The Hobbit | Introduction & Summary | Britannica

Analysis

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,” originally scribbled on a blank page in a student examination booklet, is one of the best-known opening lines in modern literature. Although it stemmed from stories, later published as The Silmarillion, that he had been writing about his fictional world, Middle Earth, for a decade, The Hobbit was the outgrowth of bedtime stories that he told to his children, improvised night after night. He began to compose the story formally sometime between 1926 and 1930, presenting it to his “Inkling” literary colleagues, foremost among them C.S. Lewis, in 1933.

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The Hobbit was Tolkien’s first published work. It was greeted with generally strong critical approval—a Times Literary Supplement reviewer likened it to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows—and gratifying sales, which led the publisher, George Allen & Unwin, to encourage Tolkien to write more. The Hobbit was accordingly followed, over a decade later, by its sequel, The Lord of the Rings. The plot and characters combined the ancient heroic Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian epics Tolkien studied and taught at Oxford University with the middle-class rural England in which he lived and felt comfortable.

When Bilbo meets the tormented Gollum in The Hobbit, he finds himself the bearer of a magic ring that makes the wearer disappear; the importance of that ring to The Lord of the Rings cycle caused Tolkien to revise The Hobbit to foreshadow its role in the later work more explicitly, and he made many smaller changes (altering “tomatoes” to “pickles,” for example) that collectors and students of Tolkien have long delighted in discovering.

Some critics have tried to read metaphors for England’s heroism during World War II or the inherent evil in some nationalities. But Tolkien was known to dislike allegory, and it is more likely simply the heroic story of a small, charming person who has no idea how resourceful he is until his abilities are put to the test.