The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien

A book to read out loud

I recently finished reading The Hobbit to my children and I loved every minute of it. You might think Tolkien breaks many rules of writing. He says “suddenly” all the time. He uses “he” multiples times in a sentence, referring to two different people. He constantly breaks the fourth wall to say “of course such and such”. He repeats words, relatively close together. And so on.

But Tolkien does all of this deliberately. Lots of the action is rather sudden. Sometimes it is confusing and he wants you to feel that. Often the repetitions are reinforcing a point. He breaks the fourth wall to create the sense that this legend is one small part of a longer, bigger history.

In so much of what we might dismiss as Tolkien being period, or genre, we can find technique.

Take his use of anachronism. Bilbo clearly has no place in the world of fairy-tale and legend, nor does tobacco, or many other aspects of Hobbit life. They are modern, small-town, almost suburban creatures, with very twentieth-century social preoccupations, who just about fit into the very pre-1066 mythical land of Middle Earth. Tom Shippey shows, in Author of the Century, Bilbo’s modernity. His conversation with Smaug, for example, is typical of an upper-class person dealing with a middle-class upstart. Tolkien refashioned old legends but he also wrote the mores of his time and place.

(This intentional use of anachronism, by the way, shows the limits of Richard Hanania’s argument that woke interpolations into fantasy disrupt believability. Richard writes, “Fantasy worlds not only appeal to human nature, but, crucially, often human nature as it existed in earlier eras”, but that simply isn’t true of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, whose central heroes are often very modern. Shippey points out, for example, that Bilbo’s courage is all internal, not external; he steels himself to face the dragon alone in the tunnel of the mountain: no ancient hero behaved like this.)

Opinion is split on whether Tolkien writes good prose. Many fairy tales are written in a prose meter that is specific to the genre, often quite lilting (“Once upon a time…”). It’s akin to writing in hymn meter, for example. Such stories are full of iambs and anapests, so that the sentences often start running in lulling rhythms, with occasional choriambs. Beatrix Potter is especially good at this, in The Tailor of Gloucester and The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher. Look at the opening sentence of The Hobbit:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Two anapests at the start, followed by an iamb, closed with an amphibrach.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

Tolkien has a great ability to write this fairy-tale prose. When you read the book out loud this lilting style becomes much more obvious and engrossing. His is often alliterative, too, as you would expect from a professor of Anglo Saxon.

Etymology is another deep root of his art. At the end of The Hobbit, Bilbo returns to find his home and possessions are being auctioned off, and that the prospective buyers are making a terrible mess, not even bothering to wipe their feet on the mat. This is a little joke, based on the dual meaning of the northern-dialect word okshen, which means both “mess” and “auction”. Tolkien knew that as he was a philologist (a scholar of language) and had written a prologue to a glossary of the Huddersfield dialect. Bilbo’s surname, Baggins, is another such joke; in the north of England, baggins is a colloquial word for the food you take with you to work (literally, baggings). Bilbo, of course, is always looking for food, and finds himself without baggings for much of his journey. The name of Bilbo’s house, Bag End is the Englished version of the French cul-de-sac. (Tolkien was professionally opposed to the Frenchification of English that had happened after 1066.) Bilbo’s grasping relations, who not only acquire many of his silver spoons in the auction but refuse to give them back when he reappears, are called Sackville-Baggins, a French-English compound. Calling Bilbo a burglar invokes the etymology of that word, which is the same as bourgeoise: Bilbo’s adventure will take him from bourgeois to burglar and back again.

These examples, all taken from Shippey’s Author of the Century (another philology professor) exemplify the way that Tolkien’s fiction is built out of names, etymologies, and word-history. He is not a mere spinner of tales, but a worker of lost languages. Tolkien knew that these words still resonate with us now, as the name of places do, even though we have lost the knowledge of their meanings, another reason to read this charming book out loud.