"In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." One of the most famous opening lines in English literature lays down the law for our perception of the basic hobbit lifestyle: comfort. Hobbits don't live in "nasty, dirty, wet hole(s), filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell". They live in comfortable tunnels "without smoke, with panelled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats...."

People have lived in holes and caves throughout history, sometimes as a means of evading detection, sometimes for purely defensive reasons. But we have never really lived in hobbit holes. Bilbo's hole, Bag End, represents the lifestyle of the aristocratic hobbit, and among Big Folk like you and me, aristocrats live in castles, palaces, mansions

anything but holes in the sides of hills.

Tolkien's fascination with underground dwelling undoubtedly owes something to his wartime experiences in France, where millions of soldiers filled trenches and underground bunkers that were clearly "nasty, dirty, wet hole(s), filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell". As with so many other writers of his generation, Tolkien's fiction pursues an escapist course which seeks to wipe away the memory of the battlefields of northern France. But in Tolkien's case, he paints a more pleasant memory over the unpleasant one while leaving a remarkably evocative set of clues to the inspirations his imagery.

Tolkien explained that The Lord of the Rings "is about death...and the pursuit of deathlessness". It provides a rich landscape carved from the clay of his imagination, but human imagination relies upon experience. We cannot imagine anything clearly without first having clearly seen something real. Perception precedes vision, and Tolkien's vision proved to be so clear because he had perceived a great deal. His stories weren't simply stories: they were legends derived from a world which mirrored the world of his experience.

And while many people would agree with such an analysis, all too often we are treated from this point forward to an awkward transformation of Tolkien's work with Old English literature (and Middle English) into tales of hobbits, elves, and dwarves. But Tolkien's hobbits, elves, and dwarves don't originate in Old English (or even Middle English). They originate quite firmly in the 20th century world Tolkien knew so intimately. You'll never find anything like The Book of Lost Tales among the collected works of Jules Verne, Charles Dickens, or Mark Twain (three of the 19th century's greatest writers in western literature). Melville could not have penned an ode to hobbit holes, and Milton gave us nothing like "Lay of Leithian".

From the very beginning, Tolkien wanted to create a modern mythology, and not simply write a heroic epic. A heroic poem may be derived from a fuller mythology, but it cannot define the mythology. And Tolkien did not merely want to reshape the old mythologies or give them modern settings. Their constituent stories remain firmly fixed in the old traditions. There is nothing like the Volsungsaga in Tolkien's string of literary worlds, each created one after the other a little larger than the previous one. Thor and Odin have no place in Tolkien. Oedipus and his Sphinx have been left behind. The Mermidons are forever bound up with Homer.

There is no doubt that Tolkien drew upon classical and medieval literature for the elements he combined into his mythologies. But he created new myths, addressing issues which were more relevant to his modern audience. Greek mythology fascinated Tolkien because "the Greek mythology depends far more on the marvellous aesthetic of its language and so of its nomenclature of persons and places and less on its content than people realize" (Letters, No. 180). A good example of how Greek myth worked would be the story of Europa.

Supposedly, Zeus, king of the gods, fell in love with a beautiful maiden named Europa. She lived in what we now call Asia Minor (or, eastern Turkey). Fearful that his jealous wife, Hera, would discover his infidelity and harm Europa, Zeus transformed himself into a bull. He approached the unsuspecting maiden who mounted his back. Zeus then flew north with Europa, where he ravished her in a new land and she gave birth to several children. Eventually, the continent of Europe was named for her (or so the Greeks said).

It doesn't matter if the ancient Greeks really believed this story when it was first told. It was surely contrived as part of a living traditional folklore in which people shared their perceptions of their world with one another in terms which were relevant to them. The Greeks knew their ancestors had not originated in Europe. They understood that there had been more ancient peoples who were pushed aside or conquered by their barbaric ancestors. The story of Zeus and Europa serves a purpose in explaining the name of the continent for its (Greek) inhabitants, but it also provides some entertainment.

Entertainment and education often go hand in hand. In the United States, school children are often treated to special performances of puppet shows, orchestras, and plays. They learn something about their world and (hopefully) have a good time. Greek mythology provides both an education and an entertainment for its audience. Whether the education is a good one by modern standards doesn't matter. It was superb in its day and helped to lay the foundation for all the sciences upon which modern western civilization is constructed.

Tolkien's mythologies, however, serve a somewhat different purpose. He was not striving to teach his audience about their world. Rather, when he first set pen to paper and wrote "The Fall of Gondolin", he was recovering from Trench Fever, contracted in northern France. Tolkien surely was seeking to absolve himself from the emotional conflict raised by the war. He was seeking healing in the way so many other former soldiers have throughout history: by writing about his experience in a way that was relevant to both himself and his intended (or desired) audience.

