Sue Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I would like to help an acquaintance of mine come
> to an understanding of The Hobbit, and I don't
> feel familiar enough with the book to do a good
> job. Can you help me? [...]

I don't pretend to know too much about any of this (having last read The Hobbit about twenty-five years ago!), but some of the following info from a few books in my possession might be helpful ...

> QUOTE:
> I hope to have some help on understanding how
> Tolkien's "The Hobbit" has become so popular, its
> "meaning" apparently so commanding. (My interest
> in this is the result of my attempt to help my
> niece in her schoolwork.)
>
> Some of the questions I ask about this work are:
>
> Is this an allegory of some kind? If so, what is
> the real substance of it and how does that real
> "message" require so extended a recitation?

As far as allegory is concerned, Tolkien himself wrote in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings, "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers". Tolkien went on to note: "That there is no allegory does not, of course, say there is no applicability. There always is. I think that many confuse 'applicability' with 'allegory'; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author". In my opinion, Tolkien's attempt to create a book that is non-allegorical is precisely the reason it has lasted so well, and continues to find new generations of readers. As Tom Shippey writes in The Road to Middle-earth (1982): "Adventure in Middle-earth embodies a modern meaning, but does not exist to propagate it" (pp. 85).

In Defending Middle-Earth - Tolkien: Myth and Modernity (1997), Patrick Curry includes the following snippet as an illustration of the reductionist tendency to find fairly straightforward allegories (ie. literal or one-to-one interpretation) in Tolkien's The Hobbit:

"One tiny example, out of a multitude: it has been asserted* (with a degree of seriousness which is hard to determine) that The Hobbit represents an alliance between the lower-middle class (Bilbo) and skilled workers, especially working-class miners (the dwarves), in order to overcome a parasitic capitalist exploiter who 'lives off the hard work of small people and accumulates wealth without being able to appreciate its value' (the dragon). This is genuinely interesting, as well as enjoyable; but it says at least as much about Marxism as a fairy-tale as it does about The Hobbit , and hardly exhausts either [...]"(pp. 17).

*Jack Zipes' Breaking the Magic Spell (1979)

Add to this Tolkien's own complaint in one of his many letters: "To ask if the Orcs 'are' Communists is to me as sensible as asking if Communists are Orcs".

Having said that, the complexities of Tolkien's views on the nature of 'allegory' (particularly his critical stance on the misuse of allegory to reduce a text to a single meaning) are readily apparent in the following extract from John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003):

"[...] Even in the midst of the Somme, Tolkien wrote that the war was 'for all the evil of our own side in the large view good against evil'. Yet on the battlefield he had faced an enemy with all the hallmarks of humanity. Meanwhile, the Allies also used poison gas and unofficially sanctioned the killing of captives. Tolkien later insisted there was no parallel between the Goblins he had invented [in 'The Fall of Gondolin', an early story written in 1917] and the Germans he had fought, declaring, 'I've never had those sort of feelings about the Germans. I'm very anti that kind of thing' [...].

"[...] Like Robert Louis Stevenson in 'Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde', Tolkien took the confused moral landscape of the real world and attempted to clarify it into polarities of good and evil; but he applied the principle on an epic scale. He explained his approach much later in a letter to his son Christopher. 'I think the orcs as real a creation as anything in "realistic" fiction', he wrote, 'only in real life they are on both sides, of course. For "romance" has grown out of "allegory", and its wars are still derived from the "inner war" of allegory in which good is on one side and various modes of badness on the other. In real (exterior) life men are on both sides: which means a motley alliance of orcs, beasts, demons, plain naturally honest men, and angels'. So it might be said that the Goblins [in 'The Fall of Gondolin'] embody 'all the evil of our own side' in the real war, as well as all the evil on the German side. They wreck and pillage, and they kill prisoners. The Gnomes of Gondolin, meanwhile, embody virtues on which no nation had a monopoly. They represent (as he wrote of his Elves in general) 'beauty and grace of life and artefact' [...]" (pp. 218-219).

