The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien – The Door in the Hill That Changed Everything

52 Books in a Year – Week 10

Let me tell you something that I think gets lost amid all the mythology surrounding Tolkien and his work. He wrote the opening line of The Hobbit on a blank piece of exam paper he was marking. Just like that. No grand plan. No architecture of Middle-earth was already mapped out in his head. He simply wrote, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," and then apparently sat back and thought, well, I had better figure out what a hobbit is.

That spontaneity, that sense of a story arriving rather than being constructed, is something you can feel on every page of this book. And that, I think, is a large part of why it works so completely.

The Man Behind the Door

Before we get into the story itself, I want to spend a moment with Tolkien, because understanding who he was makes The Hobbit considerably more interesting.

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in South Africa in 1892, orphaned young, raised in the West Midlands by a Catholic priest, and had lost almost all of his closest friends to the Battle of the Somme by the time he was twenty-four. He was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford. He was, in the most literal academic sense, the man you would choose if you wanted someone to understand the oldest stories in the English language. He had read Beowulf not as literature but as living mythology. He had worked on the Oxford English Dictionary. He had been quietly building languages, actual grammatical languages with their own internal logic, for years before a single word of The Hobbit existed.

Here is the fact that still stops me cold. Tolkien had been developing the mythology of Middle-earth, what would eventually become The Silmarillion, since around 1917. He was writing it for himself. Not for publication. Not for an audience. He was constructing an entire cosmology because he felt England lacked a mythology of its own comparable to the Norse or Finnish traditions, and he wanted to give it one. The Hobbit, written roughly between 1930 and 1936 and published in 1937, was essentially a side door into a world that had already been quietly existing in his study for nearly two decades.

His publisher, Stanley Unwin, gave the manuscript to his ten-year-old son Rayner to assess. Rayner wrote a review saying it was good and that all children would enjoy it. He was paid a shilling. He was not wrong.

There and Back Again

The plot, if you have somehow arrived at this blog without knowing it, is deceptively simple. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit. Hobbits are small, comfort-loving, deeply unadventurous creatures who live in holes in the ground and are very fond of their armchairs. A wizard called Gandalf arrives at his door with thirteen dwarves and an adventure Bilbo absolutely does not want, and Bilbo goes on it anyway. He helps the dwarves reclaim their mountain kingdom from a dragon called Smaug. He finds a ring. He comes home changed.

That last bit is the whole thing, really. He comes home changed. That is the architecture of the Hero's Journey in its most honest and intimate form, and Tolkien executes it with a grace that makes it look effortless, which is the most deceptive trick a writer can pull.

What I keep coming back to with The Hobbit is how confidently Tolkien trusts his own world. He does not over-explain. He does not pause to reassure you that what you are reading is internally consistent. It simply is. The Shire feels real because Tolkien has lived there in his imagination long before you arrive. The Misty Mountains feel ancient because, for Tolkien, they were ancient, rooted in mythological traditions he had spent his career studying. You are not reading invented geography. You are reading somewhere.

Bilbo

Bilbo Baggins is one of the great comic creations in English literature and I will not be talked out of that position.

He is fussy and domestic and perpetually concerned about his pocket handkerchief. He is not brave in any conventional sense. He does not want glory. He actively resents being taken away from his pantry. And yet, chapter by chapter, situation by situation, he keeps doing the brave thing. Not because he has been transformed into a hero. Because it turns out he always had it in him and just never had occasion to find out.

That is a much more interesting story than a character who arrives already heroic. It asks the reader something personal. What would you do? Not in some grand, abstract, battlefield sense. In the dark of a tunnel, alone, with something awful nearby, what would you actually do? Bilbo's answer, consistently and often against his better judgement, is the right one. And because he is so relatable in his reluctance, it feels like something you might be capable of too. That is extraordinarily good writing.

There is also something I want to flag about Bilbo's relationship with the ring and with Gollum, because the riddle game in the dark is, in my view, the single finest scene in the book. Two creatures, one of them barely recognisable as what it once was, trading riddles in the dark with Bilbo's life as the prize. It is tense and strange and quietly heartbreaking if you let yourself think about what Gollum is. Tolkien apparently invented Gollum almost as casually as he invented hobbits. What he stumbled into was one of the most psychologically rich characters in the entire tradition of fantasy literature.

