Have you ever found yourself at a crossroads? You know, a point in your life where you don’t know if you should take a sharp turn or keep going straight? In one of my journeys playing Dungeons and Dragons, my friends and I were given the choice – left or right? Stubborn, contrary, and more than a little drunk, we decided to keep going straight… off the beaten path and into the woods where we got lost. For two years (In real life, I mean. Seriously, we were lost) we tried to find our way back to the road only to run into more and more trouble. We didn’t blame our Dungeon Master. It was our decision, after all.
So, to honor the journey that is life, I dedicate this entry to the stories that take us all out of the humdrum of everyday living and lead us in a direction that we never expected. I can’t think of a single story that embodies this idea more than The Hobbit.
The first time I picked up J.R.R. Tolkien’s novel, I was nineteen years old and I finished it inside of a day. It was my first, and for the longest time my only, foray into high fantasy. It came as a bit of a surprise to find that he was also the first author to write in the genre.
This was the time when Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring had just been released in theaters. Everyone raved about Frodo and Sam, Gandalf the Grey, and of course, Aragorn. But I was more intrigued by Bilbo. I loved the bravery such a small creature possessed to decide to leave his home for the first time, to follow a group of dwarves into certain danger, and to find himself able to outwit not only Gollum, but a dragon as well.
Speaking of journeys into the unknown, a year or two after I read The Hobbit I took a seminar on Germanic literature in college and it came to my attention that Tolkien had based his classic tale on even older epics. Stories such as Beowulf (which Tolkien translated) and Snorri Sturluson’s Poetic Edda (though we read the Prose in class) fed his imagination about fighting monsters and finding cursed gold.
The names of the company of dwarves and the creation of the rings of power came directly from the Edda, a retelling of Norse mythology. Thor and Loki come across a river where they find a ring being guarded by a dwarf and trick him into giving it to them. The two brothers fight over who should possess the ring. The fight between Smeagol and his brother Deagol is a mirror of this battle of the gods.
The story continues in two German plays, Das Nibelungenlied (The Song of the Nibelungs) and Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelungs). Anyone familiar with these two epics would recognize Sigmund, a young man who pulls a sword from a tree, and Brünnhilde, a valkyrie, as Aragorn and Eowyn (though Eowyn is better in my opinion). The hero of the tale was Siegfried, who was raised by a dwarf and goes on to slay a dragon.
One of my favorite anecdotes is about Shakespeare’s Macbeth (I can’t remember why it came up, but it did). There is a scene where Macbeth’s home is surrounded by moving trees that turn out to be his enemies preparing to attack. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis hated the fact that the trees hadn’t been real. They loved the idea of trees that could move and speak. In fact, they loved it so much that they both wrote their own versions of sentient forests. C.S. Lewis went for a more classical approach with his dryads in Narnia, but Tolkien took it one step further and created Mirkwood and Fangorn.
As for the meandering nature of Tolkien’s adventure, that can be attributed to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, an Arthurian poem written down in the late fourteenth century and translated from Old Middle English by Tolkien himself, though he left behind the sing-song nature of the poem, choosing instead to write in prose. I’m happy to say there is a modern translation by Simon Armitage which is beautifully retold in the same style as the original.
Any good adventure starts with taking that first step out of the door. As Bilbo tells Frodo, “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, walking out of your door. You step out onto the road and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Reading Tolkien for the first time is the same. You never quite know where he might lead you. In learning where he got his inspiration, my love of adventure only grew. Much like Bilbo and Frodo, I find myself unable to keep the earth below my feet. I hope you feel the same. Thank you for taking this journey with me into the dark and mysterious world of J.R.R Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
Book Gnome 