Once, I met Priscilla Tolkien, the daughter of J.R.R. Tolkien. It was at the Oxford Catholic chaplaincy, and she was giving a talk about her father. She was charming, something of a hobbit herself with her neat figure, and an engaging talker. But she seemed taken aback by some of her audience. It was divided into two distinct parts. Some were the ordinary Tolkien admirers, the normal, slightly shabby young people you get at chaplaincy talks, and the others were, well, a bit scary. They almost all had black T-shirts, pale faces and intense expressions, and there was a weird sort of obsessiveness about their questions. They read all sorts of things into the books, symbolic meanings that had never occurred to the rest of us. At one point, I remember Miss Tolkien saying, with great emphasis, about The Hobbit: ‘It’s a story.’
In a funny way, the audience at that talk reflected the fate of J.R.R. Tolkien’s best-known works, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. There are those of us who love The Hobbit as a story. And then there are the members of the extraordinary world of fantasy it generated, with plastic orcs, computer games pitting men in cloaks against warty things with clubs, an entire world of good vs evil as imagined by awkward adolescent males. And now, in the culmination of all that, there’s the film — the premiere is next Wednesday. That’s when the cult of The Hobbit finally parts company with the book.
I shall, myself, be passing on the film, 3-D natch, with the greatest gathering of British celebs since Harry Potter — hello Ian McKellan, Billy Connolly and, oh God, Stephen Fry — in favour of reading the book in the bath.
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