I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
Many readers first meet Bilbo Baggins in childhood, when the book is borrowed from a school library. The story has long been filed under children's fiction in Australian bookshops, often shelved beside junior fantasy or tucked into a primary-school classics display. Yet something curious happens when adults return to its pages: they begin to hear the tale differently, and it grows stranger, richer, and stranger still.
The form Tolkien was reaching back toward is the fairy story. His essay "On Fairy-Stories" argues that this genre offers three great gifts: fantasy, escape, and recovery. Reading the book again with those gifts in mind turns the familiar journey to the Lonely Mountain into something far more rewarding than a simple adventure. The pleasures are quiet, unexpected, and strangely nourishing for an adult mind.
Australia has always had a soft spot for the book. Allen & Unwin, the Sydney-based publisher that brought out its first Australian edition in the late nineteen-thirties, still keeps Tolkien in print for local readers. Editions with that publisher's familiar green spine appear in secondhand shops from Fitzroy to Fremantle, often passed through family hands. The Hobbit has become part of the literary furniture of the country, as familiar as a battered Agatha Christie or a worn Colleen McCullough paperback.
This piece is for readers who already know Bilbo's path, and perhaps for those who only half-remember it. It is also for anyone who has wondered why a slim volume written in the nineteen-thirties still feels so alive when read on a porch in Sydney, or carried onto a train in Melbourne, or taken down from a bedside shelf in Adelaide. The answers are tucked into every chapter, often in the very sentences that seemed simplest at first reading.
The Hobbit opens with a sentence that feels like the start of a tale heard in childhood: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." That "lived," in the simple past, sets the tone. It is the voice of someone remembering, perhaps over a cup of tea, perhaps in a quiet room while rain taps the windows, rather than the cool distance of a modern narrator.
This voice belongs to the fairy-story tradition. The Brothers Grimm and the Scandinavian tales of the nineteenth century all share this manner. Tolkien recreates it beautifully. The narrator occasionally steps out of the story to admit that goblins are cruel, or to explain that some songs have to be left out. There is a gentle humility in the voice, as though the teller respects both the tale and the listener. Australian readers often recognise this tone in the bush yarns of Henry Lawson, which share that same sense of a yarn spun for pleasure rather than literary ambition.
Fairy stories work by letting magic enter an ordinary world, and The Hobbit is masterful in this respect. The Shire is described with such loving, mundane detail that the first arrival of a wizard feels almost ordinary. Gandalf leaves a mark on Bilbo's door, the dwarves arrive one by one with their hoods and their instruments, and the reader is brought into the magic slowly, the way one might be drawn into a tide pool at low tide.
The creatures belong to the old folklore. Trolls who turn to stone in sunlight, elves who live in caves, a dragon who hoards and broods: these are figures from medieval legend, and Tolkien knew them intimately. He had spent years editing Beowulf and other Old English texts when he wrote the book. Each monster is handled with care, never paraded, never explained away. They simply are, in the manner of fairy tales.
For Australian ears, this has a particular resonance. The country has its own folklore of strange creatures, from the bunyip to the figures of Aboriginal dreaming stories. Reading about Smaug beside a recollection of the Rainbow Serpent deepens the pleasure of both. The magic is also restrained. There are no lengthy duels of wizardry, and Bilbo's greatest magical tool is a small gold ring whose powers he does not even understand for most of the book. This restraint makes the magic feel more potent, more like the gifts of fairyland in the old tales.
Tolkien was a philologist before he was a novelist, and The Hobbit is full of language that has been thought about carefully. The dwarves' names, the places on the map, the songs that punctuate the chapters, all carry echoes of Old English, Old Norse, and the Finnish Kalevala. Even the chapter titles sound like entries in an old bestiary: "Roast Mutton," "Out of the Frying-Pan," "The Last Stage."
The songs deserve particular attention, because they are not ornaments. The dwarves' song at Bag End sets the whole quest in motion. The elves' songs in Mirkwood are among the most beautiful things Tolkien ever wrote. Songs in fairy stories hold the world together when prose cannot. Australian readers sometimes find this part of the book surprisingly moving. There is a long tradition of song in Australian folklore, from the bush ballads of Banjo Paterson to the songs of the shearing sheds, and the rhythm of a working song feels natural to ears raised on those traditions.
