novel, with the dragon slain, the treasure recovered, and order restored, Bilbo knows a
great deal more about the secondary world than he did at the beginning—and so does
the reader.
The Hobbit was published in 1937 as a children’s book and was an immediate success.
Allen and Unwin, the book’s publishers, soon began urging Tolkien to write ‘another
Hobbit’, even though he had a greater interest in the mythological materials which
would be published as The Silmarillion some years after his death (Helms 1981: ix). In
1953 and 1954, however, Tolkien completed and Allen and Unwin published, in their
regular listings and not as a children’s book, The Lord of the Rings. That enormous
book, usually presented in three volumes, drew The Hobbit into its own tremendous
aura, and the earlier, smaller volume became, as the Ballantine paperback’s cover
announces, the ‘enchanting prequel to The Lord of the Rings’ Today, the two are stocked
together in the fantasy or even the Tolkien section of most bookstores and are read by
virtually all age groups; this is true of much high fantasy, that whatever age group it
might have been written for, it is, in fact, read by all.
It is important to remember, however, that Tolkien began his career in high fantasy
with a book that he thought of—as did his publishers—as a children’s book. Picking up
on the idea that The Hobbit was a ‘prelude’ to The Lord of the Rings, a number of critics
have suggested, as Randall Helms does, that The Hobbit can be seen as a ‘mid-wife’ to
the birth of The Lord of the Rings out of the material that was to become The Silmarillion
(1981:80). Elsewhere Helms states:
Taken in and for itself, Tolkien’s children’s story deserves little serious, purely
literary criticism. But we cannot take The Hobbit by itself, for it stands at the
threshold of one of the most immense and satisfying imaginative creations of our
time, The Lord of the Rings.
Helms 1974:80But relegating The Hobbit to prelude status allows critics to ignore that book’s value as a
children’s book and as high fantasy, and it could lead them to miss some of its influence
on Tolkien’s later fiction and on fantasy literature in general.
The Hobbit contains three major characteristics which help identify it as a children’s
book: intrusions by the author, a plot about growing up, and word or language play.
These characteristics, as Lois Kuznets notes in ‘Tolkien and the rhetoric of childhood’,
are found not only in The Hobbit but are a part of the general rhetoric found in various
classics of children’s literature (1981:150–151). Tolkien, however, may have drawn on
sources other than children’s literature for those characteristics. Authorial intrusion
was certainly a part of the ancient literatures he studied; there are numerous incidents
of authorial intrusion in Beowulf and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, two poems
with which Tolkien was very familiar. The plot about growing up could also have come
from those sources; both Beowulf and Gawain learn from their experiences and return
home, as does Bilbo, significantly changed. And Tolkien, as a student of language, was
himself delighted by words and word play, and as a student of Scandinavian and Celtic
traditions, he knew how highly those peoples valued words, stories, and songs.
306 TYPES AND GENRES