That first mythology, the "mythology for England", sought to reconstruct a fictional past which showed where and when the English had emerged from their legendary roots into real history. Real history was not nearly so interesting to Tolkien as the creative history all cultures use to describe their origins. Maybe Tolkien felt that England (and France and Germany) had come close to losing itself in modern warfare. So many young men died on the battlefields that an entire generation was threatened with destruction. In the worst-case scenario, what would have become of the English children, if they had had to raise themselves?

Tolkien's premise, that Men were not the first creative beings to exist in the world, is combined with the idea that our predecessors

who in some cases served as our mentors -- have vanished entirely. We Men have had to raise ourselves as best we can, and we have failed to achieve the ideals that the Elves established, while we have repeated some of the mistakes they made.

The two world wars changed human society forever in ways Tolkien and his contemporaries could not fail to notice. They proved that the human mind can be conditioned, or reconditioned, into an almost machine-like state. Millions of obedient followers marched off to wars they themselves would never have begun. Weapons of truly horrific power were unleashed by Men upon their fellow Men without regard for the cost in spiritual wealth or purity. And I am not referring to the nuclear weapons used by the United States to bring the second world war to a close. I am referring to the weapons which rendered entire cities and whole landscapes uninhabitable: artillery and bombs.

Compare pictures of northern France at the end of the First World War with pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the nuclear strikes against them. The only real distinction is that the nuclear strikes were confined to very small regions. The widespread bombardments devastated thousands of square miles of landscape in France. In the European theater of the Second World War, whole cities were reduced to rubble by artillery, tank warfare, and aerial bombing. Conventional explosives, used on a massive scale, wrought savage wounds across the face of the Earth.

The sinking of Beleriand, a consequence of the (justly fought) War of Wrath, is foreshadowed by the destruction of the French landscape in the (unjustly fought) First World War. The devastations of Middle-earth's populations, as briefly enumerated in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings (which were composed in the early 1950s), are foreshadowed by the deaths of tens of millions of people in Europe and Asia during the Second World War.

Tolkien's death and destruction are made believable only by the reality of human experience. No one would have accepted the matter-of-fact depopulations of Eriador and Beleriand as believable parts of Tolkien's pseudo-history had similar events not already occurred in real (and very recent) human history. There is nothing in Anglo-Saxon literature or history which makes such imagery, such myths, possible. There is nothing in Greek mythology which would serve as the model for such traditions. There is some relevance between the Biblical prophetic traditions concerning the End of Days and Tolkien's experience (many people wondered if they were not living in the End Times), but Tolkien's mythologies were about an imaginary past, not a possible future.

The imaginary past, however, was drawn to resemble the world of the present: Tolkien's present, to be sure. His present world included portions of English customs and countryside, old words which few people understood any more, and vague if persistent traditions of other peoples, other cultures in distant lands who had, from time to time, clashed with the peoples of the northern world. Middle-earth, the world of The Lord of the Rings, emerged from Tolkien's present world almost wholly in place, even though the actual fabrication of the geography and cultures required years of trial-and-error.

Tolkien knew early-on that he had to build Middle-earth around the hobbits. After all, in 1937, his publisher Stanley Unwin told him that "a large public would be 'clamouring next year to hear more from you about Hobbits!'" (Letters, No. 17, preamble). What Tolkien reveals about Middle-earth is therefore shown from a hobbit's perspective. But it is not merely a hobbit's perspective, it is the sole perspective of hobbits living in the Fourth Age Shire. They are, for all intents and purposes (because nothing more was said or written about them), modern hobbits. Not so much Twentieth Century Hobbits as the last voice of civilized hobbits.

Ancient Greek civilization achieved its most advanced form under the Macedonian kings, declining after Alexander the Great. His successors divided the eastern Mediterranean world among themselves, helped to secure a firm place for the Greek language (which would endure in the region for almost another two thousand years), and quietly slipped into the shadows of history's smaller experiences. Over the next 200 years, Roman civilization would seize control over the Greek world and transform it into a wholly different place. The Romans borrowed ideas from everyone and fused them into a synthesis which was unique and in some ways enduring, like their roads.

But all the great achievements which we think of as "Greek" pretty much ended with Alexander's career. The Greek world continued for a while afterward, but its voices fell silent, until one day there were no longer Greek voices speaking in the classical world. There was a body of literature (much of it now lost) from that period of time which constituted the most modern expression of pure classical Greek thought and perspective, when the Greek voice and vision were dominant.

