Teenage kicks?

[Formendacil]

Originally Posted by Mithalwen

I just thought that teenagers might find it too young in tone and remembered ten year old Rayner Unwin's initial review estimating it would appeal to children of 5 to 9. Maybe it is that teenagers have been discovering the Hobbit via the Lord of the Rings (via the films?) rather than discovering LOTR via the Hobbit. I do remmeber being upset by the ponies being eaten (maybe why there are so few equine casualties in LOTR) and crying at the deaths of Thorin and Fili and Kili but in a moved rather than traumatised way.

I am probably reading to much into this but it is certain that childhood has changed both from when the Hobbit was first published, to when I first read it over forty years later and in the years since. The book hasn't changed so maybe our perceptions and ideas of what is suitable has. Certainly modern children are more sophisticated than their forties equivalents but many of the forties children would have left school at 14 and so had to grow up in that respect much quicker.

On the flip side, however, I think the overall vocabulary of children has decreased--certainly, overall literacy peaked years ago. I seem to recall being told that while more people have some literacy, the overall literacy level has dropped, which is why newspapers are basically written at a fifth grade difficulty level. I have no idea where The Hobbit would rate on such a scale, but I daresay that although it has a lighter tone for much of the book and is hardly "too scary" by 2010 standards, it definitely fits with Tolkien's general philosophy of "don't dumb it down for them--they'll only learn the words if they have to use them."

Now, whether that would affect its placement in a bookshop, I've not the slightest idea.