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  • General Criticism: The Hobbit
  • John Magoun (bio)

Despite a higher public profile this year thanks to the first of the Peter Jackson films, The Hobbit remains a difficult book to place center stage in a consideration of Tolkien’s works. Questions about its literary quality have occupied critics for decades, in which inevitable comparisons with The Lord of the Rings clash with its status as a classic of children’s literature. Two chapters in editor Peter Hunt’s casebook take this well-trodden path.

Keith O’Sullivan in “The Hobbit, the Tale, Children’s Literature, and the Critics” (Hunt 16–31) presents a wandering argument that The Hobbit is both a distinguished work of children’s literature and something like a classic of the fantasy genre with some literary pretensions, rather than a simplistic and almost embarrassing prequel to The Lord of the Rings. Most Tolkien critics and fans will probably not be surprised to hear this. A greater flaw throughout is that various critical receptions of The Lord of the Rings are extended to The Hobbit, on the grounds that the two books share sufficient literary qualities to justify the appropriation; the critics cited have not been given the chance to consent to this presumption.

In the same collection, C. W. Sullivan III’s “Tolkien and the Traditional Dragon Tale: An Examination of The Hobbit” (Hunt 62–73) is stronger because it limits itself to a study of The Hobbit as Tolkien’s offering in the genre of “traditional dragon tale.” Sullivan shows that Tolkien, to make the story his own, added a major battle that followed the dragon’s almost off-stage death; the battle, not the dragon, causes the deaths of Thorin and many others. Following other critics, Sullivan says that this variation reflects Tolkien’s sense of futile loss experienced during the Great War. He also points out that Bilbo’s being a trickster character, rather than a dragon-slaying hero, is an equally significant deviation from the dragon tale; but he does not analyze or connect it to Tolkien’s experiences.

The fifth edition of the Tolkien annual Silver Leaves has The Hobbit as its topic. Two articles give overviews of the book’s themes and genre; a third (by Kelly Orazi) is discussed at the end of this section. The first, “An Unexpected Hero” by Ryan Marotta (73–77), recounts Bilbo’s growth from an unadventurous squire to an almost saintly hero. Marotta focuses on how Bilbo develops his free will to accomplish his goals, in contrast to the “impulsive” natures of his antagonists, [End Page 235] Gollum, Smaug, and Thorin. The essay’s inoffensive simplicity is not spoiled by flaws such as omitting Tolkien’s early mention of the hobbit’s latently adventurous Took ancestry, referring to plot details that are supported by events in The Lord of the Rings but not The Hobbit, and quoting dialogue from the New Line films to comment on Tolkien’s writing. On the question of genre, a second article, “Escaping the Nursery: The Hobbit as a Coming-of-Age Novel” (38–41), by Jonathon D. Svendsen, claims that the book is among the classics of children’s literature due to three factors: it is a bildungsroman, it conveys a sense of nostalgia, and it reveals hidden depths upon rereading. Svendsen weakens his analysis by confusing the ideas of “coming of age” and “the hero’s journey”; for his latter two criteria, he defines the book’s nostalgia and depth not from its own writing but by how it relates to The Lord of the Rings. Again, things are not helped by errors of style and the use of inappropriate quotes from The Silmarillion and the New Line films to support points about The Hobbit.

One of the most studied parts of The Hobbit is chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark,” because of its introduction of Gollum and the Ring, which led to the epic sequel, and its engaging riddle duel between Bilbo and Gollum. It was the only chapter that Tolkien substantially rewrote after publication, to account for the different nature of the Ring in the new book—a fact that critics ignore at their peril...

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