So it is with the voice and vision that Tolkien presents of the Shire hobbits, whose comments or bare facts in the LoTR appendices constitute only a fragment of what we are supposed to accept as a large body of literature. The early Fourth Age would have been the hightide of Shire culture. The hobbits had finally come into their own. They shared a point-of-view with Tolkien's readers which helped us to establish a rapport with them: they were looking back upon their own history almost wistfully, as if it had just happened and they understood that it would recede into the shadowy past without much fanfare.

We therefore see Middle-earth as the last true Shire hobbits saw it, before their culture vanished or was absorbed into a larger culture. Tolkien implies, in the LoTR Prologue, that hobbits continue to live close to us in modern times. But they have no Shire. Their culture has either gone underground, or else they have become so embedded in our daily lives that we no longer notice them. And I think the latter is closer to what Tolkien envisioned as "true" of the twentieth century hobbits, rather than that they would have preserved some sort of hidden civilization deep beneath our feet. Hobbits, after all, enjoy the afternoon sun as much as we do.

But in order for Middle-earth to seem fresh and real to us, Tolkien has to use the perspective of ancient hobbits, looking back upon their history as if it were fresh and real. It would not work to show us Middle-earth through the stories of truly modern hobbits. They have probably forgotten everything, just as we are supposed to have forgotten everything. They must see Middle-earth the same way we do: through the eyes of that final generation of hobbits.

We are, as is every generation in its day, the "last" generation of our civilization. We represent the end result of a long history of human experience. And how we reflect upon our recent experience differs from how we reflect upon the experience of our predecessors. What we survive, what we achieve, gives us great pride, hope, and purpose. What our forefathers did gives us a heritage. Tolkien's mythology strives to create a heritage (for hobbits) which is preserved with that sense of recent experience. And he is able to construct it so vividly by drawing upon his own recent experience.

There is a paragraph in "The Conclusion of the Quenta Silmarillion" (The Lost Road and Other Writings, pp. 323-334), section 16, which echoes Tolkien's recent human experience in war:

The meeting of the hosts of the West and of the North is named the Great Battle, the Battle Terrible, and the War of Wrath. There was marshalled the whole power of the Throne of Morgoth, and it had become great beyond count, so that Dor-na-Fauglith could not contain it, and all the North was aflame with war. But it availed not. The Balrogs were destroyed, save some few that fled and hid themselves in caverns inaccessible at the roots of the earth. The uncounted legions of the Orcs perished like straw in a great fire, or were swept like shrivelled leaves before a burning wind. Few remained to trouble the world for long years after. And it is said that all that were left of the three Houses of the Elf-friends, Fathers of Men, fought for Fionwe: and they were avenged upon the Orcs in those days for Baragund and Barahir, Gumlin and Gundor, Huor and Hurin, and many others of their lords; and so were fulfilled in part the words of Ulmo, for by Earendel son of Tuor help was brought unto the Elves, and by the swords of Men they were strengthened on the fields of war. But the most part of the sons of Men, whether of the people of Uldor or others newcome out of the East, marched with the Enemy; and the Elves do not forget it.

He had seen, first-hand, how wave upon wave, "uncounted legions", of soldiery could be consumed in the fire of war. And he had also, by the time he wrote the above paragraph, seen how Germany had been humbled after the war (with the false hope that it would not "trouble the world for long years after"). It is not that the War of Wrath is a metaphor for the American intervention in the First World War, but rather that it is a mythologically true invention. That such a war could be fought is believable because (by the mid-1930s) such a war had been fought. Recent human experience told us that such conflicts were very real, and the mythology thus proved to be very realistic.

As Tolkien closed out The Lord of the Rings with the voice of the final hobbit generation, so he closed out the early Silmarillion mythologies with the voices of the final Elven generations. The transformation of the Silmarillion mythology into a portion of the Middle-earth mythology, unfortunately, fell to Tolkien's son Christopher, who understood his father's desires well enough, but could not fully achieve the effect his father pursued for a variety of reasons (the chief of which being that only J.R.R. Tolkien could have produced the exact Silmarillion he wanted to achieve, if anyone could have done so).

Nonetheless, we lost something in the transfer of mythology from father to son, something not fully realized but clearly foreshadowed in the LoTR appendices. That familiar sense of "this only just happened" was lost. In the earliest mythology, The Book of Lost Tales, Tolkien experimented with ways of conveying the feel of recent experience to the reader. He tried to have the Elves teach their history to a human wanderer who found his way into their world, but he abandoned the motif. Instead, he turned to epic poetry, composing a small body of literature for the purpose of conveying the stories. But the narrative form could not provide a modern voice.