The prose itself has the cadence of a tale well told. Sentences open with deceptively simple words, then unfold in waves. Tolkien often said that a good fairy story should be enjoyed first as a tale, and then examined for its deeper meanings. His prose obeys that rule. It is always readable, always clear, and always doing more work than appears at first glance.
The Hobbit is funny in a way that adult fantasy often forgets how to be. Gandalf's grumpy humour, the trolls' ridiculous squabbling, the elf-king's bewildered dignity, Bilbo's polite terror when facing down Smaug: these moments land because the prose treats them seriously enough to give them weight. They grow out of the characters themselves, rather than being jokes tacked onto the action.
This is also true of the book's quieter lessons. Courage is shown, not lectured about. Friendship is demonstrated in the dwarves' slow acceptance of Bilbo, and in Bilbo's slow acceptance of them. Wisdom is delivered through riddles in the dark with Gollum. Greed is exposed through the dragon, the Master of Lake-town, and the goblins' endless appetite. None of these lessons feel imposed. They rise out of the tale, as they do in the best fairy stories.
Australian readers who grew up with Garth Nix or Isobelle Carmody, or who now follow writers like Trudi Canavan or Jay Kristoff, may recognise this approach. Australian fantasy has long preferred stories where morality grows out of the action. Reading The Hobbit with these later Australian works in mind is one of the great pleasures of the local fantasy shelf.
There is something fitting about reading The Hobbit during an Australian summer. The book begins with a comfortable hole in the ground and a great deal of food, and it ends in a battle. Between those two moments is a journey through forests and mountains that can only be read in imagination. A lazy December, with cicadas buzzing in the gum trees and a cold drink on the table, is the perfect time for it.
Many Australians first read the book in childhood, around Christmas, when the warm weather conspired to keep them indoors. The book became part of those summers. To return to it now, in the long evenings of January, is to recover something more than a story: a season, a mood, and a particular way of looking at the world. Australia also has the book in comfortable editions. Independent bookshops from Brisbane's Avid Reader to Readings in Carlton stock the full range, often with the familiar green Allen & Unwin spine. Even in remote towns, where the local store may keep only a handful of titles, The Hobbit is often among them.
Australia has produced a remarkable line of fantasy writers, and The Hobbit has been a quiet ancestor to many of them. Garth Nix grew up on Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and the influence is visible in his Old Kingdom books. Isobelle Carmody's Obernewtyne cycle borrows the long quest and the small hero from Tolkien's tradition. More recently, Jay Kristoff and Amie Kaufman have written fantasy that shares the Australian taste for humour under pressure and unlikely heroes.
This shared inheritance makes The Hobbit a kind of national touchstone in Australian fantasy circles. At conventions like Continuum in Melbourne, or at smaller gatherings in Perth or Hobart, the book is still passed from hand to hand. Reading The Hobbit as a fairy story, in this country, is therefore a way of joining a long-running conversation between Tolkien and the writers he influenced, between the old European fairy tale and the newer Australian myths that have grown around it.
The most unexpected delight of returning to The Hobbit is the discovery that it is, in many ways, a grown-up book. The pleasures it offers are not childish pleasures watered down. They are the deep pleasures of a fairy story, as Tolkien described them: the gift of fantasy, of escape, and of recovery. Adults need those gifts as much as children do, perhaps more so in a world grown heavy with information.
Tolkien called the fairy story the highest of literary forms, capable of offering consolation, beauty, and a glimpse of what he called eucatastrophe, the sudden turn that lifts the heart. The Hobbit contains all three. The ending, with the homecoming and the gentle humour of the last chapter, offers a consolation that modern novels often withhold. It is a book that ends, as fairy stories should, with the suggestion that the world is larger than the troubles we know.
Australian readers, in particular, may find this quality valuable. The country has long had a tradition of looking outward, shaped by distance and longing. A book that speaks of journeys and homecomings speaks to that tradition with a clarity that few others manage. Reading The Hobbit again, slowly, with attention to the prose and the songs and the gentle humour, is to remember what stories are for. They remind us that wonder is still possible, that small people can change the world, and that there is something profoundly satisfying about a tale well told from beginning to end.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading