The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien - by Henry Oliver

I recently finished reading The Hobbit to my children and I loved every minute of it. You might think Tolkien breaks many rules of writing. He says “suddenly” all the time. He uses “he” multiples times in a sentence, referring to two different people. He constantly breaks the fourth wall to say “of course such and such”. He repeats words, relatively close together. And so on. But Tolkien does all of this deliberately. Lots of the action is rather sudden. Sometimes it is confusing and he wants you to feel that. Often the repetitions are reinforcing a point. He breaks the fourth wall to create the sense that this legend is one small part of a longer, bigger history. In so much of what we might dismiss as Tolkien being period, or genre, we can find technique. Take his use of anachronism. Bilbo clearly has no place in the world of fairy-tale and legend, nor does tobacco, or many other aspects of Hobbit life. They are modern, small-town, almost suburban creatures, with very twentieth-centur

I recently finished reading The Hobbit to my children and I loved every minute of it. You might think Tolkien breaks many rules of writing. He says “suddenly” all the time. He uses “he” multiples times in a sentence, referring to two different people. He constantly breaks the fourth wall to say “of course such and such”. He repeats words, relatively close together. And so on. But Tolkien does all of this deliberately. Lots of the action is rather sudden. Sometimes it is confusing and he wants you to feel that. Often the repetitions are reinforcing a point. He breaks the fourth wall to create t