The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
J. R. R. Tolkien · a novel for children in nineteen chapters, with the author’s maps · George Allen & Unwin, London, 21 September 1937 · scored in the revised text of 1951, on Tolkien’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Children’s adventure and Northern romance joined in one short novel; quest, comedy and siege
Mythos
The quest there and back again; the descent under the mountain and a power won in the dark; the dragon on the hoard, roused by a stolen cup; the riddle contest for a life; the small comfortable person as hero
Phase
From an unexpected party at Bag End to a homecoming that finds the hero’s goods at auction, by way of the Misty Mountains, Mirkwood, Lake-town and the Lonely Mountain
Presentation
Fiction; nineteen chapters, with songs and riddles set in the prose, Thror’s Map and the map of Wilderland; told by a narrator who addresses the reader
Register
From the fireside narrator and the trolls’ pantomime talk to riddles in the old forms, the dwarves’ song and the speech of a dying king
Scale
One hobbit, thirteen dwarves and a wizard; a dragon, a town of men, and five armies at a mountain’s foot
Governing Proposition
A comfortable hobbit is engaged by a wizard and thirteen dwarves as the burglar of a dragon’s hoard, finds a ring in the dark under the mountains, and carries the company through goblins, spiders and the halls of the Wood-elves to the mountain, where he walks alone down to the dragon; when the dragon is killed and the treasure brings armies to its door, he gives away the stone the dwarf-king prizes most to buy a peace, and goes home a stranger. The wager of the book is that courage is found alone and in the dark rather than in battle, that possession owns its possessor, and that the small person sent into the wide world must be changed by it and come back to the small one.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” The first sentence of the book is a statement of comfort, and the chapter that follows defines it: a hole that is neither nasty nor damp but a hobbit-hole, Bag End, with its pantries, its armchairs and its silver spoons. Its owner, Bilbo Baggins, is respectable, which in his country means that he has no adventures and does nothing unexpected. Into it come a wizard, Gandalf, who has marked the door, and then thirteen dwarves, arriving by ones and twos and in a crowd for tea, and the comedy of their arrival is told at length.
After supper the dwarves sing. “Far over the misty mountains cold” (chapter 1) is a song of a kingdom under a mountain, its gold and its smiths, and of the dragon that took it; and as they sing something wakes in the hobbit, “something Tookish”, the strain of his mother’s adventurous family. It is the book’s first rise out of comedy, and the first statement of what it is about: a comfortable person called out of his comfort. Thorin, the heir of that kingdom, tells its history, Gandalf produces a map and a key, and Bilbo, half against his will, is engaged as the company’s burglar, on a contract for a fourteenth share of the treasure.
George Allen & Unwin published the book in London on 21 September 1937, in nineteen chapters, from “An Unexpected Party” to “The Last Stage”, with Thror’s Map and a map of Wilderland. Its shape is the subtitle’s, there and back again: a journey out over eight chapters, from the Shire to the end of Mirkwood; a crossing in two, the barrels and Lake-town; the mountain in three; the war over the treasure in four; and the return in two. In the last six chapters the quest becomes a siege. The narrator speaks to the reader directly, most often in the first chapters, in the voice of a story told at the fireside; the book begins in that voice and will rise out of it.
Movement II
The first adventure is comic. Three trolls, Bert, Tom and William, catch the dwarves one by one and quarrel over how to cook them, and Gandalf keeps them quarrelling until the dawn comes up and turns them to stone. Their talk is a pantomime of London speech, and nothing in the scene is high. But in their cave the company finds swords forged long before, and Bilbo a knife that will serve him as a sword: the scene that looks most like an incident pays its debt in the blades that carry the rest. At Rivendell, Elrond reads on the map the letters that will open the mountain.
In the Misty Mountains the company shelters in a cave, and goblins take them through a crack in its back wall. Gandalf kills the Great Goblin and leads the escape, and in the dark of the tunnels Bilbo is lost, crawls on alone, and puts his hand on a ring lying on the floor. He comes to an underground lake, and on it Gollum, a creature of the dark who means to eat him. They play at riddles for his life, in verse of the old forms, and Bilbo, with nothing left, asks the question that is not a riddle: “What have I got in my pocket?” (chapter 5).
This is the chapter Tolkien rewrote. In the text of 1937 Gollum stakes the ring on the game as a present, and when he cannot find it he apologises and shows Bilbo the way out. In the text of 1951, the one scored here, the ring holds Gollum: he means to kill the thief, and Bilbo, invisible, finds him in the way out, spares him out of pity and leaps over him into the passage, and Gollum’s cry against the thief follows him out. The change was made so that this ring would agree with the ring of The Lord of the Rings, and it makes it already a power that holds its bearer: the possession that will own Thorin is shown first in a creature under the mountain. The hero has gained a power in the dark, from a creature of the dark, and he comes out into the light with it in his pocket.