That modern voice proved to be the most important element throughout the stories. The more polished and sophisticated Tolkien's narrative became through the years, the more his personal point of view

his authorial presene as perceived by the readers -- receded. His stories and fragments took on the perspectives of the final generations of the societies whose tales he wanted to preserve. Hence, "Aldarion and Erendis" reads like something jotted down at the end of the Second Age, and "The Battles of the Fords of Isen" is punctuated with the educated outlook of an early Fourth Age Gondorian. "Akallabeth" summarizes Numenorean history with the authority of a Numenorean voice.

From 1925, when Tolkien first jotted down "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit", until 1965, the stories emerging from his hand shaped themselves into an extended review of Tolkien's own personal experience. He was not sharing his life with the reader, though, but rather using his life to focus the reader's attention on the details he found most interesting in the imaginary histories and cultures he had devised almost solely to entertain us.

While it is true that Tolkien's invented languages drove many of his stories (leading him to write and rewrite entire legendary episodes merely to explain a few words or word-roots), his myth-making was founded upon the ancient Greek principle of explaining things. And he most needed to explain things as they introduced themselves into the stories. Although Tolkien's readers prompted him for many explanations, he shared their need to understand why hobbits chose to live in comfortable holes. He knew, from the very start (or nearly so), that hobbits want a safe place to live, in which to raise their families and enjoy the morning sun. But he also knew that they could not have sprung from the Earth ready to live in safe, comfy holes.

In fact, most Shire hobbits did NOT live in holes. As he considered how much information he would have to convey about the hobbits to his readers, he provided them with a fully plausible society: the upper-class hobbits lived in the Bag Ends, and most of the rest of Shire society lived in normal houses on the level ground. That is, of course, the way it has always been with Men, but Tolkien decided it didn't always have to be that way with hobbits. It was just that way with the Shire hobbits at the end of the Third Age and the beginning of the Fourth Age.

Tolkien composed the vast majority of his hobbit-lore after he finished writing The Lord of the Rings in 1948. According to Christopher Tolkien, The Prologue began to take shape in 1938, but the Appendices had to wait until about 1950. Unfortunately, he had far more to tell about hobbits than space would permit, and we had to wait for The Peoples of Middle-earth was published in 1996 to learn some of the answers to questions which had long plagued us.

The question of where hobbits supposedly came from remains unanswered, but we know they did not always live in the Vales of Anduin. The essay "Dwarves and Men" makes no mention of hobbits living in the region in the mid Second Age, whereas it does speak of their communities there in the early Third Age. It follows that the hobbits had to arrive in the area sometime after the War of the Last Alliance of Elves and Men.

The comfy hobbit lifestyle is also made peculiar to the Shire-folk (and Bree-folk), and almost certainly to the Shire/Bree-folk of the late Third Age. The original colonists were civilized people but they were almost a frontier-land society, living close to perilous lands (the Old Forest) and creatures (the Orcs and other evil things coming out of Angmar). "Dwarves and Men" concedes that "in their unrecorded past they must have been a primitive, indeed savage people" (Peoples of Middle-earth, p. 310).

Although Tolkien attempted to bury the most ancient hobbit history in forgotten languages and legends, even he could not refrain from wondering what came before. As the years passed by, and the Middle-earth mythology grew in scope and depth, Tolkien's personal experience became less and less relevant. He was able to extrapolate backwards, as it were, from the facts which had been established in the many stories, anecdotes, tables, and tidbits people teased out of him through interviews and correspondence.

The mythology began explaining itself, and the history began telling itself. For a hobbit, the urge to understand what had come before only awakened after the War of the Ring. For Tolkien, the urge to see what might have come before

without the transparent lens of his own personal experience -- solidified as the entire mythology became more complete. In his final years, Tolkien found himself exploring an almost wholly new world, one which little resembled the denuded landscapes of World War I France and the bombed out cities of World War II Europe. He had become a member of his own audience, caught up in the fascination of every detail.

Like us, Tolkien looked at the hobbits and kept hoping they would come back and reveal a little more of themselves. And, probably until the end of his days, they did just that for him, their special historian. He gave them a voice and a presence which have outlived him. We now study the hobbits and their world with almost as much dedication as we study the ancient Greek gods and heroes, whose world was smaller and very different from ours.

A hobbit may not want to be noticed by the clumsy Big Folk who trample the world beneath their feet, but he (or she) surely wants to be remembered. For the pleasant memory of that world which never was helps to make that world which still is a little more interesting.

Michael Martinez is the author of Visualizing Middle-earth and Parma Endorion: Essays on Middle-earth, 3rd Edition. His next book is Understanding Middle-earth, to published by Vivisphere in 2003.