A reader’s companion to The Hobbit, published

Exploring J.r.r.Tolkien’s The Hobbit

to coincide with the 75th anniversary

The Hobbit is one of the most widely read and best-loved books of the twentieth Exploring
J .r.r.
century. In December 2012, millions will be introduced or reintroduced to J.R.R.
Tolkien’s classic with the arrival of the first of two film adaptations by acclaimed
director Peter Jackson.
Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” is a fun, thoughtful, and insightful companion

Tolkien’s
volume, designed to bring a thorough and original new reading of this great work
to a general audience. Professor Corey Olsen will take readers on an in-depth jour-
ney through The Hobbit chapter by chapter, revealing the stories within the story: the
dark desires of dwarves and the sublime laughter of elves, the nature of evil and its
hopelessness, the mystery of divine providence and human choice, and, most of all,
the revolutions within the life of Bilbo Baggins. Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” is
a book that will make The Hobbit come alive for readers as never before.
The
COREY OLSEN
COREY OLSEN is an Assistant Professor of English at Washington College in

HOBBIT
Maryland. Through podcasts and his teaching website, The Tolkien Professor, Pro-
fessor Olsen brings his scholarship on Tolkien to the public. Join the conversation at
www.tolkienprofessor.com, or on iTunes.

• Celebration of Hobbit Day on September 22, 2012

• National author tour, including New York, Philadelphia, Washington DC,
Seattle, San Francisco, Boston, Nashville
SEPTEMBER

• Academic promotion
• On Twitter, follow @tolkienprof or #Hobbit

Corey Olsen
>> Publication date: September 18, 2012 <<
Publicity contact: Megan Wilson • 617-351-3377 • megan.wilson@hmhpub.com

ISBN 978-0-547-73946-5 $25.00  •  320 pages  •  5½ × 8¼

UNCORRECTED PROOF
Jacket scans and press materials are available at www.hmhbooks.com
Corey Olsen

Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s

The Hobbit

. . .
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt    Boston    New York    2012
 Copyright © 2012 by Corey Olsen
All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

CIP data TK

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Printed in the United States of America
DOC  10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Excerpts from The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. Copyright © 1937, 1951,

1966, 1978, 1995 by The J.R.R. Tolkien Copyright Trust.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
 Contents

Introduction   1

1. A Most Excellent and Audacious Hobbit   17

2. In the Lone-lands   39
3. The Ridiculous and the Sublime   54
4. Over the Edge of the Wild   69
5. The Turning Point   84
6. Where the Wild Things Are   111
7. The Friend of Bears and the Guest of Eagles   127
8. The Stinging Fly   147
9. Burgling Faerie   166
10. The Return of the King   183
11. When the Thrush Knocks   196
12. Bilbo Earns His Reward   206
13. A Burglar Indeed   226
14. The Meeting of Opposites   238
15. To Sit on a Pile of Gold and Starve   248
16. A Leap in the Dark   258
17. The Sudden Turn   265
18. Snow After Fire   275
19. Under Cloud and Under Star   288

Acknowledgments   307
Index   309
 Introduction

I have loved J.R.R. Tolkien’s books for as long as I can re-

member, though I must admit I don’t recall exactly how old I
was when I first read The Hobbit; somewhere around eight, I
believe. My very first reading of The Lord of the Rings and The
Hobbit doesn’t stand out in my memory, probably because it
was followed immediately by my second reading and then my
third. I have read the books at least once a year for the rest of
my life to date. I was not, in some ways, a stereotypical “Tolk-
ien nerd” as a teenager — I didn’t learn Quenya, I never taught
myself to write Tengwar, and I have never worn a pair of rub-
ber ears. My relationship with Tolkien has always been about
reading and re-reading the books, immersing myself in the
stories, in Tolkien’s world. No matter how many times I read
them, I find there are always new discoveries to make.
Tolkien’s works served for me, as they have for many, as a
gateway to the Middle Ages, inspiring an enduring fascina-
tion with medieval literature. (Tolkien’s books should proba-
bly come with some kind of warning attached: Caution! May
Turn Readers into Medievalists!) I ended up getting my PhD
in medieval English literature, and when I was hired as a pro-
fessor at Washington College in Maryland, I was soon able
to realize one of my life’s dreams: in addition to my courses
 I n tro d u ctio n

