A Fascinating Blend: The Familiar and the Fantastic in The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Part 2

For Tolkien and Lewis, and for many of their characters, home is closely associated with food. Meals in The Hobbit and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are often moments of celebration, community, repose, and refreshment just as they are in the primary world. When Lucy Pevansie takes tea with Tumnus, all her favorite foods are on the menu: boiled eggs, sardines on toast, and sugared cake (116). Lucy feels happy and satisfied with the meal as she relaxes in Tumnus' cozy cave with its pictures and books and its glowing hearth.

Not all things, however, are as familiar as they seem. The post-tea conversation, for instance, takes a fantastic turn as Tumnus launches into a description of Narnia's residents and their activities: the Dryads and Nymphs who dance at midnight; the Red Dwarfs who seeks their treasures; Silenus and Bacchus who visit occasionally; and the white stag who grants wishes when he is caught (117). All of these tales are commonplace to Tumnus but quite unusual, even bizarre, to Lucy, who must also adjust to the unsettling fact that her teatime host is an umbrella-carrying faun.

Bilbo may have felt a similar unsettling sensation during his first meal at Beorn's house. The supper itself is nourishing and refreshing to Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Dwarves, all of whom are exceptionally hungry after their many adventures. The food Beorn offers, however, might seem a bit odd. Beorn, who does not eat meat, likely serves them his usual fare of cream, honey, nuts, dried fruit, cakes, and mead (115, 131). Although none of these foods is particularly peculiar, Bilbo would be accustomed to something a bit more “substantial,” at least in his mind, bacon and eggs, perhaps, or a nice ham.

Even stranger than the food, though, is the way in which the meal is presented. Beorn's servants are efficient in setting the tables and providing every comfort to the tired guests, but those servants are none other than four white ponies and several gray dogs who are quite adept at walking on their hind legs (124). Bilbo's host, too, is unlike anyone he has ever met before. Gandalf has already explained that Beorn is a skin-changer who transforms into a great black bear, and Bilbo, while fascinated by Beorn's supper table tales, cannot help but be a little nervous in the presence of the extraordinary man at the head of the table.

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.

“Ozymandias”: A Poem in Motion – Part 2

As the poem moves in voice, it also moves through time. It opens in the narrator's present but quickly moves back into an undefined past as the narrator describes how he “met” the traveller who “said,” two past tense verbs (lines 1-2). We are now in the traveller's present as he speaks of the “[t]wo vast and trunkless legs of stone” that still “[s]tand in the desert” beside the place where “a shattered visage lies” with its “frown” and “wrinkled lip” and “sneer of cold command” (lines 2-5; note the present tense). These still survive, at least in the traveller's time.

We are then invited to travel further back through the ages as the traveller speculates on the sculptor who “those passions read” on Ozymandias' living face (line 6). We can picture the king posing, curving his lip into an expression of disdain as the sculptor etches his emotion into stone. Then we move forward once again, to the traveller's present as he reflects on the irony that such passions are now only “stamped on these lifeless things” (line 7). As the traveller shifts his attention to the words on the pedestal, we are once again transported back into the past to hear the voice of the king, who speaks his haughty words so the sculptor may capture them in stone for all time (lines 10-11). As the last word rings out – “...despair!” – we find ourselves once again in the traveller's present, and we stay there. “Nothing beside remains,” the traveller tells us, only a “colossal Wreck” and “lone and levels sands” (lines 12-14). Time has conquered Ozymandias, but in a way, we are also caught by it, for the poem does not return us to the present. We remain in that desert of the past, staring at the broken statue and wondering perhaps if time has conquered us as well.

The poem is almost cinematic in the way it moves through time, but it even more so in the way it moves through space. Again, the poem commences in the space of the narrator, about which we know nothing at all. We might imagine the place where he met the traveller, on board a ship, perhaps, in a busy railroad station, at a museum, but he does not tell us. The space is left blank. The traveller's immediate space is also empty, for the moment he begins to speak the “camera” shifts to a desert scene. It is a medium shot of the “[t]wo vast and trunkless legs of stone” with the arid wasteland forming a background (line 2). Then the focus moves downward to the “shattered visage” on the ground, “[h]alf sunk” in the sand (line 4).

The camera then zooms in on the expression and remains there as the traveller muses on the passions of a king and the sculptor who captured them; this is a close-up shot that mirrors the sculptor's own work of preserving a personality. Our attention then travels upward from the face to the pedestal and focuses in on its words. We can imagine a camera passing slowly over each word that we might ponder each letter, each chisel mark, so carefully inscribed in the stone. Then, suddenly, as we pass the exclamation point, the camera zooms back out to a wide shot. We see the entire “Wreck,” and “[n]othing beside remains...” only the “boundless and bare” desert, the “lone and level sands” that “stretch far away” (lines 12-14). We are left gazing across a vast space, all sand but for a pile of crumbled stone that was once a marvelous statue of a great king.

In the end, each of the three motions of “Ozymandias” fails to make a full circle. We never return to the voice of the narrator; he remains silent. We stay in the past, never coming back to the narrator's present or our own present. We continue to stare at the expanse of desert, never again thinking of the blank space in which the poem begins. The poem has drawn us out of ourselves, away from any familiar voice, away from our own time, away from any well-known space, yet in this quiet past, this vast waste, we are no longer focused on Ozymandias either. He is no longer the center of our attention. Like the traveller, we have journeyed far in this poem, moving through voice, time, and space, and we are left to reflect on voices that have faded yet still echo in our minds, on a past that is gone yet still remains within us, and on a space that points us into a distance where our imaginations can fly free.