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The Comforts: the Image of Home in <I>The Hobbit</I>

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The Comforts: the Image of Home in <I>The Hobbit</I> Volume 14 Number 1 Article 6 Fall 10-15-1987 All the Comforts: The Image of Home in The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings Wayne G. Hammond Follow this and additional works at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore Part of the Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons Recommended Citation Hammond, Wayne G. (1987) "All the Comforts: The Image of Home in The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings," Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: Vol. 14 : No. 1 , Article 6. Available at: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol14/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Mythopoeic Society at SWOSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature by an authorized editor of SWOSU Digital Commons. An ADA compliant document is available upon request. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To join the Mythopoeic Society go to: http://www.mythsoc.org/join.htm Mythcon 51: A VIRTUAL “HALFLING” MYTHCON July 31 - August 1, 2021 (Saturday and Sunday) http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-51.htm Mythcon 52: The Mythic, the Fantastic, and the Alien Albuquerque, New Mexico; July 29 - August 1, 2022 http://www.mythsoc.org/mythcon/mythcon-52.htm Abstract Examines the importance of home, especially the Shire, as metaphor in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Relates it to the importance of change vs. permanence as a recurring theme in both works. Additional Keywords Change in J.R.R. Tolkien; Home in J.R.R. Tolkien; Permanence in J.R.R. Tolkien; Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit; Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings This article is available in Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature: https://dc.swosu.edu/mythlore/vol14/iss1/6 MYTHLORE 51: Autumn 1987 , Page 29 jh>m ‘'The Me* V Jill the Comforts The Image of Home in The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings Wayne G. Hammond "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" But Bilbo Baggins’ home is not merely comfortable, —to be precise, in a tunnel that "wound on and on," it is "the most luxurious hobbit-hole... under The Hill opening through "many little round doors” into bed­ or over The Hill or across The Water" (12). Luxury rooms, bathrooms, and sitting-rooms, cellars, pantries connotes abundance, even excess: in Bilbo’s case, the ("lots of these"), wardrobes, kitchens, and dining­ quality is most vividly illustrated in his "whole rooms rooms. The plurals are impressive. "It was a hobbit- devoted to clothes" (11) and in his larders, which are hole, and that means comfort."1 Unhappily, though stocked better than the average delicatessen (or deliberately, Tolkien shows us little inside of Bag End, Ratty’s picnic basket in The Wind in the Willows), to in word or drawing, leaving its furnishing and other Judge from the (apparently) fulfilled cravings of Tho­ details largely to our imagination and to each reader’s rin and company, at the "unexpected party." No won­ notion of "comfort.”* If we are familiar with the der that the dwarves think of Bilbo aB a grocer (one children’s literature in whose tradition The Hobbit who deals with food in large quantities)! And no followB, we may picture something akin to Peter Rab­ wonder that Bilbo hesitates to leave such a comfort­ bit’s "neatest sandiest hole" "underneath the root of a able, luxurious, idealized home, of a sudden, for a very big fir tree,"3 though grander, and definitely Journey into lands he does not know, with no guaran­ with something "in it to sit down on [and] to eat."* tee he will return, to gain a treasure he doeB not Or other Beatrix Potter dwellings may come to mind, need. Not to prefer familiar comforts to certain hard­ such as Mr. Tod’s house on (and in) Bull Banks, or ship would be, by hobbit or human standards, irra­ the tidy burrow of Mrs. Tittlemouse with its "yards tional at the least. In the event, Bilbo has to be and yards of sandy passages, leading to storerooms persuaded to leave his snug home, by pride and by and nut-cellars and seed-cellars."5 Or, more likely, we Gandalf, literally run out of the house and into will think of "a place where heroes could fitly feast adventure. after victory, where weary harvesters could line up in scores along the table and keep their Harvest Home Bag End serves three functions in The