As far as searching for 'meaning' is concerned, I do feel it's useful to remember that Tolkien expressly wrote The Hobbit for his own young children. For more on the importance of story-telling itself, I think the following from from Patrick Curry's Defending Middle-Earth - Tolkien: Myth and Modernity makes some pertinent points:

"[...] The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings are first and foremost, as Tolkien claimed, stories; and ones written by a master story-teller. This is already important for understanding both Tolkien's popular success and his critical slating. Philip Pullman, upon winning the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in July 1996, put it perfectly: 'in adult literary fiction, stories are there on sufferance. Other things are felt to be more important: technique, style, literary knowingness. Adult readers who do deal in straightforward stories find themselves sidelined into a genre such as crime or science fiction, where no-one expects literary craftsmanship'. Or children's books, which The Lord of the Rings is frequently misrepresented as being; or fairy-tales, one of its principal inspirations. 'But', Pullman continued, 'stories are vital. Stories never fail us because, as Isaac Bashevis Singer says, "events never grow stale". There's more wisdom in a story than in volumes of philosophy'. Most present-day writers, however, are highly anxious to be seen as Grown-Ups. They therefore 'take up their stories as if with a pair of tongs. They're embarrassed by them. If they could write novels without stories in them, they would. Sometimes they do' [...]" (pp. 19).

> If the story is Bilbo's discovery of his courage
> through adventures directed by Gandalf, how are
> the episodes *in turn* to be explained as
> effecting that? Would it matter if many of them
> were interchanged?

As far as Bilbo's apparent discovery of his courage is concerned, the following from John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003) is possibly of interest:

"[...] [Tolkien found the phenomenon of the 'ennoblement of the ignoble' through hardship and fear deeply moving]. 'On a journey of a length sufficient to provide the untoward in any degree from discomfort to fear', he once wrote, in a transparent reference to the Great War [1914-1918], 'the change in companions well known in "ordinary life" (and in oneself) is often startling'. The potential for such change or ennoblement in the face of danger lies at the heart of all his portrayals of character [...]" (pp. 275-276).

In his acclaimed essay on the Anglo-Saxon poem, Beowulf ("Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics", 1936), Tolkien describes "the theory of courage" as "the great contribution of early Northern literature" (although having said that, it has to be said that the kind of courage displayed by Bilbo in The Hobbit - in contrast to the courage of the dwarves - is distinct from the forms of courage idealised in Beowulf or the Eddic poems or Norse saga; interestingly, the dwarves also credit Bilbo with the 'possession' of luck, which shares significant similarities with the notion of luck found in early northern literature). As far as The Hobbit is concerned, Tolkien also takes from Beowulf (among other things) the idea of a thief "stealing a cup [from the dragon's hoard], and then returning, eventually in a company of thirteen" (Shippey, 2000).

For a detailed discussion of The Hobbit I'd recommend chapter 1 ("The Hobbit: Re-inventing Middle-earth") of Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000). It's also important to bear in mind that Tolkien had been creating an imaginary mythological world for more than twenty years before The Hobbit, in the collection of tales subsequently published as The Silmarillion and the successive volumes of The History of Middle-earth (edited by Tolkien's son, and published after his father's death). For an intriguing account of Tolkien's earlier work and his formative years, I'd strongly recommend John Garth's Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003).
In answer to the direct question above about the structure of The Hobbit, the following extract from Shippey's book might be useful:

"The two sides of The Hobbit are [...] fairly clear: on the one side, there is modern middle-class English Bilbo, on the other the archaic world which lies behind both vulgar folk-tale and its aristocratic, indeed heroic ancestors. The former is represented by clocks and fussiness - Bilbo gasping out, 'I didn't get your note till after 10.45 to be precise', and feeling he cannot leave home without a pocket-handkerchief. The latter is created by poetry and the Misty Mountains and Bilbo feeling how grand it would be to 'wear a sword instead of a walking-stick'. Naturally the two sides are going to clash, and much of The Hobbit is about the clash of styles, attitudes, behaviour patterns - though in the end one might conclude that they are not as far apart as they first seemed, and that Bilbo has just as much right to the archaic world and its treasures as Thorin or Bard. However the pressing problem for Tolkien was perhaps not to introduce the archaic world - much of which, as has been said above, has long been familiar at least in its personnel even to child readers [ie. through folk-tales, fairy-tales etc.] - as to give it intellectual coherence, to make the reader feel that it had a sort of existence outside the immediate narrative. Tolkien solved this problem, in The Hobbit , if quite differently in The Lord of the Rings, by flexible and intrusive use of the authorial voice [...].

