John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892, in Blomfontein, South Africa. His father, Arthur, was a bank manager who had left England to seek his fortune, and to wait until he would be allowed to marry his sweetheart, Mabel Suffield. Mabel came out to South Africa in 1891; their eldest son, usually called Ronald, was born the next year, and their younger son, Hilary, followed two years after that. Although life was good in Africa, Mabel disliked its extremes of heat and cold, and Ronald's health was poor. In 1895, she took the two boys back to England for a visit to their grandparents. Arthur died of rheumatic fever early in 1896, leaving his family stranded. Mabel rented a cottage in a rural village with plenty of fresh air and countryside for two young boys to explore. Mabel taught the boys herself: Latin, French, German, drawing, painting, and piano. Even at this young age, Ronald had a facility for languages, although he never cared for French, which evidently just never sounded good to him. The plan was that the boys would be home schooled until they were ready to take the entrance exams for the best school in Birmingham and the one their father had attended. But in 1900, Mabel converted to Catholicism. Both the Tolkiens and the Suffields, belonging to the Anglican, Methodist, Unitarian, and Baptist churches, considered Catholicism completely beyond the pale. Her conversion cut off all hope of financial assistance and appears to have exacerbated diabetes. She died of its complications in 1904. Fortunately, her sons were left in the care of Father Francis Morgan, a priest of Spanish and Welsh descent with a private income that he was happy to use easing the way for the Tolkien brothers. The boys initially were sent to live with their aunt Beatrice Suffield, one of the few relatives who did not regard Catholicism as a form of spiritual leprosy, but after four years boys moved to rented rooms in the house of a Mrs. Faulkener. Here Ronald, at the age of 16, met Edith Bratt, three years his elder. Soon the two were in love, but when Father Francis discovered this, he forbade all contact between the two until Ronald was 21. Although Ronald threw himself into his studies and earned himself a small scholarship to Oxford, he kept his intention firm.
From Oxford to the Front In the meantime, there were languages to learn. The early fascination with Latin and German developed into a fondness for Greek, a love for Old and Middle English, and a fascination with Welsh -- in contrast to the distasteful sound of French, Tolkien adored the sound and look of Welsh long before he learned what the words actually meant. He even taught himself Gothic, an extinct Germanic language. He began fooling around with inventing his own languages, a game he had played ever since his childhood but which he took increasingly seriously as his understanding of the workings and structures of language grew. He also made firm friends at King Edward's, chiefly Christopher Wiseman, R. Q. Gilson, and Geoffrey Bache Smith. The four formed a group calling themselves the Tea Club and Barrovian Society (TCBS), after their habit of taking tea at the tearoom in Barrow's Stores in Birmingham. The ties continued after they had finished school and moved on to University, although Tolkien also continued his sociable ways at Exeter College, spending far more time in talk and pranks than in study. Although theoretically he was reading (majoring in) Classics, the class that really spoke to him was philology. At his second-year exams ("mods"), Tolkien received respectable but not stellar grades in Classics, but aced Comparative Philology. He changed over to reading English (the department in which philology was taught) and his academic career was set. His personal life was also falling into place. As soon as he turned 21 he wrote to Edith. He visited her as soon as possible, and the romance was rekindled. Plans were progressing for the two to marry.
In the midst of it all, World War I broke out. Tolkien entered a program that would allow him to complete his degree while training for the officer corps, and learned signaling (yet another language). He and Edith were married on March 22, 1916, just before he was shipped off to France.
Tolkien managed to escape the War to End All Wars with little more than trench fever, but he witnessed the carnage and irrationality of war firsthand. Furthermore, two of his TCBS comrades, Smith and Gilson, were killed. Although many have thought that the wastelands created by Sauron and Saruman in The Lord of the Rings are reflections of the nuclear wastes revealed by the second world war, it seems likely that Tolkien's vision of the waste of war was formed in his experiences and losses in the first.
With the end of the war, Tolkien returned to his wife and his career. Tolkien was hired to work on the New Oxford English Dictionary, a job that expanded even further his understanding of the development of the English language and its Germanic roots (when editors in later years protested his spelling of the plural "dwarves," pointing out that the OED preferred spelling was "dwarfs," Tolkien grandly responded, "I wrote the OED!"). After two years on the OED staff, as well as the birth of his first son, John, Tolkien was hired as Reader, and then as Professor in English at the University of Leeds. For the next five years, from 1920 to 1925, the family lived in Leeds, and two more sons, Michael and Christopher, were born. Tolkien also embarked on an edition and translation of the Middle English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, with his colleague E. V. Gordon. In 1925, Tolkien was named Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo Saxon at Oxford; the Tolkiens returned to Oxford, and the final member of the family, daughter Priscilla, was born soon after. Humphrey Carpenter, in his biography of Tolkien, comments, "And after this, you might say, nothing else really happened." Except for all that writing.

