There And Back Again Again

Well, I'm back, he said.

I've finished my first re-read of the Hobbit in quite a while--perhaps this century--and am two chapters into the Lord of the Rings. A lot of people, though reluctant to admit it, view The Hobbit as a kind of duty--if you're going to read the story, you should really start at the beginning, go on until you come to the end, and then stop. Good advice, but maybe not necessary when you're reading a medievalist's book. Medieval romances tend to spread all over the place: they usually deny claims of having been invented, preferring instead to be the translation of a mythical earlier book, and,further back to being a true story--and expand and throw off branches and go on sidetracks that can last for volumes. I had the perilous pleasure, as a grad student, of dipping long and hard into the the French Vulgate story of the Holy Grail--huge folio volumes in ugly library bindings--perhaps the hugest work of fancy this side of Robert Jordan. In those days there was no contemporary translation of all of it, so I had to fall in love with Old French as I wandered about, back to Joseph of Arimathea, and off to the wanderings of many knights. Unity? Unity's for wimps, buddy. Real men don't worry that an Arthurian Romance will go on for volumes without a glimpse of the big guy, or anything resembling the main storyline. Unity! Hah! I fart in its general direction!

Tolkien readers will recognize the references to the Red Book of Westmarch as part of that reach into the past, and further that Middle-Earth is not some magic land accessible by a cupboard or a painting, but simply our world from a while back. And while nobody could call the Lord of the Rings anything but unified, and while the above quoted last line of the tale is one of the most well considered and elegant endings, it's not the end of the book, which, instead of wrapping things up with that phrase that Bilbo Baggins invented, and he lived happily ever after until the end of his days, and rolling the credits, starts a whole new journey, of long multi-threaded histories and genealogy and even philology, even while the narrative glow slowly fades. The tale was a tale indeed, but the book as a book was a different animal indeed. Nobody had ever seen a structure like it before, and the few people who tried that later in imitation fell flat on their faces. 

The conventional wisdom is that the Hobbit is a children's book, and less extraordinary than its sequel. But upon reading the book again, that's not altogether accurate. In many ways, many of them structural, it's a very peculiar book indeed.

I was struck as I had not been before by how much LOTR is, in its shape, a sequel to the Hobbit. Gandalf shows up at Bag End, gets its master into a long perilous journey, drops out halfway through, get involved in a big battle , whereupon the Master of Bag End returns to find that everything had gone to hell in his absence. Tolkien even duplicates perhaps his most exasperating narrative device in the sequel: the huge magnificent battle recounted sketchily and in retrospect. (It did my heart good to find Peter Jackson saying 'Fuck it! Maybe J.R.R. introduced the army of the Dead and the Corsairs of Umbar just to have it all happen offstage, but I'm going to show it!")

The Hobbit, as an ordinary children's adventure, has a number of very odd turns that make it something other than the standard fare, and not all of them seem to be strokes of genius. As I've said before, by far the most interesting character in the book vanishes halfway through, to go off on what seems to be a more exciting adventure than the one in the book. The medieval romances and chansons de geste did this, and it certainly would have trivialized a lot of the subsequent adventures to have Gandalf take care of the matters. Still, when I first read the book I was craning my neck around to wonder if we were going to get any of that Necromancer and Dol Guldur stuff. And as it turned out, we never did--not that part.

But the odder thing is that the whole set-up story, Smaug and all, is solved, not by Bilbo's cleverness, but by this guy whom Tolkien rushes onto the stage with nearly no introduction, Bard the Bowman, whom we never get much of afterwards either. As a puzzle to be solved, it's more than a bit of a let down: Smaug leaves the cave and Bard shoots him. Wha?

Moreover, after the monster gets destroyed, the rest of the story seems to become the vary un-children's-book-like phenomenon of the of the various good guys coming to blows over the treasure--which doesn't get any real resolution--instead, the armies of Goblins attack. None of this flows together plotwise. It's also interesting that Bilbo falls short of success three times. He gets in the secret way into the mountain, but beyond that does not succeed in any way with Smaug; his handing over of the Arkenstone to Thorin's enemies never has a chance to work because whoops! Here come that army of Goblins everybody forgot about since chapter 5. And in that big Battle of the Five Armies, Bilbo is simply unconscious.  We all know that what's supposed to happen in books of this sort is that the childlike, powerless and good hearted protagonist saves the day--but all Bilbo's triumphs are undercut rather forcefully. This is so puzzling as to be disturbing--until one remembers that, in the sequel, long-suffering heroic Frodo, at the last crisis, fails his quest, succumbs to the Ring. What saves Middle Earth is a nasty tussle, whose climax has an eerie echo of the discussion at the Green Dragon about Frodo's parentage: "And I heard he pushed her, and she pulled him in after her." Hobbits are, in both books, surprising clever and courageous creatures--but their courage and their virtue, in Tolkien's vision of things, not infinite.

It's what Tolkien refuses to do in both books that may be the thing that made the Hobbit something more than a simple kid's book. Frankly, the moral finiteness is something I only started to see on this reading, and it's not, by itself, something that would make me lean back in the rocker and sigh with pleasure. But this complexity is a part of something else, and it's that something else that set my antennae to quivering when I got it from the Scholastic Book Service ages ago.

It's this: While Bilbo Baggins is an exquisite creation of British charm, like Rat and Mole in The Wind In The Willows or the denizens of the Hundred Acre Wood, Bilbo is different from them in that he is running around in a world among figures that do not act that way. He is cheerful and pleasant and likes to eat and be comfortable--and he's running around in a world in which people don't tend to offer him things to eat. (or if they do, they turn into bears.)

Worlds like Oz or Narnia can be big and fabulously inventive, and even dark and terrible from time to time. But even if they're not didactic, the world is there for the kids' benefit. The important triumphs are the kids' triumphs.

That's what Tolkien refused to do in this story. Part of it is because the world Tolkien created antedated the writing of the Hobbit--but the fact remains that, even in the small sketchy corner of Middle Earth, the book told you that more was going on than Bilbo Baggins learning a lesson. That is what I sensed when I first read it. Its insufficiencies were actually its virtues, in a way: the fact that I git the message that this wasn't the best story going on during this period made the book itself a lesser thing--but the promise was something deeply exciting that i hadn't felt before.

The truly magnificent thing is that Tolkien delivered on that promise: he managed to take in some ways the same story (Bilbo Baggins gets a magical ring in the middle of a war; part two, his nephew gets rid of the ring in the midst of another. In both they are the companions of someone seeking after a kingship.) and deliver all the size and seriousness--and moral finitude--hinted at the first time. The Hobbit does not deserve, I think, the judgment that it's a cute  kid's book. I think it's a lesser thing because , in all sorts of surprising ways, a rehearsal for the main event.

Well, except for the origin of golf. That's just silly.