In *Roverandom, first told in 1925 to his sons John and *Michael, Tolkien established the situation quickly, but with a narrator’s judgement: ‘Once upon a time there was a little dog, and his name was Rover. He was very small and very young or he would have known better; and he was very happy playing in the garden in the sunshine with a yellow ball, or he would never have done what he did’ (p. 1). As the story proceeds, however, the narrator keeps a low profile while Rover receives information and guidance from a series of characters such as Psamathos the sand-sorcerer, Mew the seagull, and the Man-in-the-Moon. Towards the end of the book, as Rover makes his way home, Tolkien endows him with the writer’s own thoughts about pollution (see *Environment): ‘Motor after motor racketed by … all making speed (and all dust and all smell) to somewhere. “I don’t believe half of them know where they are going to, or why they are going there, or would know it if they got there,” grumbled Rover as he coughed and choked …’ (p. 87). Then, as the narrator ties up loose ends, another personal note enters: ‘Roverandom grew up to be very wise, and had an immense local reputation, and had all sorts of other adventures. … But the ones I have told you about were probably the most unusual and the most exciting. Only Tinker says she does not believe a word of them. Jealous cat!’ (p. 89).
*Farmer Giles of Ham, first told probably in the late 1920s, also seems to have begun as an impromptu tale, and as first written down the story was specifically for the author’s children: ‘Then Daddy began a story, and this is what he said: Once there was a giant, a fairly big giant: his walking-stick was like a tree, and his feet were very very large. If he walked down this road he would have left holes in it; if he had trodden on our garden he would have squashed it altogether; if he had bumped into our house there would have been no house left …’ (1999 edn., p. 81). The language and the humour are kept simple. Later, when it is mentioned that Giles took down a blunderbuss, the narrator is interrupted by a child listener:
‘What is a blunderbuss, Daddy?’
‘A blunderbuss is a kind of big fat gun, with a mouth that opens wide like the end of a horn, and it goes off with a terrific bang, and sometimes it hits what you are aiming at.’ [1999 edn., p. 82]
In the second version of the text ‘Daddy’ was replaced by the ‘family jester’.
A similar authorial voice may be heard in *The Hobbit. This story too, begun c. 1930, was first told orally; it grew in stages, with its audience – Tolkien’s sons John, Michael, and *Christopher – happy to hear the earlier parts again as later ones were devised, though perhaps still told extempore rather than from a written text. Christopher Tolkien is said to have complained that his father changed details of the story between hearings. Even the written text preserves the sense of an oral tale when its narrator stops to explain something obscure (‘The mother of our particular hobbit – what is a hobbit? I suppose hobbits need some description nowadays, since they have become rare …’, ch. 1) or to give his audience the satisfaction of being aware of some piece of information (‘for trolls, as you probably know, must be underground before dawn, or they go back to the stuff of the mountains they are made of and never move again’, ch. 2 – the Tolkien children had heard of trolls from the family’s Icelandic au pairs).
Paul Edmund Thomas, in ‘Some of Tolkien’s Narrators’, Tolkien’s Legendarium: Essays on The History of Middle-earth, ed. Verlyn Flieger and Carl F. Hostetter (2000), finds that the narrator’s voice in The Hobbit
is not and cannot be precisely equivalent to Tolkien’s voice, because Tolkien stands both inside and outside the novel. Tolkien permeates the whole of the words of the text, so every voice within it is his, and yet Tolkien also looked upon his text objectively. Thus the narrator is, from one perspective, just as much a character as Bard, Balin, and Bilbo. And yet the narrator is a special character: as a third-person narrator, he is merely a voice, and he is in the story but not in the plot, and of course his voice has a much closer relationship to Tolkien’s voice than that of any other character. [pp. 162–3]
The narrator makes ‘interpretive comments … that give emphasis to points in the story’. When Bilbo finds the Ring, ‘It was a turning point in his career, but he did not know it’ (ch. 5). As the company enter Mirkwood, ‘Now began the most dangerous part of all the journey’ (ch. 7). The narrator also makes judgemental comments, such as that the trolls’ language ‘was not drawing-room fashion’ (ch. 2) before they had spoken a word. And he hints at the extent of his knowledge: ‘If you had heard only a quarter of what I have heard about [Gandalf], and I have only heard very little of all there is to hear, you would be prepared for any sort of remarkable tale’ (ch. 1). This is also one of the many examples of Tolkien speaking directly to the reader, often giving advice: ‘You ought not to be rude to an eagle, when you are only the size of a hobbit, and are up in his eyrie at night!’ (ch. 7) and ‘It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him’ (ch. 12).
Some readers find a certain charm and humour in the narrator, while others find him patronizing. It should be noted that in children’s stories of the time, assertive narrators were not uncommon. Tolkien in later years also regretted some of his comments as narrator, especially when, with the writing of *The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit became an integral part of his larger mythology (*‘The Silmarillion’) instead of only an independent story for young readers or listeners.
But as Thomas notes, in numerous passages in The Hobbit ‘the narrator does nothing but reveal descriptive information about the characters and the scenes and thus does nothing to call attention to himself. He makes no interpretations, no pointed opinions, and no direct addresses to the reader. Instead he puts himself in the background and appears as a self-effacing reporter of facts: the description, not the describer, receives the emphasis’ (p. 168).
Although precise dating of the writing of The Hobbit is open to debate, there is evidence both within and outside the manuscripts that there was a gap in its writing after the death of Smaug (in the middle Chapter 14), and that some time passed before Tolkien wrote ‘Not at Home’ and the rest of the story. Apparently influenced by his work on ‘The Silmarillion’ in the interim, the latter part of The Hobbit became ‘larger and more heroic’ (Letters, p. 346). Thomas comments that, with the author thus affected, the narrator of The Hobbit ‘had to follow suit by becoming more serious and by making utterances more appropriate to a heroic tale than to a children’s story … no obvious addresses to the reader occur in the last six chapters’, and in the completion of Chapter 14
the narrator presents the action from more points of view than in any other chapter. … These constitute major changes in the narrative voice. It is no coincidence that these changes occur as the language of the dialogue becomes more elevated and focused on subjects like the debate over the property claims to Smaug’s treasure and the debate over political rights in Esgaroth. It is no coincidence that these changes occur as the plot turns to violent action and swells from the onslaught of Smaug towards the Battle of Five Armies. And it is no coincidence that these changes occur as the scope of the narrator’s view abandons the domestic and provincial perspective of Bilbo and begins to sweep over great distances. [p. 179]
On the title-page of The Hobbit as published in September 1937 Tolkien is credited as the author, yet according to the blurb he wrote for publicity in December 1936 (also used on the dust-jacket) the story ‘is based on [Bilbo’s] personal memoirs, of the one exciting year in the otherwise quiet life of Mr Baggins’, and the runes on the dust-jacket Tolkien himself designed read: ‘The Hobbit or There and Back Again, being the record of