So, I have a friend who does book clubs sometimes, and they were doing the Hobbit. I haven’t read it since I was a kid, but not because I didn’t want to. Middle Earth was one of the first times I used fiction to visit another world, and I’ve felt due for a trip back. I opened The Hobbit with a little bit of trepidation. I hadn’t read it since 1998 or thereabouts. I was worried that it wouldn’t hold up. Was the quality of the book merely the product of childhood wonderment and rose-colored memory? I am happy to report that it was not. In fact, it was better this time around.
Tolkien catches a lot of flack for writing archetypal books, with flat characters and themes that we are accustomed to viewing as tired tropes. But, his work is more subtle than it gets credit for. It’s not about the songs, or the characters, or even the worldbuilding. It’s something else. In Tolkien’s universe, everything is enchanted, and this is communicated in ways that aren’t always immediately apparent.
Take the poetry, for example. As a kid, I always wondered why there was so much poetry in the books. It seemed a little excessive, a little unnecessary. But there is a good reason for it. All of the songs in the book are magic spells! Okay, maybe not every single song. But many of them are. When a character in Lord of the Rings or the Hobbit sings a song, they’re casting a spell. It’s meant to have some sort of effect. Magic is closely associated with music in Tolkien. The Ainur sing Arda into existence in the Silmarillion; Tom Bombadil banishes an evil Barrow Wight with a special song; Lúthien puts Morgoth to sleep with the magic of her singing. In Tolkien, every song is a magic spell.
For example: if you’ve read the book, you know how the dwarves escape being imprisoned by the wood elves. They hide in barrels, which are being sent down the river back to the town they came from. The wood elves send the barrels home by dropping them in the river that comes from the Elf King’s palace. That river flows east, where it joins a much bigger river that takes the barrels back down to Lake Town. At the point where the two rivers intersect, there is another small group of elves waiting, who tie the barrels together and make sure they’re ready to float down the longest leg of the route. When the barrels are launched from Mirkwood, the elves sing a song where they tell the barrels to go back home. This song is a magic spell, meant to make sure that the barrels get home safely. The fact that it is a magic spell is not directly stated, but it’s evident when you look closely. The barrels float east, where the second group of elves ties them together. There is a danger that the second group of elves will discover the dwarves inside of the barrels:
There was a mighty pushing of poles. The elves that were standing in the shallow water heaved and shoved. The barrels now all lashed together creaked and fretted.
”This is a heavy load!” some grumbled, “They float too deep–some of these are never empty. If they had come ashore in the daylight, we might have had a look inside,” they said.
”No time now!” cried the raftman, “Shove off!”
And off they went at last….
Notice the subtle implication here. It appears that the dwarves narrowly avoided being discovered by sheer luck. If they had arrived in the daytime, the second group of elves would have opened the barrels and discovered them. The reason the dwarves got “lucky” is because of the spell! For if the barrels had been opened, the barrels would never have made it back to Lake Town. In weaving a spell to send the barrels home, the elves accidentally made sure that the dwarves would get there, too.
Another example is the famous song sung by the dwarves at the beginning of the book:
Far over the misty mountains cold
To dungeons deep and caverns old
We must away, ere break of day
To seek our pale enchanted gold
The dwarves aren’t just wistfully singing about their gold. They’re weaving a spell, a sort of prayer to help them regain their gold. Magic and music are not separate in Tolkien’s legendarium. Every song is a spell.
But in a way, everything in the legendarium is a spell. In his lecture, On Fairy Stories, Tolkien says:
I said the sense “stories about fairies” was too narrow. It is too narrow, even if we reject the diminutive size, for fairy-stories are not in normal English usage stories about fairies or elves, but stories about Fairy, that is Faerie, the realm or state in which fairies have their being. Faerie contains many things besides elves and fays, and besides dwarfs, witches, trolls, giants, or dragons: it holds the seas, the sun, the moon, the sky; and the earth, and all things that are in it: tree and bird, water and stone, wine and bread, and ourselves, mortal men, when we are enchanted.
He goes on to say,
The definition of a fairy-story—what it is, or what it should be—does not, then, depend on any definition or historical account of elf or fairy, but upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Realm itself, and the air that blows in that country. I will not attempt to define that, nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible…
…Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician.
That is the real key to Tolkien. When asked why we enjoy him, Tolkien fans will say any number of things. We’ll point to the worldbuilding, and talk about the sheer scope and depth of the legendarium. We’ll speak of the Hobbit as a fond childhood memory. But we can’t point directly at the quality that makes us love his work. As Tolkien says in On Fairy Stories,
I will not attempt to define [Faërie], nor to describe it directly. It cannot be done. Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible.
And that is the entire point. Tolkien’s work does not describe magic, in the sense he outlines it. That, as Tolkien rightly notes, is impossible. But — note well! — magic, while it is indescribable, is not imperceptible. Tolkien’s work paints a picture that allows us to perceive Faërie, if only in fleeting glimpses, as it were in our peripheral vision. The entire book is lush with the feeling of magic, an indescribable something that cannot be described. It can, however, be invoked. That’s the real appeal of Tolkien’s work. It’s the mysterious power to evoke something beyond words, somehow, by using words. The songs in the Hobbit are all magic spells, because the book itself is a magic spell!