The Audible Artistry of “The Hobbit”
by Daniel Hannan
Daniel Hannan is a member of the European Parliament representing South East England for the Conservative Party. He blogs for The Telegraph (UK) and is the author of several books, including The New Road to Serfdom: A Letter of Warning to America.
http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2015/05/the-audible-artistry-of-the-hobbit.htmlWhen the editor of Conservative Home phones me, he often begins by wryly declaiming some line or other from Tolkien. If I can, I reply with the next line, and so on. He tends to get the better of our exchanges: his knowledge of the text is encyclopaedic.
Nor is he unusual among Tories. I watched the opening nights of all three Lord of the Rings films with Chris Heaton-Harris, the wittiest M.P. on Twitter, and Theresa Villiers, the patriotic Cabinet Minister, both at that time M.E.P.’s. The Northern Ireland Secretary, in particular, can recite the most abstruse details from the corpus, down to the family trees of the minor characters.
Perhaps this is unsurprising. Tolkien’s novels are, in the most literal sense, conservative, bathed in an almost overpowering sense of loss. A lot of Leftist intellectuals find them uncomfortable, and so mock them. Philip Pullman dismisses them as “infantile.” Richard Eyre calls Middle Earth “the kingdom of kitsch.” There are also Leftist Tolkienians, of course, but even some of these are uneasy about the fact that Númenóreans are fair-skinned and assailed by dark foes from the East and South. (In fact, anyone who doubts Tolkien’s anti-racist credentials should read his magisterial reply when the Nazis asked if he was Jewish.)
Conservatives, by contrast, have few such complexes. We are not in the least bit troubled that Tolkien, an unfussy Catholic, filled his works with moral purpose. Because the professor dealt in archetypes, he wrote with an unembarrassed grandeur that can grate on the modern ear—though, in general, not the ear of the young reader, who has not yet been taught to be cynical. If you’re a fan of The Lord of the Rings, you’ll know what I mean.
Now let me run a slightly more controversial suggestion past you. Much the same can be said of The Hobbit.
If, like most people, you haven’t read the shorter book since childhood, you might vaguely think that, next to its majestic sequel, it is limited, even twee. That’s more or less what I used to think—until I read it to my children.
Here is a book that, as much as any I can think of, needs to be read aloud. Tolkien, like many Catholics of his generation, understood the power of incantation. He knew that—as, funnily enough, Pullman once put it—a fine poem fills your mouth with magic, as if you were chanting a spell.
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