in a hole in the ground by shilo pearle thesis bachelor of
TRANSCRIPT
In a Hole in the Ground
There Lived a Novel of Not so Little Consequence
by
Shilo Pearle
Thesis
Submitted in partial fulfilment of the
requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with
Honours in English
Acadia University
April, 2014
© Copyright by Shilo Pearle, 2014
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This thesis by Shilo Pearle
is accepted in its present form by the
Department of English
as satisfying the thesis requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with Honours
Approved by the Thesis Supervisor
.
Dr. Kevin Whetter Date
Approved by the Head of the Department
.
Dr. John Eustace Date
Approved by the Honours Committee
.
Dr. Matthew Lukeman Date
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I, SHILO PEARLE, grant permission to the University Librarian at Acadia University to reproduce, loan or distribute copies of my thesis in
microform, paper or electronic formats on a non-profit basis. I, however, retain the copyright in my thesis.
_________________________________
Signature of Author
_________________________________
Date
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Acknowledgement
I would like to take this opportunity to thank my thesis advisor Dr. Kevin
Whetter, without whose help I would have never made it to the end of my
quest. Dr. Whetter, you have been my guiding Gandalf. It has been a
long and tough road at times, but you encouraged me every step of the
way, and helped me find my own footing. Thank you for helping me
tackle my own dragon.
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………. vii
Abstract………………………………………………………………………. xi
Introductions ………………………………………………………………. 1
Chapter 1: True Faërie …………………………………………………… 4
Chapter 2: The Minor Works ……………………………………………. 17
Chapter 3: The Soup Ingredients ……………………………………… 30
Chapter 4: The Soup as Soup ………………………………………….. 51
Conclusion ………………………………………………………………….. 70
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………… 72
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Abstract
In this thesis, I endeavour to explain why The Hobbit deserves further
critical research. First, in Chapter One, I illustrate the key elements
which Tolkien believed must be contained within a genuine fairy story.
Next I consider two of Tolkien’s pre-hobbit minor works, Mr. Bliss and
Roverandom, and how they fall short of being true fairy stories. I then
begin to examine The Hobbit itself. In Chapter Three I focus on some of
the works which had significant influence on Tolkien while writing The
Hobbit. In the final chapter, I explore some of the current critical studies
on the novel and attempt to show how these studies do not do The Hobbit
justice. I also attempt to comment on some of the characters which
scholars tend to overlook, such as the Mirkwood elves, and the eagles.
Drawing attention to these shortcomings in the current studies of The
Hobbit confirms that more critical research must be done. Overall, I
venture to establish that The Hobbit has been greatly, and wrongly,
ignored by scholars.
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Introduction
J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit has, for too long, been overlooked by
researchers in their rush to get to his larger saga, The Lord of the Rings.
Critics, such as Randel Helms, argue that “[t]aken in and for itself,
Tolkien’s children’s story deserves little serious, purely literary criticism”
(Helms 52). This is truly surprising, as The Hobbit has so much to offer.
Moreover, what little research that has been done on The Hobbit is
unconvincing at best. Therefore, in this thesis, I will explain why, based
on the many elements that Tolkien skilfully weaves together in creating
the novel, The Hobbit deserves further critical research, thus proving that
it does stand-up as a true Tolkienian fairy story along with The Lord of
the Rings.
First, in Chapter One, I illustrate the key elements which Tolkien
believed must be contained within a genuine fairy story as laid out in his
own critical essay “On Fairy-Stories” in other words, those elements
which make up the soup of fairy tale. I will return to this idea of story as
“soup” throughout this thesis, but as Chapter One makes clear, the
metaphor itself is Tolkien’s and is important in assessing his
understanding of the genre. I will also clarify why Tolkien’s own scholarly
works are the best critical basis for evaluating his own work.
In Chapter Two I consider two of Tolkien’s pre-hobbit minor works,
Mr. Bliss and Roverandom, and how they are not representative of true
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Tolkienian fairy stories. By examining these earlier works, I also
demonstrate Tolkien’s development as a writer. This development is
important since it establishes The Hobbit as something more than just
bed-time reading for his own children. The Hobbit was more carefully
thought-out than its reputation as mere bed-time fantasy allows, and,
while originally created for entertainment, The Hobbit was also designed
with a greater meaning and purpose than those of Tolkien’s earlier minor
works.
In the third chapter, I explore the soup ingredients: the literary
elements of depth which Tolkien thoughtfully infused into The Hobbit.
The soup and its flavour or depth is an important element to consider,
because as I discuss in Chapter One, the literary elements which an
author infuses into her or his own writing are of the utmost importance
in creating a well-crafted Tolkeinian fairy story. Though there are many
literary texts which Tolkien drew upon, I focus on the Elder Edda,
Beowulf, and the Bible, as they are representative of some of Tolkien’s
most significant influences while writing The Hobbit.
In the final chapter, I examine The Hobbit as a stand-alone novel,
as it was originally intended. I begin by looking at some of the current
critical studies on the novel, especially those which focus on Freudian
theories, and attempt to show how these studies do not do The Hobbit
justice. I also attempt to comment on some of the characters which
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scholars tend to overlook, such as the Mirkwood elves, and the eagles.
Drawing attention to these failings in the current studies of The Hobbit
confirms that more critical research must be done. Overall, I will attempt
to establish that The Hobbit has been greatly, and wrongly, ignored by
scholars in their rush to get to The Lord of the Rings.
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Chapter 1
True Faërie
Tolkien first publically presented his theories on what a fairy story
should be in his Andrew Lang lecture at the University of St. Andrews
March 11, 1939. In 1947 he formalised his argument and published his
critical essay “On Fairy-Stories.” In his essay, Tolkien discusses what
does and does not make a good fairy story. In order for a story to be
considered an authentic fairy story, it must create a balance between the
Primary and Secondary Worlds, present any magical or fantastic
elements as truth, embrace a completeness and depth, contain a
“eucatastrophic” ending, and impart the unique essence of Faërie unto
the reader. Tolkien excludes from fairy stories beast fables and any story
which uses dream machinery to explain (or rather explain away) the
fantastic. This first chapter will attempt to elucidate Tolkien’s argument
and explain why and how it must be used as the primary critical analysis
of Tolkien’s own work.
Before Tolkien laid out his formula for creating a good fairy story,
the predominate theories where those of Max Müller and Andrew Lang.
Both men were part of the “age of collectors” when theorists were more
concerned with the origins of fairytales than the stories themselves
(Flieger, “There Would Always be a Fairy Tale” 28). Müller believed that
everything could be traced back to solar phenomenon. Thus,
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Any time a hero went into a cave or travelled from east to
west or died in a battle – that was the sun setting; a hero
vanquishing a dragon was the rising sun conquering the
night, and so on. … Müller’s philological principle ruled
uncontested for nearly a decade before it was … [dethroned
by] Andrew Lang. (Flieger, “There Would Always be a Fairy-
Tale” 30)
Andrew Lang, on the other hand, contested that fairy stories, like
humanity, “had evolved culturally from a ‘primitive’ to a ‘civilized’ state;”
concluding that children also evolve from a primitive to civilized state led
Lang “directly to the concomitant assumption that in a post childhood –
that is to say, modern – world, fairy-tales would only, indeed could only,
be enjoyed by children” (Flieger, “There Would Always be a Fairy-Tale”
30). Thus, for Lang, fairy-tales were a primitive kind of story, only worthy
of children. While both of these theories will come across as preposterous
to modern scholars, they were valid and convincing arguments of the late
nineteenth century. Therefore, it is important to understand these two
major theories of fairytale before we delve into “On Fairy-Stories” because
Tolkien disputes and expands on both of these theories.
The point that Tolkien most strongly disputes is Andrew Lang’s
theory that fairy stories are meant solely for children. The assumption
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that fairy stories should be especially affiliated with children, according
to Tolkien, is
an error … by those who … tend to think of children as a
special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than
as normal, if immature, members … of the human family at
large. … Fairy-stories have … been relegated to the ‘nursery’,
as shabby or old-fashioned furniture is relegated to the
playroom, primarily because the adults do not want it, and
do not mind if it is misused. It is not the choice of children
which decides this. (Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 34)
Tolkien employed furniture as a metaphor to highlight the fact that
adults often give children things which they no longer want. The
assumption is that children will damage anything we give them;
therefore, it is best not to give them anything of value, be it furniture, or
fairytales. It is not for lack of value that fairytales have been overlooked,
but rather years of being trapped in the nursery, continually mishandled
by children and ignored by adults. All fairy stories really need is some
glue and a new coat of paint. “The value of fairy-stories is thus not … to
be found by considering children in particular” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-
Stories” 36). To this end, Tolkien disarms Lang’s argument that fairy-
stories can only be enjoyed by children and, subsequently, opens them
up for further critical exploration.
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Moreover, Tolkien acknowledges that writers of fairy stories may
rely on children’s
credulity [and] lack of experience which makes it less easy
for children to distinguish fact from fiction in particular
cases[;however,] the distinction in itself is fundamental to
the sane human mind, and to fairy-stories (Tolkien, “On
Fairy-Stories” 37).
Children may be more accepting of the fantastic; however, it is a natural
human ability to distinguish truth from fiction. The true writer of fairy
will be aware of this human instinct and attempt to convince his or her
reader that the story is true. Above all else the story must be presented
as true, because “[t]he moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the
magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World
again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside”
(Tolkien “On Fairy-Stories" 37). In order to avoid this breakdown, Tolkien
believed that fairy stories should have a completeness which would give
the story more credibility. “[I]t is difficult to achieve … ‘the inner
consistency of reality’ [because] [a]nyone inheriting the fantastic device of
human language can say the green sun. Many can then imagine or
picture it. But that is not enough” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 49). The
ability to make the green sun believable “will probably require labour and
thought, and will certainly demand a special skill, a kind of elvish craft”
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(Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 49). Based on this assumption, Tolkien
concludes that fantasy is not a lower form of art as many of his
contemporaries believed, but in fact a higher form of art in general. The
ability to achieve the “inner consistency of reality” is most important
because without it the “art has failed.”
Another crucial point for Tolkien in making a good fairy-story is
creating a balance. There must be a harmony between the fantastic and
reality. Consistently, Tolkien, and his critics, speak of an “arresting
strangeness” to fantasy tales. The “arresting strangeness” consists of the
elements which are different from our own world, but that the realm of
Faërie does contain. “Arresting strangeness, however, is at once an
advantage and debility of the fairy-story, for people generally do not like
meddling with the Primary World” (Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 48). For
this reason, there must also be elements in the story which relate to our
Primary World. As one critic argues:
‘hard recognition,’ or direct tie to the Primary World, is one
aspect of fantasy that must work in tandem with the other
aspects, even that “arresting strangeness” that it seems to
oppose. The best fairy-story will have both. (Northrup 810)
If the ratio of reality to fantasy is correct then the author will have taken
the reader into what has been called a “willing suspension of disbelief.”
