Throwback Thursday: The Hobbit
If I look back on it and really do some serious introspection, I think I was “that kid” when I was in elementary school. Not necessarily “that kid” as in the teacher’s pet (although, that may have also been the case), but rather in the sense that I really liked to push myself in school, particularly when it came to the reading level of the books that I chose to read independently. I was also in the school’s library pretty often or, rather, all the time, so I eventually received the title of “librarian’s assistant.” Although I’m unsure of how much assisting a ten year-old could really do in such a complicated, meticulously organized place as a library, the librarian most likely saw the enthusiasm that I had for books and reading, and took me “under her wing.” This is how I came to read, and reread over and over, J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit.
I’ll never know what a copy of such a convoluted, lore-heavy book was doing in an elementary school library, but it found its way into my eager hands. And, even though I had been advised against it, I judged this book by its cover. It was an older, paperback edition, thicker than it was wide, with a colorful watercolor painting of an imaginary landscape that wrapped over its cracked spine to the back cover. This painting, with its vibrant colors and tranquil subject, served as a background for reviewers’ descriptions of the worlds that existed in its pages. Yet it piqued my interest, and I proudly displayed the book on the corner of my desk every day until I finished it.
At ten years-old, I was a voracious reader with a penchant for fantasy and myths, so I was more than happy to accept the school librarian’s challenge when she suggested that I attempt to follow the story of the titular Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins, as he travelled with a group of dwarves to reclaim the Lonely Mountain from the evil dragon, Smaug. I imagined lush, green forests and dark, barren caves and mountains as Tolkien’s florid language described Bilbo and company’s struggles through and over them. The descriptions of the battles that endangered characters I had grown attached to left me captivated
And, when I was finally done, once Bilbo had returned to rest in the Shire, I started the story again, returning him back to the beginning of his journey. Over the course of the month that I had the book checked-out, I must have forced the poor Hobbit to undergo his journey at least four times, as I took in every detail, scarcely putting the book down. At first I had set out to see whether I could traverse such a complex, interesting universe as the one that Tolkien had created for his characters, but, after a while, I was just reading to understand every detail of the story that had captured my imagination for weeks.
To this date, I think that I’ve read The Hobbit more than times than any other book, as over the years I’ve reread it countless more times. Although it was gradually replaced by denser and denser required reading for various literature classes, I probably wouldn’t still be as interested in reading and books as I am now without that long first month with The Hobbit.
