Already a subscriber? Log in
I shall, myself, be passing on the film, 3-D natch, with the greatest gathering of British celebs since Harry Potter — hello Ian McKellan, Billy Connolly and, oh God, Stephen Fry — in favour of reading the book in the bath. And I’m trying to persuade my friends to join in this modest backlash, with the simple and sufficient aim of getting us back to the story, which the author began on an unexpected piece of blank paper that turned up in a pile of examination scripts he was marking for the Schools Certificate. There he wrote: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ He told the story to his children. Eighty years ago, in 1932, he finished the book.
It’s a wonderful story, perfectly formed, with all the gaiety and compactness that The Lord of the Rings lacks. It’s a combination of disparate things: saga and myth and larders with seed cake, and dwarves and goblins and the things of fairy tales, along with pocket handkerchiefs — which fairy tales rarely feature. There’s a great deal of learning, as you expect from a professor of Anglo-Saxon, but carried ever so lightly. Parts of the description of the dragon’s lair read as if they’re lifted straight from Beowulf, for the excellent reason that they were, but Beowulf’s dragon was fought and slain, not burgled. Tolkien took the names of Gandalf and the dwarves from The Poetic Edda, a collection of Norse poems, but The Hobbit’s Gandalf is more sublime: he blows smoke rings. Even the minor things, like the way Bilbo Baggins and Gollum play at riddles, come from a very old, Anglo-Saxon tradition. And, as a reviewer of modern children’s fiction, I can tell you there are enough subplots in the quest story of The Hobbit to sustain a dozen contemporary narratives.
The genius of the thing was evident at the time. C.S. Lewis hailed ‘a world that seems to have been going on long before we stumbled into it’ and observes that it is a children’s book only in that the first of many readings is undertaken by children … ‘only later, at a tenth or 20th reading, will they begin to understand what deft scholarship and profound reflection have gone to make everything in it’.
But what, you might ask, if the director, Peter Jackson, has made an enjoyable film — or three? I don’t care. It’s still doing what Tolkien, as storyteller, would have hated: it makes explicit everything that the mind previously imagined. He only sold the film rights to pay off his debts.
Tolkien, of course, did his own illustrations for the early editions of The Hobbit, with firm, bold lines and nice clear topography. But the pictures don’t get in the way of the reader’s imagination; they’re not explicit. You still have your own conception of what Bilbo, Balin and Gandalf look like, what Mirkwood felt like, which the illustrations never really displace.
You can never fully recover your own ideas about a book after you’ve seen a screen version, good or bad. Already, I can’t get my own idea of Gollum back from the film image of Andy Serkis all over the papers. Take it from me: in the time it takes to see the film, you can get through several chapters of the book. Don’t watch. Read.
Also in Arts Reviews
Also by Melanie McDonagh
Latest
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in