Though for Tolkien, such disbelief
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does not seem … a good description of what happens. What
really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful
‘sub-creator’. He makes a Secondary World which your mind
can enter. Inside it, what he relates is ‘true’: it accords with
the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are,
as it were, inside. (Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 37)
Finding this balance between Primary and Secondary World is necessary,
because having too many elements of either world will automatically
cause the reader to retreat into the Primary World which it is more
familiar and, as noted above, this defeats the purpose of fantasy art. To
this end Tolkien excludes “beast-fables” and any story which would use
“dream machinery” as bases for fairy-tale. Tolkien
would exclude from the title ‘fairy-story’ … ‘Beast-fable.’ …
Beasts and birds and other creatures often talk like men in
real fairy-stories. In some part (often small) this marvel
derives from one of the primal ‘desires’ that lie near the heart
of Faërie: the desire of men to hold communion with other
living things; [however, the] magical understanding by men
of proper languages of birds and beasts and trees, that is
much nearer to the true purposes of Faërie. (Tolkien “On
Fairy-Stories” 15)
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Men may learn the languages of animals, but animals should not be able
to communicate through human language, nor should animals be the
focus of the tale. For Tolkien, it appears that these aspects of beast-
fables drift too far away from the Primary World and the magic of Faërie
becomes “fanciful.”
The use of “Dream Machinery,” on the other hand, Tolkien
excludes because it makes the tale appear to be less than true. Tolkien
explicitly says,
I would also exclude, or rule out of order, any story that uses
the machinery of Dream, the dreaming of actual human
sleep, to explain the apparent occurrence of its marvels. …
[I]f a waking writer tells you that his tale is only a thing
imagined in his sleep, he cheats deliberately the primal
desire at the heart of Faërie: the realization, independent of
the conceiving mind, of imagined wonder. (Tolkien, “On
Fairy-Stories” 13-14)
For this reason Tolkien excludes stories such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice
Stories. Again, we see that for Tolkien there must be a balance between
the Primary and Secondary Worlds. Beast-fables take the reader too far
into the fantastical elements of Faërie, making the tale seem
unbelievable; however, “Dream Machinery” takes one too far out of
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Faërie, also making it seem unbelievable. This is important to note
because it greatly narrows down what we can classify as genuine Faërie.
Beyond the truth of the Secondary World, an irrefragable Fairy-
story must also, for Tolkien, have a strong historical “flavour.” By
drawing on past tales the sub-creator establishes a depth and complexity
to the tale. In trying to explain this aspect of Faërie Tolkien equated story
to a pot of soup:
By ‘the soup’ I mean the story as it is served up by its author
or teller, and by ‘the bones’ its sources or material – even
when (by rare luck) those can be with certainty discovered.
But I do not, of course, forbid criticism of the soup as soup[:]
… we may say that the Pot of Soup, the Cauldron of Story,
has always been boiling, and to it have continually been
added new bits, dainty and undainty. (Tolkien, “On Fairy-
Stories” 20-27)
Tolkien suggests here that fairy-stories refer back to each other, or in
modern-day terms, fairy stories are intertextual. The “bones” of the soup
are the elements from past stories that the “cook,” that is to say the
author, must use in order to achieve the correct “flavour” of fairy which
has been developing over time. The bones not only add “flavour”, but also
add to the story’s depth and give it a sense of history. At the same time
Tolkien is careful not to dismiss the author’s role in creating a good
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story: “There are many things in the Cauldron, but the Cooks do not dip
in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is important” (Tolkien, “On
Fairy-Stories” 31). Tolkien himself, as will be discussed in later chapters,
drew on Norse tales, Beowulf, and the Christian Bible. This is significant
because “the soup” acts as the base for all fairy-tales; therefore, if a fairy
tale develops from a good “stock” then it will be a favourable fairy-tale.
The final element that Tolkien thought a fairy-tale must contain is
a “eucatastrophic” ending. Tolkien, “coined the word Eucatastrophe, the
‘good catastrophe’ to describe the sudden, miraculous ‘turn’ from sorrow
to joy that on the brink of tragedy rescues the story from disaster”
(Flieger and Anderson 14). Being a devout Catholic Tolkien claimed, in
the last paragraphs of his essay, that the Christian story of Jesus Christ
was, and is, the greatest fairy story ever told, and the Resurrection of
Christ is the greatest example of a “eucatastrophe.”
The Gospels contain a fairy-story, or a story of a larger kind
which embraces all the essence of fairy-stories. They contain
many marvels … and among the marvels is the greatest and
most complete conceivable eucatastrophe. ... The Birth of
Christ is the eucatastrophe of Man’s history. The
Resurrection is the eucatastrophe of the Incarnation.
(Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 72)
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Based on this reasoning, Tolkien’s own fairy stories also contain
elements of Christianity, a point I will return to in Chapter Three.
All of this notwithstanding, there is more to the eucatastrophic
ending than its relationship to Christendom. The eucatastrophic also
supplements the “escape” element that fairy stories provide. This is
significant because “Fairy-stories offer their readers escape from one
world into another, a process which Tolkien defends as legitimate against
the popular criticism of ‘escapist’ as a term generally understood to mean
light or inconsequential entertainment” (Flieger and Anderson 13). Many
academics have criticised fantasy as nothing more than an escape, a
copout from reality. However, Tolkien argues that
There are other things more grim and terrible to fly from
than the noise, stench, ruthlessness, and extravagance of
the internal-combustion engine. There are hunger, thirst,
poverty, pain, sorrow, injustice, death. And even when men
are not facing hard things such as these, there are ancient
limitations from which fairy-stories offer a sort of escape,
and old ambition and desires … to which they offer a kind of
satisfaction and consolation. (Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 66)
Life is hard enough and it is not a weakness to want to escape from that,
even for a brief moment, into a Secondary World where one may depend
upon the miraculous happy ending snatched from the jaws of defeat.
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This is how Tolkien envisioned a fairy story should end, and the ending
of a story is important because it is what a reader is left with. Clearly,
Tolkien thought that readers should be left with a miraculous victory, in
other words, hope.
In his essay “On Fairy-Stories” Tolkien was responding to the
decades of theorists before who had not taken Faërie seriously, or at
least not in the way Tolkien thought it should be considered. As Flieger
puts it,
In [Tolkien’s] view [ the previous theorists such as Max
Müller, George Dasent, and Andrew Lang] were not reading
stories at all; they were examining data, a process which to
him was a gross misuse of the enchantment, what he called
the quality of “faërie,” that he found in fairy tales. (Flieger,
“There Would Always be a Fairy-Tale” 28)
Max Müller, George Dasent, and Andrew Lang were all concerned with
the beginnings of fairy tales, and where they had come from, but Tolkien
knew that fairy stories were more than just their origins. It is worth
noting that Tolkien’s view of fairy stories partially overlaps with his views
of Beowulf. One of the critical trends that Tolkien changed in Anglo-
Saxon studies was the tendency to study Beowulf as an historical or
cultural touchstone, which ignores the story as a story, or in the case of
Beowulf, poetry. (I will return to Beowulf in Chapters Three and Four, as
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it had a great influence on Tolkien’s writing of The Hobbit.) The “bones” of
the “soup” are important; however, the genuine fairy story will also
contain a balance between the Secondary and Primary World, a
eucatastrophic ending and the essence of faëire.
Tolkien gave true consideration to what a well-constructed fairy
story must contain and what it must give to its readers. He disputed with
some of the critics before him, but also expanded on their original points.
As Flieger explains, “Tolkien was by no means the only one of his
generation to respond (whether negatively or positively) to the intellectual
climate of opinion arising out of the controversy[.] Tolkien … was unique
only in basing his answer in practice as well as theory” (Flieger, “There
Would Always be a Fairy Story” 31) For these reasons,
“On Fairy-Stories” is Tolkien’s defining study of and the
center-point in his thinking about the genre, as well as being
the theoretical basis for his fiction. Thus, it is both the
essential and natural companion to his fiction. [It] is
Tolkien’s most important critical commentary. … [W]hile he
does indeed make many points both major and minor along
the way, they are all in the service of his larger declaration –
that fairy-story is a legitimate literary genre, not confined to
scholarly study but meant for readerly enjoyment by adults
and children alike. (Flieger and Anderson, 9-10)
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This is the reason that we must judge Tolkien’s writing based on his own
critical analysis. As Flieger and Anderson point out, Tolkien made his
own template of a good story in his essay “On Fairy-Stories.” He did not
create his stories based on any other critical analysis other than his own.
For this reason if a fairy story, especially one of Tolkien’s own, such as
The Hobbit, accomplishes all of the aspects discussed above, then we
must consider it to be a true Tolkienian fairy story, and worthy of critical
attention.
Since The Hobbit is often noted as having been developed ‘merely
for personal amusement” (Carpenter 199), one might expect it to be
similar to other stories which Tolkien similarly produced. This, however,
is not the case. The following chapter will examine how two of Tolkien’s
minor works do not function as complete fairy stories based on the
criteria laid out above.
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Chapter 2
The Minor Works
Critics, such as Paul Kocher, give the impression that The Hobbit was
Tolkien’s first serious attempt at writing a fairy story (19); however, he
wrote many stories before The Hobbit. These earlier stories were mainly
written for the amusement of his own children: not for publication.
However, given the success of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, these
minor works were eventually published and can now be studied
alongside the more famous stories. This chapter will specifically
demonstrate how Mr. Bliss and Roverandom were Tolkien’s first attempts
at fairy stories and will examine where they fall short of being true
Tolkienian fairy stories based on Tolkien’s own criteria, as laid out in the
previous chapter. It is important to consider these earlier works, because
they demonstrate Tolkien’s improvements as an artist. Where
Roverandom and Mr. Bliss fall short of achieving true Faërie, The Hobbit,
as I will show in Chapters Three and Four, succeeds.