Audience and Purpose
The suggestion by the critics is that the Hobbit was written as a story to entertain Tolkien's young children. Such a suggestion might be supported by the amount of protection that Bilbo is often given and by the almost accidental winning of his battles. Moreover the narrative is relatively simple and full of adventures rather than philosophizing.

Setting: Middle-Earth is an early name for the planet Earth: the middle region between heaven and hell. So the place for Tolkien's tale is simply earth­the dwelling place of humans but shared with elves, dwarves, orcs, Ents, and Hobbits (among others). The times appear to be like Europe in the Middle Ages when dragons and other supernatural but non-angelic creatures were still believed in. (See Carter p. 33).

Characters (See Carter p. 34 for Hobbits) The plot structure (outlined to introduce the characters) is straight-forward, beginning with the invitation to Bilbo to help a band of dwarves rescue treasure from a dragon, and ending with the defeat of the dragon, the restoration of the treasure, and the return home of Bilbo.

Theme: the story revolves around the use and abuse of power and the corrupting influence of having power even on good people.

Foreshadowing occurs in the prophecies at different points in the book. Irony reigns supreme in the person of the hero­the least impressive of all the characters, the weakest, and the most mundane. Other ironies also occur as in the insignificance of the finding of the ring by Bilbo, his successful thievery of it as well as of the cup which the warrior dwarves cannot get.

Sources: See Carter p. 152 ff.

Hobbit Criticism from "Where's Mama?" The Construction of the Feminine in The Hobbit by William H. Green
Copyright © 1998 The Johns Hopkins University Press.

There are no living female characters, human or animal, in J. R. R. Tolkien's 255-page fantasy The
Hobbit--a fact that makes it unusual among stories of its length and complexity.Boys' books typically construct male worlds outside the supervision of the mother--but Tolkien's story of Bilbo Baggins carries this to an extreme.

This is particularly odd because Bilbo's dead mother is mentioned in the fourth paragraph of the book, even before his name is given. She is "the famous Belladonna Took, one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across the water" (12). Not only is she prominent at the head of the story, but her family's heroic traits--traits for which Tolkien coins the term Tookish--are the basis for the unfolding of the hero's character, his successful individuation by leaving his womb-like hobbit hole and facing the dangerous world. When the wizard Gandalf summons Bilbo to adventure, he calls him "Belladonna Took's son" (14). The buried mother is the dynamic half of Bilbo's personality, the neglect of which has led to his stagnation, and so--as a complex within her son--she is central to The Hobbit. She is rooted in the life of Tolkien, who was orphaned at age twelve, identified with his mother's family (Letters 54) and kept her portrait on his bureau all his life.

Other than the references to Belladonna Took, there are only minor references to females of any kind in The Hobbit, a book with more than thirty individual characters. Bard is said to be a hereditary chief because he
is descended from the "wife and child" of the lord of Dale, who fled a dragon invasion centuries before (211); a mountain height is said to have once been the home of two ravens, "Carc and his wife" (218); and old stories are said to include "princesses" (14). Living women are mentioned once in the book when we are told that an army marches from the Lake-town, leaving behind the cowardly town master "with the women and the children, the old and the unfit" (216). This line, dismissively associating women with weakness, is
the sole reference to women existing in the story--indeed the only clear mention of any character younger than fifty. The Hobbit is a story of old kings without queens, courts without ladies, towns of men and blurry
others. Even eagles, horses, wolves, goblins, spiders, and dragons are, according to pronouns, all masculine--an unnatural condition.

The absence of women is all the more odd in episodes indebted to sources which included women. For instance, Tolkien based Bilbo's journey over the Misty Mountains on his 1911 hike through the Swiss Alps with a botanist aunt and "a mixed party of about the same size as the company in The Hobbit" However, when Bilbo's party shelters in a goblin cave--the equivalent of a Swiss cow shed--a male wizard takes the place of the aunt; the female hikers are transformed into male dwarves. But, after all, the
biologist aunt was "one of the first women to take a science degree", and so, like the female hikers, was an atypical woman easily absorbed into an all-male fiction.

