“It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” – Bilbo Baggins
Of course, while I was in New Zealand, I had to visit Hobbiton. Being there was fairly magical, I have to say. The attention to detail is so great that it seemed truly as if the hobbits were all just gone for the day, and would come back once the tourists had departed. The sense of reality was so compelling, in fact, that for moments one could believe that if one followed the East road, Bree would lie a few days travel that way, followed by Weathertop, Rivendell, and so on. You really felt like you were there, and for me, forever a boy enamored of fantasy, it was a dream come true.
The Hobbit was, after all, the first fantasy book I read, if my memory serves me properly (which, let’s be honest, it may not). Anyway, it’s the first fantasy book that I remember having read, and surely that counts. The Lord of the Rings, of course, was impenetrable to me for several years, with its long, rambling descriptions of beauteous landscapes (Tolkien was a keen naturalist, and much of Lord of the Rings is a kind of battle between the natural world and the artificial). I will say, with a hint of hipster pride, that I read it all before seeing the movies.
It didn’t happen overnight, of course. On my first attempt, I read The Fellowship of the Ring to about the council of Elrond, then gave up in despair. This book was not nearly as exciting as The Hobbit, with it’s quick action – it’s fast pace. The Fellowship was plodding by comparison, and several hundred pages in, I had not seen a moment that felt that it justified the task of the reading. This felt more like a reading assignment for school, and indeed, one teacher told us that the tome met her standards for a rather open-ended assignment in which we students could, with guidance, pick our own book to do a report on. A book that was approved by my seventh-grade English teacher? No, thank you.
Unbeknownst to me, of course, I’d quit at the exact moment before the action began. The journey through Moria and the climactic struggle of Amon Hen were just around the corner, and I waited for at least another year before experiencing them. I should actually revise myself a bit. When I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring in earnest, the movie was already out on DVD – I simply hadn’t seen it. The provoking moment was when I went to see some movie or another, and in the initial trailers was one for The Two Towers, set to come out later that year or something. I remember seeing a brief clip of the battle for Helm’s Deep, with Aragorn signaling a volley from Elvin archers. And I remember thinking: “oh, I guess these books do get good.” So I resolved that before seeing the movies, I’d read the books.
Of course, I ended up enjoying them immensely. I even overcame my frustration with the plodding narrative, and the frequent songs sprinkled throughout (a detail which, thankfully, Peter Jackson omitted from the films). In fact, I grew to love the careful way that Tolkien wrote. So, obviously, have many.
The Lord of the Rings was not the first fantasy novel, but it was the novel which ushered in the age of high fantasy. Before Tolkien there were no such thing as orcs or hobbits. Elves and dwarves were lifted from Norse mythology, but given a tremendous boost in popularity by their inclusion in Tolkien’s tale. Since Tolkien, hundreds, perhaps thousands of books have been written in various genres of fantasy, not to mention corresponding movies, shows, video and board games. Now there are orcs who have become heroes, space elves, night elves, dwarven engineers, halfling wizards, nearly every permutation of skill set, background, moral alignment, and time period. Tolkien inspired generations of writers to imagine worlds in which fantastic creatures existed, lost languages were spoken, ancient magic existed, and the moral foibles of humanity were laid bare, to be overcome. And all that began, actually, with The Hobbit.
Tolkien was, before he became a famous author, a professor of linguistics at Oxford. The saga began in his office, on a shred of paper on which he wrote the opening lines to The Hobbit. “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” And so a world was born.
Hobbits like Bilbo Baggins became characterized by Tolkien as a people who exalted the quality of predictability. To be unpredictable was, in the hobbit society, to be looked down upon. And in the world of the hobbits, there was no more respectable, and more predictable, hobbit than Bilbo Baggins of Bag End.
When Gandalf the wizard shows up at Bilbo’s doorstep, the hobbit is baffled by what the old wizard offers him: a chance to embark on a great adventure. Why would he want to do this? He’s comfortable, well-respected, and yet he is dragged along on this journey, more out of politeness than anything else. Most of us though, as we read along, pine to be tapped in such a literal way by fate. How we think wish that Gandalf would show up on our doorstep, and to embark on an Unexpected Journey.
And yet, in our own lives, don’t we make much the same choices as the hobbits? Sure, we praise those who step out, who go off to seek the wider world, but how often do we tell ourselves that now is just not the time? Like Bilbo later in life, we hesitate to let go of the comfort of “our precious” things. Our security. Our stability. Though these things may make us feel like “butter scraped over too much bread”, we cling to our jobs, our routines, and our stuff.
What if we let it all go? What would we discover out there?
We may not discover hoards of treasure, glowing swords, and dashing kings living as rangers. But we may be able to learn some new things. We may overcome old prejudices, even the deepest sort, like Gimli and Legolas. We may face down the Smaugs of our soul, the great fears that sit jealously atop the rich treasures offered by life. We may discover the answer to the great decision that Gandalf thrusts on all mortals: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
What will you do with the time that has been given to you? In life, I believe we are at our best when we are daring. For one thing, we can learn that most of our fears are ill-founded. A dangerous country may betray itself to us as a bastion of hospitality and friendliness, as Russia did for me years ago. But even if we encounter danger, we at least know, if we survive, that we were brave enough to step out, that, like Bilbo Baggins, we faced the dangerous business of going out our door. What a shame if we ended up like most hobbits, confined in our holes in the ground.