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Reading The Hobbit* was a long time coming. It hovered over my consciousness for a while, waiting to assert itself in my mind as must-read children’s literature, and finding resistance. As each year passes, I am further and further removed from juvenile classics as I hurry from one breath to another chasing adult realism in high fantasy and side-stepping my inner child’s need for�. lull, and silliness, and listening contentedly to a story as it is. Enjoying the way things are just isn’t done.

In The Hobbit, in fact, all things are as they are. Creatures in all forms and manner of creepy and fearsome, fuzzy and quirky, noble and heroic, born of a wellspring in Tolkien’s Wilderland. They are as natural as natural is, with their places in the light, or in the shadows, as they are meant to be. It is I, the stranger-reader, who is trespassing with my lofty presuppositions in this fantasy land of as-they-are, where any child would have assimilated instantly. How else could hobbits and wargs and trolls and elves and giant men and dwarves and majestic eagles and a dragon and a gollum exist otherwise, if not for magic and innocence and adventure? They existed in young Tolkien’s imagination long before they became our shared imaginations.

Tolkien’s Middle Earth is a vast fertile place, the boundaries of which stretch endlessly. Within it we are shared a very simple plot planted with enough substance to satisfy the first-time visitor like myself, but has enough literary gold for fans to dig deeper into. We trust the master story-teller to lead us there, where the journey might have ended, and back again, where the journey had begun. From The Shire through the Misty Mountains, into the dark of Milkwood Forest, up the Lonely Mountain, and once more in The Shire, we get a sense of Tolkien’s self-contained vision in so complete a tale. For me, not a word more, not a word less, is needed for a story so rich with incidents, in utter modulation of pitch and pace and mood.

To say that The Hobbit reads like poetry is probably undue, though an excellent audiobook can likely portray it as so. Without the benefit of listening to a skilled oral narrator, I can only imagine the story out loud in my head as it is being told to us in the most authoritative but kindest voice, and many a time finding myself drawn by its sonority. I have read too little Tolkien to know anything about the musicality of his writing, but this story has a pleasing rhythm that never strays from the soothing middle where it’s never very wild or very tame. Most very young readers hear their first stories by bobbing along phonetically with the rise and fall of each spoken word, and to the degree of inflection, even if they don’t actually comprehend the text and context. In my mental evergreen space where I am forever the 4-, or 6-, or 8-year old who read this book, the story sounds like a 300-plus page lullaby even in the most dramatic portions. For some older readers, it might have a somnolent effect that gives way to boredom.

Not everyone loves The Hobbit, and many do not. Some might prefer to hear the characters speak directly, so that we may know their hearts more intimately, while others might like fewer lucky escapades. The dwarves were a grumpy, singing lot, with little distinguishing traits except for a few minor ones, and so we care a tad less. Bilbo Baggins we might care more for, as it is his adventure we are following along but the befuddled, bumbling creature who turned nimbly cunning never quite connected at the heart, while the susurrating Gollum invoked my pity more. And oh, as for the rest, a charming lot if you don’t get too close but then we never really could. It suffers from the big screen adaptation in that those who loved the movies may find the book bogged with details, and those who loathe the movies, may find the book insufficient to improve upon them.

All that journeying from one high adventure to another is bound to tire even the most ardent reader. Little wonder that The Hobbit was often read in tranches before bedtime over many nights since 1937, the year it was published. Those children grew up and read The Hobbit to their children, who then read to other children and so forth, thus its timelessness, and its delight, perpetuated for generations. How each reader and Tolkien leapt from The Hobbit to the Lord of the Rings is very personal, with each person a different path.

Reading The Hobbit wasn’t planned for. The onrush of interest caught me unawares, as was tearing through it as quickly as I did. It’s hard to articulate exactly what alchemy took a subtle turn, except that right there and then at the library, The Hobbit asserted itself as a must-read, a tentative step into this Other World that Tolkien created before publishing The Lord of the Rings in 1954. It may be awhile before I venture further, not from disinterest, far from it, but from a place of preservation. Of wishing to linger in The Hobbit a bit more. I sincerely don’t feel harangued by enthusiasm shared about its sequel, but perhaps I can best explain by taking my cue from Bilbo Baggins who also lingered and lingered in the Shire because it was safe and warm and merry until adventure dropped in for tea. Upon which, time would not be long for me and the hobbits to go again.


[* 1937 nominee Carnegie Medal, New York Herald Tribune prize for best juvenile fiction, and countless awards, revisions, formats, editions in the years since]