... in the ground, there lived a Hobbit".
This sentence is known to millions of people, all those who once opened a book to enter Tolkien's world. I will take today's post to tell you a bit of my own story with Hobbits, and you'll have some nice cool bonuses at the end.
As fate would have it, I picked up The Hobbit from the shelves of the child section of the local library when I was 8 or 10, the age at which it was aimed. Strangely enough, I still remember it as if it were yesterday, the exact place where it was, the picture on the cover, everything. Yet at that time I didn't know that this book would literally change my entire life. Some years later, I discovered The Lord of the Rings and fell in love again. And when I entered university for a degree in English Studies, my brother offered me the book in English: the one-volume edition with the picture of Gandalf by John Howe on the cover. It was on reading this that I decided to become a translator, because I realised the immense gap that existed between the book I had read and loved in French, and the treasure I was discovering page after page in English, and I felt sorry for all those who couldn't experience the same thing.
Around that same time, I started to wonder about the author, the man with so many initials whose life and looks didn't quite fit with Elves and Hobbits: why were his books so different? Was it true that he had wanted to write "a mythology for England" and if yes, how could anyone get into their heads to do on their own the work of entire civilisations over centuries? My doom was sealed and from that day on, I started to voraciously eat any book about Tolkien and his works, to look for answers and discover why they had touched me so deeply. It would take many years, strength of mind, some of my Viking stubborness and a pinch of providence but in September '00, I stood for the first time of my life in front of a University jury to present a 100-page long Master thesis on "Hobbits, How and Why did Tolkien Create Them?" and heard that my research work had been huge, my critical insight impressive and the final result worthy of all praise. Once again, little did I know that this was just another milestone in my journey...
In that jury sat a man whose wisdom, gentility, kindness and eye for talent equal those of Gandalf himself, and as chance would have it, one year later, ten years ago more or less to the day, I was with this man in Paris, watching The Fellowship of the Ring on the day of its release, after having learned that he accepted me as a PhD student in La Sorbonne to work on "Celts in Middle-earth: Celtic mythological, medieval, linguistic and literary heritage in Tolkien's works". And this morning, I remembered all this as I saw on my Facebook wall the two links I'm sharing with you now:
And yes, I was crying at the end of the documentary because it reminded me how that single sentence was the start of an unexpected journey for me, some 25 years ago...
