Master of Middle Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

skeptical
materialism: ". . . one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when
there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and
prosperous . . ." Or, more plainly still, Tolkien's usual vendetta against
our machine age showing through his remarks about goblins, that they love
wheels and engines: "It is not unlikely that they invented some of the
machines that have since troubled the world, especially the ingenious devices
for killing large numbers of people at once," but in Bilbo's day
"they had not advanced (as it is called) so far." Tolkien was
ecologist, champion of the extraordinary, hater of "progress," lover
of handicrafts, detester of war long before such attitudes became fashionable.
    Besides the
paramount interest The Hobbit can claim in its own right as the earliest
specimen of Tolkien's fiction to be published and therefore as showing his art
in its infancy, it has also great interest as the immediate precursor—and, to
some extent, source— of the far more finished Lord of the Rings. In the
Foreword to the latter work Tolkien describes The Hobbit as being drawn
irresistibly toward the materials he had been assembling for several years past
to tell the history of the earlier Ages of Middle-earth. So much so that
glimpses crept into it "unbidden of things higher jar deeper or darker
than its surface: Durin, Moria,
    Gandalf, the Necromancer,
the Ring." For the most part Tolkien manages to keep unobtrusive these
"unbidden" incursions of serious historical matter not properly
germane to a children's story, but they do color the tale and perhaps help to
account for those graver, more adult touches we have been discussing.
Contrariwise, the writing of The Hobbit may well have served to
crystallize Tolkien's thoughts about the historical materials, and particularly
seems to have supplied a number of ideas that found their way, transformed, into
his epic.
    The theme for The Return of the King, for instance, which has a major place in The
Lord of the Rings, first appears in embryo toward the end of The Hobbit. Thorin is the rightful heir to Erebor by descent from his grandfather, King
Thror, but he and his companions set out with no intention of killing Smaug and
reclaiming the throne. Their purpose is simply to steal the treasure and
abscond fast. Only when he arrives destitute in Lake-town and hears its people
singing old legends about the golden age to ensue when a dwarf king comes back
to the mountain does Thorin announce, "I return!" From this point his
resolution to stay on as ruler develops naturally after he comes into
possession of the treasure in the halls of his forefathers.
    When Tolkien
brought Strider into the plot of the epic at Bree without (by his own
confession) having yet the least "notion . . . who Strider was," he
could not have had in mind the possibility of revealing him later as heir to
the throne of Gondor. 5 It looks very much as if Tolkien's first
conception of the plot of The Lord of the Rings was solely of a
dangerous journey by Frodo and his companions into Mordor, similar to Bilbo's
mission to steal the dragon's treasure. Of this journey Strider was to be only
a forester guide. The new role for him as future king was a master stroke,
suggested by its prior use in The Hobbit, bringing in its train a far
richer and more varied conception to the epic. Obviously Strider-Aragorn is no
Thorin.
    Character is
transmuted along with the role it serves, and his successive steps to the
throne are planned with great skill to assist Frodo and Sam in their
pilgrimage.
    The eagles, too,
have prominent parts in both works. They save Bilbo and the dwarves from
goblins and wargs when even Gandalf is powerless, and carry the whole party on
their backs some distance eastward. At the Battle of the Five Armies their
attack on the goblin host with beak and wing is the decisive blow which turns
the tide against them. Tolkien remembered these eagles as he came to write the
epic. When