"[...] n his essay on 'Some of Tolkien's Narrators' in the very recent collection Tolkien's 'Legendarium', Paul Edmund Thomas lists some 45 cases of direct address by the narrator of The Hobbit, and this does not include some of the types of interjection discussed here [...].

"[...] By the end of The Hobbit - and this was one of the reasons for the immediate demand for a sequel - a detailed and consistent picture of the fairy-tale world, and of many of its inhabitants, had been generated. Tolkien had to set the scene, indeed to guarantee that there was a scene to set, before the story could be allowed to unroll.

"The story itself is highly episodic, and so not easy to summarize. Briefly, one may say that the book's nineteen chapters divide approximately half and half into the adventures which Bilbo and the dwarves have before they reach the Lonely Mountain and the lair of Smaug the dragon; and the complexities surrounding the gaining, guarding and sharing of the dragon's treasure once the Lonely Mountain has been reached. Chapters tend to come in threes, with numbers 1 to 3 getting the company as far as the Misty Mountains, where they are captured by goblins; 4 to 6 dealing with the crossing of the mountains, including Bilbo winning the magic ring of invisibility; and 7 to 9 set in Mirkwood, where Bilbo uses his ring twice to rescue the dwarves first from the giant spiders, and second from the Wood-elves' prison. Chapters 12 to 14 deal with Bilbo's first two attempts to 'burgle' Smaug, the dragon's attempted revenge and final death at the hands of Bard the Bowman; and chapters 15 to 17 with the quarrels over the treasure, between dwarves, elves, men and eventually goblins. The last two chapters are an evident coda, returning Bilbo to his home; while the two central chapters 10 and 11 mark a kind of transition, as Bilbo emerges for a short while from an entirely archaic and romantic world to a world once more dominated by human beings, humdrum ideas of 'business' and the Master of Laketown, even more of a bourgeois than Bilbo.

"None of these divisions, of course, is vital, and it quite likely that Tolkien did not plan them or pay any attention to them. They do show, however, how Tolkien fed in the fairy-tale elements one at a time, introducing them separately for many chapters before making much attempt to combine them, so that they go, in order of chapters: dwarves (and a wizard); t rolls; elves; goblins; Gollum; wargs and eagles; Beorn; wood-elves and spiders (so chapters 1 to 8), with after that only one entirely novel figure introduced - Smaug in chapter 12 - and the interaction of all the creatures previously mentioned, apart from Gollum and the t rolls, in the negotiations over the treasure and the Battle of the Five Armies. The other aspect of this one-at-a-time presentation, though, is the steady rise of Biblo's status, and the increasing evenness of the confrontation between the modern values he represents and the ancient ones he encounters [...]" (pp. 18, 20-21).

> Where did the dwarves get the gold held now by the
> dragon, and why is Gandalf, whose powers suggest
> he is above material concerns, aid them in their
> retrieving it?

Just off the top of my head, doesn't the dragon's hoard have its origins in treasures originally mined and crafted by the dwarves themselves before Smaug's arrival at the Lonely Mountain [although just having had a look at some of the other posts on this thread, it seems I've possibly got the wrong end of the stick here]? As for Gandalf himself, isn't his allegiance primarily to the dwarves themselves, and what they represent, rather than to the retrieval of the treasure per se?

