Hobbit: From Childrens Story to Mythic Creation Essay -- Literature F

Hobbit: From Children's Story to Mythic Creation "Mr. Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it - so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge." -J.R.R Tolkien, letter to his publisher (quoted in Carpenter 1977, 182). The Hobbit started as little more than a bedtime story for Tolkien's children. Like most of his fellow academics, Tolkien viewed fantasy as limited to childhood. The result was a book written in a chatty, informal style that contrasts sharply with that of its serious successors. The narrator makes frequent patronising and intrusive asides, such as "And what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall without a word of explanation?" (H, 18). The language approximates baby-talk at times (nasty, dirty wet hole oozy smell"), and modifiers ("terribly", "lots and lots") abound. Many critics, including Tolkien himself, have viewed this as the chief weakness of the book. Although the tone does evoke the oral tradition through which myths were originally created, it detracts from the power of the book. It renders villains are more comic than truly threatening, its heroes more endearing than awe-inspiring. One commentator feels that The Hobbit "lacks a certain intellectual weight" and "deserves little serious, purely literary criticism" (Helms 1974: 53). The important words here are "purely literary". The novel cannot be studied in isolation, but must be seen against the broader backdrop of Tolkien's literary philosophy and the entire mythic tradition. For the writing of The Hobbit both influenced and was influenced by the profound intellectual change its author was undergoing, namely t... ...teaching its author the immense possibilities of fantasy. It itself does not exhaust these possibilities, but merely begins to explore them. It starts unambitiously, but in drawing from the rich store of world folklore and the author's imagination, soon develops into a myth that, like all good fantasy, speaks as clearly to the mythopoetic imagination today as it did in Tolkien's time. Bibliography: Carpenter, H. 1977. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography. London: George Allen & Unwin. Helms, R. 1974. Myth, Magic and Meaning in Tolkien's World. London: Granada Publishing. Nitshe, J.C. 1979. Tolkien's Art: A Mythology for England. New York: St. Martin's. O'Neill, T.R. 1979. The Individuated Hobbit. Boston: Hougton Mifflin. Rogers, D. & Rogers, I.A. 1980. J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Twayne. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1937. The Hobbit. London: George Allen & Unwin.