Hobbit with mirth and song, or where two or three friends of First, of course, it is the geographical location from simple tastes could sit about as they pleased and eat which the story begins and at which it ends. By defi­ and smoke and talk in comfort • and contentment."6 nition, a tale of "there and back again" must have This last is Kenneth Grahame speaking of Badger’s such a place, and the place need be nothing more home in The Wind in the Willows, and the description than a convenience, with no other meaning — the wiU serve as weU for Bag End — except that Badger’s railway station in C.S. Lewis’ Prince Caspian, for house is fuUy subterranean while the "best rooms" at example, or in his Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Aunt Bag End have windows looking out over a garden to Alberta’s back bedroom. the meadows and river beyond (11). For hobbits no less than humans (or the Water Rat, to continue the Bag End, however, is not merely the 'start and comparison with Grahame’s book’ ), light and air are as finish line (as it were) of Bilbo’s Journey. It is also a essential for comfort as shelter and warmth and food "familiar" setting within the "secondary world" of The and drink. Hobbit — familiar, that is, in the division of Bag End MYTHLORE 51: Autumn 1987 into rooms such as kitchens and parlors, whose func­ gold" except incidentally, on behalf of the dwarves, tions we readily understand; in the food that is con­ and when he gets some for himself he at first refuses sumed there, from tea and cakes to cold chicken and it or gives it away. Bilbo is driven by neither greed pickles; in Bilbo’s washing-up, an everyday domestic for gold nor revenge on a dragon, but initially by a chore; and even in the architecture of Bag End, if, longing for adventure and by his promise to be "bur­ again, we are mindful of its analogues in English chil­ glar" for the dwarves, and ultimately by a simple dren’s literature. Through this image of home the desire to return to his "quiet Western Land and the reader enters the fantasy world of The Hobbit, and by Hill and his hobbit-hole under it" (179). His personal the recurrence of thiB image, no less than by Bilbo’s goal is a treasure he already had but did not fully frequent expression of an "everyday" point of view, appreciate: his own home, not merely for its material the reader may accept the "reality" of Tolkien’s fic­ benefits (which he has shown he can do without, if he tional setting, following a thread of familiarity through must), but because it is home and all the good things a web of the fantastic. To apply Douglass Parker’s that that concept embodies (or seems to): order, sta­ phrase, Bag End is a bridge between the world of the bility, security. In particular it is Bilbo’s home; for reader and the world of the story that helps to make the reader it is every home that any of us know or the distant and sometimes strange matter of the tale ever knew and loved, and still (in our best memories, "acceptable to someone besides the author."8 It is a even of moments) recall as if it had been Paradise reference model against which the reader, through —since the FaH, in fact, the closest any man or Bilbo and the narrator, compares the other, "unfamil­ woman can come to it, a miniature Eden of our own iar" (or less "familiar") dwellings that Bilbo visits creation.11 along the way. Paradoxically, those "homes" in The Hobtiit that are physically most like Bilbo’s "hole in Near the end of his Journey, Bilbo expresses this the ground" —the trollB1 cave, "Goblin-town," Gollum’s feeling in poetry: grotto, the Elvenking’s halls, the passageways of Ere- bor —are settings for danger and discomfort, and are Roads go ever ever on depicted as "dreary," and "dull," and "nasty.” On the Under cloud and under star, other hand, Rivendell (particularly as seen from a Yet feet that wandering have gone distance in Tolkien’s painting) and Beorn’B "great Turn at last to home afar. wooden house" (103), which are of more (to us) tradi­ Eyes that fire and sword have seen tional, above-ground construction, are settings for And horror in the halls of stone rest and reflection, and are depicted in positive Look at last on meadows green terms. These under- and over-ground dwellings are And trees and hills they long have known. also, of course, places of darkness and light — by (252-53) extension, as the reader will, Evil and Good, Hades and Elysium, nightmare and blissful dream.* Signifi­ Hearing this, Gandalf declares that Bilbo is not cantly, Bag End, like our own world, has elements of the hobbit he once was.
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