on Chaucer and Arthurian literature, I also began to offer a

course on Tolkien.
Teaching Tolkien’s works at the college level was just as
much fun as I had expected it to be. In one way, that class was
very different from any other class I had ever taught: most of
the people who took my Tolkien class were people who had
already read Tolkien, and many of them already considered
themselves fans. As a medievalist, I had never had that ex-
perience before. I never had people sign up for my Chaucer
class because Chaucer was their favorite author. No one had
ever come up to me after class to show me the ragged and
dearly loved copy of Chrétien de Troyes’s Arthurian romances
that her parents had first read to her when she was seven. I
never had a student who was a regular contributor to a Piers
Plowman fan site and who regularly attended Langland con-
ventions dressed up as Conscience or one of the theological
virtues. Generally, the first order of business in teaching me-
dieval literature is lowering students’ defenses against it and
convincing them that although it is strange and foreign to us,
it is still fun and worthwhile. My Tolkien students, by and
large, needed far less convincing.
I found among my Tolkien students an obvious hunger to
learn more and study the books more thoroughly. I also found
numerous obstacles that students wanted help to overcome.
Casual fans found many things about Tolkien’s writing diffi-
cult to understand, and some of his books difficult to get into
at all (especially The Silmarillion). Many students, even those
who had read Tolkien’s major works many times, confessed
that they skipped over the poetry as they read, and that the
songs and poems just didn’t seem all that important or rele-
vant. All in all, I found that what students both liked best and
profited most from was the opportunity to read carefully and
2
 I n tro d u ctio n

slowly through the texts, working out the meanings of tough

passages and seeing how the ideas in the story came together.
I taught my Tolkien course several times, but as I ad-
vanced in my academic career, I became increasingly dissatis-
fied with the other half of my professorial duties: the world of
scholarly publication. Professors, of course, must “publish or
perish,” as everyone knows, but I found the world of scholarly
publication frustratingly limited. I would be greatly surprised
if many people reading this introduction have ever read the
articles on Sir Thomas Malory or even on Tolkien that I had
accepted early on in my career. Typical academic books and
journals circulate not to thousands, but to hundreds, or even
to dozens, of people. They tend to be priced so high that only
research libraries can afford to purchase them, and therefore
the general public has little or no access to the work that most
scholars do. Increasingly, scholarly publication has become in
practice a closed conversation among scholars and some of
their students. I knew that there were tens of thousands of
people in the world who had the same desire to learn more
about Tolkien that my college students shared, and I wanted
to engage them in a conversation to which everyone could be
invited.
In 2009, therefore, I started my podcast and website called
The Tolkien Professor (www.tolkienprofessor.com). I started by
posting lectures, and I was astounded by the response. Within
a month of launching the podcast on iTunes, I had over a
thousand subscribers, and in a year the podcast had had over
a million downloads. People were even more excited than I
expected about the opportunity to take part in a serious aca-
demic conversation about Tolkien. I began having recorded
discussions, holding live call-in sessions, and hosting online
seminars. I have been having a tremendous amount of fun
3
 I n tro d u ctio n

talking to both dedicated Tolkien fans and new Tolkien read-

ers alike over the past several years and helping to facilitate a
deeper appreciation for Tolkien’s works.
This book brings together the lessons I’ve learned in the
classroom, the experiences I’ve had through my podcast, and
the love I’ve always had for Tolkien’s work. There is nothing I
enjoy more than walking slowly through a great book with a
group of people, taking the time to notice important details
and keep track of themes that often slip by when you read on
your own. I hope that you too will enjoy the journey.

Exploring The Hobbit

Many people, I have discovered, get nervous at the prospect
of a literary critic discussing a work they love. Too many peo-
ple have had unpleasant experiences in high school English
classes in which they were made to disassemble works of liter-
ature, and they don’t want to see that grisly fate befall a work
they actually value. This book, however, is not called Dissect-
ing The Hobbit. I will not be acting as an amateur psychia-
trist (or psychic), claiming to tell you what was in Tolkien’s
mind and why as he wrote the book.* I will not be enthron-

* When I use quotations from The Hobbit in this book, I generally attribute
them to the narrator of the story, rather than to Tolkien himself. I do this
in part to draw attention to the character of the narrator, who is an impor-
tant figure in this story, and in part because I want to make a distinction be-
tween the many occasions on which I am pointing to what the text says and
the far fewer occasions on which I am explaining a theory of my own about
Tolkien’s ideas. As a rule, I do the latter quite seldom. I make no claims to
be able to read Tolkien’s mind posthumously, and in most of this book I will
simply be discussing the patterns that we can see in the published text. I do