In general, there have not been many critical studies done on
Tolkien’s shorter works. This seems to be particularly true in the cases of
Mr. Bliss and Roverandom. Furthermore, the studies that have been done
generally leave much to be desired. For example, Nils Ivar Agøy, in his
short essay “Mr. Bliss the Precursor to the Precursor,” attempts to make
connections between Mr. Bliss and The Hobbit, particularly between the
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main characters Mr. Bliss and Bilbo Baggins. His connections, for the
most part, are far-fetched. While he maintains that they are “obvious,”
his argument does little to persuade the reader that there are any
connections at all.
To begin with, Agøy attempts to point out the similarities between
the main characters: Bilbo and Mr. Bliss. Agøy claims that
Both are independent, both live alone – not counting the
Girabbit – in special houses just outside a village. Both are
middle class … and are by their surroundings regarded as a
little eccentric[;] … both [The Hobbit] and Mr. Bliss … start
with a description of the main character’s house, with ‘rows
of pegs in the hall’ for Mr. Bliss and ‘lots of pegs’ for Bilbo.
(Agøy 25)
These connections, however, are far from self-evident. For starters, the
Girabbit, Mr. Bliss’s half giraffe-half rabbit pet, cannot be so lightly
dismissed. The Girabbit drives the story’s beginning and is a significant
part of the ending as well:
One day Mr. Bliss looked out of the window early in the
morning. “Is it going to be a fine day?” he asked the Girabbit.
… “Of course it is!” said the Girabbit. … After breakfast Mr.
Bliss put on his green top-hat, because the Girabbit said it
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was going to be a fine day. Then he said: “I will go and buy a
motor-car!” (Tolkien, Mr. Bliss 6-7)
Mr. Bliss seemingly goes out and buys a car based on the
recommendation from his Girrabit that it will be a “fine day,” an action
that will drive the majority of the tale. Secondly, Bilbo is described as
being more than middle class, and even Agøy admits that there is no
textual evidence in Mr. Bliss to support the idea that the main character
is middle class it is more of an assumption. Furthermore, Agøy seems to
have parts of The Hobbit backwards, or perhaps has not fully explained
his ideas about the eccentricity of Bilbo and Mr. Bliss. At least in the
beginning of The Hobbit we are told quite specifically that Bilbo is the
very definition of a respectable hobbit.
This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit, and his name was
[Bilbo] Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the
neighbourhood of The Hill for time out of mind, and people
considered them very respectable, not only because most of
them were rich, but also because they never had any
adventures or did anything unexpected: you could tell what
a Baggins would say on any question without the bother of
asking him. (Tolkien, The Hobbit 3)
It is not until the end of the novel we are told that his neighbours think
him strange at all. “Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons –
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he had lost his reputation. … He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the
neighbourhood to be ‘queer’” (Tolkien, The Hobbit 278). As for the
description of “pegs,” well Agøy appears to be grasping at straws here. It
is important to disentangle these misguided connections because they
highlight the fact that Mr. Bliss and The Hobbit have little, if anything, in
common.
Agøy makes similar false connections between the three bears in
Mr. Bliss and Beorn in The Hobbit, the Dorkins and the Sackville
Baggins, the bicycle and the Arkenstone, and, among other things, the
main character’s separation from his friends (Agøy 26-7). This is not to
say that all of Agøy’s connections are completely without merit. One
exception is the names Fattie and Gaffer Gamgee, which in Mr. Bliss are
the names of a couple of characters who Mr. Bliss meets during his
adventure with his motorcar. Fattie and Gaffer Gamgee do not appear in
The Hobbit, but are rather the names of some hobbits in The Lord of the
Rings. Furthermore, Tolkien was a shameless self-plagiarist, and often
drew on previous tales of his own for names. Therefore, the connections,
for the most part, are without merit. The names alone do not warrant a
sufficient connection between Mr. Bliss and The Lord of the Rings, and
certainly do not equate Mr. Bliss to The Hobbit.
It is important to recognize that even when critical studies of this
earlier story have been attempted they fail to demonstrate that Mr. Bliss
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is anything more than a short story that Tolkien once told to his
children. Mr. Bliss began as a story for Tolkien’s own children “inspired
in part by Tolkien’s children’s toys ... [where the car] was based on a toy
car owned by Christopher in 1928 [and] [t]he three bears in the story
were also inspired by stuffed bears owned by the Tolkien sons” (Croft 68).
It seems unlikely that Tolkien meant for it to move beyond such family
origins. Mr. Bliss lacks the depth and history of stories like The Hobbit or
The Lord of the Rings and the three bears and the Girabbit make the tale
almost into a beast fable. These points are significant, because, as
explained in Chapter One, Tolkien believed that a genuine fairy story
needs to have depth and a sense of history, and he specifically excluded
any story which could be placed under the category of beast fable. The
story does end with a eucatastrophic moment, though, with the
disappearance (43) and reappearance of the Girabbit (46). However, what
most damages Mr. Bliss’s reputation as a substantial fairy story is that
the magic in the story is sprinkled in without care or consideration,
something Tolkien would come to despise, as discussed in the previous
chapter. Indeed, Tolkien disliked the tale altogether:
Professor Clyde Kilby of Wheaton College, Illinois,
corresponded with Tolkien (probably late 1964) about the
possible publication of the story, and Tolkien told him that
its publication ‘would not enhance his reputation.’ He came
to dislike the story and considered it a ‘private joke,’ and
22
decided that it would be better if Mr. Bliss was published
posthumously. (Bramlett 51)
Despite Tolkien’s dislike of the tale it is not altogether horrible. “[I]t was
written in dramatic, exuberant style” (Bramlett 53) and is rather
amusing. However, it does not possess the depth of his later novel The
Hobbit, because it seems only to draw upon personal elements from the
Tolkien family’s lives, rather than incorporating itself into the larger
history of literature. In other words, it is soup that was never meant to be
thrown into the pot.
Tolkien wrote several other short stories, including Roverandom.
We can examine Roverandom in a similar fashion to Mr. Bliss. Though
Roverandom does have some depth, it is still not up to genuine fairy story
standards, as I will demonstrate. Much like Mr. Bliss, critical studies on
this novel are rare and unconvincing. It seems that the only critics to
have done any serious study on the novel are Christina Scull and Wayne
Hammond in their introduction to the only available edition. This is
hardly surprising given that it was Scull and Hammond who collected the
various drafts of Roverandom and, with the help of Michael Tolkien,
published a final version in 1998. J.R.R. Tolkien had written several
drafts of the story and had once submitted it for publication, but
abandoned the project in favour of more stories about hobbits. As a
result of Tolkien’s abandonment his final vision of the story was never
23
finished, which explains why it is lacking some of the key elements of
faërie.
To begin with, Roverandom is a beast fable. As was shown in the
previous chapter, and as exemplified already by Mr. Bliss, this was one of
the types of stories which Tolkien explicitly said did not belong to the
world of Faërie (Tolkien, “On Fairy-Stories” 15). If the tale had focused
more on the little boy in the story, then perhaps the story could have
been a true fairy tale, especially if the boy had interacted in the fairy
world, such as in Smith of Wooton Major (another of Tolkien’s minor
works, in which the main character, Smith, continually travels between
the Primary and Secondary world), or in The Hobbit in which Bilbo
Baggins also enters into a Secondary World, a point I will return to in
Chapters Three and Four. However, as Roverandom does not focus on
the boy and his interactions with Faërie, but rather on the adventures of
a dog who becomes a toy dog, we must immediately exclude it from being
a true Tolkeinian fairy story.
The world of Roverandom is presented as truth, which is a key
element of a genuine fairy story, as outlined in Chapter One; however,
the Primary and Secondary Worlds are not in balance. On the one hand,
there are many elements of the Primary World: the toy shop (5-6), the
typical British family (Tolkien’s family) (6-10), and Rover’s eventual
return to the grandmother (88). Furthermore, it is accepted by the few
24
critics that have discussed the tale, that Tolkien based this story on the
events of his family’s trip to Filey, which included the loss of Michael
Tolkien’s favourite tin toy dog, the full moon, and a terrible storm (see,
for example, Christine Scull and Wayne Hammond; Carpenter; Leslie
Ellen Jones or Perry C. Bramlett). On the other hand, Rover flies on the
back of a seagull to the moon (17-22), is given wings by the Man-in-the-
Moon (24), and given webbed feet by Mrs. Artaxerxes (64). The Primary
World elements clash with the fantastic magical elements in a way which
makes the whole story collapse, because this clash makes it
unbelievable. Again, this unbalance shows how Roverandom falls short of
being a true fairy story.
Scull and Hammond attempt to conceal Roverandom’s rather static
plot by asserting
[t]hat it did not emerge fully formed, but was devised and
told in several parts, might be deduced from its episodic
nature, and from its length; and in fact this is verified by a
tantalizingly brief entry in Tolkien’s diary (written almost
certainly in 1926 as part of a resume of events of 1925)
about the composition of Roverandom at Filey: ‘The tale of
“Roverandom” written[,] to amuse John (and myself as it
grew) got done.’ (Scull and Hammond x)
25
Scull and Hammond use the term “episodic” rather kindly. In fact, by the
end of the novel, the reader is left not knowing exactly how Rover ever
returned home after all of his adventures. Indeed, the whole story may
well have been a dream of Rover’s, though that may be a stretch. Yet the
events do occur very much like Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland chaotic and
unfocused, and magic is used in a rather silly and trivial way. Even the
Man-in-the-Moon, probably the most serious character in the novel,
indulges in this silliness as he commands a giant spider to make him a
webbed hammock (40). As Janet Brennan Croft asserts, “Roverandom
lacks the sense of realism and serious purpose of The Lord of the Rings
and even The Hobbit. … It is whimsical and ‘miniaturized’ in a way
Tolkien later came to dislike, which he condemned in his 1939 essay ‘On
Fairy-Stories’ (Croft 68). This is an important point because, as explained
in the last chapter, this balance and the seriousness of the magic are of
the utmost importance if the story is to succeed as a true fairy story.
That Roverandom contains magical elements is not enough. By not
taking the magic seriously, the novel loses status as a legitimate
Tolkienian fairy story.