Furthermore, in most of the apparent literary sources of Tolkien's story, female characters are common. The Hobbit emulates many medieval tales, as well as Victorian adventure fiction and children's stories. Tolkien claimed that most parallels were unintentional, emerging unconsciously as he let his imagination work, but some influences are obvious. For instance, scenes involving the Wood-elves in Mirkwood echo the Middle English romance, Sir Orfeo, which Tolkien translated into Modern English.
Orfeo, a harper-king who mourns in the deep forest after his wife has been abducted by the king of Faërie, sees troops of knights and ladies on snow-white horses, like the snow-white deer in Mirkwood. Orfeo first notices the fairies when he hears hunting "with dim cry and bloweing, / and houndes also with him berking", just as Bilbo first hears the elves "with dim blowing of horns in the wood and the sound as of dogs baying far off" (127). Orfeo infiltrates the fairies' underground stronghold behind magic doors, as Bilbo does in Tolkien's story. Orfeo's purpose, like Bilbo's, is to free the captive of the elvish king. Sir Orfeo is, of course, a romance about a man in love and a court of beautiful ladies, with all the paraphernalia of courtly love--very unlike Bilbo's story. In Sir Orfeo, as in other apparent sources such as the Victorian tale by George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin, Ywain by the medieval writer, Chrétien de Troyes, and several ancient Norse sagas, women play important roles, both as motivators and as dynamic characters, but Tolkien's imagination expunged them as he translated episodes into The
Hobbit.

The same trend continues in The Lord of the Rings. Obviously manifests sexual bias, bias that Catherine Stimpson calls "subtle contempt and hostility toward women". She may overstate the case though, and clearly Tolkien would dispute her charge, calling his wife and daughter in evidence. Moreover, his personal letters to and about women seem cordial, suggesting no contempt or hostility. Nevertheless, any Tolkien apologist must account for the absence of women from The Hobbit and their marginalization elsewhere in his writings. There is certainly a bias here, an emotional charge pushing the women to margins of stories or deep into their symbolic cores, and if it is not "contempt and hostility," however subtle, then what is it?

A more likely name for this charge is fear, fear of sexuality, which Tolkien saw as dangerous. "The dislocation of the sex-instinct," he wrote in a letter of advice to his adult son, "is one of the chief symptoms of the Fall" (Letters 48). Tolkien professed to be a heterosexual male and feel the ruinous appeal of sex in the presence of women. Monogamy is, he said, contrary to man's fallen nature, and marriage resists immorality only "as hunger may be kept off by regular meals" The sex drive is so omnipresent- so tainted with the Fall--that ordinary friendship between members of the opposite sex is impossible. "The devil," he wrote, "is endlessly ingenious, and sex is his favorite subject. He is as good every bit at catching you through
generous romantic or tender motives, as through the baser or more animal ones". It is fair, however, to note that, for all his fear of sexuality, which he localizes in the male-female relation, Tolkien does not demonize women; indeed, a long paragraph in the letter to his son defends women from the negative projections of male desire--particularly literary characterizations of women as cold, unfaithful, and cruel--and sketches sympathetically the plight of the "typical" woman who must deal with inchoate male desire . His view, a modified Victorian one, is that women do have strong reproductive drives but
are generally more domestic, better suited than men for monogamy and relative chastity. If the devil's "favorite subject" has made one sex demonic, it is the polygamous male.

So, if "contempt" is the term, it seems likely that Tolkien excludes women from his children's stories, not because they deserve contempt, but because men behave contemptibly around them. Women do, however innocently, tempt. Perhaps The Hobbit excludes women because a traditional adventure story cannot exclude men, and Tolkien does wish to exclude sex, the subject on which his feelings were so confused and divided. A conservative Roman Catholic, he saw sex as a corrupting force that romantic love and the sacrament of marriage as only a partial redemption in a world where the only "romance, glory, honour, fidelity" was "the Blessed Sacrament". However, his loyalty to this religious ideal was painfully divided. On the one hand, he rejected the "artificial courtly game" of romantic love, which he knew intimately as a medievalist; but on the other, he fell passionately in love with his wife when they were teenagers, waited years for her, married against family advice, and otherwise enacted with her the script of romantic courtly love. Moreover, his attachment to the courtly love mystique--however inferior it may be to the romance of the Blessed Sacrament--was not wholly repented in later life, for he placed on his and his wife's gravestones the names Beren and Lúthien, after a pair of romantic lovers in his mythological cycle, The Silmarillion (Carpenter 259-60).

