I didn’t really care for this book. Dwarfs and Gandalf come to Bilbos house. They bring him on an adventure. They go through some orc mines or something. Bilbo encounters Gollum which is quite spooky. They go to a house of human/bear shapeshifter. They travel through a dark forest for a very long time. At some point they escape from somewhere by getting into some barrels. Maybe it was the elves in the dark forest. I can’t remember. They go to the town close this mountain with a dragon. They find the dragon’s lair. A battle ensues. And they win.

I have great respect for Tolkien. I appreciate him as a scholar and a writer. I took a grad level course covering some of Tolkien’s lesser known works like Leaf by Niggle, Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, On Fairy Stories, selections from The Silmarillion, and his poem Mythopeia. I’m not unfamiliar with his project, and I admire it. But, even so, I still didn’t care much for this book.

I think I would have liked it if I had read it as a child or a teenager. I had read the Fellowship of the Ring and some of The Two Towers when I was in high school and I enjoyed it. And I loved the movies, too, when I was a teen.

I appreciate fantasy for what it is and what it can do, especially for children. But our culture’s present obsession with fantasy is somewhat obnoxious to me. The Marvel movies are some of the worse films I’ve ever seen and they won’t stop making them. They won’t stop making garbage Star Wars films. Stranger Things, with the exception of the first season, is not a terrible show. All of it seems adolescent to me. The product of an infantilize generation. And so it made The Hobbit difficult for me to enjoy.

I’m sure The Hobbit is probably a great book, and I just don’t get it, but my present context has soured me on the fantasy genre.

I believe in the power of the Kingdom of God to transform every area of life, and this includes fantasy. I think Tolkien and Lewis fantasy works are great works of art that I would like to see more of as a replacement to things like modern Disney. Christians ought to be making the best stories for children, and I think Lewis and Tolkien did a good job of this. But I think our present nerd culture is infantilizing and disordered. Eventually you have to grow up, leave Narnia, and deal with the real world.