The Great Tolkien Reread: The Hobbit

Illustration from the Swedish translation of The Hobbit, by Tove Jansson, 1962

[A previous version of this essay appeared on Asking the Wrong Questions in October 2010]

The most that can be said for the dwarves is this: they intended to pay Bilbo really handsomely for his services; they had brought him to do a nasty job for them, and they did not mind the poor fellow doing it if he would; but they would have done their best to get him out of trouble, if he got into it, as they did in the case of the trolls at the beginning of their adventures before they had any particular reasons for being grateful to him. There it is: dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money; some are tricky and treacherous and pretty bad lots; some are not, but are decent people like Thorin and Company, if you don't expect too much.

Last week's news that the long-beleaguered production of The Hobbit is finally getting on its way sent me back to the book itself for the first time in nearly a decade. I reread The Lord of the Rings every few years, but The Hobbit is less dear to my heart and thus less frequently returned to. What brought me back this time was the desire to gain some grounding in the text from which to wonder how Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens were going to adapt the novel, which in my recollection was childish and episodic, into something of a piece with their Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Tolkien's celebrated affinity for worldbuilding means that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings clearly take place in the same invented world, but it's precisely at those points that the two works overlap that the differences between their Middle Earths are most apparent. There is danger in The Hobbit, and the characters face many merciless, amoral foes. But evil, which drives the antagonists in The Lord of the Rings, is absent from the book. Its villains are merely bad. There is, as well, no sense of grandeur in The Hobbit, nor of the high stakes that are perpetually in the background, and finally the foreground, of The Lord of the Rings.

Nowhere is the gulf between the two books' tones more apparent than in the chapter "Riddles in the Dark," which Tolkien rewrote when the idea for The Lord of the Rings began germinating in him. In the chapter's original version, Gollum bets the One Ring willingly and accepts its loss with merely some loud complaints. The new version not only changes the manner of Bilbo acquiring the Ring, but the nature of Gollum and the Ring itself, to fall more in line with what they are in the later novel. Reading it, one feels very much as if Bilbo has temporarily stepped into another novel, one whose stakes, both physical and moral, are much higher. Gollum's corruption by the Ring, and the role the Ring itself plays in abandoning him and taking up with Bilbo, are darker themes that don't quite fit with the rest of The Hobbit. Combined with the cavalier way in which Bilbo uses the Ring later in the story, this change leaves the novel feeling a bit wobbly.

Once Bilbo returns to his party and resumes the journey to the Lonely Mountain, the novel reasserts its own preoccupations, which are something quite different from what we've learned to associate with Tolkienian fantasy. Characters in The Hobbit don't seem to care about the same things that characters in The Lord of the Rings do. They don't want to save the world; they're not interested in vanquishing evil; they just want to get paid. The whole novel is driven by money, and the desire to gain or regain it. The quest driving the novel could easily be reconfigured as one for revenge, or to reclaim a lost birthright. But the dwarves themselves leave no doubt that what they're after is the legendary treasure of Thror. As Bilbo himself points out late in the novel, to defeat Smaug would take a hero, whereas the dwarves have brought with them a burglar. 

(It has been pointed out many times that this depiction of the dwarves as greedy and concerned primarily with money has problematic implications—all the more so because of the acknowledged influence of Semitic languages on the language of the dwarves. But I am even more struck by how the most obvious change one could make to the story in order to ameliorate this problem—changing the dwarves's intentions from regaining a treasure to regaining their lost homeland—has its own real-world resonances.)

The villain of the piece is a dragon, which many myths and fairy tales link with avarice and possessiveness. This is not always the case in Tolkien's other writing—the dragons, or "worms" in The Silmarillion are creatures of Morgoth, more concerned with doing mischief to the elves than their own enrichment. Thousands of years later, however, their priorities appear to have changed. Smaug's reaction to the theft of a single item from his enormous hoard is "the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted." He literally sleeps on a pile of gold and uses it as a physical shield, like a modern-day oligarch.

The good guys, meanwhile, are banking on making bank. It's never stated out loud, but reading between the lines it's easy to guess that Gandalf is helping the dwarves in expectation that he will be compensated, and even Bilbo, the most adventurous and least greedy character in the novel (who is also the richest, at its outset), holds on to the note promising him a fourteenth share of the treasure throughout his travails. There is, on both their parts, a sort of businesslike attitude, like the one attributed to the dwarves in the quote that opens this essay—a sense that, though they would probably still go above and beyond even if no money was on offer, seeing as it is on offer, they expect to be paid.

