The Hobbit

A seminal work with troubling stereotypes

Hi everyone,

It only occurred to me a few days ago how funny it is that sometime ago I decided the thing that was missing from my life was writing a weekly book report. And here’s this one:

The Book: The Hobbit
The Author: J.R.R. Tolkien
The Illustrator: There are many. My copy was illustrated by Michael Hague
Length/Picture Density: Mine is 288 large pages, pictures every five pages or so

Alright, confession: I considered writing this review before fully finishing The Hobbit. We were around two-thirds of the way through and I had a pretty good sense of how I felt about it. I knew how it ended from having it read to me as a child and seeing the animated movie at some point. Also it was taking forever to get through. The language can be a little hard to follow for a kid and occasionally a grownup, and the chapters are very long. We kept getting sidetracked by books that offer more immediate pleasures.

So, I finished it on my own and I’m glad I did. The last act of the book is not at all what I remembered and it makes the whole story heavier and more challenging.

We’ll get to that, but first let’s back up.

The Hobbit is a seminal fantasy text. It sets the stage for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, introducing Bilbo, Gollum, Gandalf, the ring, and the world of Middle Earth and its races of dwarves, hobbits, goblins, elves, and more.

There is an element of storytelling that Tolkien does really well. The pacing finds this excellent balance where things are allowed to marinate and become more significant, but the stakes always feel high and the action comes at the right moments. He brings in new types of characters and environments on a regular basis without ever losing the story. I once heard that he was trying to create a mythology for England and the storytelling does have a Greek myth feel to it while layering in rich descriptions.

But then there’s the story itself. The various turns of the narrative are generally quite engaging, but the overall driving forces in the story are really odd.

Here’s why this story happens at all: A group of dwarves had their gold stolen from them two generations ago by a dragon who terrorizes the land a ways away from them, and they are on their way to kill the dragon and take the gold back. What about the hobbit? The hobbit is a frumpy old fellow who likes to lounge around and eat bacon. He gets manipulated into joining these dwarves, who he doesn’t know at all by a powerful wizard with a knack for trickery.

The fact that Bilbo chooses to join them at all is a little farfetched, but Tolkien does a good job of justifying this over time through developing the more adventurous side of his character. Bilbo is an odd choice for a hero, but a satisfying one in the end. The dwarves gradually become differentiated from each other, at least a little, though Bilbo has essentially the same relationship with all of them. Eventually their leader, Thorin Oakenshield takes a prominent role in the story and his hard-headedness becomes an important plot element. We’ll get to that. First let’s talk about Gollum.

The best scene is the iconic one with Gollum, when Bilbo stumbles on the magic ring deep within some mountain caves. Gollum seems like one of those characters who pops in to fill a specific purpose and ends up taking on a bigger role because of how he steals a scene. Or maybe Tolkien always knew he would be a key character in the coming Lord of the Rings series. Either way, the battle of wits between him and Bilbo becomes the gravitational center of the story, because its such a compelling scene, and it’s when Bilbo acquires the ring that allows him to turn invisible.

Before we go onward, we have to talk about the races, namely the Dwarves and Goblins.

You’ll never guess what people the Dwarves, who have long beards and are obsessed with money, are modeled after. Yup, it’s the Jews. Tolkien talked about this in interviews, saying he modeled their language and even how they were spread around in various tribes after Semitic people. He also said their warlike nature was drawn from parts of the Hebrew bible. He saw Jews in a very stereotyped way, but also called them a “gifted people” and while the Dwarves are flawed characters, they are mostly good. There is respect mixed in there, though he’s obviously reinforcing stereotypes.

Then there are the Orcs and Goblins. They are evil, murderous, brutal and dark skinned. The bad guys are also dark skinned in the Lord of the Rings. He doesn’t dwell on their racial characteristics, and he doesn’t seem to have the same attention to detail mapping them onto a specific group the way he does with Dwarves and Jews, but it’s also hard to give him the charitable interpretation here when the Dwarves are explicitly Jews and the Goblins are described as black skinned. The Goblins are reasonably intelligent, but they are also cruel and violent, and their deaths are treated as a simple good thing.

And in the end, the Dwarves don’t do so well either. [Big spoilers incoming.]

Somehow I remembered Bilbo killing the dragon at the end, and then the Dwarves collect their gold, Bilbo takes his share and gets to settle back into his comfy home, having had an incredible adventure to tell his friends and neighbors.

Which isn’t what happens. Bilbo talks to the dragon and appeals to his ego to get him to reveal his one weak point. He tells the Dwarves, a bird overhears him and tells a human warrior in the nearby village. The dragon goes to attack that village for helping the Dwarves who are trying to steal his stuff, kills about a fourth of them, but then that one guy fires an arrow into the weak spot on his belly and kills him.

So, then it’s basically over? No. Word spreads to the elves and humans that the dragon’s hoard is now unguarded and they all make their way toward the mountain. Meanwhile, a Dwarf army also learns what’s happening and makes their way there to support their brethren. It looks like they’re about to have a huge battle against each other (with humans and elves allied) and not just because there’s a huge pile of gold there but because Thorin refuses to share any of it because he says it all belongs to his family. The humans were trying to strike a deal but he refuses.

But right before they all fight each other, the Goblins show up and everyone has to team up against them. No negotiating happens with the Goblins, they just show up and start fighting.

In the end, the dwarf-human-elf contingent win, but many of them die, including Thorin and two other dwarves who were present throughout the story. Thorin laments his obsession with recovering his family’s gold in the end, once he knows it cost him his life. That message is good and fine, except that it is delivered by the head of the dwarves, essentially saying that he wishes he wasn’t so warlike and obsessed with money, which are the two big traits Tolkien associates with Jews.

So, it’s an incredible story with many elements I didn’t get to even mentioning that helped launch an entire genre. It also relies on unflattering racial stereotypes to provide big chunks of its world building and sense of morality. I was glad to reconnect with it after all these years, but I can’t fault anyone for passing here.