ABSTRACT
A well-known book begins as follows:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.
(11) Why have these words proven so consistently pleasurable to so many that, even as a child, they’ll take the trip into that unknown hole? Well, first, almost every word makes immediate sense, creates easily imagined pictures and associations and thus a recognisable space. It also appeals to the senses: sight, touch, smell. The phrasing is nicely balanced, more or less rhythmical (‘In a hole/in the ground’); and the gently iterated negations (‘not’, ‘nor’, ‘nothing’) take each of our simple familiar mental pictures and feelings and deny their relevance, leaving a wonderful blank space to fill. Enlivening it all is the allure of strangeness contained in that one provocative word, used twice, that in contrast to all the rest will resist instant understanding: ‘hobbit’. It’s a bit like ‘rabbit’ and rabbits live in holes, but they live in the holes which are counted out by the storyteller – either wet and filled with the ends of worms or, more likely, dry and bare. A ‘hobbit-hole’ is clearly something different from 9just a ‘hole’. A hobbit, then, is something new to our reading experience, and we want to go down into its hole to find out just what ‘it’ is. One further detail in the passage is crucial: when we get there we are told we’ll be somewhere comfortable. This brief journey of two sentences takes us away from our own space and delivers us to a safe place – a place of ‘comfort’ with seats and food. So, by the time we’ve got to the end of the second sentence, we’ve forgotten we are reading a book. Instead we are travelling into an environment that is new and yet, along with its strangeness, beguilingly promises safety.