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About The Hobbit
The Hobbit is a novel written by J.R.R. Tolkien in the tradition of the fairy tale. It was first published on September 21, 1937.
While it also stands in its own right, it is often seen as a prelude to Tolkien's monumental fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings (published in 1954 and 1955).
The story, subtitled There and Back Again, follows the adventures of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins as he travels across the lands of Middle-earth with a band of dwarves and a wizard named Gandalf on a quest to restore a dwarven kingdom and a great treasure stolen by the dragon, Smaug.
The Novel Is Born...
In a 1955 letter to W. H. Auden, Tolkien recollects in the late 1920s, when he was Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College, he began The Hobbit when he was marking School Certificate papers. On the back of one of the papers, he wrote the words "In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit". He did not go any further than that at the time, although in the following years he drew up Thror's map, outlining the geography of the tale.
The tale itself he wrote in the early 1930s, and it was eventually published because he lent it to the Reverend Mother of Cherwell Edge when she was sick with the flu; while the Reverend Mother was in possession of the manuscript, it was seen by the 10-year old son of Sir Stanley Unwin, Rayner Unwin, who wrote such an enthusiastic review of the book that it was published by Allen & Unwin.
Tolkien introduced or mentioned characters and places that figured prominently in his legendarium, specifically Elrond and Gondolin, along with elements from Germanic legend. But the decision that the events of The Hobbit could belong to the same universe as The Silmarillion was made only after successful publication, when the publisher asked for a sequel. Accordingly, The Hobbit serves both as an introduction to Middle-earth and as a link between earlier and later events described in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, respectively.
It has been suggested that The Hobbit can be read as a Bildungsroman in which Bilbo matures from an initially insular, superficial, and rather ineffectual person, typical of most hobbits according to Tolkien, to one who is versatile, brave, self-sufficient, and relied-upon by others when they are in need of assistance. Some have compared his development to the theories of Joseph Campbell on myth and, in particular, the journey of the epic hero.
However, Tolkien himself probably did not intend the book to be read in this way. In the foreword to The Lord of the Rings he writes, "I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence." He further claimed that The Lord of the Rings is "neither allegorical nor topical", and it seems safe to assume that The Hobbit was written with the same caveats.
Although a fairytale, the novel is both complex and sophisticated: it contains many names and words derived from Norse mythology, and central plot elements from the Beowulf epic, it makes use of Anglo-Saxon runes, information on calendars and moon phases, and detailed geographical descriptions that fit well with the accompanying maps. Near the end, the tale takes on epic proportions.