Hobbit: From Childrens Story to Mythic Creation Essay -- Literature F

Hobbit From Childrens Story to Mythic Creation Mr. Baggins began as a comic description among conventional and inconsistent fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it - so that even Sauron the appalling peeped over the edge.-J.R.R Tolkien, letter to his publisher (quoted in Carpenter 1977, 182). The Hobbit started as small-scale more than a bedtime story for Tolkiens children. Like most of his fellow academics, Tolkien viewed phantasy as limited to childhood. The result was a book written in a chatty, informal style that contrasts sharply with that of its serious successors. The narrator makes patronage patronising and intrusive asides, such as And what would you do, if an uninvited dwarf came and hung his things up in your hall without a word of explanation? (H, 18). The language approximates baby-talk at times (nasty, dirty wet hole oozy smell), and modifiers ( frightfully, lots and lots) abound. Many critics, including Tolkien himself, have viewed this as the ch ief failing of the book. Although the tone does evoke the oral tradition through which myths were originally created, it detracts from the function of the book. It renders villains are more comic than truly threatening, its heroes more endearing than awe-inspiring. peerless commentator feels that The Hobbit lacks a certain intellectual weight and deserves little serious, purely literary criticism (Helms 1974 53). The important words here are purely literary. The novel cannot be studied in isolation, but moldiness be seen against the broader backdrop of Tolkiens literary philosophy and the entire mythic tradition. For the musical composition of The Hobbit both influenced and was influenced by the profound intellectual change its author was undergoing, videlicet t... ...teaching its author the immense possibilities of fantasy. It itself does not exhaust these possibilities, but merely begins to look them. It starts unambitiously, but in drawing from the rich store of world fo lklore and the authors imagination, curtly develops into a myth that, like all good fantasy, speaks as intelligibly to the mythopoetic imagination today as it did in Tolkiens time. Bibliography Carpenter, H. 1977. J.R.R. Tolkien A Biography. London George Allen & Unwin. Helms, R. 1974. Myth, witching(prenominal) and Meaning in Tolkiens World. London Granada Publishing. Nitshe, J.C. 1979. Tolkiens Art A Mythology for England. New York St. Martins. ONeill, T.R. 1979. The Individuated Hobbit. capital of Massachusetts Hougton Mifflin. Rogers, D. & Rogers, I.A. 1980. J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston Twayne. Tolkien, J.R.R. 1937. The Hobbit. London George Allen & Unwin.