Smaug

I have to talk about Smaug. Because Smaug is extraordinary.

He is vain and he is intelligent and he is deeply, specifically dangerous in the way that only a creature who has been lying on a pile of gold for a hundred and seventy years can be. He knows his hoard. He knows it by feel, by smell. He notices the cup that Bilbo steals almost immediately, a detail that connects directly back to what I wrote about the dragon in the Beowulf blog. In fact, Tolkien scholars have noted that the Smaug episode draws explicitly on the dragon in Beowulf, that ancient, terrible creature who burns a kingdom over a stolen cup. Tolkien was not borrowing casually. He was consciously reaching back into the mythological tradition he had spent his life studying and pulling that dragon forward into a new story.

He even said so. Tolkien wrote in a letter that the dragon episode was, and I am paraphrasing here, the least original part of the book and the one he was most proud of. Because he knew exactly where it came from and knew exactly what he was doing with it.

The conversation between Bilbo and Smaug, conducted through flattery and riddle and half-truth, with Bilbo invisible and Smaug knowing perfectly well someone is there, is the kind of scene that reminds you why dialogue is the sharpest tool in a novelist's kit. Smaug is not just menacing. He is compelling. You almost like him. That is the mark of a great antagonist.

What Tolkien Built and What It Cost Him

Here is the thread I keep pulling at with these books. Every great work on this list has been, underneath its adventure and its mythology, about something deeply personal to the person who made it. Gilgamesh is about grief. The Iliad is about pride and its consequences. The Mahabharata is about the cost of righteousness. Beowulf is about mortality.

The Hobbit is, I think, about the danger of staying comfortable.

Tolkien lived through the First World War. He lost Geoffroy Bache Smith and Rob Gilson, two of his closest friends from a group they called the Tea Club and Barrovian Society, a gathering of young men who met in a Birmingham tea room to talk about literature and language and the world they intended to make things in. They did not all get to make things in it. Tolkien survived. He carried that with him. And I do not think it is reading too much into the text to suggest that the Shire, that perfect, bounded, comfortable world that Bilbo cannot bring himself to leave, and the adventure that tears him out of it, carries some of that feeling. The knowledge that comfort is precious and also, sometimes, a kind of trap.

Bilbo comes back to the Shire to find his neighbours auctioning off his furniture, having assumed he was dead. He has been gone so long that the comfortable world has simply continued without him. And he does not quite fit back into it the same way. He is, from that point forward, considered a bit peculiar. Respectable families do not go on adventures.

He seems absolutely fine with that. Better than fine.

Why This Book Belongs on Every List

I said in the Prose Edda entry that reading it was like going back to the source code of modern fantasy. The Hobbit is the moment that source code became a living, breathing, widely read literature. It is the book that made the genre. Not single-handedly, not without predecessors, but with a clarity and a joy and a completeness of world that nothing before it had quite managed.

Tolkien brought together the Norse mythology he loved, the Anglo-Saxon tradition he had devoted his academic life to, the Finnish mythology that had captivated him since he first encountered the Kalevala as a young man, and the particular English pastoral sensibility of rolling green hills and warm fires and the deep, specific pleasure of a good meal. He made something new out of all of it. Something that felt, paradoxically, ancient.

And he did it on a blank exam paper, on a line he wrote without quite knowing where it came from, about a creature he had not yet invented living in a hole in the ground.

Some stories do not get planned. They arrive. This one arrived, and it brought an entire world with it.

Final Verdict

★★★★★ (5/5)

There was never going to be any other rating. The Hobbit is a perfect book. Not in the sense that it has no rough edges or that it does everything a novel can do. It does not try to. It is perfect in the sense that it does exactly what it sets out to do, does it with complete confidence, and leaves you at the end feeling as though something has been given to you that you did not know you were missing.

Read it as a child and you get an adventure. Read it as an adult and you get something quieter and more personal. The reluctant hero. The comfortable life interrupted. The discovery that you were capable of more than you thought, and the bittersweet knowledge that once you know that, you cannot un-know it.

Bilbo never quite fits back into his armchair the same way. Neither, honestly, do you.

Next Up: The Fellowship of the Ring - We have to get through it, and you know what’s coming!