We here at
the Jade Sphinx spent the Christmas
holidays reading The Hobbit, written
in 1937 by J. R. R. Tolkien
(1892-1973). It was the sole blot on a
wonderful season.
I should
state here that I have been reading – with great satisfaction and complicity –
works of science fiction and fantasy for more than 40 years. In my high school days (or, perhaps, daze),
Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy
was pressed into my hands by appreciative classmates, and I was never able to
get beyond the mid-point of the second novel.
I have been allergic to hobbits, trolls, orcs and dwarves ever since.
As I
reached my middle years, I have become more and more fascinated by the great
works of children’s literature, books that I missed entirely during my actual
growing up. I did not read Wind in the Willows (1908) or Peter Pan (1911), or the Pooh or Oz books until well into adulthood.
Friends insisted that The Hobbit was a classic children’s novel, one of
the most important of the 20th Century, and that I could not seriously say that
I have read deeply in the field until I have digested this book.
My
misgivings were exacerbated by the spate of recent truly awful film versions of
Tolkien’s books. I had an uncontrollable
fit of the giggles during the first Lord of the Rings film (exploding into loud
hilarity when I saw Christopher Lee
and Ian McKellen beat up
one-another), and the visuals of the films never quite gelled with the fleeting
mental pictures I had made while trying to read the books. I always think of hobbits as sort hominid
rabbits, and seeing well-known actors in big-foot shoes and Mr. Spock ears does not quite gibe with
my mental image. We left the first film
after the mid-way point, and kept our distance from all others until the recent
first-film of The Hobbit series, and saw, with disappointment, that things
never got any better.
But, on to
the book. The Hobbit deals with Bilbo Baggins, a member of a race of
little people called hobbits, who travels away from his comfortable home in the
company of dwarves to kill a dragon called Smaug
and retrieve the treasure Smaug stole from the dwarves. They are accompanied by a wizard, Gandalf, for the first and final halves
of the journey – he is unaccountably absent from the hazardous middle-section.
At the end,
dragon dead and dwarves reunited with gold, various groups of dwarves and elves
and men, now in conflict over the treasure, band together to defeat a marauding
band of goblins. After much death and
slaughter, Bilbo returns to his country home, a sadder but wiser hobbit.
In summary,
it sounds like an interesting read, but the entire book is rendered a thudding
bore by Tolkien’s lugubrious, turgid literary style. Tolkien struggles to give his work the
cadence of fairy tale or baldric epic, but succeeds only in creating faux-King-James-Bible
or slightly rancid Kenneth-Grahame-knockoff.
It is amazing that Tolkien, who made his career as a philologist as well
as a professor of English Language and Literature, should have such a tin ear,
but there it is. Listening to The Hobbit
read aloud (as I did to my better half during much of the holiday), is to
experience a particularly donnish deconstruction of a tale created to excite
into something quite bland and uninteresting.
The
sections of The Hobbit that I enjoyed the most were those passages in the early
part of the book where Bilbo Baggins is at home. Hobbits, it seems, like good food (and lots
of it), pipes and tobacco, a wee dram of something every now and then, warm
homes and a life close to nature. In
short, all the best things found in Wind in the Willows and the Pooh
books. I actually love that part of the
book … and certainly wish there was more of it.
(I dimly recall the opening birthday party scene of The Lord of the
Rings, and hoping the books would get back on track with that – to no avail.) As soon as the ‘adventure’ starts, my
sympathy evaporates. Tolkien obviously
shared my sympathy for a pre-Industrial world, but the quest tale he creates
for his ancient world invariably disappoints.
More
telling, too, is that Tolkien often writes himself into a corner and then takes
the easy way out. Gandalf seems to have
extremely limited powers for a wizard (he seems to be quite good with
fireworks, and that’s about it), and the one time Gandalf can actually do some
good, Tolkien absents him from the action while he is away on “other
business.” Worse yet, for a coming of
age story, Bilbo uses his ring of invisibility much too often to keep himself
out of any real danger; indeed, during the climactic battle, he spends most of
his time literally invisible on the sidelines, keeping out of trouble.
Tolkien
also drapes his cultural prejudices a little too thinly. Clearly hobbits are the rural English, caught
up in outer-world events not to their tastes and beyond their control. The avaricious dwarves seem uncomfortably
Jewish to this reader, and the wood elves a bit too much like gypsies.
Some wag at
The New Yorker has called The Hobbit
The Wind in the Willows Meets The Ring
of the Nibelungen, and I can’t seem to top that.