Against this divided background, the womanless world of The Hobbit--like a manless world by a female author--may be seen as a Utopian construction, an Edenic world without sexual tension and guilt, a world consonant with pre Freudian ideas of childhood innocence. However, such a strong gesture betrays itself. It is not, in fact, so much a relaxation into asexuality as it is a Quixotic effort to sweep back the sea of gender. We cannot deny half the world consciously without its reasserting itself, particularly if that half includes our first beloved person. The portrait of the mother remains on the bureau, and Bilbo's mother is written even before his name in his womanless story. In later chapters, she seems to recede, like Jim's mother in Treasure Island, but her very absence is a presence. Such an apparently total blackout is a mark of obsession, and obsessions inevitably manifest themselves.

So where is Mama, the beloved face on the bureau? Informed by Jung and his students, especially by Marie-Louise von Franz's lectures on fairy tales and Erich Neumann's classic studies of dragon-slaying myths and the Great Mother, my recent book on The Hobbit interprets the story as the process of Bilbo's maturation through his encounter with the buried feminine, the archetypal mother. Symbolically, she is manifest, not only at the head of the book, but throughout, so much so that--after we have noted the obvious
fact that it is the story of Bilbo Baggins--we can reasonably add that the book is about his mother. Bilbo moves from belated childhood, a boyish lingering near the womb, outward into androgynous maturity. And, of course, all of this is about sexuality--more so because all reference to procreative instinct is expunged from the text. So where is Mama, the buried beloved, the repressed? To this complex question, I offer three
answers.

First, she is Mother Earth manifest in patterns of landscape and related symbols that equate the world to the body of the Goddess. Neumann's book The Great Mother is especially helpful here, glossing psychologically the tendency of Bilbo and his companions to encounter hungry creatures in womb-like tunnels, or alternatively to become trapped in bags--saving themselves with swords or speech. The dragon in the mountain is, as Neumann explains, a symbol of the negative mother who becomes positive and nurturing once the hero--of either gender, according to Neumann- escapes her dark caves, reborn to the sunny earth. Early in chapter 3, a passage describes a landscape like a supine woman, crotch in the foreground, breasts in the distance. The symbolic womb is a moist ravine of hospitable elves in Tolkien's. The breasts are distant mountains, whichTolkien says subtly that "the tips of snow-peaks gleamed" (46). And later a treasure must be wrested from the hoard of a dragon or reptilian witch--a treasure that lies under a breast-like volcano with a snow areola and a tunnel at its base: emblems of the mother. The buried mother (of author or of protagonist) is, in terms of depth psychology, a repressed autonomous complex, and as such, is projected compulsively until the landscape becomes her proxy. She is the landscape of caves, monsters, and mountains. Second, the mother is buried in androgynous figures who are "feminine" in character, sometimes even feminine in traceable origin, despite their masculine pronouns. Gandalf, again, is a fictional proxy for Tolkien's scientist aunt in the trek over the Misty Mountains. He arrives at Bilbo's doorstep naming Belladonna Took and, in Jungian terms, functions as Bilbo's female soul or anima, leading him out toward his shadow in the name of the feminine. A womanless book, of course, can have no ordinary anima figures but Gandalf is scarcely distinguishable from a cross-dressed fairy godmother. He leads Bilbo into the world as Athena, disgused as a male, leads Telemachus in The Odyssey. Neumann emphasizes the androgyny of wizard figures, who play a role, he says, originally performed by women. "Even in a later period," he writes,"the male shaman or seer is to a high degree 'feminine,' since he is dependent on his anima aspect. And for this reason he often appears in woman's dress" (296). Indeed, Tolkien's wizard wears flowing garments as
women and as priests do today, an interesting connection when we recall that a priest, Father Morgan, assumed the function of Tolkien's dead mother (Carpenter 32). Even Gandalf's magic wand, arguably a phallic feature, is today associated more with fairy godmothers than with wizards, more with Glinda the Good than with Merlin. Gandalf's character as cross-dressed anima is concretely supported by an illustration from E. A. Wyke-Smith's 1927 book, The Marvellous Land of Snergs, which Tolkien admitted imitating. This
picture of a wizard-like figure on a pony could easily double as an illustration of Gandalf in The Hobbit, but it actually represents a witch in disguise, Mother Meldrum traveling in a false beard (Anderson 305).

