I was invited to review and write a blurb for The Wisdom of Hobbits: Unearthing Our Humanity at 3 Bagshot Row last year (2022) by the author, Matthew J. DiStefano. We shared a somewhat lengthy email correspondence beginning in November. I enjoyed reading a pre-print copy of the book and somewhere along the way I promised to review it here on the Middle-earth Blog when the book was published.
Well, that was supposed to be in March and as I explained in this post from July 1 I had a rough winter. I simply wasn’t able to follow through on my promise, and for that I feel badly. Then again, now that I’m finally forcing myself to do this – I don’t think the timing could be better.
I’ll say right now, up front, I think this book would make a wonderful Christmas gift for any Tolkien fan.
Small Disclaimer
I don’t write many book reviews. It’s not my forte. So what follows are my thoughts about what I think is important or interesting. It’s not an attempt to write a book review. I’ll leave those kinds of articles to the New Ork Thymes and their ilk.
The Wisdom of Hobbits Explores Depth in Middle-earth
One thing most people agree on is that J.R.R. Tolkien created a story so rich in depth that it felt real, like he was simply relating in his own words events that had truly happened. That was the premise behind the fictional Red Book of Westmarch but even without Tolkien’s occasional mentions of the supposed source for his story, it just feels more like a real-life adventure than a typical piece of fiction.
The art and illusion of creative depth in fiction have been discussed to death. You can literally search Bing or Google for “how to create depth in your fiction”, and they’ll give you suggestions or link to Websites that purport to explain the mechanics.
Even Wikipedia has a typically misleading article titled “Impression of Depth in The Lord of the Rings” (misleading because Wikipedia rules forbid or limit the use of primary sources and original research – so it’s not an in-depth analysis of Tolkien’s writing style).
I don’t know if I could explain any better than the legions of other Internet pundits how to create depth in fiction, but I do know what it’s like to spend more than 25 years exploring the depth in Tolkien’s fiction.
The illusion of depth in Middle-earth is real – it’s there. You can feel it as you read through the stories. And that’s because if you ask a question about something there always seems to be an answer. That’s why this blog has yet to exhaust the endless funnel of questions people have submitted even after publishing more than 1,000 articles.
The Three Parts of the Book
Part One is titled “Hobbit Wonder”. I’ll discuss it in some detail below.
Part Two is titled “Hobbit Will”. These three chapters explore some of the usual themes of literary criticism: heroes, the journey of the hero, and free will. By limiting most of his discussion to the hobbit characters of the story, he provides a unique illustration of Tolkien’s method for exploring well-known themes.
Hobbits are about as ordinary as you can get, and yet they are heroic and magnificent. This ordinariness-to-heroism connection that resonates well with readers.
Part Three wraps up with a discussion of hobbit wisdom. What are the lessons learned from the story of hobbits as revealed in the depth provided by Tolkien?
I’ll argue these are lessons the reader can’t take away from Tolkien’s stories about the Eldar and the Edain in The Silmarillion, because those stories aspire to be heroic like sagas and epic poetry. Nor can the reader take these lessons away from stories like “Aldarion and Erendis” or “The Battles of the Fords of Isen”, which explore small themes.
How Matthew DiStefano Explores Tolkien’s Depth
Writing in the Foreword to the book, Matthew’s friend Michael Machuga says: “Having known Matthew for going on a decade now, I can guarantee that in every way but stature, he is a legitimate Hobbit…”
And Matthew opens the book’s Introduction with this: “Hobbits are a fascinating bunch. They generally enjoy the simple life—gardening, eating, drinking ale, eating some more, and smoking the finest pipe-weed they can get their hands on. For most, these modest pleasures are all that are needed to enjoy their time in Middle-earth. Others, however, need something more. They need adventure. They need to see mountains, and Elves, and Dwarves, and even Ents.”
To borrow a corny phrase from science fiction idiom, if you want to understand a hobbit you need to BE a hobbit. Anyone can be a hobbit. And everyone has been the hobbit. We live in the Hobbit Continuum, where it’s so easy to slip into Bilbo’s chair, drink his tea, eat his cakes, and wander around Middle-earth in search of adventure.
The Wisdom of Hobbits does all that by focusing on the hobbits. If you search the book for phrases like “the ents”, “the dwarves”, and “the elves” you’ll find fewer than 20 occurrences of each. There isn’t much minutiae about non-hobbity folk in there.
The Philosophy of Hobbitdom
To see that hobbits have a concept of what being a hobbit means, Matthew shows us how they talk amongst themselves about each other. Hobbits judge hobbits through the lens of hobbitness. He exposes their flaws and their strengths – as revealed by Tolkien – in a simple, straight-forward manner.
