Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Next up is another British classic and now a multimillion-dollar Hollywood movie, The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien. This book presumably was the start of you getting into fantasy.
Yes, I have always thought that The Hobbit was a better book than Lord of the Rings. It was tighter and better. I remember discovering it and it launched me off on a big fantasy thing. When I was a kid there weren’t very many Dungeons and Dragons books. But there were all sorts of other things. There was another book called The Little Grey Men, which was about three gnomes, and I really enjoyed that one. I think at that point I was enjoying fiction because it was escapist.
But there is still a cosy feel to The Hobbit. After all, it is rooted in England’s Home Counties around Oxford.
Yes, it is all very cosy and homely. Bilbo Baggins is the cosiest hero you could possibly imagine.
What are your favourite parts of the book?
The bit I remember particularly is the dragon, Smaug. I love myths – I could have put any number of them in my list of books. When I was a kid my dad worked for Oxford University Press and they published a whole series of myths and legends including Tales of the Norse Gods and Heroes by Barbara Leonie Picard. I read this book over and over again. Tolkien was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford and he had readings of the Icelandic sagas while he was there, so The Hobbit is full of that kind of imagery.
Many years after reading those myths I wrote a pair of books, Bloodtide and also Blood Song, which were modernised versions of the Icelandic Volsunga saga. In Barbara’s original book that saga was in there.
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Melvin Burgess is a British author of children’s fiction. His first book, The Cry of the Wolf, was published in 1990. He gained a certain amount of notoriety in 1996 with the publication of Junk, about heroin-addicted teenagers. Burgess again caused controversy in 2003, with the publication of Doing It, which dealt with adolescent sex. America created a TV show based on the book, Life as We Know It. In his other books, such as Bloodtide and The Ghost Behind the Wall, he has dealt with less realist and sometimes fantastic themes. Burgess was a speaker at the Battle of Ideas in London, organised by the Institute of Ideas
OK, let’s get your recommendations. You know the drill – top five.
First up, The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, by JRR Tolkien. But you knew I was going to say that. This one book, which was published in 1937, defined so many variables for the fantasy tradition that are still in place today. Tolkien’s extraordinary achievement was to recover the epic landscapes of Anglo-Saxon myth, bring them back to life, and then to take us through them on foot, so we could see the details up close, at human scale. The Hobbit is both mythic and relatable at the same time – The New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik recently called it “an arranged marriage between the Elder Edda and The Wind in the Willows”, and I think that’s entirely fair. Though I would give more credit to the bass register of Tolkien’s imagination, its abyssal depths. Mole never delved as deep as the Mines of Moria.
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Lev Grossman is an American writer of fantasy fiction and thrillers. He is the author of two New York Times bestselling fantasy novels, The Magicians and The Magician King, and is a senior writer and book critic at Time magazine
