There and back again

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To be completely honest, I began reading The Hobbit because I dearly miss having adventures of my own, despite clearly identifying with Bilbo Baggins’ initial adoration for comfort. Also, fiction shall always be the door that leads me to realities I seldom wish to see, to glorious pursuits I feel too small and inadequate to conquer, and to certainties too dynamic to believe as one’s own.

As they sang, the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and a jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him, and he wished to go and see the great mountains, and hear the pine-trees and the waterfalls, and explore the caves, and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up—probably somebody lighting a wood-fire—and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered; and very quickly he was plain Mr Baggins of Bag-End, Under-Hill, again.

I was drawn not only to the outward adventures of Bilbo and company, but also to the inner turmoils that the hobbit went through. Bilbo Baggins had been introduced as a curiously unassuming fellow, making the reader wonder how he commanded a fantasy epic to bear his name.

“Is that The Mountain?” asked Bilbo in a solemn voice, looking at it with round eyes. He had never seen a thing that looked so big before.

“Of course not!” said Balin. “That is only the beginning of the Misty Mountains, and we have got to get through, or over, or under those somehow, before we can come into Wilderland and beyond. And it is a deal of a way even from the other side of them to the Lonely Mountain in the East where Smaug lies on our treasure.”

“O!” said Bilbo, and just at that moment he felt more tired than he ever remembered feeling before. He was thinking once again of his comfortable chair before the fire in his favourite sitting-room in his hobbit-hole, and of the kettle singing. Not for the last time!

The skill with which Tolkien painted the makings of a humble hero is the same stroke of his simplistic prose that made The Hobbit an enduring children’s fiction, whether you believe dragons are good, evil, or something that grows within the confines of your frail heart—something that must be slayed from within.

There was the usual dim grey light of the forest-day about him when he came to his senses. The spider lay dead beside him, and his sword-blade was stained black. Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath.

“I will give you a name,” he said to it, “and I shall call you Sting.”

Photo from The Telegraph | “The Hobbit: What has made the book such an enduring success?”

For me, the grandest bit of this story is the hobbit’s homecoming. After experiencing the wonders of a world he could only imagine before, as well as conquering the depths of his inner landscape, Bilbo Baggins returns to Bag-End, to an existence that is now forever altered by his adventures.

Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons—he had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folks as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be “queer”—except by his nephews and nieces on the Took side, but even they were not encouraged in their friendship by their elders.

I am sorry to say he did not mind. He was quite content; and the sound of the kettle on his hearth was ever after more musical than it had been even in the quiet days before the Unexpected Party.

In the end, The Hobbit sparked within me a hunger to set on a quest of my own—to relinquish comfort and discover greatness beyond my self.

…travel spins us round in two ways at once: It shows us the sights and values and issues that we might ordinarily ignore; but it also, and more deeply, shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty. For in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to moods and states of mind and hidden inward passages that we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit.

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This is what Camus meant when he said that “what gives value to travel is fear”—disruption, in other words, (or emancipation) from circumstance, and all the habits behind which we hide. And that is why many of us travel not in search of answers, but of better questions. (Source)