The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. . . .”

This is a tale that begins as something akin to a beast-fable such as "The Wind in the Willows." Here we have little creatures with furry feet who live in snug little holes with round doors, and Dwarves who, when one encounters them at the beginning of "The Hobbit," are much like their equivalents in “Snow White” and similar tales: “Dwalin and Balin, and Kili and Fili, and Dori, Nori, Oir, Oin, and Gloin, and “Bifur, Bofur, Bombur, and especially Thorin!” (The Hobbit, Chapter 1, “An Unexpected Party”). We have a Wizard, who is a slightly comical fellow with bushy eyebrows. And we have Bilbo Baggins, as unlikely a character for High Fantasy as can be imagined.

One of the marvels of this tale is the manner in which it moves from the comfortable environs of Bag End and Hobbiton to the world of Men and Elves and the great affairs of the wise and strong, of good and evil. As late as the “Sign of the Prancing Pony” (The Fellowship of the Ring: Part I, Chapter 9, or for brevity here and elsewhere: FOTR I.9) the whole tale could be taken as a children’s story: a pleasant diversion, but nothing of import.

The gradual change into a grown-up tale, which I consider worthy to stand alongside the likes of the Odyssey and Iliad of Homer, is foreshadowed in “The Shadow of the Past” (FOTR I.2), and comes irrevocably with Strider (FOTR I.10):

“All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost. . . .”

Then again -- another marvel of this tale -- the homely atmosphere of a children’s fable never quite leaves the story, for these little hobbits are at the center of it. They are neither strong nor valiant, and the Powers of the world consider them to be of no import, not even as potential slaves. But, as it proves, they alone can save the world. And in so doing, “these hobbits will sit on the edge of ruin and discuss the pleasures of the table, or the small doings of their fathers, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers, and remoter cousins to the ninth degree” (TTT I.8, “The Road to Isengard”).

This is not an Allegory.

The Shire of the Hobbits, lovely though it is, is only a small corner of the wide world. Its people are inconsequential. Are they not like the Children of Israel, in their small homeland on the edge of empires? For, through much of the Tale in which we are part, the Story centers in the Kingdom of Judah, an unlikely and backwards little place, by the time of Hezekiah and the last Kings perhaps forty by ninety miles in extent, hardly larger than the county in which I reside (and smaller than the Shire). But it is through this nation, from beginning to end a strange and unlikely people, most often the object of scorn and derision, and always on the edge of extinction by one Final Solution or another, that salvation has come to the world.

Tolkien insisted, repeatedly, that LOTR was not an Allegory. Neither is it an overtly Christian tale in the manner of the "Chronicles of Narnia" or "Perelandra" Many Tolkien fans are positively anti-Christian, and enjoy the books without any thought of connections with Christianity. But the tale is suffused with it, and that is one of its greatest strengths.

I could easily multiply examples for many pages; a few must suffice. And those few must wait for another time.

[Part Two; Part Three]