Hammond and Scull also praise Tolkien for the many literary
references that he includes, saying,
Roverandom is remarkable too for the variety of biographical
and literary materials that went into its making. To these
26
Tolkien added a wealth of references to myth and fairy-story,
to Norse sagas, and to the Red and White Dragons of British
legend, to Arthur and Merlin, to mythical sea-dwellers[.] … It
is a wide range, but these diverse materials combined well in
Tolkien’s hands, with little incongruity and much
amusement – for those who recognize the allusions. (Scull
and Hammond xvi- xvii)
However, the references that Hammond and Scull mention appear to be
thrown into the story aimlessly and without any real finesse and are
mainly stacked on top of one another in the course of one passage. The
White Dragon, we are told
fought the Red Dragon in Caerdragon in Merlin’s time …
after which the other Dragon was Very Red. Later he did lots
more damage in the Three Islands, and went to live on the
top of Snowdon for a time. … A long time since, and not until
the dragon had flown off to Gwynfa, some time after King
Arthur’s disappearance at the time when dragons’ tails were
esteemed a great delicacy by the Saxon Kings. (Tolkien,
Roverandom 33)
When Tolkien spoke of the “soup” of Faërie he did not mean that writers
should simply toss in the occasional name or character. Tolkien asserts
in “On Fairy-Stories” that “[t]here are many things in the Cauldron, but
27
the cooks do not dip in the ladle quite blindly. Their selection is
important” (31). The different elements which authors draw on should
impart a certain flavour into the story, not become cumbersome, so that
the reader has to bite down on them like an unpleasant piece of gristle.
To this end I must disagree with Hammond and Scull’s praise of
Tolkien’s use of other material in this tale. For this reason Roverandom’s
merits as an authentic fairy story can be discredited.
Additionally, Roverandom lacks a “eucatastrophic” ending. There is
a brief moment where it seems as though the wizard Artaxerxes will not
be able to turn Rover back into a normal dog again, but this moment is
fleeting and does not build adequate anticipation for a proper
“eucatastrophic” conclusion. In fact, the dramatic moment is turned into
more of a joke:
[Artaxerxes] never noticed that Roverandom [that is to say
Rover] was not taking any notice, and the whale was
winking. Mrs. Artaxerxes had got up and gone to her
luggage, and now she was laughing and holding out an old
black bag in her hand.
‘Now stop waggling your beard, and get to business!’
she said. But when Artaxerxes saw the bag, he was too
surprised for a moment to do anything but look at it with his
old mouth open. (Tolkien, Roverandom 85)
28
The reader is never in any real doubt that Rover will be turned back into
a real dog, and even if he was not turned back he does not appear to
have had a terrible time as a toy dog, despite a rough start. Therefore,
there is no miraculous victory, and not really any jaws of defeat for the
main character to be saved from. In light of this, we may conclude that
yet another essential aspect of Faërie does not apply to Roverandom: the
eucatastrophic ending.
Again, this is not to say that Roverandom is an unpleasant story,
rather “It is not on a level with the Hobbit, [sic] but in regards to
(especially) wit and fun, it will entertain and amuse children of all ages”
(Barmlett 55). The fact that Tolkien did not publish the story during his
lifetime is worthy of pause. The story simply falls short of a true
Tolkienain fairy story.
The culmination of all of these points highlights the fact that The
Hobbit was not Tolkien’s first attempt at writing Faërie:
These children’s stories demonstrate the maturation of
Tolkien’s skill at creating a coherent fantasy world – evolving
from the oddly mixed cultural references and disjointed
picaresque adventure of Roverandom and Mr. Bliss to the
economically sketched world and mature authorial voice of
Smith of Wooton Major [and The Hobbit]. (Croft 70)
29
There is a notable growth in artistry between Mr. Bliss, Roverandum and
The Hobbit. While these shorter works are entertaining, they lack the
complexities of The Hobbit. They fall short because they do not have the
essential elements of Faërie. Neither of these minor works handles the
fantastic elements with proper care, nor is there a consistent balance
between the Primary World and the Secondary World, an adequate depth
and relationship to past fairy stories, or a proper eucatastrophic ending.
In light of all of this, they must be excluded from our definition of fairy
stories.
The final chapters of this thesis will demonstrate how The Hobbit
does exemplify all of these qualities and is therefore worthy of the title
fairy story.
30
Chapter 3
The Soup Ingredients
In trying to place the origins of The Hobbit, many critics refer to the
infamous story of Tolkien sitting at his desk marking exam papers when
he came across a blank page. One critic to recount this story is Douglas
A. Anderson, who wrote The Annotated Hobbit. Anderson opens his
introduction with these words,
Tolkien often recounted how he began the story. One hot
summer day he was sitting at his desk, correcting students’
examination papers … on English literature. He told an
interviewer, ‘One of the candidates had mercifully left one of
the pages with no writing on it, which is the best thing that
can possibly happen to an examiner, and I wrote on it: “In a
hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” Names always
generate a story in my mind: eventually I thought I’d better
find out what hobbits were like.’ (Anderson 1)
While this is a true story, as told by Tolkien himself, it is not the whole
story. Tolkien did not simply sit down and write The Hobbit one afternoon
in his study. Tolkien infused a great deal of depth into his novel by
drawing on different components of medieval, Norse and Christian
literature. Though there are a number of different tales which Tolkien
drew upon, from the legend of King Arthur to his own, unpublished,
31
Silmarillion, I will be focusing on the Elder Edda (briefly) as a source of
inspiration; on Beowulf as a structural base for both the plot and Bilbo
Baggins’ character; and finally, on how Tolkien incorporated Christianity
into the ending of his novel. Again, keeping in mind Tolkien’s essay “On
Fairy-Stories,” as discussed in Chapter One, Tolkien believed that a great
fairy story could be compared to a pot of soup. The author would use
“the bones” of other stories to create “the stock” of his or her own novel:
“the soup.” It is clear that this is what Tolkien was doing: he used the
bones of medieval, Norse and Christian literature to create the stock for
The Hobbit. The bones which he used impart a certain flavour and give
his story a greater depth than what most critics have been able to taste.
It is this depth and flavour which combine to complicate The Hobbit’s
reputation as a mere prequel to The Lord of the Rings.
Tolkien appears to have had a preoccupation with filling in the
blanks that many of the medieval tales left incomplete. One such blank
occurs in the Elder Edda. The Elder Edda is a collection of Old Norse
poems, one of which contains the tally of the dwarves; these dwarves, we
are told:
At tables played at home; joyous they were; to them was
naught the want of gold, until there came Thurs-maidens
three, all powerful, from Jötunheim. Then went all the
powers to their judgment-seats, the all-holy gods, and
32
thereon held council, who should of the dwarfs the race
create, from the sea-giant's blood and livid bones. Then was
Môtsognir created greatest of all the dwarfs, and Durin
second; there in man's likeness they created many dwarfs
from earth, as Durin said. Nýi and Nidi, Nordri and Sudri,
Austri and Vestri, Althiôf, Dvalin Nâr and Nâin, Niping, Dain,
Bivör, Bavör, Bömbur, Nori, An and Anar, Ai, Miodvitnir,
Veig and Gandâlf, Vindâlf, Thrain, Thekk and Thorin, Thrôr,
Vitr, and Litr, Nûr and Nýrâd, Regin and Râdsvid. Now of the
dwarfs I have rightly told. Fili, Kili, Fundin, Nali, Hepti, Vili,
Hanar, Svior, Billing, Bruni, Bild, Bûri, Frâr, Hornbori, Fræg
and Lôni, Aurvang, Iari, Eikinskialdi. (Edda 2)
Tolkien used the names of the dwarves in the Edda tally for the names of
most of the dwarves in The Hobbit. Furthermore, Tolkien noticed that
among the dwarves there was what he translated to be a “staff-elf.” “It
looks as if Tolkien … interpreted the first element of ‘Gandâlf’, quite
plausibly, as ‘wand’ or ‘staff’, while the second element … obviously
means ‘elf’” (Shippey, Author of the Century 17). The Elder Edda gives no
explanation as to why this “staff-elf” is included in the tally. Scholars
widely accept that at least part of Tolkien’s inspiration for The Hobbit
comes from an attempt to explain why the “staff-elf” is present in the
tally of the dwarves (see Deborah Rogers and Ivor A. Rogers; Stuart D.
Lee and Elizabeth Solopova; or Humphrey Carpenter). Tom Shippey
33
notes, “[Tolkien] must have looked at it, refused to see it, as most
scholars do, as meaningless or no longer comprehensible rigmarole, and
instead asked himself a string of questions about it” (Shippey, Author of
the Century 16). This is significant, because it proves that the idea for
The Hobbit was not as simple as an idle day dream on the back of a
blank exam page. At least some of its foundation lies in trying to fill in
missing information from the Elder Edda.
All of this notwithstanding, the Elder Edda was only a minor
inspiration. Perhaps one of the greatest inspirations for Tolkien came
from his obsession with Beowulf. Tolkien was working on his most
renowned scholarly lecture (which would later become the predominate
essay on Beowulf studies) “The Monsters and the Critics,” as he was
writing The Hobbit, and it is evident that elements from the lecture
seeped their way into his novel. The most basic way in which Beowulf
finds itself in The Hobbit is the structure of the plot. In Beowulf, the
eponymous hero must first face Grendel (the giant), just as Bilbo’s first
challenge in The Hobbit is the trolls. In fact, Grendel’s exact nature is
unspecified in the poem. He is big, like a giant, and stronger than
humans, but his appearance may well be troll-like. There are some Norse
analogues to Beowulf in which the monster is in fact a troll (See Beowulf
Appendix B). More importantly, however, are the facts that in both
episodes the monsters (Grendel and the trolls) are enormous in size, the
battles take place at night, and on land. The second conquest for Beowulf
34
is Grendel’s mother, who lives in a cave under water. Similarly, Bilbo
confronts Gollum, who lives under the Misty Mountains, on an island, in
the middle of an underground lake. The third and final trial for Beowulf
is a dragon, just as Bilbo encounters the dragon, Smaug. These three
trials highlight Tolkien’s uses of the basic Beowulf plot structure, but
also how Tolkien manipulates them into a story all his own.
Furthermore, the heroes of these tales, Bilbo and Beowulf, are
simultaneously comparable and antithetical. At the beginning of The
Hobbit Bilbo is nothing like the hero Beowulf, and says outright, "Sorry! I
don't want any adventures, thank you. Not today. Good morning!” (The
Hobbit 7). Much to Mr. Baggins’ initial dislike, however, Gandalf thrusts
adventure upon him. This is unlike Beowulf, who actively seeks out
Grendel:
I [Beowulf] have done
many a glorious deed. This business with Grendel
was made known to me on my native soil;
…
Then my own people advised me,
the best warriors and the wisest men,
that I should, lord Hrothgar, seek you out,
35
because they knew the might of my strength
…
and now with Grendel, that monstrous beast, I shall by
myself have a word or two with that giant. From you now I
wish
…
a single favour,
that you not refuse me
…
that I might alone
…
cleanse Heorot.
