Bilbo suspects that the dwarves want him to
play a part in slaying the dragon. Although his Baggins side would
like nothing better than to sit at home with his pipe, the Took
influence in him fuels his curiosity about the adventure, and he
is reluctantly excited by the tales of dragons and treasure and
great battles. After looking at the map and discussing the adventure
with the company, the hobbit makes up beds for all his guests and
then spends the night in troubled dreams.
Analysis
In The Hobbit, Tolkien presents us with
a fantasy world of his own creation, complete with its own races,
languages, and geography. Tolkien was a language scholar, and he
was partially motivated to write his stories by his desire to invent
other languages. He implies at the beginning of Chapter 1 that
this fantasy world, which he later dubbed Middle-Earth, is somehow
connected to our own world, saying that hobbits “have become rare
and shy of the Big People,” which is why we no longer see them around.
In The Silmarillion and The Lord
of the Rings, Tolkien implies that Middle-Earth is our
Earth as it existed millions of years ago, when the continents had
very different forms. Thus, Tolkien’s world is as much mythological
as it is fantastic. Its larger purpose, like that of Greek and Roman
mythologies, is often to reflect truths about our own world that
may be better seen when presented in a mythical context. In fact,
Tolkien first wrote about Middle-Earth with the intention of creating
an entirely new mythology for the English people, and the story’s
form is based on the ancient heroic epics that Tolkien taught and
studied at Oxford. But The Hobbit is only tangentially
connected to Tolkien’s history of Middle-Earth and to the larger
mythology that Tolkien would explore in his longer and more ambitious
works.
The Hobbit’s tone is much warmer and
more humorous than that of most heroic epics, such as Beowulf. Tolkien
tested out The Hobbit as he wrote it by reading
it to his sons, and the manner of narration is, at times, very much
like a children’s story. Its style is extremely playful and conversational,
with frequent asides and jokes directed at the audience, including
one famous quip about how an ancestor of the Tooks invented the
game of golf when a goblin’s head he had chopped off in battle rolled
into a hole.
The unlikely pairing of Bilbo with wizards, dwarves,
and dragons in the first chapter establishes the contrast between
the novel’s historically inspired, mythological subject matter and
its lighthearted, modern tone. Much of the humor in the novel’s
early chapters stems from this contrast. For example, as the dwarves
hold their great feast, Bilbo worries that they will chip his plates
and furniture—both Bilbo and the dwarves end up looking slightly
ridiculous. The hobbit’s skeptical outlook on his guests and on
the adventure mirrors our own outlook, and it enables the story’s
more fantastic elements to be introduced in a manner that is more
entertaining than explanatory. Tolkien eases us into his fantasy
world, so that as Bilbo develops into a bolder and more heroic figure,
we also become more familiar with the magical landscape of Middle-Earth.
In the preface to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien
conveyed his distaste for allegory. In the decades after writing The
Hobbit, however, he openly acknowledged the link between
hobbits and the English people of his own time. There are even many
similarities between Bilbo and Tolkien. Like Bilbo, Tolkien enjoyed
middle-class comforts—simple food, a pipe, and a quiet life. Like
Bilbo, Tolkien had “adventurous blood”—his mother was from a family
known for its extensive escapades. In a more general sense, Bilbo
can be seen as a gentle caricature of the English—a reserved, quiet
people who, nevertheless, can be roused to action when the situation
calls for it, a trait Tolkien witnessed firsthand during his service
in World War I.