Movement III
The journey out goes on through fire and darkness. Goblins and wolves tree the company and set the trees alight, and the eagles carry them off. Beorn, who changes his shape and keeps a household of beasts, shelters them in “Queer Lodgings”, a set piece the book lingers over. Then Mirkwood, under black trees where the path must not be left. Gandalf leaves them at its edge, the dwarves stray after the lights of an elvish feast, and spiders take them. Bilbo, alone, kills a spider in the dark, names his blade Sting, taunts the spiders away from their prey and frees the dwarves. The small person has begun to lead.
The Wood-elves take the dwarves prisoner, and Bilbo, invisible in the halls of the Elvenking, frees them in empty barrels down the river. At Lake-town, built on the water below the mountain, the Master and his people welcome the heir of the mountain with old songs of gold returning; the book is careful to show what such a welcome is worth. The company comes to the mountain and finds the hidden door at the time the letters on the map foretold, with a thrush knocking a snail on the stone, and the dwarves send their burglar in.
He goes down the tunnel alone, toward a red glow and the sound of the dragon breathing, and the book marks the moment as it marks nothing else: “Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did” (chapter 12). The courage is found alone, in the dark, before anything has happened. He steals a cup, as the thief steals one in Beowulf, and the dragon wakes and ravages the mountainside. On a second visit Bilbo talks with Smaug in a duel of riddling courtesy, naming himself in riddles, and sees a bare patch on the dragon’s jewelled breast; and Smaug, roused by the theft and the talk, flies out to burn the town of men that helped the dwarves.
Movement IV
Over Lake-town the dragon is met by Bard, a bowman of the town descended from the lords of Dale, who has learned from the thrush where the dragon is unarmoured. His black arrow goes home, and Smaug falls burning on the town and into the lake. It is the book’s grandest scene, and the hobbit is not in it. The dragon-slayer enters the book in the chapter in which he kills the dragon, a slayer by function more than by person, and the book lets that stand.
With the dragon dead, the treasure becomes the subject. The men of the lake, whose town is ruined, and the Elvenking come to the mountain to claim a share, and Thorin walls up the gate and refuses them. The hoard has taken him. The wronged exile becomes a besieged miser who will let his allies starve rather than part with gold, and the sickness that was the dragon’s is now his. Above all he seeks the Arkenstone, the Heart of the Mountain, which Bilbo has found and kept.
Bilbo’s answer is a small act of giving. At night he climbs down from the wall, goes to the besiegers’ camp and gives them the Arkenstone to bargain with, and goes back to his friends; when Thorin learns of it he is cast out. Then goblins and wolves come down from the north, the army of the Misty Mountains, and the quarrel over the treasure becomes the battle of five armies, dwarves, elves and men against goblins and wolves, with the eagles coming last. The hero misses it. Bilbo stands with the elves on Ravenhill, wearing the ring, until a stone strikes his helm and knocks him senseless, and the battle is told to him after.
Movement V
Bilbo wakes to find the battle won and Thorin dying. The king makes his peace with the burglar, and the book’s finding is said in his words: “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world” (chapter 18). Thorin is buried under the mountain with the Arkenstone upon his breast; the treasure is shared; Bard will rebuild Dale. Bilbo takes only a little of what his contract promised, and turns for home.
The return is told in two chapters of its own, and it is part of the argument. The road goes back by Beorn’s hall and Rivendell, and the songs come back with it. At home Bilbo finds himself presumed dead and his goods being sold at auction, and he has to buy back much of his own furniture. He has lost his reputation among his neighbours, the narrator says, and does not much mind it: the respectable hobbit has come back a stranger, who writes poetry and visits elves.
