The Hobbit (6 Points)
I had always felt like a liar when it came to talking about my fondness for fantasy. Especially when it came to Middle Earth, where I had only ever gained any knowledge about it from the films. I'd stubbornly tell myself that I would read all the books when I'd see the film playing or when hobbits came into the conversation. All throughout middle and high school, I'd pick up the first volume of "The Lord of the Rings" Trilogy and open to the first page, and then my thoughts would drift away from the book and back into the real world. By junior year, I had sworn off trying to read the books out of frustration when I just couldn't grasp that the ink on the page was words. I was pretty confused at the difficulty digesting the prose provided, as I was an avid reader with relatively high reading ability, but had been drifting farther and farther away from it in time.
So when I received this assignment, it was with a lot of dread. Even though "The Hobbit" was by far shorter than a trilogy and far less advanced than Tolkien's most praised works, I worried I wouldn't be able to dig into this book at all. Thankfully, I've begun to learn that I'm a very good auditory learner, and audiobooks have been a helpful tool to keep me on task when reading wordier works.
This book's writing of chapter one is by far the most comforting text I've had the pleasure of reading that called me back to my moments of reading "Spiderwick" and "Inkheart." The world-building is still very much gilded in nature, but anyone who reads a passage and denies ever wanting to live in the Shire is lying through their teeth. It is romanticized, the life of a hobbit. Truth be told, I think the life that Bilbo Baggins leads is what my generation (in our current ages) long for. A stable, warm home with foods and comforts surrounding us alongside plenty of company. Living in a community where there's hardly any trouble and no looming dangers nearby. But, just as Bilbo mentions now and then when he was much younger, we longed for the fantastical as elementary students. To jump head-long into danger and adventure, meet new people map unexplored places, we'd pretend whenever we could and make-believe our best. Fantasy is a wish, a wish that there is more within the world than graying concrete and paying our taxes. It is also a call back to a less technological time where, in some ways, life was much simpler than our current world.
This is the crux of what makes Bilbo incredibly relatable. He, after gaining all the comforts of life and aged beyond his youth, is finally presented with the opportunity he'd dreams of as a child. I find him even more relatable of a character now when reading because I have very much aged (mentally at least) since I saw the film, and would react almost exactly as he had when first presented a quest by Gandalf: No, thank you! But, just I have been persuaded by friends at the need of a snack run at one in the morning or yelled at by a friend that I was late for a very important appointment, Bilbo Baggins is frantically pulled into an adventure without actually deciding if he has wanted to go in the first place. And I can't blame him, even though I'm sure Bilbo and I know that spur of the moment adventures don't always go the way we'd like them too.
While I will say that Bilbo has a lot of traits that are relatable, I sometimes feel that he and his dwarven comrades don't have too much distinguishable personality amongst themselves, or at least don't feel stronger than on a surface level. Much of the story focuses on the journey, and I do see Bilbo, the dwarves, and Gandalf's progress but I'm often left wondering if I'm so used to texts that describe what the main character is feeling and thinking far too much.
I also am very curious about how his experiences in the war had played a role in much of his writings, and I felt that the much more dramatic scenes like the passage of through the mountains or the midnight attack of the goblins felt very akin to the hardships of war.
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