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.
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