You’re Getting to Be a Hobbit with Me

Abstract: In this personal reminiscence, the author recalls first reading The Hobbit because his older sister said that everybody in her class was reading it and notes how, although he lacked a grounding in British fairy tales, his familiarity with TV westerns and SF made the characters and events in the novel familiar and comprehensible. He also compares the excitement of a collective read to that of the popular media rituals of the time involving The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan . He concludes this section of the article by recounting how his subsequent encounter with The Lord of the Rings vividly separated childhood from adolescence, calling it “the moonlit bridge to adulthood.” In this longer, comparativist part of the article, the author argues that The Hobbit is superior to The Lord of the Rings , which possesses “all of the imperfections of greatness,” for which he draws on criteria for evaluating fairy tales proposed by the fantasist and critic Philip Pullman. The basis for his argument is The Lord of the Rings fails as a novel because it attempts—and fails—to blend fairy tale and the gritty realism of a war novel, whereas The Hobbit is seated comfortably within the conventions of a fairy tale. In other words, less is more.