4
 I n tro d u ctio n

ing myself on the judgment seat as the arbiter of taste, tell-

ing you which bits of The Hobbit are good and which are bad.
In the end, this book just sets out to do a little more of what
I suppose you already do yourself: reading and enjoying The
Hobbit.
In Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, we will take a
journey through the story, looking carefully about us as we
go. It is easy to rip through a book that you like at top speed;
the main thing I hope to do is to slow things down enough
to be able to see more clearly what is unfolding in the story
as we go. We will take notice of the recurring themes and im-
ages in the book, thinking about the ideas that the story keeps
coming back to and developing along the way. We will listen
closely to all the songs and poems Tolkien has built into the
story, for they reveal a great deal about the book and espe-
cially about the characters who sing or recite them. If we walk
slowly and pay attention, we may find that our perspective
is enriched by the journey as much as Bilbo’s was, and that
our eyes have been opened to marvels that we never expected
to see.
Along the way, we will see the cultures and characters of
several new peoples: the Dwarves, the Trolls, the Goblins, the
Eagles, the Elves (of both Rivendell and Mirkwood), and the
Men of Lake-town. We will meet a few remarkable charac-
ters with whom we will be invited to linger, so that we can
get to know them better — such as Gollum, Beorn, and Bard

not claim to know whether Tolkien himself thought about those themes and
patterns consciously or not. I have tried, therefore, not to attribute ideas
to Tolkien himself unless I believe there is good evidence that Tolkien con-
sciously intended those ideas.

5
 I n tro d u ctio n

the Bowman. Most of all, however, we will see several central

ideas that come up repeatedly throughout the book:

1. Bilbo’s Nature: In Chapter One, we learn that Bilbo is

the child of two very different families, the Tooks and the
Bagginses, and that his Baggins side and his Took side push
him in very different directions. The interaction between
these different impulses in Bilbo is one of the central realities
of Bilbo’s character, and Tolkien’s handling of the balance be-
tween Bilbo’s Tookish and Bagginsish* desires as the story pro-
ceeds is subtle and complex, not following the simple patterns
that we might expect.
2. Bilbo’s Choices: There are several moments in Bilbo’s
journey when he comes to a crucial decision point, when he
must take a huge step forward on his own. Waking up alone
in the goblin tunnels, coming to his senses to find a giant spi-
der tying up his legs, setting out down a dark tunnel to con-
front a dragon in his lair — these are the particular moments
that define Bilbo’s character as the story progresses, and the
narrator lays great stress on them.
3. Burglar Bilbo: Bilbo’s adventure begins when he is iden-
tified by Gandalf and hired by the dwarves as a professional
burglar, and throughout the story we are reminded of Bilbo’s
relationship with his official position. At first, Bilbo’s hiring
seems like a rather absurd human resources failure, but his

* Tolkien uses the adjective Tookish numerous times, but he never uses
the much sillier corresponding word Bagginsish. That term is my own in-
vention, and I must admit that I enjoy how clunky and comical the word
looks — there is something about it that seems to me to capture the discom-
fort and awkwardness so often associated with Bilbo’s Baggins side during his
adventure. However, since this word is not in fact used in the book, I’ve tried
not to get carried away with it.

6
 I n tro d u ctio n

burglarious career ends up going in some quite surprising di-

rections.
4. The Desolation of the Dragon: When Bilbo and the
dwarves finally approach the Lonely Mountain, they find
that it is surrounded by a wasteland that the dragon has made
by his very presence, choking off the life that once filled
those fertile lands. In the second half of the book, however,
we begin to see that the physical desolation that the dragon
has created also serves as an image for the destructiveness of
dragonish desires: the “dragon-sickness,” as the narrator calls
it. Each character confronts these desires, and in some ways
the dangers they face only increase after the dragon himself
is killed.
5. Luck: Bilbo and his friends are the beneficiaries of a pe-
culiar run of both good and bad luck in their journey, and
the narrator draws our attention to it quite forcefully on sev-
eral occasions. In addition, we learn in Chapter Three that the
quest of the dwarves is bound up with the fulfillment of old
prophecies, which come more and more plainly to the center
of the story as Bilbo’s journey continues. Through the interac-
tions between the choices of the characters and the frequent
interventions of luck, Bilbo’s story challenges us to think
about the relationship between fate and human choice.
6. The Writing of The Hobbit: At several points, we will
pause to look at the construction of the story and the second-
ary world that Tolkien has made through that story. The Hob-
bit is a story that is very self-conscious of being a story, as we
are reminded when we see Bilbo actually writing the book in
its last pages. Tolkien enjoyed thinking and writing about sto-
ries and their growth, and as we read, we will take a look at
how Tolkien frames the story, and how the tone of the story
grows and changes.
7
 I n tro d u ctio n

I have laid out my discussion of The Hobbit chapter by chap-

ter, so that it is easy to read it alongside the original. I have
also included subheadings in each chapter, however, so that
those who would like to skip ahead to trace a particular theme
forward in the book may conveniently do so.