The Hobbit -- a review

Where were you when . . . ?

I do not remember where I was the first time I read most books. But I do remember where I was when I first read The Hobbit. I was working in the State Office of the Oklahoma Welfare Department and going to college. I was not yet married and had no children.

The Hobbit was ostensibly a children’s book. My attitude has always been that if I hadn’t read a book when I was the traditional age to read that book, then now was as good a time as any. I’ve since read The Hobbit three times and as of yesterday, a fourth.

The first time I could read it only on breaks, at lunch, and in between classes and studying, and those my normal life activities that seemed necessary. I resented terribly those intrusions into the world Tolkien was telling me about. The wizard and dwarves, the trolls, the goblins and worgs. (Such a change from the classical fare one gets in college literature classes! Thackary and George Elliot and the so-called modern writers James Joyce and that other James boy, Henry. My professors must have been as old as they seemed.) The spiders and elves and the dragon. It was awful to have to quit reading and enter data into the computer or answer the phone or read an assignment when what I really wanted was to find out if Bilbo Baggins survived.

Thank goodness, the book is both short and a quick read. I wasn’t left long, dangling by a thick thread of spider’s silk or wandering through a dark and dangerous wood or trapped in an elf king’s subterranean castle or a dragon’s lair.

Now when I read it, I know the end and life’s interruptions don’t seem so frustrating and I can think fondly of my return to Bilbo’s story. Now my only dissatisfaction is that my grandchildren live 817 miles away and I can’t read it to them. Tolkien wrote this book to be read aloud. You can hear it in his conversational telling of the story.

“Now goblins are cruel, wicked, and bad-hearted. They make no beautiful things, but they make many clever ones. They can tunnel and mine as well as any but the most skilled dwarves, when they take the trouble, though they are usually untidy and dirty.”

It’s like sitting before the fireplace with your favorite uncle and you’re not sure that his stories are not true. In fact, you hope they are true. And even though it’s quiet and safe where you are, you can see and feel and smell Bilbo’s dangers and he’s no bigger or stronger than you are.

Maybe I shall have to barge into my neighbor’s home at bedtime and read to their children. Tonight, and tomorrow night, and the night after that until our hobbit is safely back in his hobbit hole under the hill with his sword hung over the mantelpiece and his coat of mail lent to a museum. Of course even his homecoming turned out to be an adventure of sorts.