LotR -- Book 1 - Chapter 01 - A Long-Expected Party

[Hilde Bracegirdle]

One thing that hits me, well like a train, is Tolkien’s choosing to mention express trains, clocks and carriages. He seems to gently ease us into that older world by degrees, first taking us to the Shire, and sprinkling his story with a few ‘more modern’ items before hinting at that there is more to this existence than we or the hobbits are fully aware of.

I agree that we, in a way, are like the hobbits. We are caught up in our own concerns; feeling like this is what life is all about, unaware or disinterested in the things not considered useful or pertinent to our mundane life. But we find there are things that influence life, and a history that we are blissfully unaware of. We along with and through Frodo begin to discover that something else, a difference life, lies beyond the realm of our experience.

As for hairy feet and short statue, perhaps hobbits are really men sprouting roots and growing ‘treeish’, their height merely an outward expression of a lack of desire to reach for those higher things, or to see beyond their own patch of land.