A Fascinating Blend: The Familiar and the Fantastic in The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Part 1

The Bilbo Baggins residence contains all the comforts of home and then some, but it is still a hole in the ground. The Beavers have a wonderfully cozy place to live, but it is precariously perched on a dam in the middle of a frozen river. Bilbo and the Dwarves enjoy a satisfying meal at Beorn's house, but the servers are dogs and ponies. Lucy Pevansie takes a delightful tea with Mr. Tumnus, but he is a faun who lives in a cave. In The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis present a fascinating blend of the familiar and the fantastic, and while their storytelling choices contrast on some points, their motives for such a synthesis converge as they encourage their readers to engage in a sense of wonder toward the world around them.

Throughout The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Tolkien and Lewis take up familiar, even comfortable, themes and give them fantastic variations. This paper will focus on two such themes: home and meals.

Home is a concept familiar to most readers, so familiar in fact that it might easily be taken for granted and ignored, but Tolkien and Lewis draw the theme of home into the foreground by mixing familiar elements with fantastic features. Bilbo's home, for instance, is remarkably comfortable with its fine set of “bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes..., kitchens, [and] dining-rooms” (1). These are the kinds of rooms one might find in any house although perhaps in greater numbers at the home of the “well-to-do” Bilbo (1).

The hobbit's sitting room, too, is quite pleasant, with its warm hearth and the ticking clock on the mantelpiece (12). A reader might feel as if she could easily snuggle up for the evening there with a good book and a cup of cocoa. Bilbo's residence, however, is not as normal as it might first appear. After all, it is essentially “a hole in the ground,” not an earthy, barren hole to be sure, but still a hole dug back into a hill (1). Its entrance is a round door with a knob in the very center, and visitors come in to a “tube shaped tunnel” lined with more round doors (1). Although this tunnel is anything but dark and dirty, especially since it is paneled, tiled, and carpeted, it is a tunnel nonetheless and therefore strange and perhaps a bit jarring to readers. Tolkien awakens a sense of the fantastic in his description of Bilbo's hobbit hole, even as he depicts all the comforts of home.

C.S. Lewis does something similar when he presents Mr. and Mrs. Beaver's house. The scene inside is one of snug domesticity. When Mr. Beaver and the Pevansie children walk in, Mrs. Beaver is hard at work at her sewing machine. She has also started cooking supper, and “the potatoes are boiling and the kettle's singing” on the wood stove (142-143). The girls hurry to set the covered table, and as they do, Lucy notices Mr. Beaver's neatly-stored tools and the onions and hams that hang tidily from the roof (143).

Not everything about the Beavers' home is entirely familiar to the children or the readers, however. Lucy observes, for example, that the Beavers sleep in built-in bunks rather than beds. The exterior of the house proves even more fantastic. Perched somewhat precariously in the middle of a dam, the “funny little house” looks like “an enormous beehive,” and smoke drifts up from “a hole in the roof” (142). Mr. Beaver and the children must walk along a slippery path on the top of the dam to get to the house, and the children quickly become rather nervous as they peer over the side of the dam to the frozen river far below. Indeed, neither the children nor the readers have ever encountered a house like this before, and even for all its warmth and pleasures, it is extraordinary and even a bit disconcerting.