…
I too will scorn
…
to bear a sword or broad shield,
…
but with my grip
36
I shall grapple with the fiend and fight for life,
foe against foe.
(Beowulf 399-40)
Here Beowulf speaks to Lord Hrothgar, whose kingdom has for many
years been plagued by the giant Grendel. In his speech, Beowulf not only
tells the Lord Hrothgar that he will kill Grendel, but also that he wishes
to do so without a sword or shield. This is a far cry from Mr. Baggins who
must be forced out into the wild by Gandalf. While Beowulf has already
“done many a glorious deed,” and is a hero from the very beginning and
remains so until his death, Bilbo will grow to become a different kind of
hero, but a hero nonetheless.
Tom Shippey has asserted that
[Bilbo’s] courage is not aggressive or hot-blooded. It is
internalized, solitary, dutiful – and distinctively modern, for
there is nothing like it in Beowulf or the Eddic poems or
Norse sagas. Just the same, it is courage of a sort, and even
heroes and warriors ought to respect it. (Shippey, Author of
the Century 28)
While I do not disagree with Shippey entirely, in that Bilbo does have a
unique kind of courage, I must argue that Bilbo’s courage does resemble
a kind of medieval bravery. Significantly, Bilbo has an attitude which
37
embodies the Northern Courage motif which Tolkien praises in his
Beowulf lecture: no matter how bad the situation is, you keep going, you
keep fighting. Throughout The Hobbit, Bilbo continually thinks of his nice
cosy hobbit hole:
‘I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, with the
kettle just beginning to sing!" It was not the last time that he
wished that!’ (31)
‘I wish I was back in my hobbit-hole by my own warm
fireside with the lamp shining!’ (163)
[H]e had many a merry jest and dance, early and late, with
the elves of the valley. Yet even that place could not long
delay him now, and he thought always of his own home.
(275)
Yet, he never turns back, even when the situation seems darkest, and
this willingness to carry on is the embodiment of Northern Courage. In
fact, Bilbo shows more valour than the dwarves at times. For example,
when Bilbo escapes from the goblin caves in the Misty Mountains
He wondered whether he ought not, now he had the magic
ring, to go back into those horrible, horrible, tunnels and
look for his friends. He had just made up his mind that it
38
was his duty, that he must turn back ― and very miserable
he felt about it ― when he heard voices. (The Hobbit 86)
The voices Bilbo hears are the dwarves:
The dwarves wanted to know why [Bilbo] had ever been
brought at all, why he could not stick to his friends and
come along with them, and why the wizard had not chosen
someone with more sense. "He has been more trouble than
use so far," said one. “If we have got to go back now into
those abominable tunnels to look for him, then drat him, I
say.” (The Hobbit 87)
While Bilbo is not happy about having to go back, he is willing to return
for the sake of his friends. Meanwhile, the dwarves behave rather
selfishly and are almost pleased at having lost him. Furthermore, Bilbo
rescues the dwarves several times after this, notably from the spiders in
Mirkwood (145-155), and again in the Elvenking’s caves(160-180). In all
of these situations Bilbo soldiers on despite knowing there is a very good
chance he may die. For Tolkien this heroic resignation was an essential
component of the Northern Courage motif:
It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination
that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre,
gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent and
terrible solution in naked will and courage. 'As a working
39
theory absolutely impregnable.' So potent is it, that while the
older southern imagination has faded forever into literary
ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its
spirit even in our own times. (“The Monsters and the Critics”
25-26)
In this passage, we can see clearly the deep admiration that Tolkien had
for this aspect of Northern Courage. It is, therefore, natural that he
should instil this motif, which can so clearly be seen in Beowulf, into his
main character, Bilbo Baggins. Yet Bilbo’s heroic heritage, as Shippey’s
comment reveals, has been only partially recognized by modern scholars.
By the time the company reaches the “doorstep” of the Lonely
Mountain the dwarves have become quite dependent upon Bilbo: “It was
[Bilbo] that made the dwarves begin the dangerous search on the western
slopes for the secret door” (The Hobbit 190). Yet, while Bilbo progresses,
and gains the respect of the dwarves, he never becomes (nor do we
expect him to become) a hero like Beowulf.
It has been critically acknowledged that Bilbo’s stealing of the cup
from Smaug was directly inspired by the thief in Beowulf, who also stole
a cup from a dragon (see Jones or Burns, for example). Indeed Tolkien
himself admitted as much in a letter to the editor of the Observer:
Beowulf is among my most valued sources; though it was
not consciously present to the mind in the process of writing,
40
in which the episode of the theft arose naturally (and almost
inevitably) from the circumstances. It is difficult to think of
any other way of conducting the story at that point. I fancy
the author of Beowulf would say much the same. (Letter 25)
Furthermore, while Beowulf does kill the dragon, it costs him his life.
Bilbo, on the other hand, does not kill Smaug. This is hardly surprising,
because it would make the story unbelievable to have Bilbo kill a dragon
on his own. In Beowulf, a thief steals a cup from the hoard of a dragon,
and the enraged dragon unleashes his fury upon the Geats:
The hoard-guardian waited
Impatiently until evening came[.]
…
The beginning was terror
To the people on land, and to their ring-giving lord
The end would be sore indeed.
Then that strange visitor began to spew flames
And burn the bright courts; his burning gleams
Struck horror in men. That hostile flier
Would leave nothing alive. (Beowulf 2302-2315)
41
Beowulf, as king, must go and destroy the dragon before it destroys his
people. Though Beowulf is an elderly man, we still expect him to defeat
the dragon. Yet, the price of killing the dragon is Beowulf’s own life. As if
Beowulf’s death is not a tragic enough ending, the Geats fear that their
kingdom will be attacked by their enemies now that their king is dead
(Beowulf 2910-2913).
While Tolkien’s Hobbit is similar to Beowulf in plotline and
essence, Tolkien does change and expand on some crucial points. For
example, it is Bilbo who steals the cup in The Hobbit, not an unknown
thief:
[Bilbo] grasped a great two-handled cup, as heavy as he
could carry, and cast one fearful eye upwards. Smaug stirred
a wing, opened a claw, the rumble of his snoring changed its
note. Then Bilbo fled. (The Hobbit 201)
When Smaug awakens to discover the theft, he is enraged and descends
upon the people of Lake-town. This is where Smaug meets his end. He is
shot down by the bowman Bard. To some this may seem to rob Bilbo of
his ultimate heroic moment; however, as noted above, we never really
expect Bilbo, “only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all” (Tolkien,
The Hobbit 280), to kill the almighty dragon Smaug. As Tolkien himself
notes in “The Monsters and the Critics,” it is an essential part of
Beowulf’s greatness that he is a able to conquer the dragon: “Not many,
42
even in dying, can achieve the death of a single worm” (“The Monsters
and The Critics” 47, note 31). With this in mind, if we do expect Bilbo to
take on Smaug, then in all likelihood, we should also expect his death,
just as Beowulf dies.
One reason Tolkien may have spared Bilbo is his strong personal
connection with the character. Tolkien once wrote:
I am in fact a hobbit … in all but size. I like gardens, trees,
and unmechanized farmlands; I smoke a pipe, and like good
plain food (unrefrigerated), but detest French cooking; I like,
and even dare to wear in these dull days, ornamental
waistcoats. … [I] have a very simple sense of humour (which
even my appreciative critics find tiresome); I go to bed late
and get up late (when possible). I do not travel much. (Letters
213)
In light of these similarities, Tolkien may have felt too attached to Bilbo
to kill him off. This is not to discredit Tolkien for not having created a
more heroic protagonist. Unlike Beowulf, who is an unattainable figure
and almost alien in his superhuman strength and heroism, Bilbo
maintains a tangible level of heroics and is extremely relatable. Bilbo
functions as a scale which effectively balances the Primary World (the
tangible and familiar) and the Secondary World (the magical and
uncanny). Shippey notes how “Tolkien insists that Bilbo … remains a
43
person from the modern world; but that people from that world need not
feel entirely alien in, or inferior to, the fairy-tale world” (Shippey, Author
of the Century 29). While Bilbo has a great adventure we, as readers, can
still relate to him. His sudden transformation into a dragon-slaying hero
of mythical proportions would reduce or ruin this effect. Unlike the
careless use of fantastic elements in Tolkien’s earlier texts Roverandom
or Mr. Bliss (as outlined in Chapter Two), Tolkien appears to have found
a genuine equilibrium between the ordinary and the remarkable in The
Hobbit, and, as noted in Chapter One, this balance is yet another
essential element in creating a genuine fairy story.
Furthermore, because Bilbo survives, Tolkien is able to narrate
what happens after the death of the dragon. Naturally, Tolkien could
have done this even if Bilbo had died, but the entire novel has been told
through Bilbo’s point of view. It would seem unnatural to the reader to
float along after their guide and companion had been destroyed. Just as
in the Elder Edda, where Tolkien was trying to answer the unexplainable
“staff-elf,” Tolkien also appears to be expanding on the ending of Beowulf
and what happened to the Geats; or in the case of The Hobbit, this means
what happens to the dwarves and the men of Lake-town after Smaug’s
end. This seems to be a point often overlooked by scholars, who generally
avoid discussing the ending of The Hobbit, other than to say it is a
eucatastrophic ending. I will return to this point later.
