Tolkiens Arda – Sveriges stora Tolkienforum

I’m not sure that we properly appreciate The Hobbit as children. We enjoy the story, obviously, and the pace, and the characters. But only now, reading the book to my eight-year-old, am I touched by the pulse of the prose.

It is a book written to be read aloud. Tolkien understood the power of incantation: the way in which, as Philip Pullman puts it, reciting a fine poem makes you feel as if you were voicing words of power, chanting a spell. The story is filled with songs which follow the strict rules on metre and alliteration of the Old English verses which Tolkien loved, and whose force cannot be properly felt unless the lines are vocalised:

The dwarves of yore made mighty spells
While hammers fell like ringing bells
In places deep where dark things sleep
In hollow halls beneath the fells.

Anyone could have told Tolkien this is not kids’ stuff. Nor, for instance, is the death of Thorin Oakenshield. An American lady told me once that she read the whole book to her sons, aged seven and ten, and when they got to this scene, she saw the tears rolling down their cheeks. Until JK Rowling started producing 700-pagers, publishers used to say that children’s books had to be short nowadays, because the kids’ attention spans were also short.

They were wrong. Just as she brought back length, so Tolkien boldly, or maybe unthinkingly, brought back emotional depth.

Politically correct, of course, The Hobbit was not and still isn’t. One of its most attractive characters — in a way — is Beorn. It’s perfectly clear that he is a were-bear, and his manners are frankly bearish. He’s also, and this is a feature borrowed from Norse sagas, not someone to hang around with once evening comes on.

He was good at landscapes, too. He got the name “Mirkwood” from very old poetry indeed, but his description of it — dark, untrodden, spider-haunted, and above all stiflingly airless, like the long-closed room of a very elderly relative — is one of the great forest pictures of English literature, which has many of them, from Robin’s Sherwood to the stoats’ Wildwood. The Misty Mountains are another borrowing from Norse. And the hobbits’ Shire is now the world’s image of England.

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