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The Hobbit
J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is an extremely popular book, both because
it is a simply written and fast-pace adventure story and because it is set in
Middle-earth, one of the great fantasy creations in the English language.
Although most students respond quickly and positively to the book, teaching it
to adolescents can require some delicacy. On the one hand, some students may
resent having to read a mere children's book, feeling that fairy tales are
beneath their dignity. On the other hand, some students will already be
intimately familiar with Middle-earth, and their strongly developed attitudes
about the exact appearance and meaning of Bilbo's world may be an important part
of their personal identity.
The Hobbit's chapters are between seven and twenty-five pages long.
Dividing the book into eight sections provides reading assignments that are
fairly uniform in length and correspond to natural divisions in the story:
·Chapter 1: 25 pages
·Chapters 2-4: 36 pages
·Chapters 5-6: 39 pages
·Chapters 7-8: 42 pages
·Chapters 9-10: 27 pages
·Chapters 11-13: 40 pages
·Chapters 14-16: 26 pages
·Chapters 17-19: 27 pages
This teacher's guide includes a biographical and critical background of The
Hobbit and four or five sections for each chapter:
·Plot summary
·Comprehension questions
·Vocabulary items
·Open-ended topics for class discussion, essays, or term projects. Many of
these topics can be extended beyond one chapter.
·At selected places, critical essays explaining literary conventions and major
themes.
J.R.R. Tolkien and Middle-earth
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in 1892 in Blomfontein, South Africa, where
his father was a branch bank manager. At the age of three, Ronald's health
caused him, his mother, and his brother Hilary to return to England, where they
settled in Sarehole, a county village on the outskirts of Birmingham. His father
died soon after, and his mother when he was twelve. His early education was at
King Edward's School in Birmingham, where he showed promise in languages and Old
English literature. During his last years at St. Edward's he fell in love with
Edith Bratt, also an orphan, and formed close friendships--and an informal
literary society--with several of his schoolfellows.
In 1911 he entered Exeter College, Oxford, and received a First Class Honours
degree in English in 1915. Immediately after graduation he entered the army. In
1916 he married Edith and was shipped to France. After four months in the front
lines he was stricken with trench fever and sent home.
After the war he joined the staff of the Oxford English Dictionary
(writing entries in the W's), taught at Leeds University for a while, and was
elected to a chair in Anglo-Saxon at Oxford.
"And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened. Tolkien came
back to Oxford, was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon for
twenty-years, was then elected Merton Professor of English Language and
Literature, went to live in a conventional Oxford suburb where he spent the
first part of his retirement, moved to a nondescript seaside resort, came back
to Oxford after his wife died, and himself died a peaceful death at the age of
eighty-one...And that would be that--apart from the strange fact that during
these years when "nothing happened" he wrote two books which have
become world best-sellers, books that have captured the imagination and
influenced the thinking of several million readers."1
The creation of Middle-earth, which occupied Tolkien for sixty-years, can be
divided into three stages. The first stage, begun at the St. Edward's School,
involved first the creation of languages and then the development of a series of
legends that could give these languages a social context in which to develop.
These legends soon became important in their own right, a mythic cycle which
combined Christian and pagan (especially Germanic and Celtic) sources to provide
England with a national mythology that would express the English spirit as the
Eddas and the Kalevala does for Scandinavia and Finland. As Tolkien put it:
"I had a mind to make a body of more or less connected legend, ranging from
the large and cosmogonic to the level of romantic fairy-story--the larger
founded on the lesser in contact with the earth, the lesser drawing splendor
from the vast backclothes--which I could dedicate simply: to England; to my
country....I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only
placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a majestic
whole, and yet leave scope for other minds and hands, wielding paint and music
and drama."2
The death in World War I of most of his St. Edward's friends apparently firmed
Tolkien's resolution, and after twenty-years he had elaborated several
languages, a cosmology, and large parts of The Silmarillion, high heroic
tales (written in verse and prose, English and Elvish) of the fall of the
angelic Melkor and the futile struggles of Men and Elves against him.
As a diversion from these weighty labors, Tolkien composed stories and sketches
for his own children. About 1930, one of these beginning with the idle sentence
"In a whole in the ground there lived a hobbit," became more and more
involved as Tolkien defined hobbits and created adventure for one particular
hobbit. Gradually it became clear to Tolkien that Bilbo Baggins' adventures took
place in the same Middle-earth as his high heroic tales, but at a much later
age. After six years of intermittent composition, The Hobbit was
published as a children's book to critical and popular acclaim. Immediately
Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings, published in 1954-55 after
years of painstaking revision. In many ways a reworking of the plot of The
Hobbit, the length, intensity and complex theses of the Rings trilogy
make it the adult epic Tolkien desired to create. Although its reputation was
slow to grow, the paperback publication of the trilogy in the mid-sixties
established the enormous fame of Middle-earth and its creator.
The third stage of Tolkien's literary career followed the publication of the
trilogy and continued until his death in 1973. He spent these years polishing
the conception of his heroic cycle, leaving the original stories relatively
untouched but embellishing their context with philosophical essays, genealogical
tables, historical speculations, and especially in his last years, philosophical
and theological explications, all designed to clarify the meaning of his
creation and enhance its internal consistency. The Silmarillion and Unfinished
Tales, both edited by his son Christopher and published posthumously, bear
witness to the three crucial elements of Tolkien's authorship: the ambitiousness
and learned complexity of his creation, his ceaseless reworking of details in
search of perfection, and his loving devotion to these labors.
There can be no question that the enormous popular success of Middle-earth is
due to the labors and spirit of its creator. The creation of an accomplished
storyteller, linguist, poet and painter, Middle-earth's depths and plausibility
are unmatched in modern fantasy and it's reworking of the common ground of
Norse, Celtic and Judeo-Christian tradition lies in Tolkien's belief in the
importance and perfectibility of Man.
