the same elements of myth and legend. We consider a self-interested but honestly-English bachelor who resides under a hill. We consider a man with only humble beginnings and who carries with him, at first, the indignity of his self-awareness, as well as the plainness of his common sense. And we consider his closeness to us literarily, as if he were next to us in the room or telling the tale from a bar stool.

Bilbo comes across then as one answer to Turin: a turn toward levity away from high-romantic tragedy. True, there are crucial elements unaccounted for from Turin’s story that The Hobbit has no answer to. But the overall approach is worth consideration.

Conclusion

The tragedy of Tolkien’s literary legacy is undoubtedly that he never fully completed what had been on his mind since his earliest forays into the world of Arda and Middle-Earth. His version of the Silmarillion, in its entirety, never reached a state satisfactory enough for him to finally set it aside as finished. As a result, the only works about Middle-Earth that he released were ones very far downstream of his earlier interests in the Eldar Days. As one reads past The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, one cannot help but feel like something of a burglar perusing the dusty cabinets and shelves for treasures that their master had left long hidden. This applies every bit to The Silmarillion as it was published by his son as it does to the voluminous collections of work from The History of Middle-Earth.

As such, aside from the gulf in content differences, perhaps it is unfair to compare The Hobbit to The Children of Hurin. The latter was never given an official release by the author, and indeed, it was never completed. The Hobbit stands on its own, meanwhile, with whatever relevant background or awareness of Middle-Earth that is necessary already baked into its story. Hurin does not, requiring somewhat extensive background on the War of the Jewels to even make sense of who Hurin was and why his son and daughter were cursed. As such, like the rest of his work on the Eldar Days, none of it is particularly self-contained.

Nonetheless, the transition of focus in Tolkien’s earlier work into his later era is somewhat apparent. The Hobbit, although not a later work of his, is in the same direction of focus with its protagonists as his magnum opus, which would be released almost a decade and a half later. His attention to the Eldar Days remained strong toward the end of his life, despite never getting it published, but the general message seems clear.

A good hero is one who fulfills the station placed upon him by divine providence, one who wills himself to cooperate with what seems like fate in the pursuit of bringing good out of great evil. Antagonists fight against providence, often calling it fate, and find that it traps their every action. Villainy and the will to do evil are defined by this rage against God. But the good guys, the heroes, even if they cannot clearly foresee their role in the great plans above their heads—and even those that do—work toward the culmination of the good with simplicity and humble action. Where providence becomes chains around the wicked, it is precisely what frees the good.

1Gnome in a popular sense. Tolkien had called the Noldori ‘gnomes’ in his early efforts to write his First Age material.

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