[Formendacil]

I can only disagree with Davem regarding The Hobbit's inclusion in the Legendarium, the lines Aragorn says regarding green grass as a part of legend springing to mind for some reason.

But this thread is not devoted to Davem's inclusion of The Hobbit in the Legendarium, but about Chapter 1 of The Hobbit.

For me, this is where it all began, something like eight years ago, when in a fit of boredom, I went browsing through my dad's bookshelves, and discovered The Hobbit. I knew the title thanks to C.S. Lewis (having been a Narnia fan), and on the strength of that tenuous connection, I pulled down the book with a lovely dragon and horde on the front, and began to read:

"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit..."

So this chapter was my very first introduction to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, and it sucked me right in, with its charming feeling of "real" world, but a real world in which Dwarves coming to visit, while not exactly normal, was not the life-shaking event that it would be if it ever happened here.

Although, of course, we soon learn that it DOES, in fact, shake poor Bilbo's life up far more than he expected.

There is an element of the traditional children's story in the repetitiveness of the arrival of the Dwarves, that familiar feeling of "here we go again". And one has to wonder, from within the context of the Legendarium, precisely why the Dwarves arrived by twos and threes, the answer (I believe) from Unfinished Tales being that Gandalf didn't want to shock Bilbo all at once.

The descriptions of food in this chapter tend to set me salivating- getting in touch with my Hobbit side, so to speak. In fact, between this and Narnia, I early on got into the habit of eating when reading, a habit that would be best broken, but doesn't seem likely to happen...

"Far over the misty mountains cold,
through dungeons deep and caverns old,
we must away ere break of day,
to sake the pale, forgotten gold."

This whole Dwarf-song, which I cannot remember in completion, is one of my favourite pieces of verse in Tolkien's work, possibly because it's the first one I encountered, but also because of the way it is incorporated into the story. Like Bilbo, I feel drawn away to a long-lost dwarfen kingdom, seeing it again in its forgotten splendour...

And like Bilbo, when I reach the end of this first chapter, I'm somewhat tired at the "cacophony" of events that have torrentially arrived in the space of a chapter, and leave with the feeling that surely it will calm down somewhat soon.