This week, I read Tolkien’s classic, The Hobbit. This iconic piece of folklore is about a hobbit named Bilbo who gets chosen to accompany a group of dwarves on a quest to take back stolen treasures. The plot itself has become such a huge part of the fantasy lexicon that I will not bore you with the summary, which everyone undoubtedly has heard by this point.
The book was a major player in the world of fantasy fiction. It paved the way for a new style of content and writing that stretches the boundaries of reality through fantasy. Tolkien was remarkably prolific in his world building abilities. He sculpts such an elaborate world for us that is elegant even in its smallest details that we believe it all to be real (or at least believable), no matter how outlandish the whole thing can be. The Hobbit is kind of unique in the realm of world building, as well. Tolkien is able to create a new world with unheard of things presented to us while still giving us rich stories that take place there. All the while, none of this feels as being too much on the reader to take in, because of how robustly Tolkien presents it to us. I found a great quote from C.S. Lewis describing the world of the hobbit as, “a world that seems to have been going on long before we stumbled into it but which, once found by the right reader, becomes indispensable to him.”
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