The Hobbit strikes again

You don't mind if I take another week away from musical matters to write about re-reading The Hobbit, do you? I tried to resist making this blog series into a trilogy, but I seem to need a little more time to escape the deadlines and the stress, at least on this blog. In real life, I'm practicing for multiple concerts again. The other day I practiced the bulk of three in one day. I just got invited to play at another cathedral--on two week's notice. It's a great opportunity, and I'm enjoying dusting off some old music that I enjoy playing, but I don't really have the time. But I'm doing it anyway. It's exciting, but it's also a very tight schedule, and after another day full of practice, I'm tired.  Let's talk about Bilbo instead.

The first thing that is obvious to me about reading The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings is the vast difference in style. The Hobbit sounds as if it were written for children--at least the first part. Eventually, the author gets more serious in tone and indulges in fewer silly asides. But there is ever the sense that the book is meant to be read aloud, narrated, and that the author is conscious of the reader being in the room with him.

I don't have Peter Jackson to holler at personally, but this book IS NOT AN EPIC! It is not on the scale of the Lord of the Rings, and it should not have been made into three movies. It does not take a hundred pages to just make it out of the Shire, or 25 pages to visit Rivendell; these things occur much more quickly, sometimes just in a few paragraphs. Absent are entire page weather reports, or vast descriptions of fauna. The sense of evil is still there, but it is not so overpowering, nor does the author spend so much ink building up to it and holding us paralyzed by an all-encompassing malevolent uber-force, however much the movies insisted all the bad guys knew each other and were working to fulfill some epic, single-minded vision, as they all prepared for the final showdown that was Lord of the Rings. Tolkien, for one, had no idea where this story was headed when he wrote The Hobbit. Take it down a notch, guys.This one is a lot more relaxed in tone.

Tolkien's world was not so ready-made when he wrote the Hobbit. There are places where the "omniscient" author tells us that he does not know things: this would never do in the world of The Lord of the Rings.

Where the author is already wise is in the conclusion; the dragon has been vanquished, but all does not go well, and indeed, we are assured that it will be some time before everything is put back to rights. Bilbo returns from his journey to find his things being auctioned off, and it takes a long time to get most of it back (but never all), and, having been on the kind of adventure that most hobbits would not countenance, much less dream of, he has lost the respect of most of his neighbors. Like many artists, Tolkien seems to have a keen sense of being alone among his fellow creatures, even despised, for not adhering to the routines of ordinary life, and his protagonist lives not only the drama of wishing for adventure and then wishing he could have stayed home once it was given to him, but the fracturing of normalcy that results from his exploits. Things can never be the same, and they are certainly not going to be happy ever after. That, at least, is some nonsense Tolkien avoids, even in this book, to say nothing of the ones that came next.

The poetry is no better this time, and doesn't try to be, though for some reason, it was more memorable. Somehow, The Hobbit must be ingrained in an even younger part of me, and its less grand and dangerous narrative is more comforting and entertaining, and familiar, and delicious. I enjoyed reading it again. That is why I did it in the first place.
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I'm playing at Heinz Chapel in Pittsburgh this weekend (Sun at 3p.m. if you're interested); one of the pieces on the concert is this week's featured recording on the homepage at www.pianonoise.com. Check it out.