Interestingly enough, Tolkien derived the names of nearly all of the dwarves in The Hobbit from the Old Norse poem Voluspa. 'Gandalf' (or rather the Old Norse equivalent, 'Gandalfr') is also included in this original list of dwarves' names, and - according to Tom Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2000) - Gandalf was the name Tolkien originally gave to the chief dwarf in original drafts of the story, "while in the first edition what Bilbo sees that first morning is just 'a little old man'. Even in the first edition, however, the little old man's staff soon comes into the story, while by the third edition - Tolkien made significant changes in both the second and third editions, 1951 and 1966 - Gandalf has become 'an old man with a staff' (my emphasis). This seems highly suitable [...]. It looks as if Tolkien sooner or later interpreted the first element of 'Gandalfr', quite plausibly, as 'wand' or 'staff', while the second element, as [mentioned previously], obviously means 'elf' [a creature in all tradition quite distinct from a dwarf]. Now Gandalf in Tolkien is definitely not an elf, but then it turns out that he is not just an 'old man' either [...]. Tolkien seems to have concluded at some point that 'Gandalfr' meant 'staff-elf', and that this must be the name for a wizard. And yet the name is there in the Dvergatal [ie. 'the Tally of the Dwarves', the section of the Voluspa mentioned above], so that the wizard must in some way have been mixed up with dwarves. Could it be that the reason the Dvergatal had been preserved was that it was the last fading record of something that once had happened, some great event in a non-human mythology, an Odyssey of the dwarves? This is, anyway, what Tolkien makes of it. The Hobbit, one might say, is the story that lies behind and makes sense of the Dvergatal [...]" (pp. 17).

> Why is the Golum the owner of the magical ring,
> and why does that episode occur when it does in
> Bilbo's story?

As I recall, the means by which Gollum comes into possession of the Ring are described in detail in The Lord of the Rings, but I can't remember the details enough to go into specifics here.

Although this doesn't directly address the question asked above, the following from Shippey's J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (2003) is interesting, and should go some way towards contextualising the existing text of The Hobbit as a quite extensive reworking of earlier editions in which the basic structure had already been established (which should also serve as a helpful warning to anyone interested in pocking and prodding at the text as though it emerged fully formed from the imagination of the author, or as if it was fully realised - in its present form - before Tolkien started work on The Lord of the Rings):

"[...] Tolkien had to do a good deal of work [...] in modifying what he had said about the ring, Bilbo's ring, the ring not yet imagined as the One Ruling Ring, in the first edition of The Hobbit. It comes as rather a shock to anyone who has gathered the story from The Lord of the Rings and a later edition of The Hobbit, to go back and read the account of Bilbo's contest with Gollum in the first 1937 edition of The Hobbit. The surprising thing is that Gollum is not all that attached to his 'precious'. He wagers it against Bilbo's life; he loses the riddle-contest; but then he does his best to play fair. When he cannot find the ring (for it is already in Bilbo's pocket), he apologizes profusely for not being able to pay up, and Bilbo, being in a tight corner, accepts Gollum's offer to show him the way out instead. They part on something close to good terms, with Gollum's last words being:

'Here'ss the passage ... It musst squeeze in and sneak down. We dursn't go with it, my precious, no we dursn't, gollum'.
"From the second edition of 1951 onwards, by contrast, his last words are:

'Thief, thief, thieft! Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever!'

"Tolkien retained the original and alternative version as the story which Bilbo had told Gandalf and the others, a story in which his claim to the ring was significantly stronger: the fact that Bilbo lied about this is, in The Lord of the Rings, an ominous sign that the Ring is gaining power over him, becoming (he uses the same word as Gollum and Isildur), his 'precious'. But this original version of the story contradicts one of the basic facts which we are later told about the Ring, which is that its owners from Isildur on, Gollum included, do not abandon it - it abandons them [...]" (pp. 112-113).

> =======================================
>
> I would appreciate answers to the above questions
> and will be thankful for any other notes that help
> me find any respect for this - as I now see it

I'm intrigued by this rather peculiar turn of phrase. Tell us more ...

Damian

LOL - it's seems discussion of trolls (t r o l l s) is no longer an option on this MB (hence my strange spacing above). There go all those interesting discussions about Norse mythology ...




Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/09/2005 04:15PM by Damian Walter.