[Child of the 7th Age]

Tuor -

I'm also using the Annotated Hobbit (the modern one published in 2002). Also like you, I am enamored of the illustrations. I especially like the fact that the drawings come from editions of the Hobbit that have been published in different countries. It's the only source I know that does this.

Esty -

I'm glad that you mentioned Belladonna Took. It's always struck me as a little odd that Belladonna figures so prominently in the first chapter, if only by name, but that she is the only female explicitly mentioned in the entire book. We don't even have a character like Shelob, let alone a Galadriel or an Arwen! (If someone else can cite another female character in The Hobbit, please let me know.) Maybe this is simply because his listeners were his sons John and Michael rather than anything more than that? Younger sister Priscilla was apparently too young to join the group.

I love how Tolkien uses the parents to set up the two different sides of Bilbo's personality: the staid Baggins type and the adventurious Tooks. How intriguing that Tolkien suggests a possible tie-in between the Tooks and the fairies (presumably the Elves). Even in the 1937 edition, long before LotR or Frodo was a glimmer in the eyes of the author, JRRT mentions the local belief that the Tooks may have had an ancestor who married into a fairy family. I think he picks up on this idea again in the beginning of LotR when he talks about the differences between Harfoot, Fallohides, and Stoors. The Fallohides look and act a bit like miniature Elves!

Why does Tolkien throw open the possibility of a fairy/hobbit union? Is the physical and personality resemblance of the Tooks completely a coincidence, or could there actually have been a union between a Took and an Elf back in the old days when Hobbits were still wandering about Middle-earth before their settlement in the Shire? There have been plenty of fanfictions which are built on the latter premise, and I know it's been discussed in the Books section before. I doubt the latter idea seriously crossed Tolkien's mind when he was writing down the text of The Hobbit, but could he have remembered the possibility later on when he composed LotR and went on to discuss such things as "the light in Frodo's eyes"?

As you can see from this post, I am very guilty of one thing. I find it almost impossible to read The Hobbit on its own. When I first read this book, I was about 13 years old and had not yet read LotR. (The Ballentine edition hadn't even come out then, so very few people in the U.S. knew anything about Sauron or Frodo.) At that time, I was able to read The Hobbit on its own, appreciating it for what it is and not asking that it be anything more. Now I keep remembering things In LotR or in Unfinished Tales, and demanding to know why Tolkien changed this, or how something in The Hobbit foreshadows something else in LotR. In a way that's too bad, since I've lost the immediacy of the text. Plus, at first, I felt fairly guilty about this way of approaching things. Surely, the author wouldn't want us to read his book "backwards", which is sort of what I am doing.

But then I remembered what happened to Tolkien when he told the story: the characters from the wider Legendarium kept knocking on the door and inserting themselves into his children's story. I guess life is like that. You can't compartmentalize things you've experienced or thought about: they all run together and influence each other!

I know Davem has mentioned that he views The Hobbit as outside Tolkien's Legendarium. His statement struck me. I suppose that could be so, depending on how you define "Legendarium". But my gut feeling is that it's difficult to exclude the Hobbit from this wider body of writings. The story is just too important in how it set up the main characters and the story line for LotR. Frankly. I have an easier time including The Hobbit as part of the Legendarium than I do some of the earliest material in The Book of Lost Tales, which seems to be radically different than the later writings by Tolkien. I can't think about Bilbo in The Hobbit without considering what was to happen to him later. Maybe that's right or wrong but it's a given I can not change.