and what you may ask is a hobbit?
Apr. 25th, 2009 01:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseAlso, hobbits! Oh hobbits. I have read so much hobbitfic over the last few weeks, you have no idea. Too much to do individual recs for, but they're all stacked up in my delicious, over yonder.
I've been trying to puzzle out just why on earth I lurve them with such passing fervor, and I think last night I finally hit on it - they're Victorians who get to go on Quests. Seems obvious, but when I unpack it, I think there's a lot there for me.
The thing that I love about Victorian (and Regency, and Edwardian) novels, is their intense pragmatism, both of character and of structure. To take the last first, they have this endlessly charming habit of just sort of wandering around picking up little bits of narratives and then putting them down again. It's an almost artless way of writing, more artisanal. Craftlike. Akin to ballads and work songs and lullabies that go on for as long as they're needed.
And the characters, at least my pet ones, tend to deal with great troubles without too much fussing. Jane Eyre, Tess Durbeyfield, Jo March, Elnora Comstock, Maggie Tulliver, Mary Lennox. Even Anne Shirley, when she actually has to, can get things done pretty plainly. Terrible things happen to them, but they deal with it.
(Just realized that list is only the girls. I'm working on that - realizing that some of my guys hail from the same time and place. For some reason I gender-segregate oldfashioned novels in my head. So, also: Jack Aubrey (bless!), Dickon Sowerby, Curdie, Will Ladislaw, Gilbert Blythe, and Colonel Brandon.)
Except that in most cases, they're confined to realist novels. So people die, you're too poor, you get raped, you can't go to college, but you're not likely to end up imprisoned by wood elves or facing down a dragon or pursuing a supernatural quest object. Or saving the world.
I think that I love my hobbits because they're as close as I can get to Tess Durbeyfield being a vampire slayer. Cause you know she'd rock that ish.
Frodo - and more especially Samwise - both have that exact same quality of solid, dogged, capability, without foofery or unnecessary dramatics that I love so much in my Victorian girls and boys. And they get to have ridiculously high adventures, slipping around narrative corners into the heraldic, the romantic, the mythic. All the shiny of a quest-plot combined with the sturdy attractions of good plain hobbitsense. It just really, really works for me.
They don't hesitate, and they don't dramatize. "I will take the ring to Mordor," says Frodo, just like that, "though I do not know the way." And, "Then holding the star aloft and the bright sword advanced, Frodo, hobbit of the Shire, walked steadily down to meet the eyes." I love the way Tolkien practical-izies the Quest, thinking about distance and footsteps, food and water, walking songs and weather. I love the way that Frodo can be a hero of song and story, and still be as free from, oh, ego perhaps, as he is. No ofermod for this one.
Oh, hobbits!
I've been trying to puzzle out just why on earth I lurve them with such passing fervor, and I think last night I finally hit on it - they're Victorians who get to go on Quests. Seems obvious, but when I unpack it, I think there's a lot there for me.
The thing that I love about Victorian (and Regency, and Edwardian) novels, is their intense pragmatism, both of character and of structure. To take the last first, they have this endlessly charming habit of just sort of wandering around picking up little bits of narratives and then putting them down again. It's an almost artless way of writing, more artisanal. Craftlike. Akin to ballads and work songs and lullabies that go on for as long as they're needed.
And the characters, at least my pet ones, tend to deal with great troubles without too much fussing. Jane Eyre, Tess Durbeyfield, Jo March, Elnora Comstock, Maggie Tulliver, Mary Lennox. Even Anne Shirley, when she actually has to, can get things done pretty plainly. Terrible things happen to them, but they deal with it.
(Just realized that list is only the girls. I'm working on that - realizing that some of my guys hail from the same time and place. For some reason I gender-segregate oldfashioned novels in my head. So, also: Jack Aubrey (bless!), Dickon Sowerby, Curdie, Will Ladislaw, Gilbert Blythe, and Colonel Brandon.)
Except that in most cases, they're confined to realist novels. So people die, you're too poor, you get raped, you can't go to college, but you're not likely to end up imprisoned by wood elves or facing down a dragon or pursuing a supernatural quest object. Or saving the world.
I think that I love my hobbits because they're as close as I can get to Tess Durbeyfield being a vampire slayer. Cause you know she'd rock that ish.
Frodo - and more especially Samwise - both have that exact same quality of solid, dogged, capability, without foofery or unnecessary dramatics that I love so much in my Victorian girls and boys. And they get to have ridiculously high adventures, slipping around narrative corners into the heraldic, the romantic, the mythic. All the shiny of a quest-plot combined with the sturdy attractions of good plain hobbitsense. It just really, really works for me.
They don't hesitate, and they don't dramatize. "I will take the ring to Mordor," says Frodo, just like that, "though I do not know the way." And, "Then holding the star aloft and the bright sword advanced, Frodo, hobbit of the Shire, walked steadily down to meet the eyes." I love the way Tolkien practical-izies the Quest, thinking about distance and footsteps, food and water, walking songs and weather. I love the way that Frodo can be a hero of song and story, and still be as free from, oh, ego perhaps, as he is. No ofermod for this one.
Oh, hobbits!
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Date: 2009-04-26 12:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-26 03:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-26 03:41 am (UTC)... damn, my clothes are getting RAINED ON.
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Date: 2009-04-26 03:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-04-26 03:58 am (UTC)