I remember when I first read the books when I was thirteen I found the homely adventuring in the Shire at the start a bit of a labour and was impatient to get to the grander and darker settings promised me in the chapter The Shadow of The Past. I had little time for Hobbits then and, seeing as I tackled the daunting book largely because I felt I was done with children's books, I almost felt cheated by the presence of Farmer Maggot and his infernal mushrooms. Obviously Tolkien won me over in the end but it still seems odd when one considers the two greatest records of the legendarium; one, the Silmarillion, written by the first-born Elves, the other, The Red Book of Westmarsh written, not by men, but by a half-sized off-shoot of men most of whom wouldn't know a Balrog from a Bill Ferny. But Hobbits is what we loves so Hobbits is what we gots. I wonder that if the epic wasn't given to us from such a familiar viewpoint would it have been read at all?
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"Come away, O human child!/ To the waters and the wild/With a faery hand in hand,/ For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand."
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