Going Out Your Door

Frodo says it, quoting Bilbo, on the road to Crickhollow, right at the start of everything: “It’s a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.” Tolkien lets the line slip out almost in passing, unstressed, in the middle of some hobbit chatter on a walk through the Shire, and yet the whole thesis of his work is sitting in it. Leaving home is dangerous; staying put is worse.

Hobbits are the most domestic creatures in Middle-earth. They eat six meals a day and smoke their pipes in the garden. Adventures hold no appeal for them, being a nuisance and an inconvenience, the sort of thing that makes you late for dinner. What they want from life is a comfortable house, a well-stocked pantry and no surprises. Tolkien writes about them with obvious affection, and no wonder, since in many ways he was a hobbit himself, a man of fixed habits who loved his garden, his pipe, his beer and his academic routine at Oxford, and who looked at the modern world with a mixture of distrust and sadness.

Yet this hobbit wrote books about hobbits who leave home, and that is where the tension lies. He could have written about elves going off in search of adventure, which would have been easy, since elves are immortal and curious and have nothing to lose. He chose hobbits instead, creatures for whom adventure is the least natural thing in the world and the most costly, the thing most at odds with everything they are, which is why they need it most.

Bilbo has no wish to go with the dwarves. The first chapter of The Hobbit is about a man straining every nerve not to be dragged into an adventure. Gandalf turns up, the dwarves overrun his house, eat all his food and sing him a song about a faraway mountain, and Bilbo says no, this sort of thing doesn’t interest him, he is a respectable Baggins. The next morning he goes chasing after them without so much as a handkerchief. Tolkien offers no clear psychological explanation. Something woke up in Bilbo, he says, something Tookish from the adventurous side of the family, and it was stronger than his love of comfort.

It’s tempting to read this as a narrative trope, the reluctant hero answering the call, the pattern Campbell systematised and Hollywood turned into formula. In Tolkien, though, adventure is closer to a spiritual necessity. Bilbo leaves because staying would be a kind of death, a cosy, well-fed death, but death all the same. Without adventure the Shire slowly turns from paradise into prison, and Tolkien shows as much at the end of The Lord of the Rings, when the hobbits come home to find Saruman has taken it over. The safe place stopped being safe because there is no such thing as absolute safety, and those who thought they could ignore the outside world discovered that the outside world had not been ignoring them.

Frodo repeats Bilbo’s pattern in a darker key. Bilbo goes off and comes back richer and wiser, with a magic ring in his pocket and good stories to tell. Frodo never really comes back. He reaches the Shire, yes, but can no longer live there, because the Ring has hurt him in ways that don’t heal, and in the end he sails from the Grey Havens with the elves, westward, towards something short of death that is no longer life as he knew it. The adventure cost him everything, and Tolkien, who was not naïve, doesn’t pretend the cost was smaller than it was. There is no proportional reward and no happy ending in the usual sense, only a man who did what had to be done and paid for it.

That is what sets Tolkien apart from the generic fantasy that followed him. There, adventure is fun and it pays, and the hero rides out, fights, wins and comes home in glory. In Tolkien it has to be done, though nobody in their right mind would want it, since it breaks people and changes them in ways they didn’t choose, takes them away from what they loved and never quite lets them back. Sam can go home to the Shire, plant his garden and raise his children, and Frodo can’t. Adventure lands differently on each of them, and on some it leaves damage that can’t be repaired.

There is something very Catholic about this view, and I don’t think you can understand Tolkien without it. In Catholicism a vocation is a calling, something that comes from outside and asks for what you’d rather not give, pulling you out of your comfort and onto a path you didn’t design. You answer it with obedience rather than enthusiasm, and obedience carries a cost nobody can tell you in advance. The saints seldom had a good time of it. They said yes to something that destroyed them and then rebuilt them as something else, and Frodo is a secular version of that, someone who said yes, was broken and rebuilt, and came out in a shape that no longer fits the world he used to live in.

Ours is an age that optimises comfort better than any before it, and in such a world the suggestion that comfort isn’t enough sounds almost offensive. We have food brought to the door, endless entertainment, climate control, risk kept to a minimum, and you could live an entire life without leaving your own private Shire. Still, something is off. Depression and anxiety rates in the developed world appear to be the highest in recorded history. People have everything they need and feel empty, so they medicate and distract themselves, and the emptiness stays put.

Tolkien diagnosed this in 1937, before smartphones and the internet, before industrial comfort took its present shape. He could do it because he was a medievalist who knew a world where comfort did not exist and where life had an intensity that modernity swapped for safety. He did not idealise the Middle Ages, and he was no naïve reactionary pining for plague and serfdom. But he understood that something went missing in the exchange, something to do with risk and exposure to the unknown, with the real possibility of failing, of suffering, of not coming back.

For Tolkien adventure means being willing to be changed by something you don’t control, and it has little to do with tourism or a gap year, skydiving or backpacking round Southeast Asia. It means saying yes to a road whose end you can’t see, stepping out of your door in the knowledge that whatever waits on the other side might destroy you, and stepping out anyway, not out of courage but from a hunch that staying in would destroy you more thoroughly, slowly and quietly, one identical day at a time.

“It’s a dangerous business, going out your door.” It is. Staying in is more dangerous still.