I’ll never forget the first time I saw a dragon.
I was six years old, a precocious and likely slightly annoying reader, with an overactive imagination. My mother started reading me a book, by some fellow I’d already come across – he’d written Roverandom, a favourite of mine, and the annually popular The Father Christmas Letters (even if, at that tender age I still hadn’t quite figured out how much of those letters the Professor himself had written). After a few chapters in this new and odd book, though, I grew frustrated. Not out of boredom, mind, but because I wanted to keep reading it long after my mother needed to attend to other tasks. So I kept reading on my own, because I could not put The Hobbit down.
I now only have vague sensations, flickering snatches of awareness of that first read through. Mirkwood, I recall, was very exciting to me. So too were Bilbo’s encounters with the loathsome Gollum and the striking Beorn. And while I cannot prove it, I would not be shocked if my deep and abiding love for all things Dwarvish stems from this early literary encounter.
But I digress. I knew, of course, what a dragon was, what it is, long before I read The Hobbit. There are dragons in Roverandom, in the (junior versions of the) Greek and Nordic and Arthurian legends I already loved, cartoon dragons, dragons in art, dragons in our own prehistory (and yes, I knew that they were dinosaurs, call them what you will). I knew what a dragon was, I had seen them represented in word and in image.
But I’d never actually seen a dragon, not truly, not a real one, until I read The Hobbit. I still remember it terribly clearly – for hundreds of pages, Bilbo and Thorin and Gandalf have been talking about the dragon, worrying about the dragon, planning for the dragon. And as Bilbo crept down that tunnel, and he turned a corner and I turned the page, I saw the dragon, even as he saw it. I saw Smaug, great and terrible, at once trapped in the words of a book and in a picture, and also somehow, impossibly, thousands of miles distant in the Lonely Mountain and yet right there and right before me in my own home. I saw a dragon.
I don’t know what it was, if it was the words or the striking illustration or just good luck or a bit of all of them. But I’ve never really forgotten seeing Smaug, red and massive and fearsome on heaped gold, and the tiny shadow of Bilbo shrinking away from him.
A year later, I read The Lord of the Rings. Two years after that, the first Jackson film came out. I think I saw it on New Year’s Day 2002, my first ever ‘15+’ (‘M’, for any Australians) movie, but there was no keeping me away from watching it. Two years after that, I reread LOTR, and a year or so after that, The Silmarillion. Quite a few years and many rereadings later, I started a blog which is ostensibly about anything I am interested in, which really means a lot of Tolkien.
To be honest, The Lord of the Rings is really my great Tolkien love. I love his short stories, his academic works, and his swathes of Legendarium writings and tales and concepts. But it is LOTR that really keeps me invested in his mythology, and LOTR that I can return to time and time again. A lot of Tolkien scholars and lovers feel similarly to me, though many others will pick some other tale from his wider works – perhaps the entire Silmarillion, or perhaps one of the Great Tales from that work. Others might nod toward Smith of Wooton Major (another old favourite of mine) or Leaf by Niggle (which I am only recently coming to terms with just how good it is). For the Tolkien lover, there is a wide spread of equally deserving works that could rightly be named a ‘favourite’.
Few would choose The Hobbit, though. It’s a cute stepping stone, an incongruent insertion into the wider mythology, or a frivolity to many. Light, silly, irreverent. It is so often forgotten that it is a frequent occurrence (in my limited experience) for some lore question to arise and be hotly debated in some Tolkien forum, only for it to be eventually pointed out that there is a clear and easy answer in The Hobbit. Tolkien ‘fans’ just don’t like The Hobbit – well, some do, of course. But many think it to be trite, a distraction from the ‘real’ Legendarium. Which is itself funny to me, as I would consider The Hobbit’s canonic authority as being higher than any other Legendarium text, save LOTR, as these were the only tales Tolkien published…but that isn’t a discussion for now.
Or maybe it is, actually. Because, while LOTR is my great literary love, The Hobbit was my first, and you never forget your first. And, for whatever reason, The Hobbit has been on my mind a lot recently, and I’ve been giving it a little bit more thought. And I think there are some very interesting, very worthwhile things in The Hobbit that we do not discuss enough, if we are aware of them at all.
So, while everyone else goes crazy this month over some television show or something, and everyone else writes and broadcasts reams of material on everything concerning the Second Age, I’m gonna zag while they zig. September’s going to be my The Hobbit month, I’ve got three posts (plus this introductory one) I want to publish by the end of the month, concerning The Hobbit and what it tells us about the Faerie in Middle-earth, The Hobbit and Thorin’s true narrative role in it, and how I think that the portrayal of Elves and their nature in The Hobbit is something often (and unfairly) forgotten by modern Tolkien readers and modern lovers of fantasy.
But, in the meantime, go pick up a copy of The Hobbit, especially if you haven’t returned to it in a while. It is a light and easy read, after all. And if you do so, I would encourage you to approach it through two, near-contradictory perspectives. One is to read and understand The Hobbit as being nothing more than what it is, a cute and clever and scary fairy tale, with a drily witty narrator, a bewilderingly creative imagination, and a keen understanding of drama. Forget the Ring, forget Gandalf’s wider purpose, forget Elrond’s lineage, forget the storied histories that lie beneath the surface of The Hobbit. In the story, the Necromancer is nothing more than a vague and shadowy evil, Gondolin is nothing more than a pretty name for a forgotten Elf city, and the War of the Dwarves and the Orcs is simply a war fought because Dwarves and Orcs don’t love each other. Don’t worry about trying to understand whether the Arkenstone is a Silmaril in another form, or look for connections between the Elf-king and Thingol, or even trouble yourself with understanding Gollum beyond his role as a pitiable enemy, and a possessor of a handy magic ring. Just try and enjoy The Hobbit for what it was and is, an entirely satisfying story in its own right.
At the same time, though, don’t be afraid to consider some themes that occur time and time again in Tolkien. The desire for eternal life. The turning of good into evil. The frictions that can arise between good folk. The tragedy of war. The importance of mercy and pity. These are not simple or easy themes, and all of them (and more) are developed and explored in various ways throughout The Hobbit, sometimes obviously, and sometimes less so. The story may be silly and simple, but that is not to say that it is a silly or a simple story. There’s a lot going on in The Hobbit, and I hope to touch on some of those things in the coming blog posts.
And, at the worst and least, there is a dragon waiting for you to stumble upon when you read The Hobbit, and he is huge and golden and terrifying, and it is worth a few hours of reading to see a real dragon.
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