Some years later Gandalf comes to Bag End with Balin, and the close turns on luck. Gandalf will not let Bilbo think that his escapes were “mere luck” (chapter 19), managed for his benefit alone: he is “only quite a little fellow in a wide world” (chapter 19). Bilbo laughs, agrees, and hands the wizard the tobacco-jar. The book’s law, that wit and small decency outlast force and greed, is set under a larger one it does not name. The book was a success from its first year, and the ring Tolkien made consistent in 1951 became the subject of the long book that began as this one’s sequel; but the story that ends with a pipe at Bag End is complete in itself, and its hero is the small one.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test is passed more often than an episodic book should allow. The early adventures look like a string of incidents and are not: the trolls yield the swords that carry the rest; the goblins of the Misty Mountains are the army that comes at the end; the cave yields the ring without which Mirkwood, the Elvenking’s halls and the dragon’s lair could not be passed; the thrush at the door pays off in the dragon’s death. The Arkenstone, planted in the dwarves’ history, carries the last third. What the test finds is a looser middle: Beorn’s house could be cut by half, the dwarves’ arrival is told for its comedy, some songs ornament, and the narrator’s asides could go with no loss. Perhaps a sixth is permitted rather than compelled.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A comfortable, timid person has in him a courage he did not know, and he finds it alone and in the dark, not in battle: of the walk down the tunnel toward the dragon, “Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did” (chapter 12). Possession corrupts: the hoard turns Thorin from a wronged exile into a besieged miser who will let his allies starve, and the cure is a small act of giving, the Arkenstone handed to the besiegers, for which the giver is cast out. And the one who goes there and back comes home a stranger. Held below 8.0: the meaning is simple and partly spoken, by the dying Thorin above all; it is a moral more than a condition uncovered, and the register for children keeps it near the surface.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Height comes often, and in more kinds than the opening promises. The dwarves’ song in Bag End, “Far over the misty mountains cold” (chapter 1), wakes “something Tookish” in Bilbo and in the book: the first rise, out of comedy. The riddle game in the dark with a creature who means to eat him, and the leap over Gollum, are dread of an old kind. Then the burning trees and the eagles; the black of Mirkwood and its spiders; the tunnel down toward a red glow and a dragon asleep on gold. Smaug’s fall over Lake-town under Bard’s arrow is the grandest scene, Thorin’s death the warmest. Held at 8.0: the nursery register sets most of the first half as comedy, the trolls talk like Londoners in a pantomime, and the largest event, the battle, is seen by a hobbit knocked senseless and reported after.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth built, and much of it load-bearing. The spine is the quest there and back again, with a descent under the mountain where the hero gains a power in the dark from a creature of the dark. The dragon on the hoard, roused by the theft of a cup and ravaging the country of men, is the last part of Beowulf taken into the plot as its engine, not as allusion. The riddle contest for one’s life comes from the Old Norse, the names of the dwarves and of Gandalf from the dwarf-list of the Völuspá. The ring holds Gollum and the hoard holds Thorin: the dragon-sickness is enacted by the people of the book. And the hobbit has become an archetype of his own, the small comfortable person as hero. Held below the bar: Bard is a dragon-slayer by function more than by person, the other dwarves bear no pattern, and the light register keeps much of the deep pattern implicit.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The inheritance is double: the English children’s book of the nursery voice and the adventure (Grahame, Nesbit, and George MacDonald’s goblins under the mountain), and the literature of the North that Tolkien taught, the Eddas, the sagas and Beowulf, with William Morris’s prose romances between them. The turn is the joining: a philologist’s North, with its own dwarvish history, runes, tongues and maps, set under a bourgeois English hero and a fireside narrator, in an invented world whose depth shows past the edges of the story, in Gondolin, the Necromancer and the elder history of the dwarves. From that joining modern fantasy came. The stake was small: a book written for his children, by an Oxford professor whose name was not staked on it, in the established form of the children’s adventure; and the larger break in the same direction was the later book’s.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Change the form and the book loses what it knows. The journey there and back, with the return home given chapters of its own, is the argument that the small person is changed by the wide world and must come back to the small one; a tale that ended at the mountain would not know it. The point of view is held close to Bilbo, so that the world is met at a hobbit’s height, and the battle of the five armies, seen by him until a stone strikes his helm, is the book’s judgment on war: the hero misses it. The rise of register, from nursery comedy to siege and death, is the form of a growing up. Held off the top: the narrator’s asides are a container more than an instrument, and the episodic middle could stand in other orders without the knowledge changing.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Evidence rather than promise, over eighty-nine years. The book has a scholarship of its own: Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit and John Rateliff’s The History of The Hobbit, with long treatment in Tom Shippey’s The Road to Middle-earth. It is reread by adults who read it as children, and the rereading finds the doubled moral of a burglar who robs and then gives up what he took, the ironies of Thorin’s speech at the gate, and the question Gandalf puts at the close, whether Bilbo’s escapes were “mere luck” (chapter 19). Held at 7.8: much of the return is to the invented world the book opens rather than to the book, much of the scholarship is source and textual history, and the meanings lie near the surface, largely had on a first reading.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is English fiction of the 1930s and, inside it, the children’s book and the romance of the marvellous. The force: the book made an invented world with a history, tongues and maps of its own the ground of a popular adventure, and it gave the quest a form used since without end: the company of mismatched travellers, the guide who leaves and returns, the dragon and its hoard, the small hero. Held at 8.2 because much of what followed came by way of The Lord of the Rings, which began as this book’s sequel, and because the book moved a genre more than the novel at large. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a success from its first year, the root of modern children’s fantasy, and a matter that passed into the games and fantasies of the century, where the halfling of the role-playing game is the hobbit.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Survival weighed on form, then presence, then fabric. The text survives whole; its one change is the author’s own revision of 1951, the text scored, and the 1937 text survives beside it. The presence is continuous and of the widest kind for a book of its century: in print since 1937, widely translated, read to and by children in every generation since, taught in schools, and adapted for radio, the stage, animation in 1977 and three films from 2012 to 2014. Fame and sales are presence, not proof. The surface is barely fixed to its moment: the nursery voice of the 1930s has dated a little, the matter not at all. Held a tenth below the widest: part of the presence since the 1950s has come through the later book and the films, and eighty-nine years stand well below the millennia of the epics it draws on.
