The Hobbit (Book, 1937)

🚀 Warp-speed summary (in 3 sentences)

• A small and comfortable creature – Bilbo Baggins – is thrust into an unruly world filled with evil (and a lot of good).
• The story follows Bilbo, a company of dwarves and a wizard, as they travel to the dwarves ancestral home, which has been taken over by a dragon.
• Alliances turn out to be fleeting, but doing the right thing does not.

📡 Discovery

My eight year old daughter wanted us to read her another fantasy novel after we finished the Harry Potter books, and had heard about The Hobbit. Turns out a Danish version of The Hobbit filled with over 50 illustrations from Tove Jansson (made back in 1962) had just been released.

👨‍🚀 Impressions

When I did my DPhil in Oxford back in 2014–2018—where J.R.R. Tolkien had written The Hobbit almost eighty years earlier—I had the pleasure of joining a few meetings arranged by the wonderful Tolkien Society. The rich world imagined by Tolkien is still—deservedly—widely read and celebrated, and I still remember being amazed at how seriously the society treated his stories. In one particular outing, we (about 20 fans) visited Tolkien’s dorm room, still in use, which some poor Merton student had agreed to let us wander through (and probably regretted it).

The Hobbit was first written and read as bedtime stories for Tolkien’s own children, so I was excited to see what our eight-year-old daughter would make of it. The last time I read The Hobbit was almost 20 years ago, and I couldn’t quite remember the style. Although she found the first chapters a bit boring, she was quickly drawn in. In the Danish translation, some of the sentences were quite hard to read aloud—I think it was a combination of Tolkien’s long sentences and translation into a language with fewer words than English. And there were some places where I think the translation could have been more true to Tolkien’s original text: for example, the mountain orcs (or are they goblins in the English book?) were called trolls in the translation, despite “ork” being an accepted word in Danish; while perhaps translating goblins to “nisse” would have been a serious mistake. But overall, the book was of amazing quality, not least because of the many drawings, made by Tove Jansson back in the 1960s when the book was translated into Swedish.

One of the more interesting images among the drawings is that of Gollum, which is very different from how he is normally portrayed.

For me, one of the best sections of the story was the climactic final battle at the Lonely Mountain, where shifting alliances blur the lines between good and evil. Actions—and notions of greed and pride—not historical alliances nor rights, end up deciding the day. The fact that these elements are portrayed in their complex interplay (even Bilbo is not immune to dragon sickness; and only later explains how the ring is what allowed him to escape the mountain orcs) makes it a particularly good children’s book in my mind.

The ring itself, of course, recounts a philosophical argument made in The Republic by Plato. There, Plato’s brother, Glaucon, tells the tale of The Ring of Gyges, which makes its owner invisible, and asks whether any man could resist the temptation to steal, kill, or generally just do whatever he wanted if he had such a ring. Plato ultimately made the counterargument that such a man would not be free, but instead a slave to his appetites.

After we finished the book, I asked my daughter what she would do if she had a ring that could make her invisible. The first thing: “I would do things that are exciting, but I am not allowed to do now—like bike to school.” And after a few seconds’ reflection: “And I would steal chocolate from the drawer!”

Plato never gave any parenting advice, so all the better that we have Tolkien.

🦾 Top three moments

• The Five Army battle at The Lonely Mountain.
• Smaug´s rampage.
• When Bilbo comes back home and finds his home being auctioned off.

⭐ Rating

🧙‍♂️🧙‍♂️🧙‍♂️🧙‍♂️🧙‍♂️: Five wizards out of five.