Bilbo: en hobbits äventyr by J.R.R. Tolkien

January 14th, 2008

Bilbo: en hobbits äventyr
(The Hobbit or There And Back Again)
J.R.R. Tolkien
Translated by Britt G. Hallqvist
Illustrations by Tove Jansson
308 p.

Rabén & Sjögren, 1962
(first published 1937 by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.)

For Decades ‘08 and Here Be Dragons.

Back cover blurb:

none

I read this book a year or so before the first Lord of the Rings film was released, and it took longer time still before I actually realised that the upcoming film and the book I had read some time before were even connected. (what can I say? I wasn’t a particularly bright kid, and I’m still daft.) I read it in the same version as I did now, an older translation and beautiful pictures by Tove Jansson (who, if you don’t recognise the name or the style, also wrote and drew the Moomin-stories, as well as illustrated several other childrens’ novels). It is a lovely translation, and it isn’t often I can say that. Admittedly, I sometimes started wondering if the text was only translated, or if it had been altered in any way. As I have never read The Hobbit in English, I can’t tell. The style of writing is vastly different from the one he came to use when writing Lord of the Rings, which I haven’t read in English either. I am a little ashamed, yes.

Now, when I was tiny, I loved this book. When I later read Lord of the Rings, I loved that even more. I was completely enraptured by these hobbits and dwarves and men who were so amazing and different from any other thing I’d read. I never particularly liked the elves, I thought them self-important and more than a little egotistical. The humans were the ones for me. Still, I thought them the best books ever published. I never re-read The Hobbit, which is a little peculiar, but the trilogy I read three or four times. Completely brilliant. Now, when I read it again, I started to feel a little nervous. After fifty pages I didn’t enjoy it at all as much as I ought to. I ought to swoon and go “Oh Tolkien!” in wonder, but these swoons were illuminating in their absence. It was very alarming. And quite upsetting. I really wanted to love this book as much as I did when I was ten.

In the end I didn’t. I liked it more than I did when I started, but it never filled me with that alarming sense of joy that was present the first time. I liked the middle a lot. The middle made me happy. The end confused me a bit, because I had got a strong idea of what was going to happen: the dwarves were going to hunt down the dragon and everything was going to be hunky-dory. Of course, this didn’t happen. I remembered vaguely what was going to happen - who was going to do the dragon in and a few of who were dying. That didn’t match with my view of what should happen. When the great battle started I found myself disappointed again, because in my mind, a great big battle wasn’t really justified for this. The orcs hadn’t been that important before and the dragon was the fiend! Battles where hundreds of people die are not necessary! I guess reading a few Tolkien-ripoffs has taken its toll already. That it ricochetted on Tolkien himself was a bit of misery, though.

I don’t mean that I didn’t enjoy it. I did enjoy it, but with the expectation so high, I loved it less than I wanted to. When I reread it, in several years, I will probably read it in English. This translation is beautiful, the poems and songs are fantastic, but reading the original is always nice. If we had owned it in English (which we don’t. We have a copy of the first edition of Silmarillion, a book it is highly unlikely I’ll read again, but not The Hobbit in English. Two in Swedish, though.), I would have read it in that language. This one copy I read is so worn and loved that the back has fallen off and the spine is leaving. The edges are banged and frayed. Still, it is a lovely edition of a more than decent book.

Entry Filed under: Challenges, Children, Decades '08, Fantasy, Fiction, Here Be Dragons, Swedish