44
After the death of Smaug there are many races who want a piece of
the legendary treasure: the dwarves, the people of Lake-town, and the
elves of Mirkwood (a point I will return to in Chapter Four). As a result of
their greed for the untold wealth of Smaug, the Men of Lake-town will
join forces with the Mirkwood elves, whom they have always had trading
with, against Thorin and Company in an attempt to receive, at the very
least, a large portion of the treasure. The troops remain at a standstill for
some days, until at last, Bilbo “steals” the Arkenstone (220) and, though
somewhat reluctantly, gives it to Bard to use as a bargaining chip
against the stubborn Thorin who has become consumed by his greed
(251). This point has been discussed by scholars, though usually only as
an example of Bilbo’s morality compared to the dwarves (see Bursten or
Deborah Webster Rogers and Ivor A. Rogers, for example). The point
which few, if any, critics have discussed in detail is Bilbo’s later part in
the Battle of the Five Armies. Just when it seems that the elves, men,
and dwarves will end up fighting each other over Smaug’s treasure, the
goblins and wargs attack them in the valley. At the last moment Gandalf
realises that the goblins and wargs will soon be upon them, and has the
men, elves, and dwarves band together to defeat their common enemies:
‘Halt!’ cried Gandalf, who appeared suddenly, and stood
alone, with arms uplifted, between the advancing dwarves
and the ranks awaiting them. ‘Halt!’ he called in a voice like
thunder, and his staff blazed forth with a flash like the
45
lightning. ‘Dread has come upon you all!’ … So began a
battle that none had expected; and it was called the Battle of
Five Armies, and it was very terrible. (The Hobbit 258)
At the beginning of the battle Bilbo puts on his ring so that he may
go unnoticed in the battle. Bilbo does not kill a single goblin during the
fight, and is in fact knocked out fairly early on (263). But why would
Tolkien have Bilbo, now a hero in his own right, absent for the last great
adventure, just as it reaches its climax? Many scholars only dance
around the topic, never fully considering it. While some scholars, such as
Deborah Webster Rogers and Ivor A. Rogers, simply avoid the issue
altogether by never mentioning the fact that Bilbo is knocked
unconscious (Rogers 76), others, such as Tom Shippey, simply state that,
“in these events Bilbo plays almost no part at all” (Shippey, Author of the
Century 44). William H. Green does attempt to make a comparison
between The Hobbit and King Solomon’s Mines in that both narrators are
knocked senseless at desperate moments in their respective battles
(Green 105-6). However, while Green acknowledges that Tolkien does not
ever simply retell another story, it does seem to be Green’s only
explanation as to why Bilbo would be knocked down so early on in the
Battle of the Five Armies. There are other scholars as well who also
simply avoid the topic or never fully elucidate upon it (see Randle Helms,
for example). I will boldly venture into this territory where other scholars
dare not tread and propose two ideas as to why Tolkien chooses to leave
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Bilbo absent in The Battle of the Five Armies. First, Tolkien could be
attempting to make the battle seem even more dramatic by having Bilbo
fall. As a reader, having Bilbo, the hero of the novel and the character
who has been our eyes and ears throughout the tale, fall in the pivotal
moment of the battle adds to our sense of confusion and panic:
something terrible must be going to happen if Bilbo has already been
knocked down. It also adds to the suspense of the battle, since not only
do we have to wait to see if Bilbo will live, but once he is found we must
wait until he returns to the campsite and is himself debriefed about the
outcome of the battle.
Another possible reason for Bilbo’s absence may have been a play
on Tolkien’s religious beliefs. Some critics, such as Katharyn W. Crabbe,
claim that Bilbo is a Christ figure because he is willing to go back into
the Misty Mountains to rescue his friends, which, in turn, makes him a
sacrificial Christ-like figure (Crabbe 41-2). However, even Crabbe admits
that “this connection is tenuous” (41), and indeed, it is rather
unconvincing. I would argue that Bilbo is really more like the pagan hero
who does something, not knowing the guaranteed outcome. For example,
Beowulf, as mentioned previously, sacrifices himself for his people, the
Geats, when he is killed by the worm. This undertaking of a perilous task
is exactly the sort of Northern Courage sacrifice that Tolkien praises in
the “Monsters and the Critics.”
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Jane Chance Nitzsche also claims that Bilbo may resemble a
Christ figure, but she asserts that "when Bilbo renounces the arkenstone
he has stolen, he resembles the greatest burglar, the rex justus Christ
who gave up that humanity he had appropriated in order to redeem
mankind" (Nitzsche 42). However, I must also disagree with Nitzsche.
Christ, as a part of God the Father, did not really sacrifice his humanity;
rather, Christ knew that his humanity was temporary and that he
belonged in heaven with God the Father. Therefore, it is impossible to
compare Bilbo and Christ based on Nietzsche’s reasoning.
Though I disagree with Crabbe and Nitzsche’s particular
explanations, I do believe that Bilbo is a Christ-like character. This
parallel becomes especially evident when one looks at it as a possible
explanation for Bilbo’s absence in The Battle of the Five Armies. In “On
Fairy-Stories,” as I have mentioned in Chapter One, Tolkien claims that a
true and complete fairy story will contain a eucatastrophic ending: “The
eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its highest function”
(Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories 68). The Hobbit has many such moments due
to its episodic nature: to take the most prominent examples, Gandalf
distracts the trolls until the sun comes up which turns them to stone
(39-41), the eagles come and rescue Thorin and Company from the
burning trees before they fall victim to the goblins and wolves (100-1),
and Bilbo wakes just before he is encased by a spider’s web and manages
to kill the spider (a major turning point in his heroic career) (145-6).
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Furthermore, as mentioned in Chapter One, Tolkien claims that the
greatest eucatastrophic ending of all was Jesus Christ’s crucifixion and
resurrection. As Bilbo has gone through his journey, he has matured and
become a source of hope and even guidance for the dwarves, though they
did not believe in him at first. Bilbo had to perform a series of miraculous
acts before the dwarves could have any sort of faith in him: killing the
spiders (145), rescuing them from the Elven-king’s prison cells (175), and
figuring out the secret door into the Lonely Mountain (196-7). By the
time they reach the inside of Smaug’s lair the dwarves have come to
expect great things from Mr. Baggins. Furthermore, at the end of the tale
during the Battle of the Five Armies, just when things have become their
darkest, Bilbo gives the last call of hope: “‘the eagles are coming!’” This
announcement certainly gives hope to those who are fighting and
inspiration to carry on. Just when Bilbo has brought this great news he
is stoned and thought to be dead (The Hobbit 263). But he will rise again,
just in time to forgive the dying Thorin. Finally, once Bilbo has performed
the miracles, and risen from the dead, he returns to his home in the
Shire. This is similar to the story of Jesus Christ in the Bible. At first,
many did not believe in Jesus and he had to prove himself by preforming
miracles such as turning water into wine (John 2), the healing at the pool
(Jn. 5) or walking on water (Jn. 6:16-24). Just when people began to
believe in him he was crucified on the cross, and thought to be dead (Jn.
18 and 19). Three days after his death Christ rose again (Jn. 20).
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Christ’s death was in sacrifice for humankind so that their sins could be
forgiven in order that they could join God in heaven in a blissful afterlife.
Once he had performed his miracles and risen from the dead, just as
Bilbo returns to The Shire, Christ returns to his home in heaven with
The Father: “I am going there [my father’s house] to prepare a place for
you, And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take
you to be with me that you also may be where I am” (Jn. 14:2-3). For
some it may seem dubious to compare Bilbo to Christ, but Tolkien was a
deeply religious man, and it has long been thought that his works, like
those of C.S. Lewis, were steeped in Christian ideology (see, for example,
Jeffrey L. Morrow, Bradly J. Birzer, or Randel Helms). Also, throughout
The Hobbit, Bilbo acts as a moral compass. This is just one possible
explanation for Bilbo’s absence in the Battle of the Five Armies, and I
expect there are more possibilities. This scene of Bilbo’s near
resurrection provides an example of the complexities of The Hobbit, and it
also demonstrates the need for further scholarly research on the novel.
The fact that The Hobbit draws on so many sources functions in
two significant ways. It places The Hobbit within a medieval and Norse
literary history, which showcases its depth and its potential for endless
literary research, not something to be overlooked in our rush to get to
The Lord of the Rings. It also verifies the fact that The Hobbit is a true
Tolkienian fairy story, and thus an elevated form of writing, unlike the
minor works of Roverandom or Mr. Bliss as discussed in Chapter Two.
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Simply by elucidating on the Elder Edda, Beowulf, and the Bible, we can
see clearly that there is a wealth of underlying notes to The Hobbit which
all seek to give it depth and a unique and complex flavour which begs for
further tastings and analysis. Some final elements of this flavour will be
sampled in Chapter Four.
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Chapter 4
The Soup as Soup
The last chapter explored the works which influenced Tolkien’s writing
and gave his writing depth, or, in other words, the soup ingredients. This
chapter will attempt to explore “the soup as soup.” Many critics have
failed to explore The Hobbit as a standalone novel: the way it was
originally intended. The majority of scholarly work that has been done on
The Hobbit as a novel has attempted to push it into a particular
theoretical ideology, particularly Marxism (Elisa Bursten), Fascism (Peter
E. Firchow), and psychoanalysis (as will be discussed below). This has
done the novel a great disservice. By trying to force The Hobbit into a
particular theory, scholars have manipulated it beyond reason, as I shall
illustrate in this chapter. The other point which scholars seem to focus
on is Bilbo’s maturation throughout the novel, and indeed Bilbo does
mature; however, very few critics analyse anything else about Mr.
Baggins. Some scholars have briefly mentioned how Bilbo is our gateway
into Middle-earth, but the research stops there (see Tom Shippey, for
example). Furthermore, critics appear to forget that there are other
characters in The Hobbit, notably the Mirkwood elves and the eagles. In
short, there are significant gaps in the research which has been done on
The Hobbit, and while I cannot comment on all of the gaps in this thesis,
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hopefully I will be able to shed some light on these forgotten characters,
and on how the novel surpasses its presupposed simplicity.
To begin with, it is important to consider the research that has
already been done on The Hobbit. As noted above, the majority of this
research attempts to connect the novel with particular critical theories.
The most common theories that critics use are Freudian. Scholars turn
to Sigmund Freud’s theories in a somewhat misguided effort to explain
the maturation of Bilbo Baggins. Randel Helms asserts that
[i]t must seem a curious thing that there has been so little
serious criticism of the hobbits. There is perhaps a feeling
that real criticism would involve psychoanalysis and that the
results would be so improper as to destroy the atmosphere of
the book altogether. (Helms 41)
Helms appears to believe that the only way in which to “seriously” study
The Hobbit is through psychoanalysis and that this kind of criticism
would enhance the novel. Therefore, Helms rushes into his own
psychoanalysis of the book, saying, “[t]o make the story of the Hobbit
seem Freudian, one has only to tell it” (Helms 41). As Helms explains his
Freudian theories about The Hobbit, he goes so far as to claim that it is
not only Bilbo who goes through this Freudian transition, but the
dwarves as well. Having attempted to establish Bilbo’s hobbit hole as a
vagina, and illustrating Bilbo’s “birth” from the hobbit hole womb, Helms’
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then argues that “[t]he dwarves, likewise, must undergo a distressing
‘birth,’ from the sacks in which the trolls have imprisoned them; … Bilbo
later acts as midwife, helping Gandalf ‘untie the sacks and let out the
dwarves’” (Helms 43). This idea is far-fetched at best, yet Helms is not
alone. Critics, such as William Green, attempt to make Bilbo’s every
move into a Freudian symbol.
