Planet of the Hobbits

The Hobbit, I think, lends itself to flights of fancy and turbulent imaginings.  After all, this is a story that presumes to trace the invention of the game of golf to a hobbit that knocked the head off a goblin king with a club and sent it flying down a rabbit-hole.  Hobbits are often revered for their quaint charms, but they are still creatures that live in holes – and it is easy to imagine them in a more animalistic fashion, as when the narrator of The Planet of the Apes visits the stock exchange and says, “Imagine a hall of vast proportions crammed full of apes, screaming, gesticulating, and running hither and thither in a completely disorganized manner, apes in hysteria, apes… who formed a swarming mass right up to the ceiling…”  He goes on to note that “The most disturbing part of my present image was that… I now saw the members of this insane crowd in the guise of human beings.  It was men I thus saw shrieking, barking, and swinging about on ropes…”

For a long time, the boundary between humans and animals has fascinated, and sometimes frightened, observers – and hobbits, for all their oddities, are thoroughly human characters.  To the eyes of, say, a dragon, hobbits might appear as unpleasant, furtive creatures.  Bilbo lives a genteel life, but one could imagine great burrows full of them, greedily hoarding piles of food, breeding like rabbits, tentatively exploring the outside world, sending up vast clouds of smoke from their countless pipes and endless cooking-fires.  In such a vision, the older powers of the world might look at swarms of furry-toed, giggling hobbits with disdain and disgust – thinking them, as it were, little more than rabbits with pocket watches.

 

 

Yet, fortunately, our hobbit’s home is “Not a nasty, dirty wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.” 

Image: Arthur Rackham

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Rackham_Alice.jpg