It's the 75th anniversary of the publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit. Why has it been such an enduring success?
From a story in the Telegraph...
Today The Hobbit has sold 100 million copies and been translated into
something like fifty languages, including (two of Tolkien’s favourites)
Icelandic and West Frisian. One hopes Tolkien’s colleague got him to sign
those first editions he bought in 1937, and that his children held on to
them, for a good copy with a dedication by Tolkien in it went for £60,000
four years ago. Prices will undoubtedly go up once Peter Jackson starts to
bring out his Hobbit movies — three of them now planned, so we hear —
beginning late this year.
What has made the book such an enduring success? There are lots of reasons why
one would not have expected it to be. Too much poetry! No female characters
at all! (How will Jackson get round that one?) A lot of professorial
quibbling over words!
But maybe Tolkien’s boldest defiance of accepted children’s-fiction practice
was that he offered no child figure for the reader to fix on. It’s true, the
hero Bilbo Baggins is “only a little hobbit”, so he’s a kind of surrogate
child, but he’s put in positions no child could be expected to identify with.
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