“… and that means comfort.”

I have picked up The Hobbit again after, it must be 25 years. I haven’t read it since I was a kid. I am having the time of my life. I found that I still had the first paragraph in my head, almost word for word.

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

I remember what the book looked like when I was a kid. It had a drawing on the cover of a green hill with a little round door stuck in the middle of it, and smoke coming up out of a teeny little chimney. It was magic. The book I have now is a bit more literal. It looks like a painting by Turner or somebody, only there is also a drawing of Gandalf, stalking towards one particular hill, with his tall staff, and if you look closely you can see the little round door.

The book is as I remembered it. It’s like candy. You want to eat it up as quickly as possible before the savory taste disappears. It does not have that much substance. The substance seems to have been added on by fanatical readers, and by Tolkien himself as he developed the Ring Trilogy. The Hobbit is just a sweet and sometimes scary romp, of a homebody forced to leave his home. I loved all of those funny grumpy little dwarves when I was a kid, with their different colored hats and tassels. I remember during one particularly obsessive moment, in order to keep them all straight, I took notes.

Like this:

Dwalin: blue beard, golden belt, dark-green hood
Balin: white beard, scarlet hood
Dori: purple hood, gold and silver belt

The little obsessive in me loved the detail, loved the adjectives.

Bilbo, the little home-bound gardening staid hobbit, is chosen. He is not ready to be chosen. He doesn’t want to have adventures. He is unprepared to do things like climb trees, run from Wargs, and slay an entire flock of enormous spiders. But … with much grumbling and moaning, with much “Oh, I wish it were YESTERDAY” – he rises to the task.

Isn’t that what all great stories are truly made of? Nobody is re-inventing the wheel here. It is not necessary to do so.

We can see ourselves in Bilbo. We love to sit at home, by a nice crackling fire, having soup, and ale, conversing with friends, enjoying the moonlight. We don’t want to race down stony hills, fleeing from angry goblins, we don’t want to venture into pitch-black caves and meet creatures like Gollum who want to eat us alive … and yet if we were called upon to do these things, if the stakes were high, if we knew that we were “chosen” – perhaps we too would step up to the task at hand.

Like Bilbo does, time and time again.