Shippey talked a lot in the first chapter about The Hobbit, which I have not read. This caused me to be a little confused with what was being discussed. I was lost when Shippey was talking about dragons and Bilbo other such things.
I was interested in the part of the chapter where Shippey talked about the time in history in which Bilbo is placed. Shippey pointed out that Bilbo smoked a pipe, had mail delievered daily by the postal service, and the fact that there were railways when Bilbo was supposed to have lived “long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green.”
The comparison of Hobbits to rabbits, and animals, never crossed my mind. Animals live in holes, not people but the holes that Hobbits live in are more extravagent, Victorian and of course comfortable. This brings me to another part of the chapter that interested me: The part where Shippey talked about the devices that Tolkien used in his writings. How he wrote things in way in which there seemes to be a story within a story that the reader already “knows” is something I wouldn’t have noticed.
