The Hobbit Companion by David Day and illustrated by Lidia Postma
01/11/2002 . Source: Jane Palmer 

Pub: Chrysalis Books/Pavilion Books. 92 page small padded hardback. Price: £ 4.99 (UK). ISBN: 1-86205-518-1.

Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK.

The fact that this is a pocket edition of the larger format book published in 1997 immediately explains the minuscule size of the text. The presentation of the small volume with its padded cover is attractive and is pleasant to handle.

Unfortunately, even for those who don't need to reach for their spectacles, it has been at the sacrifice of readability. After being deafened by the soundtrack of the film, now have your optic nerves stunned by a companion book. So reaching for the highest magnification glasses I have, I endeavoured to read it.

Not being a Tolkien devotee I was, a little cynically, hoping that this tiny volume would be a send up. No such luck.

Buy this book for the illustrations if you find the words too difficult to see. Lidia Postma has quite uncannily captured the essence of an unlikely and totally mythic subject, especially when Hobbit faces appear from under tousled haystacks of hair in a panorama of crowded celebration.

Hobbits are not merely diminutive parodies of human beings in her paintings, they are believable entities with character and existence and without the laboured artwork that is all too often employed to depict the supernatural and mythic.

The 'Dwarves' are more problematic because their beards obscure most of them. Female 'Dwarves' do not figure at all. The only mention of them crops up in the name of Dis which means- guess what? - Sister. Notwithstanding, two of the most enchanting Hobbit images are of Melilot Brandybuck and Diamond of Long Cleeve, dropped in respectively before and after the main text.

David Day explains Tolkien's logic and the genealogy of his mythic characters along with intensive research of their linguistic origins. The ancestries of the three Hobbit subdivisions are dealt with in a suitably diminutive potted history peculiarly devoid of female intervention. It is rather odd how fully formed societies, even ones who live in holes, manage to spring into existence without the usual natural progenitors.

For a tunnelling society, Hobbits are strangely unaffected by subsidence, apart from one instance of a town hall collapsing, fortunately with no casualties apart from dented pride.

The author touches on the reason why so many are comfortable with the idea of these homely parodies of an English ideal. Unlike the Brownie who springs from primeval origins, the Hobbit has more in common with the paterfamilias, albeit benign, of Victorian and Edwardian England.

Perhaps my ambivalence about Hobbits stems from this representation. As an English (as far as I know anyway) woman and despite being hardly over five-foot, I find the analogy disquieting.

This may have been all right for a mind like Tolkien's, seldom coming down from his linguistic dreaming spires. Not the humdrum Celtic, Teutonic, Norse, Briton, Huguenot, Gaelic - and many from farther afield since then - descendants who constitute the genuine English persona.

If you are a Tolkien addict you probably have the larger format edition of this book anyway. If not and you have exceptionally good eyesight, it is attractive and informative for anyone who needs to know more about Hobbits after seeing the films and preferring not to read the books.

Jane Palmer