Now read this! J.R.R. Tolkien’s <I>The Hobbit</I>

Now read this! J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit

Posted on July 6th, 2009 by Christopher Guerin

I know, I know. But, a.) I’m on vacation, so I needed something I could write about off the top of my head and briefly, and, b.) while you may have read it, you’d be surprised how many people, particularly young people brought up on the LOTR movies, have not read Tolkien’s masterpiece.

If you haven’t read The Hobbit, you need to do so before the movie comes out next year and spoils it for you forever. The main reason why is expressed in the book’s subtitle, “There and back again.” Today we call them “road movies,” but The Hobbit is a trip, Bilbo Baggin’s walking trip, over and through craggy mountains full of orcs, and terrifying forests full of other unmentionables, and beyond to even greater perils. The magic of the book is in the way it conveys the time and effort it takes to make such a journey. Incident, danger, the changing of the terrain, of the seasons, suprising new characters at every turn, and the sheer physical exertion required, all add up to an incredible “journey”. And journey is not something we get to do anymore.

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Christopher Guerin

Christopher Guerin is the author of two books each of poetry and short fiction, a novel, and more than a dozen children’s books. If he hadn’t spent 26 years as an arts administrator, including 20 years as President of the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, perhaps he’d have worked a little harder getting them published. His consolation resides in his fiction and poems having been published in numerous small magazines, including Rosebud, AURA, Williams and Mary Review, Midwest Quarterly, Wittenberg Review, RE: Artes Liberales, DEROS, Wind, and Wind less Orchard. His blog, Zealotry of Guerin, features his fiction and poetry, including his sonnet sequence of poems after paintings, “Brushwork." He is the V.P. of Corporate Communications at Sweetwater Sound, Inc., the national music instrument retailer.