The Hobbit

by Sheila Connolly

If you haven't heard, today is the 75^th anniversary of the publication of J. R. R. Tolkien's book, The Hobbit.

 

At least, in the United Kingdom.  It took a while to make it to this country.  I still have my copy, a paperback from 1965.  I blush to admit I thought the whole premise sounded silly—short guys with hairy feet?—so I didn't read it until 1966.

 

The Ring Trilogy hit me like a bolt of lightning when I was an impressionable sixteen-year-old.  My best friend, who had discovered it first, gave me a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring as a birthday present in May, and I tore through it—and then ordered The Hobbit and the second and third books of the trilogy (hark back, o readers, to the day when there were no online bookstores, and physical bookstores were widely scattered and unavailable to someone not yet old enough to drive).  The books arrived on the last day of school that year, and I read them all in a mad rush.  I recall bursting into tears at three o'clock one morning when the corsairs of Umbair unfurled the flag of the king…  Okay, I was a nerd.

 

Maybe it's hard to remember the innocent days before Dungeons & Dragons, or the Harry Potter series or George Martin's series, but Tolkien gave birth to a genre that captured a generation.  A scholar of impressive credentials, he created multiple languages within the books, Elvish tongues based on his own academic field.  More important, he tapped into venerable literary traditions that embodied the eternal conflict of good versus evil, and made them sing again.

 

I never forgot the books.  Once a nerd, always a nerd?   I reread the trilogy every summer for at least a decade; I nearly wept when one volume was left out in the rain (and I rushed to replace it). Even now I find myself referring to various elements from the stories.  For example,"mathoms." I live in a house filled with them.  In case you've forgotten, a mathom is a hobbit birthday present.  To quote from the Fellowship of the Ring, "Hobbits give presents to other people on their own birthdays.  Not very expensive ones, as a rule, and not so lavishly… it was not a bad system.  Actually…every day in the year was somebody's birthday, so that every hobbit…had a fair chance of at least one present at least once a week.  But they never got tired of them." Doesn't that sound like a lovely system? (I have a sneaking suspicion that they "regifted.")

 

Whenever I've traveled any significant distance, I find myself repeating:

 

        The Road goes ever on and on
        Down from the door where it began.

 

And then there is "Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger,” which for some reason I find a very useful phrase. It's a much more polite way of saying "butt out."

 

In many ways the books have informed my own writing.  I always felt that Sam was the true hero of the Trilogy, and Frodo was kind of a prig.  That taught me the importance of the sidekick, because no hero can succeed without help: wizards are handy, as are kings and princes, but it's the good friend who saves the day. 

 

If there's a downside to Tolkien's writing, it's that his female characters are less memorable.  He celebrates the heroic quest, but it's mainly the male characters who take the lead.

 

But the flaws don't matter, because the whole is so much greater than the sum of its parts. So let us celebrate the anniversary that marks the beginning of something wonderful. Who would have thought that a race of short creatures with hairy feet would travel so far?