For example, Gandalf hurrying Bilbo out of his hobbit hole acts as
a symbol of birth for Green:
Gandalf hustles him [Bilbo] off naked – that is, without hat,
cloak, or pocket-handkerchiefs – on the road to the lawless
east. The symbolism here is of birth, or rather of rebirth, the
first of several rebirths in the story. (Green 50)
This particular statement can be somewhat justified in that Gandalf does
hurry Bilbo out of his home on the road to becoming a new hobbit: in
this respect there is a “rebirth.” However, to say that Bilbo is “naked” and
make it appear as though Gandalf is some sort of Middle-earth midwife
takes the analogy too far. Green furthers his Freudian theories by
examining the troll scene. Green claims that Bilbo’s crawling away from
the trolls is another marker of his growing maturity:
Bilbo’s escape from the trolls also launches his heroism:
crawling away (the infant’s first gesture of independence),
Bilbo discovers a key to the trolls’ cave, from which he gains
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a sword, symbol of the phallic power of the hero to escape
entrapment. (Green 54)
There are many obvious things wrong with Green’s statement, among
them the fact that Bilbo does not crawl away from the trolls. The narrator
explicitly tells us that, “Bilbo had just enough wits left, when Bert
dropped him on the ground, to scramble out of the way of their feet,
before they were fighting like dogs” (36; my italics) Even if we dismiss the
fact that Green takes great liberties with his word choice, Bilbo’s
“crawling” away from the trolls has little to do with an infantile mile
stone. Bilbo’s “scrambling” has much more to do with the simple fact that
he wants to get away from the trolls unnoticed.
Similarly, scholars also appear to take great delight in examining
Bilbo’s sword. Katharyn F. Crabbe claims that
[t]he sword’s phallic associations and its masculine
suggestions of aggression combine with its elvish nature
(goodness) to connote an active opposition to the forces of
evil, while the ring, a symbol of the feminine, of wholeness,
perfection, and the eternal suggests a more passive but
equally strong commitment to the good[.] … With the sword
and the ring together, Bilbo possesses and balances the two
sides of the human – the aggressive and the passive, the
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physical and the spiritual, the male and the female. (Crabbe
38)
Again, much like Helms and Green, Crabbe takes her analogy far
beyond anything Tolkien intended. Crabbe seems to be attempting to
make Bilbo into some sort of god balancing the elements of the universe.
However, sometimes, much to the disappointment of Freudian theorists,
a sword is just a sword. To deny that Bilbo matures throughout The
Hobbit would indeed be madness. Bilbo does grow and mature; however,
to make claims that Gandalf, or indeed Bilbo, is some sort of Middle-
earth midwife, or that Bilbo is able to balance the universe because he
has a sword and a ring, goes beyond reasonability. To these scholars I
can only say that such Freudian symbolism is there if you want it to be
there. One may be able to force the circular narrative of The Hobbit into a
triangular Freudian hole, but the damage that is inflicted upon the story
in order to perform such a feat does not justify the end results. There is
no evidence to suggest that Tolkien intended to insert any sexual
meaning into his works. It is widely accepted among scholars that
Tolkien was a happily married and very religious man (see Humphrey
Carpenter’s J.R.R Tolkien: A Biography). He enjoyed Norse mythology and
medieval literature from a young age, and his novels reflect these aspects
of his life, not any assumed underlying personal sexual desires. Based on
these facts, attempting to put a Freudian spin on The Hobbit is
inherently wrong, or at the very least questionable. While these extremist
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scholars acknowledge that there needs to be more critical attention given
to The Hobbit, they are simply trying too hard. They fail to examine the
soup as soup. Bilbo’s growth as a hobbit and a hero need not be
manipulated so far as to claim a Freudian connection.
In the previous chapter I explained how Bilbo is like Tolkien, and
that Tolkien once stated in one of his letters that “I am in fact a hobbit …
in all but size” (Letters 213). Bilbo, like Tolkien, is a simple man who
enjoys the simple things in life; however, with a little push from Gandalf,
Bilbo soon comes to find that he also likes adventure. As readers in the
Primary World we easily relate to Bilbo and his ways far more than we
connect to the dwarves, elves, Gandalf, or even Bard. These “others” are
part of faërie and Bilbo is our ticket into that Secondary World. Bilbo
expresses the same fears as we would if we were in Mr. Baggins’s shoes;
because of this, Bilbo is a much more relatable character than Beowulf,
Sigurd, Bard or the dwarves. However Bilbo is also part of the Faërie
world and does have some unique attributes, such as his size, and his
ability to move quietly which is noted several times throughout the novel.
For example,
[Hobbits are] a little people, about half our height, and
smaller than the bearded Dwarves. Hobbits have no beards.
There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary
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everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and
quickly[.] (4)
But at any rate hobbits can move quietly in woods,
absolutely quietly[.] … As for Bilbo walking primly towards
the red light, I don't suppose even a weasel would have
stirred a whisker at it. (33)
Also they can move very quietly, and hide easily, and recover
wonderfully from falls and bruises, and they have a fund of
wisdom and wise sayings that men have mostly never heard
or have forgotten long ago. (67)
His abilities are not outlandishly magical to the point where they become
unbelievable, but they do give him an advantage over us and make him
into something more than ordinary: something that can, and does,
belong to the Secondary World. This is unlike Roverandom where the
magic becomes too extraordinary to be believed: flying to the moon on
the back of a seagull, or being given wings by the Man-in-the-Moon. The
magic in The Hobbit is done with a greater subtly which allows the reader
to become immersed rather than alienated: readers are treated to the
flavour, not repulsed by the gristle. Yet again, this is one of the major
points which separates The Hobbit from Tolkien’s earlier works: the
magic is taken seriously and treated with care.
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However, while Bilbo is our key into Middle-earth he is not the only
character in the novel, a fact which many critics appear to miss. This is
surprising given that there are so many complexities within every race in
The Hobbit. Paul Kocher claims Tolkien laid out his characters’ races very
carefully:
Despite its surface connections with The Lord of the Rings
the two works are so unlike fundamentally as to be different
in kind. The Hobbit is a story for children[,] … The Lord of the
Rings, on the other hand, stretches the adult imagination[.]
… Also [for the children’s] benefit is Tolkien’s method all
through The Hobbit of prefacing the introduction into the
story of each new race with a paragraph or so setting forth in
plain words whatever needs to be known about its looks, its
habits, its traits, and whether it is good or bad. (Kocher 19-
21)
Kocher’s point, however, greatly oversimplifies the matter. He is missing
two very basic points. Firstly, that Tolkien did not have to explain any of
the races in The Lord of the Rings because he had already done so in The
Hobbit. Why would he repeat himself to the readers who had, for the
most part, already read The Hobbit? Secondly, the morality of each race
is not as simple as the narrative voice of The Hobbit would have us
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believe. In spite of the variety and complexity of races, there have been
few studies done on the other beings in The Hobbit.
A few critics discuss the eagles in relation to The Lord of the Rings;
however, few critics consider the eagles’ role in The Hobbit. This seems
unreasonable given that in The Lord of the Rings the eagles have no prior
context in the story, and have all the feelings of a deus ex machina
wheeled out by Tolkien to solve an impossible ending. However, in The
Hobbit the eagles do have context. We meet them first when the dwarves,
Bilbo, and Gandalf are trapped in burning trees by the goblins and
wolves. As Kocher points out, we are quickly given a description of them
and their race as a whole:
Eagles are not kindly birds. Some are cowardly and cruel.
But the ancient race of the northern mountains were the
greatest of all birds; they were proud and strong and noble-
hearted. They did not love goblins, or fear them. When they
took any notice of them at all … they swooped on them and
drove them shrieking back to their caves, and stopped
whatever wickedness they were doing. The goblins hated the
eagles and feared them, but could not reach their lofty seats,
or drive them from the mountains. (The Hobbit 98)
This description by the narrator strongly implies that the eagles are
representative of angels. “They are proud and strong and noble-hearted”
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like angels; “the goblins” appear to be a form of demons whom the angels
do not fear or notice; but when they do take notice they stop them and
send them back to the caves: to Hell; the goblins (demons) hate the
eagles (angels) and fear them, but cannot reach their lofty seats (in
heaven). With this kind of description we might assume that the eagles
are purely divine creatures; however, Tolkien makes them more complex.
As Cory Olsen notes, “The eagles are not … the Anti-Goblin S.W.A.T.
Team” (Olsen 124). In fact, they appear to me to mirror John Milton’s
angels in Paradise Lost. They are essentially good beings, but are
generally indifferent to the lives of other creatures unless compelled
otherwise. In The Hobbit, the only reason that the eagles help the
company at all is to repay Gandalf for a favour he previously did for
them:
The wizard and the eagle-lord appeared to know one another
slightly, and even to be on friendly terms. As a matter of fact
Gandalf, who had often been in the mountains, had once
rendered a service to the eagles and healed their lord from
an arrow-wound. (The Hobbit 104)
The eagles bring the company back to their eerie and provide them with
food and shelter for the night. Nevertheless, when asked if they can
transport the company over Mirkwood the eagles refuse (The Hobbit 104).
They will help others but only when they owe a service, when it is
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convenient, or when it is beneficial to them. This is significant, because it
disproves Kocher’s earlier statement that all of the races are plainly
labelled as good or bad. The eagles are capable of preforming good deeds
for other creatures, but to be good is not their primary goal.
The eagles venture into the story a second time during The Battle
of the Five Armies. As discussed in Chapter Three, just when it seems
that the elves, men and dwarves are going to declare war on each other,
Gandalf halts them and draws their attention to the impending goblin
army making for an attack (The Hobbit 258). As the war proceeds, it
seems that the story will end in great bloodshed. However, this is a true
Tolkienian fairy story, and, therefore, it contains a spectacular
eucatastrophic ending. Again as mentioned in Chapter Three, Bilbo
shouts out the last cry of hope: “‘The Eagles! The Eagles!’ he shouted.
