“… and back again” – The Hobbit’s long journey home.

(Warning: Long. Get a cup of tea). 

I was all of ten years old when I read The Hobbit, and since then, my recollection has been muddied by a fabulously overblown three-part movie adaptation. So when a friend waxed lyrical about it recently, I was moved to re-read it. I found myself entranced all over again, but this time for very different reasons.

This small but polished jewel of fantasy shines for the simplicity and charm of its storytelling. But just like a gem held up to the light, it reveals deeper insights glinting from its depths which give the tale a mythic quality.

Our unassuming hobbit, Bilbo, departs reluctantly on the quintessential hero’s journey. This is the mythical path that represents the rites of passage that are common across time and cultures: separation, initiation, and return. (Joseph Campbell explores this “monomyth” in Hero with a Thousand Faces).

Writers love this hero’s journey stuff. If you haven’t heard of it, you haven’t attended enough creative writing classes. Many books (and films) have attempted similar mythic story arcs. Some of them have succeeded, but others apply the journey’s structure mechanistically, reducing it to little more than a trope. (Is your plot desultory? Just add the hero’s journey and stir!) But the enduring popularity of The Hobbit demonstrates that the mythic journey still holds a fascination that goes well beyond superficial entertainment.

I haven’t read the entirety of Campbell’s book, nor have I fully come to grips with the three-act structure that typifies the scriptwriter’s standard approach to incorporating the mythic journey into their plot. But I love dreams, symbols and metaphor, and I’ve long been fascinated by Jungian psychology. It seems to me that what gives the journey such irresistibility is that it’s about every wo/man. It’s about the stages of psychological development that we all must progress through to reach our fullest potential. The journey isn’t about getting to the end or winning the prize, it’s about the process we undergo along the way to achieve self-actualisation, or ‘mastery.’ (#denouement)

When Bilbo sets out, he’s unprepared, leaving without his pocket handkerchief, or even suitable clothing.

…Bilbo was wearing a dark-green hood (a little weather-stained) and a dark-green cloak borrowed from Dwalin. They were too large for him, and he looked rather comic.

Along the way he encounters various tests and trials, often reluctantly.

He did not go much further, but sat down on the cold floor and gave himself up to complete miserableness, for a long while. He thought of himself frying bacon and eggs in his own kitchen at home – for he could feel inside that it was high time for some meal or another; but that only made him miserabler.

The further they travel, the more he’s called upon to commit himself whole-heartedly to his path.

 “Go back?” he thought. “No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!”

But eventually these challenges wear the travel-weary hero down.

They did not sing or tell stories that day, even though the weather improved; nor the next day, nor the day after. They had begun to feel that danger was not far away on either side.

The hero finds himself alone, and in a desperate place, stripped of all of the normal props of his life.  He must confront that most existential of opponents – the fear within himself.

It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.

So it is that the mythic hero fights the ultimate battle, defeats the monster, and claims his prize. But the victory is not about the loot. It’s about the stages of development that every person must go through to achieve their own highest potential. The key to mastery is the self-knowledge that is applied and integrated into our protagonist’s identity, and carried home with or without the magic rings or jewels of victory.

But in order for this integration to occur, something else is dislocated. The hero plays a price.

Gandalf looked at him. ‘My dear Bilbo!’ he said. ‘Something is the matter with you! You are not the hobbit that you were.’

In this sense, the mythic journey is more than an outward bound adventure. The real heroism comes not in the journey “there” but on the way “back again”. This achieves real poignancy once you realise that Tolkien, like many of his contemporaries, served in the horror-soaked trenches of World War I. We can only imagine the sense of unreality that he must have felt upon his return to England, invalided due to trench fever, while his comrades in arms stayed at the front and ultimately perished.

This is the profound displacement of arriving home, only to realise that the experience of “home” will never be the same, not because it has changed, but because the hero has been irreversibly altered by their journey.

Indeed Bilbo found he had lost more than spoons – he had lost his reputation. It is true that for ever after he remained an elf-friend, and had the honour of dwarves, wizards, and all such folk as ever passed that way; but he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be ‘queer’

Bilbo wears this difference around himself like an oversized green travelling cloak that will never be taken off. A century after Tolkien faced off against the monsters of mortar and machine gun fire at the Somme, the same displacement has a very modern expression: it’s something that the serving members of defence forces - and their families - must grapple with on their return from expeditions in faraway lands. This adjustment is even more difficult for those soldiers who have sustained physical or psychological injuries as a result of the magnitude of their experiences.

But war is not the only battleground that people find themselves caught in. The post-traumatic experience is shared by people who have survived any number of cataclysmic life events, such as natural catastrophes, violent assault, torture, or life-threatening illnesses or accidents. These people have lived through events that are unthinkable, even unimaginable, to most other people. When a person’s lived history is so starkly different to their contemporaries, their role and identity in different domains of life is challenged, and with it their very sense of self. Like the hobbit, all of these people have travelled far from their comfortable burrows, and desperately need to return home.

The impact of traumatic change is profound, but it’s not always bad. Recently, a new perspective has emerged, one of post-traumatic growth. The emphasis here isn’t on mental illness, but rather the positive personal evolution that can occur as a result of seismic life events. Even in the face of extraordinary suffering, some individuals are able to integrate their experience in such a way that they come out the other side stronger, somehow transformed.

I’ve been reading about the role of narratives in helping people to re-establish a sense of identity after trauma. The simple act of telling our story to another human helps us to make sense of it in new ways. Neimeyer refers to this as “re-storying” – and it’s so powerful that it’s used as a therapeutic intervention for survivors of trauma to reflect on, disassemble and reassemble their unthinkable experiences into a meaningful narrative. This process results in insights, often unexpected, about themselves, without which they cannot rebuild their lives.

Put simply, stories heal.

My own sense is that The Hobbit’s universal appeal arises not only because of its psychological relevance to every wo/man, but also because it contains the lived energy of one man’s real journey through the fragmentation of war and illness, of his own homecoming, and his slow return to wholeness as he used his story-making to rearrange and reframe his experience into a new coherent whole.

And perhaps his most enduring discovery was that the courage, compassion, strength, spirit or fearlessness that the hero found in the dark tunnel in the mountains is needed more than ever back at home by the fire.

So, even though we can all connect with the excitement of Bilbo’s adventure, it is the very human adversity, pain and the overcoming of it that Tolkien has woven into this book that gives it its power and triumph. And it challenges each one of us, like Bilbo, to go ‘There and back again’ to find our strength, and most importantly, to bring it home and to live it every day.