Keeping up with the Hobbitses

A skeptical hobbit. Image credit: Shore Leave Media

We so often come to works of art after they are completed. Perhaps we imagine the author sitting down in an isolated spot, wetting his pencil and beginning to write. Completing chapter one, then two, then three and so on.

But this is almost never how a work of art is constructed. Each creator has his or her process. Perhaps they stand on their head for 10 minutes before every writing jag. Maybe they like to write about each character first, and then create a narrative around them. Sometimes the exact opposite, deriving characters from the scenarios in the author's mind.

It is fascinating to take an inside look into that process and to observe moments of impasse. Tolkien left a wealth of letters and communiques that detail his blocks - exacerbated no doubt by the prodding of his editors. After the success of The Hobbit, they were eager to see a sequel. But of course, just as Gd almighty gave Adam free will, so too an author cannot coerce his creations to be who they are not. On 24 July 1938, Tolkien wrote:

The sequel to the Hobbit has remained where it stopped. It has lost my favour, and I have no idea what to do with it. For one thing the original Hobbit was never intended to have a sequel – Bilbo 'remained very happy to the end of his days and those were extraordinarily long': a sentence I find an almost insuperable obstacle to a satisfactory link. For another nearly all the 'motives' that I can use were packed into the original book, so that a sequel will appear either 'thinner' or merely repetitional. For a third: I am personally immensely amused by hobbits as such, and can contemplate them eating and making their rather fatuous jokes indefinitely; but I find that is not the case with even my most devoted 'fans' (such as Mr Lewis, and ? Rayner Unwin). Mr Lewis says hobbits are only amusing when in unhobbitlike situations.  

Sitting at the end of that journey, we know of course that the 'sequels' in Middle Earth were far grander in scale than simple hobbits. Bilbo passes the adventure torch to the next generation, and Tolkien preserves his fidelity to his amusing Hobbit folk.

I especially love the heartache Tolkien constantly communicates in his letters, that the world at large doesn't get his work the way he does. He would be indefinitely amused by tales of daily life in the shire, a Hobbit Reality Show. But the public longs for hobbits in 'unhobbitlike' situations.

Reminds me of a joke - Q: how man television executives does it take to screw in a light bulb?
A: Does it have to be a light bulb?