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Abstract:

The article considers how the traditions of Victorian and Edwardian England, focus on home comfort, a sense of security and safety are reflected in the story of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit, or There and Back Again” (1937), in the description of the hero’s small warm hole. The “estate” of a hobbit (halfling) is a hole dug under a hill (and thus mostly hidden underground), but furnished with maximum comfort. Such an “estate” is a real fortress, a nest that you never want to leave, a model of a closed world. Tolkien creates an ideal, eternally calm, unshakable, unchanging world, a space for escapism, where the everyday life of the heroes is depicted in the traditions of ancient bucolics — and thereby sending readers to “good old England”, where you can hide from everyday storms and conflicts, where a small English “estate” becomes a fortress, and its walls give a protection from outer evils.