Fast Facts:

Book Title: The Hobbit

Author: J.R.R. Tolkien

Genre/Audience: Children; fantasy

Rating: 9/10

Worth the read?: Definitely!

reliving my childhood

When I first read The Hobbit in sixth grade, I groaned and complained about how awful it was until the last quarter of the book when I finally got into the story. This time around, reading it for a class, I couldn’t get enough. It’s a book I can imagine reading to my future children (many, many years in the future).

Just like the books in my last blog post, I completed The Hobbit several months ago. But little bits and pieces of the fantastical story have been glued to my memory since I was just a kid, and now there are even more.

in the dark

The only thing I remembered strongly from my reading in middle school was that there was a scene where Bilbo was in a place so dark that he could not even see his hand in front of his face. Why this particular line stuck with me so long is beyond me, but when I reached that part this time around, I was astounded at how accurate my memory was; it was almost word-for-word. I’ve carried this line with me for more than a decade, and every now and then it randomly pops into my head. I couldn’t tell you the number of times I have been in a dark place and waved my hand in front of my face to see if I had finally found the same kind of darkness Bilbo experienced (I have–in a cave my junior year of high school).

I also have strong childhood memories of watching the 1970s cartoon with my mom. She loves that thing (and, of course, she has a strong childhood memory of watching it, too). The Bilbo from that cartoon has always been the Bilbo I see in my head, and I love his little Cabbage Patch-like features.

life lessons

This reading, coming in the final few weeks of my college career, had its own powerful (though small) message:

They were at the end of their journey, but as far as ever, it seemed, from the end of their quest. None of them had much spirit left.

No truer words could have been spoken about my final semester of undergrad. From the first day of classes, I was exhausted, stressed, and overwhelmed by how much remained to be completed by December. I felt alone without my friends who had graduated and moved onto the next phase of life, my research project was draining my soul, and the newspaper was constantly begging for more attention than I could seemingly give. The journey was coming to a close, but the end was nowhere in sight; I was weary and exhausted. And, admittedly, I was incredibly afraid.

Afraid of…the dark?

I was afraid because the journey was almost over, you see, and once the journey ended, the quest would really begin—the quest for what’s next—and who ever knows where that may lead? No one, of course, and especially not me. I’ve always seen myself going to graduate school, getting a PhD, and being a boss lady. But I am afraid that, by the end of this journey, I simply don’t have much spirit left.

It’s rest and recovery that I need—a little space to separate from the classroom for a while so that I can reexamine what it is I want to offer the world. It’s hard to convince myself that this is acceptable, because I’ve always been a person ahead of everyone else, and it feels like admitting failure to say that I need a break from school. But it isn’t a failure—it’s just the next step of the quest.

Why, little Bilbo Baggins, who knew that you had so much to teach me?