He compares the way hobbits of the Shire differ from Bree-land hobbits through their interactions with, and behavior toward, outsiders. The Bree-land hobbits are more welcoming and open than their Shire-bound cousins.
But what often gets overlooked is the hobbits’ propensity for growth, to adapt to change and challenge. The journey of Frodo and his companions provides plenty of evidence for Matthew’s analysis and conclusions. “This is a lesson for all Hobbits, as well as all Big Folk;” he argues: “we grow when we step outside of our borders…”
The Earthiness of Hobbits
The most famous passage in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books is the opening to The Hobbit: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”
Much has been made of hobbit holes. People today even love to build their own hobbit-hole homes, or stay in them on adventurous vacations. Matthew DiStefano digs into the hobbits’ predilections for underground dwellings, and their love of gardens, to understand their earthiness. “Hobbits have such a strong relationship with the earth,” he says; “in fact, that they often dig their homes into it.” The hobbit way of life is simpler and less aspirational than the elvish way of life. Hobbits are not “lords and ladies” of Middle-earth, but rather “tenders and stewards”.
I find this discussion to be a refreshing point of view about both hobbits and their place in Middle-earth as its true custodians. Most people associate the Elves and Dwarves with the earth, identifying them with spirits of nature. But I think Matthew’s perspective makes a lot of sense. Hobbits have a special relationship with the land that even the elves don’t quite grasp.
Using that relationship between hobbitry and the land as a foundation, he explores what it means to see their world devastated by the fringes of war and Saruman’s petty vengeance. And he compares hobbits’ before and after relationships with their Shire in terms that reflect Tolkien’s own regret about the way we treat the earth that nurtures us: we torture it in war and enslave it with industry.
He concludes the first third of the book by suggesting how we can apply the lessons that Tolkien’s hobbits learned from their own challenges and conflicts in our daily lives.
And that brings me back to the idea of depth in Middle-earth. The Lord of the Rings isn’t just an adventure story. It’s a way-of-life story, as revealed through The Wisdom of Hobbits. The glimpses into these lifestyles and the changes the characters experience are the flourishes Tolkien used to paint Middle-earth with such convincing realism.
The lessons Matthew DiStefano takes from those details and flourishes vindicate our perception of depth in the story. If we can apply these life lessons in our own experiences, then the author has succeeded in creating the depth he wanted. Matthew’s logic follows a clear path from how the story describes hobbits to how we relate to them.
Finding Wisdom in Hobbit Tales
The premise of the book is that we can take something away from the details Tolkien inserts into The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit about his most famous fictional race.
We are hobbits, and hobbits are us. They’re not simply caricatures or echoes of an idealized Victorian past. Whereas the great heroes of the First Age performed deeds we can’t hope to match (like Hurin’s slaying of 70 trolls and Lúthien’s singing Morgoth to sleep), Tolkien’s hobbits live and think much as we do – as we could aspire to.
Tolkien’s hobbit banter could be heard in a quaint pub today, or around a campfire. Hobbit preferences for staying at home still reflect the way hundreds of millions of people live around the world. Some of us are like Aragorn, traveling the world in pursuit of personal priorities. Some of us are like Boromir, traveling great distances when need demands it. Some of us are like Legolas, Gimli, Merry, and Pippin: drawn into larger campaigns than we imagined we would undertake.
What I think Matthew did well was bring the hobbits’ experiences to the fore in a new way (for me). He doesn’t simply extract details from the story and explain what they mean in a literary or moral context. He connects the dots in a conversational method that should get people to thinking and talking about what it would be like to live as hobbit.
In fact, many of us do live as hobbits, because hobbits live as we do. What makes them special and fantastical is the story Tolkien wrote around them. They lived in a world that was still filled with magic and wonder, and they responded to that world as we might.
And I think the lesson here is that if you want to experience the wonder and magic that hobbits experienced, maybe you just need to look at the world around you the way they looked at their world. The fact we can do so is a testament to Tolkien’s skill as writer and story-teller.
Conclusion
I didn’t want to give away too much of the book. I hope I wasn’t too vague.
Through the years some people have criticized me for being an “originalist” – that is, I rarely quote the critics and scholars who have published books, research papers, and magazine articles. I’m not trying to be another literary critic. I’m just exploring the details of the stories.
If you like that kind of commentary about Tolkien’s Middle-earth, I think you’ll enjoy The Wisdom of Hobbits. There’s literary commentary and scholarly reference in the book, but that’s not the point of the book. I think the point of the book is to say, “Hey, this feels so real because so much of it is real.” It’s a realness that is rooted in one man’s life experience; it doesn’t feel like it’s a vicarious perspective drawn from library research and book knowledge.
