Week 4: The Hobbit as an Adventure Story

The Hobbit declares itself as an adventure novel before the book even begins – the subtitle, There and Back Again, is an announcement of as much. Tolkien’s story follows the Cambellian archetypes, or rather correlates to them, to a great extent. Bilbo Baggins is a reclusive homebody who is visited by a sage who compels Bilbo to set out on a journey that will change him in an irreversible way. For the purposes of the adventure story, the details of Bilbo’s journey are not nearly as important as their mere existence, and that they are happening to this particular hobbit.

On a more macro, theoretical level, the Cambellian hero journey is a myth about children, or at least characters who are categorizable as such. The reluctant hero reflects the fear of setting forth that all children and even adolescents face, because the sort of journey described by Campbell does not involve taking action in one’s own world but rather leaving it entirely. The familiar world is surrogate for the home, and the hero is easily transposed with the child. A childhood is an opportunity to explore “safe” surroundings in a “safe” manner, and the adventure story breaks down that safety to reveal a world of dangers and mysteries.

In all of Tolkien’s Middle Earth works, the Shire stands in for a Garden, an idyllic hideaway from the danger outside. The Garden of Eden is our entire species’s childhood story, and we still identify lush landscapes with the safety of youth. We've had class discussions about this idea, particularly as we've looked at stories that involve escaping our confining structures. Even the picture book we looked at for Inquiry portrayed settings that children would recognize as pastoral landscapes, with farm animals and small towns. These are the safe environments that children respond to, and as such it's no coincidence that Tolkien describes the Shire as a similarly bucolic place.

The adventure story becomes something entirely different when the hero returns to find their home changed. An adventure operates on a child’s level because the safety of home is preserved even though the protagonist is changed – they return with knowledge and boons that can help their home. Bilbo’s journey does exactly this; once he returns from the quest to Erebor, he settles back into Bag End and becomes an example of oddity to the rest of the Shire. The Shire remains the same, but Bilbo grows up for the better.

Compare this to the ending of The Lord of the Rings. When Frodo returns to the Shire after destroying the One Ring, he finds the countryside destroyed and replaced by industrial factories. He and his companions must retake their home and rebuild it themselves. This small change in ending greatly impacts the larger novel’s ability to function as a children’s book. The fear of your home being destroyed while you are gone is terrifying to a small person, whereas they can appropriately engage with their own development not affecting the safety of their home.

Ultimately, The Hobbit deals in a lot of tropes found in children's adventure stories. Bilbo’s unconsciousness during the Battle of the Five Armies is an important distinction fro. Battles in Tolkien’s other works – the chaos simply isn't relevant to Bilbo’s journey of leaving home and returning. The subtitle really gives the gist away; this is a child's story about gaining the courage to leave, discover something, and return to the safety of home having changed.