Mythmaker by Anne E. Neimark;

Author:Anne E. Neimark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company

Chapter 8

AFTER THE EVENING COALS WERE snuffed out and Edith and the children were asleep, Ronald would climb the stairs to the attic. He’d sit on a camp bed, writing in his latest notebook. A keyhole desk was stuffed with papers and an old Hammond typewriter. It didn’t matter that the next day would be crowded with lectures, that the Coalbiters—a group Ronald had formed to read Icelandic literature—would convene at the Edgewood Hotel, or that he had supper plans with his friend, fellow writer and lecturer C. S. Lewis. Nor did it matter that thirteen-year-old John needed to be fetched from boarding school in Berkshire or that Ronald had promised to plant tomato seeds with six-year-old Christopher; he put off sleeping to spend several hours alone in the attic, “discovering” a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins.

Hobbits, he wrote, were little folks “half our height,” living in elaborate underground holes in the Shire region of Middle-earth. They wore no shoes because their feet grew “natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair.” Fond of colorful clothes, gardens, food, and tobacco (“pipe weed”), they were good-natured but shy. Bilbo, an ordinary hobbit, never did anything rash or unexpected. One day, however, while having tea, he was visited by thirteen dwarves and the Wizard Gandalf. Against all his objections (“We don’t want any adventures here, thank you!”), he was whisked off with his visitors on a risky mission: retrieving treasure stolen from the dwarves by the ferocious dragon Smaug.

Ronald’s hobbit story grew into a children’s novel. He finished a handwritten draft in the early 1930s, passing it around “for fun” among several friends and students. He was busy with a coveted philology grant he’d won in 1934, based partially on his paper on the Ancrene Wisse, which had broken new academic ground. He’d shown that passages in that book were not just rough West Midland dialect, but a polished language that could be traced to pre-Conquest times. How could an Oxford professor, most of Ronald’s colleagues would later agree, be hailed for his scholarship, be considered one of the world’s foremost philologists, and even think of writing a fairy tale?

The Hobbit, as Ronald’s book came to be called, contained the wonder of fantasy along with deep morality and wisdom. Good and evil battle across the pages as Bilbo Baggins learns he is capable of adventures. To Ronald, even the most ordinary person—or hobbit—could turn out to have heroic possibilities. Bilbo, no longer a passive, self-satisfied “homebody,” becomes a little warrior, taking responsibility for himself and others. Almost killed by goblins and giant spiders, nearly eaten by trolls and a spooky creature named Gollum, he finally confronts the fiery dragon Smaug in a mountain tunnel. (“Going on from there,” Ronald wrote of Bilbo, “was the bravest thing he ever did.”) Caught in a Battle of Five Armies (dwarves, elves, men, goblins, and wild wolves), Bilbo finally triumphs on behalf of justice. He may not be a hero who creates magic or kills dragons—but he

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