‘The Eagles are coming!’ … dancing and waving his arms. If the elves
could not see him they could hear him. Soon they too took up the cry,
and it echoed across the valley” (The Hobbit 263). As we learn later,
The Eagles had long had suspicion of the goblins' mustering;
from their watchfulness the movements in the mountains
could not be altogether hid. So they too had gathered in
great numbers, under the great Eagle of the Misty
Mountains; and at length … come speeding down the gale in
the nick of time. They it was who dislodged the goblins from
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the mountain-slopes, casting them over precipices, or driving
them down shrieking and bewildered among their foes. It
was not long before they had freed the Lonely Mountain, and
elves and men on either side of the valley could come at last
to the help of the battle below. (The Hobbit 266)
This seems in contrast to the eagles who refused to help Thorin and
Company across Mirkwood. In this scene the eagles swoop in like angels,
and are the turning point of the war. They not only drive the goblins out
and allow the men and elves to join in the battle, but give hope to those
who could only see defeat coming. The eagles are the climatic
eucatastrophic ending, and the eucatastrophic ending, as described in
Chapter One, is the most important element of a Tolkienian fairy story:
The eucatastrophic tale is the true form of fairy-tale, and its
highest function. … A tale that in any measure succeeds in
this point has not wholly failed, whatever flaws it may
possess, and whatever mixture or confusion of purpose. (“On
Fairy-Stories” 68-9)
Unlike Roverandom or Mr. Bliss, where the reader never questions the
fact that there will be a happy ending, the Battle of the Five Armies
presents a real possibility for a horrific conclusion. It is the arrival of the
eagles that snatches victory from the jaws of defeat and creates a
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eucatastrophic ending, making The Hobbit a true and elevated Tolkienian
fairy story, equal to that of The Lord of the Rings.
There is one final element to The Hobbit that keeps it from having
the simplistic happy ending that is generally (though falsely) associated
with children’s novels: this is the deaths of Fili, Kili, and Thorin. The
narrator tells us that Fili and Kili, the youngest of the dwarves, are killed
in an attempt to protect Thorin during the Battle of the Five Armies (The
Hobbit 268). The deaths of the youngest members of the Company create
a sombre and sorrowful tone that critics tend not to comment upon.
Their deaths also emphasize the even greater destruction that might have
occurred were it not for the eucatastrophic arrival of the eagles. Despite
the best efforts of Fili and Kili or the eagles, however, Thorin, the leader
of the dwarves, the king under the mountain, is likewise fatally wounded,
though his death is somewhat prolonged. As discussed in Chapter Three,
Bilbo arrives just in time to forgive Thorin for giving into the dragon-
sickness and for turning his back on Bilbo. Though the dwarfs’ deaths
are tragic events, at least Thorin is given a chance to redeem himself:
‘Farewell, good thief,’ he said. ‘I go now to the halls of waiting
to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I
leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little
worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would
take back my words and deeds at the Gate.’ … ‘No!’ said
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Thorin. ‘There is more in you of good than you know, child of
the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in
measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above
hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry,
I must leave it now. Farewell!’ (The Hobbit 266)
Here we can see how Tolkien seamlessly combines the joyous
eucatastrophic ending and the supremely realistic consequences of war
and greed. This juxtaposition is significant because it keeps the novel
from having a simplistic ending. Furthermore, it also aids in maintaining
the ever important balancing of the Primary and Secondary Worlds.
Having Bilbo arrive just in time to forgive Thorin is miraculous, but
having Thorin, Fili and Kili die keeps the novel rooted in the sometimes
brutal reality of the Primary World.
While critics do acknowledge that greed plays a large role
throughout the novel (see Elisa Bursten’s critical essay “The Love of
Beautiful Things,” for example), they generally only talk about greed in
terms of the dwarves. Few, if any at all, discuss the elves and their greed
in any detail. Much like the eagles, the elves are also more complex than
the critics credit. Here I will direct my focus to the Mirkwood elves. It is
said that the dwarves and elves are different, and even at odds with each
other:
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[the Mirkwood elves] did not love dwarves, and thought
[Thorin] was an enemy. In ancient days they had had wars
with some of the dwarves, whom they accused of stealing
their treasure. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a
different account, and said that they only took what was
their due, for the elf-king had bargained with them to shape
his raw gold and silver, and had afterwards refused to give
them their pay .(Tolkien, The Hobbit 157)
Despite the elves’ claim to superiority, they appear to have much more in
common with the dwarves than appears at first glance. The most
notable similarity, and what seems to be one of the main topics of the
novel, is their greed for treasure.
The elves in Tolkienian literature are generally made out to be
creatures of goodness and purity: almost divine. Just as Kocher asserts
above, the Mirkwood elves are described in full almost immediately after
they appear in the story:
The feasting people were Wood-elves, of course. These are
not wicked folk. If they have a fault it is distrust of strangers.
Though their magic was strong, even in those days they were
wary. They differed from the High Elves of the West, and
were more dangerous and less wise. For most of them …
were descended from the ancient tribes that never went to
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Faërie in the West. … [E]lves they were and remain, and that
is Good People. (The Hobbit 156-7)
However, though they are not evil beings, they are not as pure as the
narrator would have us believe.
On the other hand, we are not given a direct description of the
dwarf race at the beginning of the novel, but learn as we go. Nearer to the
end of the novel, just after Bilbo asks if any of the dwarves will come with
him into the tunnel to face Smaug, the narrator seems forced to admit:
There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with
a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and
treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are
decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don't
expect too much. (The Hobbit 199)
At this the reader is most certainly disappointed in the dwarves for their
unwillingness to join Mr. Baggins at the journey’s end. The descriptions
of the Mirkwood elves and the dwarves seem, at first glance, to be almost
opposites; however, as I will demonstrate, the elves share in the same
dragon-sickness of which the dwarves are accused.
Elisa Bursten defines this dragon-sickness (greed) as wanting more
than what we need: “It can be called greed, however, when a person
wishes for more than they can possibly use” (Bursten 70). Bursten also
67
notes that though the dwarves have been banished for a long time by
Smaug, they clearly have enough wealth to live on when they arrive at
Bilbo’s doorstep, as is exemplified by their fine clothes (silver tasselled
hoods, gold chains on their necks, etc.). Furthermore, the dwarves do not
hesitate to pay for Bilbo’s travelling expenses. “They could clearly live
well on what they have acquired during their exile, but they desire ever
more” (Bursten 70-71). These points are all valid and noteworthy;
however, like many other critics, Bursten fails to notice that the
Mirkwood elves also appear to possess a great deal more than what they
need. And the elves, like the dwarves, also thirst for more. This seems
axiomatic when one considers all the banquets and parties they seem to
have, and the fact that they can even spare decent meals for their
prisoners (The Hobbit 161; Bursten 70). The narrator tells us that
If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially
for silver and white gems; and though his hoard was rich, he
was ever eager for more, since he had not yet as great a
treasure as other elf-lords of old. (The Hobbit 157)
This “weakness for treasure” ventures into the dreaded territory of
dragon-lust, which of course is Smaug’s undoing, and ultimately Thorin’s
as well.
The greed does not stop at merely longing for the wealth. Both the
elves and the dwarves, especially their leaders, are willing to go to war
68
over the treasure if necessary. Though the Elvenking seems more
righteous when he says, “‘Long will I tarry, ere I begin this war for gold’”
(The Hobbit 258), we must not forget that the army of elves was already
making its way to The Lonely Mountain before Bard’s men went in search
of aid, after Smaug burnt down their town:
Bard at once had speedy messengers sent up the river to the
Forest to ask the aid of the King of the Elves of the Wood,
and these messengers had found a host already on the move,
although it was then only the third day after the fall of
Smaug. … For [the Elvenking] too had not forgotten the
legend of the wealth of Thror. So it was that Bard's
messengers found him now marching with many spearmen
and bowmen … which had at first been direct towards the
Mountain. (The Hobbit 235-6)
The Elvenking had not forgotten about the treasure that Smaug hoarded.
When the Elvenking heard of the dragon’s death he presumed that
Thorin and Company had died and wasted no time in trying to siege The
Lonely Mountain and claim the treasure for himself, though he scarcely
needed it. This desire for treasure, even to the extremes of going to war,
is what makes the elves so comparable to the dwarves. Thorin may be
redeemed in the end, but the Elvenking is not, nor are any of the other
dwarves. This is an interesting point to note and merits further scholarly
69
consideration. The similarities between the Mirkwood elves and the
dwarves are not often considered, but when analysed, they greatly
complicate the assumed simplicity of The Hobbit. This is to say nothing of
the Rivendell elves, nor the elves as they are portrayed in The Lord of the
Rings. I would argue that the undertones of greed and perfidiousness of
the Elvenking of Mirkwood make the elves in The Lord of the Rings
appear almost boring and greatly simplified by comparison. Again, these
points suggest that The Hobbit deserves more critical attention.
There are many unexplored possibilities in the current research of
The Hobbit. As I hope I have demonstrated there are many complexities
in the characters of The Hobbit. I have only touched upon the eagles and
the Mirkwood elves. This is to say nothing of Beorn, Bard, the men of
Lake-town, the trolls, spiders or the orcs. With all of these uncharted
components to The Hobbit, researchers need not go so far as to stretch
the novel out into psychoanalysis in order seriously to consider its
meaning and possibilities. Taken on its own terms, The Hobbit is a hearty
bowl of soup out of which any scholar could make a meal.
70
Conclusion
Throughout this thesis I have argued that The Hobbit fulfils all of
Tolkien’s own requirements for a genuine fairy story. It balances the
Primary and Secondary Worlds; treats the magic seriously; contains a
sense of depth; and finally, finishes with a proper eucatastrophic ending.
We must, therefore, conclude that it can be classified as a true
Tolkienian fairy story, and is worthy of further scholarly research as
such.
While many assume that The Hobbit was Tolkien’s first attempt at
writing a fairy story, this is not the case. As I have demonstrated in
Chapter Two, Tolkien wrote many stories, primarily for his own children,
long before he wrote The Hobbit. It is in The Hobbit that we can see his
development as a writer, and his skill at creating true faërie. Such skills
are not really in evidence in Mr. Bliss and Roverandom. Although these
early works each have their merits, neither possesses the depth and
detail of true faërie.
With this in mind, it also stands to reason that there should be
an abundance of quality research done on The Hobbit, but this is not the
case. I have shown the novel to have elements of the Elder Edda,
Beowulf, and the Bible. However, there are many other sources upon
which Tolkien drew, such as The Volsung Saga, and Arthurian legend,
the significance of which has yet to be explored. Furthermore, I have
71
shown the considerable gaps in the research of The Hobbit as a
standalone novel, such as Bilbo’s absence in The Battle of the Five
Armies, the underlying similarities between the Mirkwood elves and the
dwarves, the relevance of the Eagles, and the novel’s connections to
Tolkien’s Christian beliefs. All of these factors complicate The Hobbit’s
reputation as a simple precursor to The Lord of the Rings, and
demonstrate the need for further scholarly research on this novel which
began Tolkien’s career as a writer. In summary, just because The Hobbit
is shorter, and has fewer characters than The Lord of the Rings, does not
mean that it should be, or can be, ignored as part of Tolkienian research.
72
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