The Hobbit - Chapter 06 - Out of the Frying-Pan Into the Fire

[Bêthberry]

I suppose it is time to raise a point I have been noticing as I reread TH for this discussion. In general the question is, "How is this a children's story and how is it not, if it is not?"

Time was, academe turned its nose up at children's literature. It wasn't so long ago that literature departments refused to allow courses in children's literature or, allowed only students in the Education programme (that is, those training to be teachers) to earn credit for English courses in Children's literature. Didn't Tolkien himself express regret that he had written TH as a children's story?

Yet children's literature has become one of the finest areas of development in literature in the last decades. Ideas about what children's literature is and how it should be written are prime topics for discussion.

So, what can we gather about Tolkien's ideas concerning children's literature from TH? One aspect I have noticed is how the narrator seems to describe events and characters from what I think must represent Tolkien's conception of a child's point of view. This is, I think, what makes Bilbo seem so childlike at times: Tolkien describes a point or feeling so as to make his audience--his sons--identify with Bilbo.

This is the excerpt in this chapter which makes me think Tolkien might have made a very good Sunday School teacher. It is the opening paragraphs:

Originally Posted by Tolkien

Bilbo had escaped the goblins but he did not know where he was. He had lost hood, cloak, food, pony, his buttons and his friends. He wandered on and on, till the sun began to sink westwards -- behind the mountains. Their shadows fell across Bilbo's path, and he looked back. Then he looked forward and could see before him only ridges and slopes falling towards lowlands and plains glimpsed occasionally between the trees.

"Good heavens," he exclaimed. "I seem to have got right to the other side of the Misty Mountains, right to the edge of the Land Beyond! Where and O where can Gandalf and the dwarves have got to? I only hope to goodness they are not still back there in the power of the goblins!"

Children are by nature empiricists. Until they have developed the habits (and brain function) capable of abstract thought, they live by observation. Here is our little hobbit fellow noticing very experientially just where he is. We might perhaps as well comment on the style of dialogue here, but I prefer to move on to another point about this opening.

Originally Posted by continuing on from above quote

He still wandered on, out of the little high valley, over its edge, and down the slopes beyond; but all the while a very uncomfortable thought was growing inside him. He wondered whether he ought not, now he had the magic ring, to go back into the horrible, horrible, tunnels and look for his friends. He had just made up his mind that it was his duty, that he must turn back -- and very miserable he felt about it--when he heard voices.

Now this paragraph represents well a child's sense of moral dilemma, the quandry between protecting oneself and doing what he has been told is the right thing to do.

There are other passages in the previous chapters where the narrator gives to Bilbo this kind of child psychology. I think it is Tolkien the story teller working on his audience, to help them identify with his hero.

Does this make sense?

What else can we gather about Tolkien's ideas concerning children's literature from this story?