I'm reminded too of Nathaniel in Lud-in-the-Mist: isn't he somewhat given to un-Luddish flights of morbid fancy, before ever the fairy fruit inveigles its way over the border?
Absolutely. Bilbo and Nathaniel Chanticleer are both people who are weirder than they realize or allow themselves to think—a gift for thievery and riddle-games, the Note that can sound at any minute of the commonplace—and that weirdness rises them to the occasion, as little as they or anyone else would have believed it.* More generally, both books are about the transition beyond the fields we know, taking as their thesis that the fey and faraway is really much closer at hand than common belief is comfortable with: fairy influence is underneath even the off-the-cuff oaths of Dorimare; the Shire is so small a fragment of its world that it's only when Bilbo returns (even more so the case with Frodo) that the reader realizes the hobbits' cozy comfort is the exception, not the rule, of daily life in Middle-Earth. And there is both humor and insight to be mined from the clashes in registers of language, although I think Lud-in-the-Mist is more numinous and The Hobbit more what the hell? I will have to re-read the former to be sure, but having just finished the latter, it's a tonal crazy quilt, full of mythic motifs alongside snips and snaps of fairy tale and deadpan modern understatement to point up the heroism of its characters and undercut it at the same time: "Victory after all, I suppose! . . . Well, it seems a very gloomy business." The fact that it all holds together in the first place is nearly as much of a feat as its enduring classic-of-children's-lit status.
* Bilbo has a harder time of it than Nathaniel, of course. I haven't looked into Guillermo del Toro's thoughts on the matter, but any adaptation worth its mushrooms should be able to spin a setpiece of social comedy out of the five-dwarf pileup on the doormat while Bilbo is juggling too many plates in the air of flustered manners and temper and dashing about and, well, plates: culminating with our hero melting down spectacularly in the drawing room and being stashed somewhere dark with a glass of brandy while the dwarves figure out what to do next. To be able to move from that sort of Ealing Studios silliness to the genuine suspense of "Riddles in the Dark"—and then the Battle of Five Armies, which changes gears again into the epic—is not and should not be impossible, because Tolkien achieved it, so I'll just pray it's a balance del Toro gets right.
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Absolutely. Bilbo and Nathaniel Chanticleer are both people who are weirder than they realize or allow themselves to think—a gift for thievery and riddle-games, the Note that can sound at any minute of the commonplace—and that weirdness rises them to the occasion, as little as they or anyone else would have believed it.* More generally, both books are about the transition beyond the fields we know, taking as their thesis that the fey and faraway is really much closer at hand than common belief is comfortable with: fairy influence is underneath even the off-the-cuff oaths of Dorimare; the Shire is so small a fragment of its world that it's only when Bilbo returns (even more so the case with Frodo) that the reader realizes the hobbits' cozy comfort is the exception, not the rule, of daily life in Middle-Earth. And there is both humor and insight to be mined from the clashes in registers of language, although I think Lud-in-the-Mist is more numinous and The Hobbit more what the hell? I will have to re-read the former to be sure, but having just finished the latter, it's a tonal crazy quilt, full of mythic motifs alongside snips and snaps of fairy tale and deadpan modern understatement to point up the heroism of its characters and undercut it at the same time: "Victory after all, I suppose! . . . Well, it seems a very gloomy business." The fact that it all holds together in the first place is nearly as much of a feat as its enduring classic-of-children's-lit status.
* Bilbo has a harder time of it than Nathaniel, of course. I haven't looked into Guillermo del Toro's thoughts on the matter, but any adaptation worth its mushrooms should be able to spin a setpiece of social comedy out of the five-dwarf pileup on the doormat while Bilbo is juggling too many plates in the air of flustered manners and temper and dashing about and, well, plates: culminating with our hero melting down spectacularly in the drawing room and being stashed somewhere dark with a glass of brandy while the dwarves figure out what to do next. To be able to move from that sort of Ealing Studios silliness to the genuine suspense of "Riddles in the Dark"—and then the Battle of Five Armies, which changes gears again into the epic—is not and should not be impossible, because Tolkien achieved it, so I'll just pray it's a balance del Toro gets right.