Storybooks are for kids: re-evaluating J.R.R. Tolkien

They say, adult picture books don’t sell.

Theres always been a stark divide in what we think of as ‘mature’ enough, complex enough for a grown adult to read. Today is a Schrodinger’s day, authors chasing each other around the rosemary of whatever seemingly innocuous genre is trending today, though at the same time – books have become a symbol of days long gone that authors must harken back to in some way or another. In such a time where so much writing seems more for some ulterior, aesthetic goal, people start to turn back the pages.

As a young man, J.R.R Tolkien was in a writer’s club at a local bar – he and his colleagues wrote ideas late into the night. When war struck, Tolkien and his friends were quickly whisked away from their bar, into a pit, where many of these friends perished. Widowed from the very people who created this trove of ideas Tolkien now bears witness to, he wrote down the line, ‘somewhere, there was a hole, a Hobbit Hole… Bag-End’ a line which would eventually morph into the book tens of millions have read today.

That first line sort of gives away The Hobbit, it’s a book about home. Bag-End as a narrative character, begins as a sort of gravitational-pull on Bilbo, an anchor tying him to his simple, markedly Hobbit, life. As soon as he life all gets turned over by his perhaps timely adventure, the first thing he longs for is the whistling of a kettle, perhaps a comfortable bed. Homes distance, both physically and tonally marks the
book’s journey to-and-fourth, by the time Bilbo returns, he doesn’t quite fit any longer. The power of home as a theme, is that it is an almost universal. Whatever patch of ground you claim as your place to put a mattress and a kettle; it seems to be wired in that we miss it. We are good at being inside a world, given to us here is not just a narrative but the surrounding ethos, convincing enough to inspire the reader’s head
to peek through the pages into Middle Earth. You feel emotionally tied to the tracks of the narrative, in a way that makes you forget exactly where you are and instead weigh much more concern on contemplating exactly how the hell a mini sized human can enter and escape Mt. Doom with their furry feet intact.

Being the founding father of the genre of fantasy, its literary and cultural impact should not be understated. One of the many people in that bar with Tolkien was C.S. Lewis, a very little-known author who of course did nothing much important – Tolkien, however, inspired (if not in whole) the foundations for what would become stories from Harry Potter to the Hunger-Games – Other, rather small, literary footnotes.

It is entirely earnest in its writing, unadulterated by the past, present or future. It cares much, much more about its own world then whether such a book would sell in the first place. The feeling of being yanked through a curtain into a meticulously constructed world and falling on the other side, on its own, sparks more than any simple revision of our own world ever could. It’s the kind of story that doesn’t need pictures and instead warrants to show you itself in your own head. Anyway, storybooks are for kids.

Asher S, Year 10