"Time shall run back": Tolkien's The Hobbit

J.R.R. Tolkien's heroic romance for children, The Hobbit, has not fared well among the critics who, interested in defending or explaining The Lord of the Rings, treat The Hobbit as a mere prologue to the trilogy. Robert Giddings and Elizabeth Holland devote three continuous pages to its early success, because this made Stanley Unwin insist on a sequel (7-9), then mention it five times in the rest of their book. Though Randel Helms gives it two chapters of Tolkien's World, he objects to the angle of address adopted by the narrator, "of approximately forty-five degrees, talking down to his little listeners" (26). Katharyn Crabb notes the same stance more sympathetically; she discusses The Hobbit seriously as a quest-story which "lacks complexity in conception, in design, and execution" because "written down to a naive audience" (28) of children. Crabb's approach may be critical, but she treats The Hobbit seriously, unlike Helms who spends twelve pages of a fifteen-page chapter on a "Freudian" interpretation of Bilbo's adventures, then reveals that this is not meant as "a fully serious criticism" but "a parody of what William Empson did for (or should I say to?) Alice in Wonderland" (52). He asserts that, unlike Frodo's renunciative quest in The Lord of the Rings, "taken in and for itself, Tolkien's children's story deserves little serious, purely literary criticism" (52), and concludes that "as Bilbo Baggins grew up, so did Tolkien's imagination" (53). What he means by "serious, purely literary criticism" seems to be his careful working-out of parallelisms in The Lord of the Rings (76-108). Helms's dismissal of The Hobbit seems to mean that in a children's story narrative structure, characterization, and verbal art do not deserve such analysis and that The Hobbit is inferior because of its audience as well as its content. He seems to have changed his mind once The Silmarillion became available in 1977, for in Toikien and the Silmarils he finds that the stories of the Elder Days (mainly written before The Hobbit) form a narrative pattern similar to that of The Hobbit so that The Hobbit is The Silmarillion "writ small" (80).

Helms approaches Tolkien's later publications as forms of "myth", an approach also taken by David Harvey, who has very little to say about The Hobbit, in which obvious "myth" is so peripheral that it is unlikely to attract attention. Giddings and Holland devote most of their book to following the same mythic threads into unlikely places. Richard Purthill, approaching Tolkien as a philosopher, says something about The Hobbit on five pages of a 140-page book. The collection A Tolkien Compass includes two essays on The Hobbit out often, one documenting some of Tolkien's revisions, another presenting seriously the "Freudian" interpretation mocked by Randel Helms.

Some of this critical dismissal may come from the fact that The Hobbit seems to be no more than a "story", invented almost by accident for Tolkien's children, published almost by accident on a child's recommendation (Biography 180-1), and therefore "wanting art" despite its important catalytic role in enabling Tolkien to make his "lost tales" into a coherent narrative, and despite his careful revisions for the second and third editions. Early in his study of what a novel consists of, E.M. Forster apologetically defines story as "a narrative of events arranged in their time sequence. . . . Qua story, it can have only one merit: that of making the audience want to know what happens next" (28). Tolkien did not share Forster's apologetic attitude to "story", but defines it as for him the most important aspect of literature (Reader 51-2); his own fictions conspicuously raise and answer the question "what happens next?" in a world peopled by elves, dwarves, goblins, talking birds and beasts, shape-shifters, giants, trolls, dragons, and heroes, which he had not imagined but found (the root sense of "invented") in folk tales and heroic legends. The events of The Hobbit seem to follow mere temporal order; as Crabb declares, "the [naive] reader will not...