In the same way, other characters in The Hobbit could easily be rewritten as women, so androgynous are their characters, particularly hosts who nurture Bilbo and his companions at Homely Houses, places of security and rest, and who re-supply the adventurers between the dangers of the journey. Beorn, though a fierce bear-man with knotted muscles, has much in common with the folk-figure, Mother Nature. A vegetarian beekeeper, he "loves his animals as his children" (119) and is served by horses, dogs, and sheep, whoselanguage he speaks. Elrond, the lord of Rivendale, is a glamorous elf man said to be "fair in face" and "kind as summer" (51). And the all masculine Wood-elves, whose king has a weakness for "silver and white
gems" (145), are described in terms conventionally applied to ladies in medieval romance: "Their gleaming hair was twined with flowers; green and white gems glinted on their collars and their belts; and their facesand songs were filled with mirth" (134). [End Page 193] One reason The Hobbit works so well withoutfemale characters is that male characters, or at least characters gender-marked with masculine pronouns, enact stereotypically feminine roles by nurturing, soothsaying, and being beautiful. A little re writing could translate Gandalf the Grey into Glinda the Good and feminize other characters--even Bilbo, whose impulses are remarkably similar to Dorothy's--and though this would change the surface of the story, perhaps even for the better, it would not weaken the narrative coherence of The Hobbit or alter its moral and psychological themes.

Finally, the mother is implicit in the glorification of "feminine" versus "masculine" values--the humiliation of men who lack an impulse to nurture, a gift for domesticity and self-sacrifice. Bilbo, the androgynous male protagonist, is a throwback to a mid-Victorian vision of domestic virtue analyzed in Claudia Nelson's 1991 book, Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children's Fiction, 1857-1917. Prior to the 1880s, popular children's fiction defined "manliness," or masculine virtue, as a virtual opposite to "maleness," or masculine instinct. In Nelson's words, "ideals of womanliness were presented to Victorian boys as ideals of manliness" (5), their main goal being "the avoidance of the guilt of adult men" (18). Children's lack of power, like women's lack of power, was presented as a moral advantage (20), and male heroes of popular mid-Victorian fiction--such as Frederic Farrar's Eric and George MacDonald's At the Back of the North Wind--were asexual and effeminate, virtual girls in breeches, young proxies of the Angel in the House, the Victorian stereotype of the idealized mother.

In The Hobbit, a revisionist version of the Victorian ideology, some feminine virtues--such as passivity and fear of adventure--are weaknesses to be overcome, but their masculine opposites, the restlessness and testosterone-driven ambition of the macho hero, are vices. Maleness, as opposed to demure manliness, is evil; even in an asexual fictional world, chaotic male impulses must be resisted with manly strength. Thorin, the head of Bilbo's company, is destroyed by the vices that Nelson identifies with maleness in mid-Victorian fiction (19). A victim of power and prosperity, he is saved only by self-sacrifice and a deathbed confession praising domesticity: "If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world" (243). In effect, Tolkien contrasts male pride and foolhardiness with manly courage--which is ironically built on feminine self-abnegation. Bilbo's androgynous courage is like Dorothy's, when she defends her dog from the Cowardly Lion who has intimidated the male Scarecrow and Tin Woodman; courage here is a humane self-sacrifice, not an expression of dominance or ambition. Bilbo resists the lure of power and wealth. Serving bravely but modestly under the sign of the mother, the
Victorian Angel in the House, he battles to make the world safer for feminized domesticity, then returns to the obscure parlor and pantry where he began. In The Hobbit, as in mid-Victorian children's fiction, good values are feminine; the mother is the model of good behavior.

Tolkien's politics were not feminist. He was a traditionalist, born a Victorian and loyal to his heritage and times. However, Catherine Stimpson's dismissal--reading a mythic neo-Victorian work as a literal document of twentieth-century politics--misses complexities that grew from the single mindedness with which Tolkien pursued his mythic visions and exposed the ambiguities of gender. There is in The Hobbit, masked by fear of sex and an enactment of the Victorian ideal of "purity," a focused rejection of traditional masculine values. Salvation is earned by sexless characters who are good Victorian women in all but costume and pronoun reference. Gandalf the Grey and Glinda the Good are one.