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Tolkien, like Lewis Carroll before him, is drawing heavily on the landscape round Oxford where he lived. Just as, I am sure, the chessboard view of three counties from White Horse Hill suggested Alice Through the Looking-Glass , it surely also gave rise to the Shire. But Tolkien took a leaf out of William Morris’s book too, The Well at the World’s End , and drew on the whole Upper Thames Valley. Here there are stuffy willow-choked flats, Wychwood, rivers like the Windrush and the Evenlode, the Rollright Stones, the long barrow called Wayland’s Smithy, plow land and orchards round Didcot, the Seven Barrows, Thames water meadows, and the austere landscape of the chalk downs. And he used them all: there is even a real place called Buckland. Three other things he did not use here, though they are immensely important in the rest of the book, are the Thames itself; the old prehistoric road called the Ridgeway, which is probably the oldest road in Britain, leading from east to west (like the way to the Grey Havens), sometimes as a cart track, sometimes as broad as a motorway, and at other times vanishing in a valley; and finally a strange Oxford phenomenon, whereby the streets of the town are at times filled with a scent of distant flowers, for hours on end, as if one were smelling Heaven somehow. This is in a manner setting a thief to catch a thief, since I lived in Oxford for many years too and tend to use these things as well, but it is not important to know about them. I only draw attention to them to point out this first of Tolkien’s narrative sleights-of-hand: by writing of things which were home to him, he contrives to give the reader a sense of home and security too.
    But he is about to do something much more complicated than Carroll or Morris. He opens with a party. A burst of fireworks and fun. And here at once he surreptitiously introduces three major themes. The first, and by far the most important for the rest of the book, is the pressure of events which have happened long before the story opens. Later, this pressure comes from the far-off heroic past; but here it is underplayed, deftly, and seems merely to be a hangover from Bilbo’s former mad journey. Which of course brought the Ring into Bilbo’s possession. The Ring, whatever else it does, always brings the tragic past into the present. But at this stage Gandalf, in a pedagogic way in keeping with the homely tone, simply makes Bilbo give the Ring to Frodo and retire into the past himself.
    But make no mistake. Undertones of the heroic and of the chivalry of Medieval Romances are being firmly introduced too, in the other two themes. One of these is the Quest itself. Because of the beguiling domesticity of the Shire and Tolkien’s manner at this point, you are lulled into thinking of it in fairy-story terms: the hero journeys to a confrontation and receives supernatural help on the way. Of course the hero wins. And yet it starts with a party, like the best-known of all high romances, the stories of King Arthur. A Quest nearly always begins with the King feasting in Camelot. Enter a damsel or a churl demanding a boon. In this case Gandalf, and the Quest is delayed, but the pattern is there. And you should remember that, though a lot of quests, like that of Sir Gareth, prove the hero a man, a great many, like Gawain’s with the Green Knight or that of the Grail, do no such thing. Furthermore, the title of the most famous collection of Arthurian Romances, Malory’s, is The Death of Arthur . In fact, You Have Been Warned—although you need only feel a little uneasy at the moment.
    For his third theme, Tolkien also drew on romances. The poet of Gawain and the Green Knight calls King Arthur “sumquat childgered”—i.e., rather boyish. Froissart too regards this as the most chivalrous aspect of real knights (and so did Kipling later). Sir Percival is traditionally naive to childishness. And so are the Hobbits who set