Why did JRR Tolkien say, “I am the Hobbit?”

English actor Martin Freeman acted the part of the young Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, in the 2012 Peter Jackson film. But, John Robert Reuel Tolkien’s actual life (1892 – 1973) even more closely reflected the attitudes and sensibilities of the Hobbit character he created in his fantasy novels. This may not be surprising since the best fiction writers are most successful when they draw on their abundant life experiences. Tolkien saw himself as a Hobbit, and as a pretty ordinary fellow. He once assessed his life: “I am a Hobbit in size, I live in the countryside, smoke a pipe, enjoy tea, good plain food and mushrooms, I go to bed and get up late, and I don’t like to travel much.” Despite his humble assessment of himself, Tolkien’s experiences are rich and varied.

“I am a Hobbit in size, I live in the countryside, smoke a pipe, enjoy tea, good plain food and mushrooms, I go to bed and get up late, and I don’t like to travel much.”

His Hobbit characters and his living experiences demonstrate that heroes do not have to be endowed with superpowers to achieve heroic results. According to Tolkien, ambition, bravery, commonsense, and perseverance are more valuable tools needed to equip a hero. Tolkien’s most popular and successful creations are, of course, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings (LOTR) books. The Hobbit, first published in 1937, has sold about 50 million copies worldwide. The LOTR, published from 1954 -1955, has sold about 200 million copies to date and was voted The Favorite Book by a poll of British voters. It was also named the Amazon.com book of the millennium.

Hobbits are the heroes and the primary figures in Tolkien’s books. They are portrayed as brave but reluctant warriors. Yet, they are a peaceful, friendly, intelligent, resourceful, and humble breed.  Tolkien found the name, ‘Hobbit’ in a 1584 text on Witchcraft. A Hobbit was described as about half the size of Dwarves. However, the otherwise brilliant Peter Jackson’s movies on the Tolkien books had trouble keeping these size proportions in the films. The Hobbits are ordinary folks with no magic, but they are good commonsense English people. The Mother of Bilbo Baggins, was Belladonna Took, an adventurer. Thus, she was not considered in  Bag End, her village, as being as respectable as Bilbo Baggins’ relatives on his father’s side. The Baggins were comparatively more comfortable than the Tooks and more interested in enjoying life solely in their shire (village). Bilbo growing up very comfortably in parent’s house and had no reason to go on any adventure unless he strongly coerced to go on one.

The Hobbit and the LOTR books take us from a comfortable early 20th-century English shire ( like the one that Tolkien grew up in) to the Middle Earth world. This resembles a society that might have existed in the Thirteenth-Century or earlier in Anglo-Saxon, Celtic, Germanic, or Norse mythology. Readers might not have considered that these as time-travel books, but they are. Poet, W. H. Auden, a student of Tolkien’s, argues that Tolkien’s tales are most inspired by his interest in the 8th-Century English book, Beowulf.

C.S. Lewis, a longtime friend, wrote of Tolkien, “In his books, a number of good things, never seen before, have come together: an understanding of children, and a happy fusion of the scholar and the poet’s grasp of mythology.” Thus, Tolkien created a whole new genre of literature, now called modern fantasy. Authors that followed him, like C.S. Lewis of The Chronicles of Narnia and J.K. Rowling of Harry Potter, are quick to give him credit for creating the successful mold for modern fantasy literature. Let us look at Tolkien’s early life, education, and career, and see if we can determine some of the ways that his experiences informed his creations.

The Hobbit was first inspired by Tolkien’s home in the countryside, where there were a mill and a small home, much like the book’s Bag End house. The Shire appears to be modeled after a late 19th Century English Village. Villagers enjoy modern amenities like drinking tea and smoking pipes which preclude them from being placed in the Middle Earth time period.  Smoking pipes and drinking tea were first introduced to the English in the late seventeenth century by Sir Walter Raleigh. More than likely then, the shire is inspired by the early twentieth-century village where the author grew up. Tolkien, like Bilbo, was not urged to do much unexpected or to explore the world outside of his shire. But, he was allowed to roam freely around it to explore nature. He loved all of creation, including plants, trees, rivers, mountains, and all living creatures. He enjoyed drawing them and went on field trips collecting mushrooms. There is a humorous story in the LOTR about his attempt to collect mushrooms without permission on his neighbor’s property. He believed in the concept of animism, where he believed there is a life force and consciousness in all created beings. He was once bitten by a tarantula in his own garden and he was briefly kidnapped as a child. Giant killer spiders are creatures that Bilbo must overcome on his heroic adventure, and he and his dwarf partners are repeatedly kidnapped or trapped. It seems that a psychologist would have an adventure exploring the subconscious impressions of his early experiences.

Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa and lived for his first four years with his father. His mother was an English merchant, who lived in Birmingham, England. His family was well established and decidedly English, but he had German ancestors. Thus, his name is derived from the German word, “Tollkuhn, meaning, ‘foolhardy.’ His father ran a bank for newfound diamonds in South Africa, which young Tolkien would have likely seen. Consider the vast treasure of diamonds and gold in Smaug, the dragon’s cave. His father died when J.R.R. was about four and the lad returned to England to live with his mother. Once again, we see similarities in Tolkien’s life and the Bilbo Baggins Hobbit. Tolkien’s father, like the Baggins, was an adventurer who took risks, while his mother favored a comfortable no-risk, stay at home approach.

Young Tolkien loved reading, particularly fantasy books. He was fond of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland books and Andrew Lang’s fairy tales and mythology books. Consider how Alice leaves her ordinary life in her country home and enters a fantasy underworld with fantastic creatures who speak in rhyme and riddles. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz books were very popular in Tolkien’s childhood, as were various versions of the tales of King Arthur, Sir Lancelot, and the Knights of the Roundtable.

Tolkien’s family had initially been Baptist, and his father opposed to Catholics. Eventually, his mother, Mabel, brought the family up as Catholics and had much support from the church. His mother died when Tolkien was 12, and Father Francis became JRR’s guardian. The Catholic religion subsequently became an important part of Tolkien’s life. Lewis inspired him to become more involved with religion. But Tolkien’s influence on C.S. Lewis is most evident in his Chronicles of Narnia. Tolkien disagreed with Lewis’s overt use of Christianity in Narnia. However, Tolkien’s Mt. Doom scene in the LOTR, reflect passages from the Lord’s Prayer. The Hobbit Frodo Baggins is rescued in LOTR by crossing a river, where the evil Orcs pursuing him are drowned by flooding. Recall the image of Moses crossing the Red Sea and being rescued by the pursuing Egyptians as the waters close in on them.

Tolkien was smart and ambitious enough to leave home and go on heroic adventures to learn and create languages.  He attended and graduated from Oxford College in England. Though it may have been about the same time he attended, he never saw The Great Gatsby at ‘Ogs-ford.’ After Oxford, he earned an officer’s commission and entered the army as a second lieutenant assigned to the Lancashire 13^th reserve battalion. He studied the art of war for about a year. He later switched to the signal corps – where at least, he was using words and learning to make and break codes. Father Francis married Tolkien and his longtime love, Edith, in 1916 before Tolkien left for the war in France. He wrote that the parting from his wife felt like death. He had taught her and wrote to her in secret code while he served in the army so she could securely keep track of his works and whereabouts.

As an officer, he had private soldiers who tended to his personal needs during the war (consider Sam of LOTR). Tolkien wrote about the Allied offensive engaged in the battle of the Somme River in France and said it was vicious. His World War I experiences haunt him and inform many of the heroic motifs in his books. But instead of glorifying the war, his books reflect his disgust with the destruction and pointlessness of the war. Ernest Hemingway wrote about the same war as Tolkien. However, Hemingway wrote about it through the lens of ultra-realism, while Tolkien transported the horrors of war to the Middle-Earth. Tolkien refused the British Army’s request to become a code breaker in World War II because of his utter disgust for war. However, he said he despised the Nazis and their philosophy and objectives. Thus, Tolkien’s battles in his books are not to be interpreted as attempts to glorify war but to describe its horrors. He also pointed out the enormous environmental destruction of the war, pointing out that the only ones who won were the machines.

After the war, Tolkien became a lexicographer for the Oxford Dictionary. He was then employed as youngest professor at Leeds College, where he produced a well-received version of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In 1925, he accepted a prestigious professor position at Oxford. He stayed at Oxford, Pembroke for 20 years and wrote both The Hobbit and The LOTR there before retiring in 1959.

Tolkien spent his lifetime studying, appreciating, and mastering the nuances of languages. He learned English, Latin, French, and German at home with his mother. He studied ​Old English, Greek, Italian, Spanish, and Welsh at various schools​. At Leeds and Oxford, he studied Hebrew, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse Poems. ​He created Orc and two Elvic dialects for his books. ​He also became a researcher and noted scholar on Beowulf. He believed that the study of mythology helped us to better understand the dangers of modern warfare and the possible future direction of humanity.

Despite Tolkien’s astounding popularity and literary accomplishments, he has never received much recognition or acclaim from scholars for his Hobbit or LOTR masterpieces. However, he wrote later in his life, “It is a constant source of consolation and pleasure to me, and I may say, a singular piece of good fortune that wonderful people still buy my book. And to a man who is retired that is both grateful and comforting.”

In the future, I shall consider how The Hobbit may be interpreted as a Heroic Journey, in the tradition of Joseph Campbell’s, The Hero with a Thousand Faces. I welcome comments from readers and will respond personally to them if they are written in the dialogue boxes below.

Selected Sources

• J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit & The Lord of the Rings: The Life and Legacy of the Author and his books by Charles River Editors (Kindle Version). ​
• Tolkien & the Great War: Threshold of Middle-Earth: by John Garth, 2003.
• The Road to Middle-Earth by Tom Shipley, 2003. ​

by