Although its most striking creatures are noble Elves, evil goblins, proud
Dwarves, cunning dragons, wizards, Eagles and demons, the most important race in
Middle-earth is Men, for whose creation and salvation Middle-earth is prepared.
The Men of Middle-earth, free to choose their own destinies, run the full gamut
from demonic evil and goblin-like depravity to a purity and integrity equaling
that of the noblest Elves. The contrast between goblins and Elves provides one
of the most important measures of good and evil in Middle-earth. The
Silmarillion, tells that Elves, the Elder Children of God, were created to
guide Men, the Younger Children, on the long journey to spiritual wisdom and
love of God. Goblins, in contrast, are corrupted Elves, bred in mockery of
Morgoth, the Necromancer's master, whose revolt against God brings evil to
Middle-earth. Thus Bard's ability to learn restraint from the Elvenking is an
important sign of his virtue, and Bilbo's love of Elves indicated his spiritual
grace.
Where the Elves serve as a model for Men's aspirations, hobbits provide a
touchstone. Their lives display a basic goodness, a conservative, pastoral
simplicity. Close to Nature and free from personal ambition and greed, hobbits
need no government and are generally anti-technological. Rarely corrupted, they
never corrupt others. The hobbits' Shire is a quiet backwater, removed both from
the agonies and the high destiny of Men, whether in Middle-earth or the 20th
century. The Shire is, for Tolkien, a mirror in which we can search for the
simple peace at the center of our hearts.
1. Humphrey Carpenter, Tolkien: A Biography (New York: Ballantine Books,
1978), p.124
2. Carpenter, pp.100-101.
The Uses of Fantasy
Good fantasy offers the possibility of active, serious participation by the
reader in an imagined world, which heightens one's sense of Self and Other. This
participation depends not only on the reader's intentions but also on the moral
plausibility of the fantasy world. The reward for this participation is a sense
of wonder that enables the reader to return to the "real" world with
enhanced understanding and appreciation--either of the world itself or of his
relation to it.
In Tolkien's view, expressed in his influential essay "On Fairy
Stories" (written in 1939 as he was beginning The Lord of The Rings),
fantasy has an important positive function. In this subtle and somewhat diffuse
essay, Tolkien asserts that this can be an escape to a serious Secondary World
(or "sub-creation") as much as an escape from the Primary World of
reality.
For a Secondary World to be serious, it must first arouse enchantment, or
Secondary Belief. Where Coleridge's "willing suspension of disbelief"
is an exercise in which the critical intellect is made passive while the
emotions are given free play, Secondary Belief is an active and integrative
process by which the audience perceives the Secondary World to possess "the
inner consistency of reality," to be as true--on its own terms--as the
Primary World. The Secondary World must be created for Art, not Magic--as a
wonder in itself, not with the pretense of altering the primary World or the
reader's status in it. Any type of wonder is acceptable, but Tolkien asserts
that the act of serious sub-creation inevitably reflects the primary creation,
so that even when it objects and inhabitants are marvelous, the values and
aspirations of a Secondary World are familiar.
Thus, a fantasy world is inevitably a mirror of our own world, and Tolkien
explains the nature of this mirror using four terms: Recovery, Escape,
Consolation, and Eucatastrophe. The sense of wonder aroused by Secondary Belief
is not a discovering of the exotic but a Recovery of the familiar, the
"regaining of a clear view" of the objects of the Primary World freed
from the taints of anxiety, triteness, and above all, possessiveness. In a
Secondary World our sense of wonder should extend not only to "the centaur
and the dragon" but also "like the ancient shepherds," to
"sheep, and dogs, and horses--and wolves,"1 and on our return to the
Primary World we may retain some of that wonder and appreciation. At the same
time as it offers an Escape to renewed significance, fantasy offers Escape from
things worth fleeing: the petty evils of tawdriness and ugliness; the "grim
and terrible" evils of "hunger, thirst, poverty, pain, sorrow,
injustice, death"; and, on a more positive note, the "ancient
limitations" on worthy desires such as "the desire to converse with
other living things."2 The fulfillment of these Escapes is one of the
Consolations of the Happy Ending. In its best form, the happy ending is a
Eucatastrophe, an unexpected turning of the plot, "sudden and
miraculous...never to be counted on to recur." Fantasy admits the
possibility of failure, sorrow, and death, but "it denies (in the face of
much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat...giving a fleeting glimpse
of Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief."3
A complementary view of fantasy is offered by the child psychologist Bruno
Bettleheim in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy
Tales. Bettleheim accepts Tolkien's view and indeed borrows much of his
terminology. But where Tolkien as author stresses the art of sub-creation and
the recovery of wonder, Bettleheim as therapist emphasizes the use of fantasy to
teach children about the Primary World and to encourage personal development.
For Bettleheim, "the fairy-tale is future oriented and guides the child--in
terms he can understand in both his conscious and his unconscious mind--to
relinquish his infantile dependency wishes and achieve a more stratifying
independent existence."4 The wish-fulfillment element of fantasy both
relieves anxiety and shows the child that personal success can be obtained,
although at a certain price. At the heart of this lesson is the fact that the
hero must work for his success. Magic accessories and good advice may be given
to him, but he must use these aids actively and appropriately, and success often
comes only after years of obscure labor or initial failure. Thus, the
development of the hero is less a matter of change than of self-discovery.
1. J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories," in Tree and Leaf,
reprinted in The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), p.
57.
2. Tolkien, pp. 57-58
3. Tolkien, p 68.
4. Bruno Bettleheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of
Fairy Tales (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), p.11.
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This page last updated on August 20, 2004