Like Star Wars, The Divine Comedy, and Moby Dick, J.R.R.Tolkien's The Hobbit is the story of a hero's journey. This helps to explain, of course, why, like those other narratives, it has proved so perennially compelling.

     The hero's tale follows a classical, almost stereotyped, pattern: a person is wrenched out of complacency and self-absorption and called to a great adventure, during which he (or she), through struggle, comes to maturity and vision. In Moby Dick, the young Ishmael quits the narrow space of his depressed mind ("whenever it is a damp drizzly November in my soul") and goes on a long and dangerous voyage of discovery; in The Divine Comedy, the middle-aged Dante leaves the dark wood where he had become lost and goes on a pilgrimage through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, until he comes at last to salvation; and in Star Wars, the teen-aged Luke Skywalker (who is modeled in many ways after Dante) is wrenched out of the quietude of his aunt and uncle's home and summoned to an inter-galactic struggle against dark powers, which results in his coming of age.

     The Hobbit begins, humbly enough, with this line: "in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." Tolkien is quick to clarify that this is not a nasty or unkempt hole, like the lair of a mouse, but rather a cozy place, filled with fine furniture, doilies, and a well-stocked kitchen. This is the homey, all-too-comfortable space from which Bilbo Baggins (the hobbit in question) will be summoned to adventure.

     To the door of Bilbo's residence comes Gandalf the wizard, a figure evocative of the in-breaking of grace. This association between the wizard and supernatural grace is not an arbitrary one, for Tolkien was a devout Catholic, and Christian themes abound in this particular hero's story. Though he ardently resists it at first,  Bilbo eventually accepts Gandalf's invitation to join a cadre of dwarves on their mission to recover a horde of treasure that had been absconded by a dragon named Smaug. He will come to maturity precisely in the measure that he leaves his "comfort-zone" and finds the path of self-sacrificing love.