Lalwende wrote:
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This Hobbit hole is a bungalow! British readers will all know that bungalows are something of a symbol of comfortable suburban life, and what's more, he lives in what seems to be a between the wars period bungalow - complete with tiled hallway covered by carpet and lots of hat pegs.
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Indeed, the whole portrayal of Hobbiton in this chapter is strikingly modern, even bourgeois. This is something that is present to some extent in LotR as well, but it is much more obvious here. The beginning of
The Hobbit is largely about a meeting between the, comfortable, well-fed, upper middle-class of modern England and the darker, medieval world of Germanic mythology. Shippey discusses this in
Author of the Century, and I think I agree with him that a large part of what
The Hobbit does is to show (over the course of the whole book) that the modern English are not really so far removed from the world of wizards, Dwarves, and dragons.