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What a hobbit wants...first Martinez essay posted at MERP.COM

May 05, 2003 at 01:46:09

Xenite.Org founder Michael Martinez posted his first essay for MERP.COM the last weekend in April. Here is a teaser for 'What a Hobbit wants...'

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." One of the most famous opening lines in English literature lays down the law for our perception of the basic hobbit lifestyle: comfort. Hobbits don't live in "nasty, dirty, wet hole(s), filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell". They live in comfortable tunnels "without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats...."

People have lived in holes and caves throughout history, sometimes as a means of evading detection, sometimes for purely defensive reasons. But we have never really lived in hobbit holes. Bilbo's hole, Bag End, represents the lifestyle of the aristocratic hobbit, and among Big Folk like you and me, aristocrats live in castles, palaces, mansions -- anything but holes in the sides of hills.

Tolkien's fascination with underground dwelling undoubtedly owes something to his wartime experiences in France, where millions of soldiers filled trenches and underground bunkers that were clearly "nasty, dirty, wet hole(s), filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell". As with so many other writers of his generation, Tolkien's fiction pursues an escapist course which seeks to wipe away the memory of the battlefields of northern France. But in Tolkien's case, he paints a more pleasant memory over the unpleasant one while leaving a remarkably evocative set of clues to the inspirations his imagery.

Tolkien explained that The Lord of the Rings "is about death...and the pursuit of deathlessness". It provides a rich landscape carved from the clay of his imagination, but human imagination relies upon experience. We cannot imagine anything clearly without first having clearly seen something real. Perception precedes vision, and Tolkien's vision proved to be so clear because he had perceived a great deal. His stories weren't simply stories: they were legends derived from a world which mirrored the world of his experience.

And while many people would agree with such an analysis, all too often we are treated from this point forward to an awkward transformation of Tolkien's work with Old English literature (and Middle English) into tales of hobbits, elves, and dwarves. But Tolkien's hobbits, elves, and dwarves don't originate in Old English (or even Middle English). They originate quite firmly in the 20th century world Tolkien knew so intimately. You'll never find anything like The Book of Lost Tales among the collected works of Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, or Mark Twain (three of the 19th century's greatest writers in western literature). Melville could not have penned an ode to hobbit holes, and Milton gave us nothing like "Lay of Leithian".

Read the full essay here.