In the midst of all the bad news swirling around us, it may provide some small comfort to commemorate in some way International Hobbit Day, which falls on this 22nd day of September, the traditional ‘birthdays’ of both Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, nephew and uncle respectively. The Hobbit itself – as a book – was published on September 21st, 1937, and the proximity to the fictional hobbit birthdays may have been accidental. Then again, as Tolkien’s works demonstrate, there are no accidents really in God’s providence. The trilogy of the Lord of the Rings begins with Bilbo’s eleventy-first birthday.
Th subtitle of the Hobbit was ‘There and Back Again’, which is a parable of life itself, and the exitus–reditus of the Christian tradition: We go out from God, and we must return to God, through the thorns and thistles, but also the meadows and mountains, of the pilgrimage of this life.
Take hope, dear reader. There is a Shire, in a heavenly sense, and we all meet merrily there one day, in God’s good time.