Money, and specifically Thror's treasure, drives much of the plot of The Hobbit. When Thorin is captured by the forest elves, he refuses to state his business in the Mirkwood, fearing—with, we're led to believe, some justification—that their king will only release him in exchange for a share of the treasure. When Bilbo and the dwarves escape the elves and arrive in Lake Town, the people are overjoyed at the return of the king under the mountain, but the master of the town fears for his business ties with the forest king. Smaug is killed, with relatively little fuss and almost no input from our heroes, several chapters before the novel comes to an end, and what takes up these remaining chapters is a dispute over how to distribute his hoard: the people of Lake Town and the elves initially believe that Thorin is dead and march on the mountain to claim the treasure for themselves; when they discover that he is alive, they demand compensation for the destruction of Lake Town; Thorin refuses, and a tense and volatile siege follows.

The further I read in The Hobbit, the clearer it became that the key disconnect between it and The Lord of the Rings wasn't one of tone or complexity, but of subgenre. Tolkien, who is credited with inventing, or at least codifying, epic fantasy, wasn't practicing it here. Instead, The Hobbit reads like a very strange cross between sword & sorcery, whose characters are mercenaries rather than heroes, trying to make a buck rather than save the world, and the modern reaction to Tolkien's own conception of epic fantasy, which replaces honor, chivalry, and noble kings with messy political systems whose rulers are more concerned with accruing power and wealth than in triumphing over evil.

In other words, the argument could be made that Tolkien's starting position for both Middle Earth and his take on fantasy was closely in line with what modern fantasy writers have done in response to The Lord of the Rings. That he, like them, imagined a fantasy world in which people sought money and power, and thought only of their own petty concerns. The difference between Tolkien and modern fantasists is that the story he chose to tell in that world involved changing its priorities, and maybe even its nature.

The Hobbit is quite decidedly set against greed and the desire for wealth, not only through the character of Smaug, but through Thorin and his reaction to regaining his grandfather's treasure. When Bilbo and the dwarves are set loose in Smaug's hoard, the effect that the gold and jewels have on them is explicitly likened to a magic spell, a lingering effect of the dragon's presence; Tolkien uses the same terms to describe this spell that he will later use to describe the lure of the Ring. Bilbo's theft of the Arkenstone is described almost as a compulsion, and recalls Pippin's obsession with, and theft of, the palantír. Characters who value gold above all things come to a sticky end—Smaug, Thorin (who forgives Bilbo only when he knows that he is dying, and can't take the treasure that Bilbo stole from him to the afterworld), and even the master of Lake Town, who steals the money meant for the town's reconstruction, then dies alone in the wilderness. Bilbo, meanwhile, learns to relinquish wealth—he gives up the Arkenstone, and his fourteenth share in the treasure, in the hopes of making peace between Thorin and the besiegers, and when he returns home takes only a small reward from the dwarves, and even leaves unmolested the treasure that he and the dwarves took from the trolls on their way out.

All this isn't enough for Tolkien. He doesn't just want to make the point that money is evil. He wants to say that it isn't even important. The final chapters of The Hobbit see the petty concerns of the novel and its characters subtly replaced, making way for the ones that will occupy The Lord of the Rings. Bard of Lake Town, who is described as grim-faced but steely, and is the descendant of the last king of Dale, is a proto-Aragorn. When he slays Smaug the people of Lake Town mutter that the master of the town "may have a good head for business ... but he is no good when anything serious happens!" The novel climaxes with the army of Thorin's cousin Dáin about to face off against the joint forces of the men of Lake Town and the elves of the forest (despite the elven king's reticence to start a "war for gold"). The battle is interrupted by the arrival of a goblin army, which gives them all something serious, something meaningful, to fight over.

At the end of that battle Thorin is dead, the more open-minded Dáin is king under the mountain, Bard is cemented in his leadership role (and later rebuilds Dale), and the first shots of the War of the Ring have been fired. As much as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings differ in tone, at the very end of the first novel one can sense the second coming into being—it describes a world passing from an age of commerce into an age of heroism.

Next time: On May 5th, we return to The Lord of the Rings, and encounter the hobbit again in "Many Meetings"

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