Score: 9.1 / 10
Judged on Tolkien’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain narrative sentence and of landscape: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” (chapter 1); the passage through Mirkwood with its darkness and its enchanted stream; the long approach to the mountain, made with exact, concrete particulars and an ear for the old words. The riddles keep the old forms; the dialogue is quick and comic, and Bilbo’s talk with Smaug is a duel of riddling courtesy. The plot is laid with care: the Arkenstone, the bare patch on the dragon’s breast, the thrush. Charged: the narrator talks down to the reader in the first chapters; most of the thirteen dwarves are a name and a hood colour; Bard enters in the chapter in which he kills the dragon; and the verse is uneven.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the trolls of chapter 2, Bert, Tom and William, squabbling over how to cook a dwarf, and the siege of chapters 15 to 17, with Thorin’s refusal, Bilbo’s night walk with the Arkenstone and the death of a king. One law governs both: wit and small decency outlast force and greed, and luck is more than luck. The trolls are talked into the daylight, Gollum is beaten by a question, the spiders by taunts, Smaug by courtesy, and the siege by the giving away of a stone. The range is wide and the law holds. Held at 7.8: the register changes faster than the law, so that the comic trolls, the golf joke of chapter 1 and the singing elves of Rivendell belong to a nursery world the last chapters have left; and Gandalf’s absences serve the plot.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Judged on what a short novel holds. The domestic order: Bag End, its comforts and its spoons, and the auction at the end. Labour and money, more than one expects: a burglar’s contract for a fourteenth share, the trade of Lake-town and its Master, the hoard as wealth that owns its owners. The state and war: the Elvenking’s claims, the Master’s politics, the siege, the five armies. History, in Durin’s line and the ruin of Dale, borne by the present as a debt. The natural order, in Mirkwood, the eagles, Beorn and his beasts. Consciousness, thinly, in Bilbo’s homesickness and his one dark walk. The hoard and the journey integrate them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve: the family, sexuality and the sacred are absent or a hint, no woman is among the people of the story, and every order is seen at a child’s distance.
Score: 7.2 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.1, then The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, and Pressure on Tradition and The Made at 8.2. A text whole in its author’s revision, in print since 1937 and read to and by children in every generation since; a dragon taken from Beowulf as the engine of the plot, and a ring and a hoard that hold their bearers; the root of modern children’s fantasy and of the quest as it has been told since; and a plain narrative sentence that makes landscape exact.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.2, held by what a short novel and its child’s distance leave out: the family, sexuality and the sacred absent or a hint, and no woman among the people of the story. Next above it, four axes at 7.8: The Inevitable, for a looser middle of set pieces and asides; The Unconcealment, for a meaning simple and partly spoken; The Bottomless Well, for meanings largely had on a first reading; and The Inner Law, for a register that changes faster than its law.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.2, The Living Form at 8.0, The Inner Law at 7.8, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four of its five axes: The Imperishable at 9.1 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep at 8.4, Pressure on Tradition at 8.2, The Swerve at 7.9 and The Unconcealment at 7.8 fall short. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.2. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 8.0, at the foot of Tier IV, well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, first published by George Allen & Unwin, London, on 21 September 1937, in nineteen chapters with Tolkien’s maps. It is scored in the revised text of 1951, the second edition, in which Tolkien rewrote chapter 5, “Riddles in the Dark”, so that its ring would agree with the ring of The Lord of the Rings: in 1937 Gollum stakes the ring on the riddle game and, unable to find it, shows Bilbo the way out; in 1951 the ring holds him, he means to kill Bilbo, and Bilbo escapes him invisible and spares him. The revision is the author’s own and the text read since; the 1937 text survives as a scholarly object and is named as context. The Lord of the Rings is not part of the work, and the reach that belongs to it is not credited here. Tolkien’s drawings and maps are part of the book as he made it, and are noted where they bear; the words are the work. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Tolkien’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain. The studies named under The Bottomless Well are cited as the record of the book’s reception and are not part of the work. Facts that could not be verified, among them the book’s length in words, the number of its songs and poems, the changes of later editions, the dates of the studies, the number of its translations and the author’s later view of his narrator’s manner, are not given. Citations are by chapter.