A growing hobbit with the student populace

ON July 19 Professor Ronald Reuel Tolkien, for a generation one of England's best-known Catholic dons, will receive the Royal Society of Literature award for services to literature. He's written some pretty tough stuff on philology and the like during his 75 years, but it's not those books that have made him famous, of course.
His claim to pre-eminence is based on the strange race of creatures called Hobbits. They are little people about half our height. inclined to be fat in the stomach: they dress in bright colours (chiefly yellow and green): wear no shoes because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly): have long, clever brown fingers, goodnatured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner which they have twice a day when they can get it). So goes Professor Tolkien's own description.
He wrote his first Hobbit book—"The Hobbit"—in the 1930s. For years it sold quite nicely to quite nice middle class kids.
In the early 50s he produced "Lord of the Rings" still using Hobbit characters, but now a fairy story for adults blown up to epic proportions.
A couple of years back this trilogy was published in paperback in America and suddenly a whole new cult sprung up.
"Lord of the Rings" tells how Frodo becomes heir to a magic ring that, in the hands of Sauron the Dark Lord, would give him domination over Middle Earth, the place where Hobbits live.
A clever old wizard called Gandalf persuades Frodo to destroy the ring by carrying it to Sauron's domain of Mordor and then dropping it into the inpenetrable .Cracks of Doom. On his journey Frodo is helped along by a variety of elves and dwarfs, set upon by nasty yellow-toothed Ores, a giant spider and other henchmen of Sauron. His quest ends when the Dark Lord is destroyed during the bloody War of the Ring.
This story fired the imagination of countless students on university campuses up and down America. A Tolkien Society of America was founded with its own Tolkien Journal and all the mumbo jumbo that goes with mass adulation began to appear:
Hobbit buttons — examples: Frodo Lives, Come to Middle Earth, Gandalf for President— Hobbit boots and soaps.
At meetings of the Tolkien Society it is usual to lie around eating fresh mushrooms, a favourite Hobbit food, drinking cider and talking about family trees which no Hobbit can resist.
A true Hobbit enthusiast must remember to call wolves Margs, goblins Ores, treelike people Ems and the sun She. A popular greeting—one used by the Hobbits --is "May the hair on your toes never grow less" and walls around the campus are covered in Hobbit slogans.
Tolkien books have been translated into nine languages including Japanese and Hebrew. They form part of the degree course at Liege University and their world sales now approach 31 million copies.
The author—"Hobbits have what you might call universal morals. I would say they are examples of natural philosophy and natural religion"—says he wrote the Hobbit books because he was bored and is quite unmoved by his new-found fame. In fact he gives the impression that he finds it rather a nuisance. But friends think that secretly he is really rather pleased about it.
The American students produce all sorts of allegories: the Dark Lord represents the Bomb, the goblins the Russians and so on, Tolkien says it's all rot. "It is not about anything but itself. Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general. particular or topical, moral, religious or political."
His publishers in England. Allen and Unwin, receive a vast amount of fan mail. "Some of it," says the girl who answers the letters, "is written in Elvish, the script the Hobbits use. That sends, me crackers." Admirers also send Tolkien mushrooms, candles and sealing wax, all things dear to the hearts of Hobbits.
This fantasy world is all a far cry from Professor Tolkien's own academic surroundings. In the 1920s he was Reader in English Language at Leeds University and then Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford until 1945. After that he did various lecturing jobs at St. Andrews, Glasgow and Oxford.
Now he lives in retirement, devoting his time to writing, in particular to "The Silmarillion" which deals with the age prior to "The Lord of the Rings."
Rumour has it that he was recently invited to lecture to the students at a well-known English seminary, He accepted but instead of the serious talk they expected the students were treated to a Hobbit story.
So far Hobbitomania has not taken on in England in the same way as America, but it may not be too long before it does. Allen and Unwin have plans for a British Tolkien Society and already the buttons and maps of Middle Earth are beginning to fill up their Bloomsbury showrooms.
As The Times has noted, we may soon be saying "Professor Tolkien has become a Hobbit with me."