My First Hobbit

When I first met Bilbo Baggins, he was a woman.

I was eight years old, on a mysterious school trip to a spooky old building, with no real idea about what was going to happen to me or my classmates. My only clue had come the previous week. Our teacher had told us to memorise a series of strange names which bemused my fellow pupils, but left me feeling proud of my own cleverness, since I seemed to be the only kid in class who recognised Dwalin and Balin and all the rest of them as the thirteen dwarves from JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

A few months earlier, I’d read The Hobbit for the first time. It was my sister’s copy, the 1966 Unwin paperback edition; I still have it on my bookshelf, but that’s okay: she never liked it. The book transported my fevered child’s imagination in a way it had never been transported before. Imagine my excitement, then, as a school coach carried us off, packed lunches gripped tightly in hand, to Middle Earth.

Looking back, I can see the day for exactly what it was: a workshop laid on by a local drama group. For an eight year-old with an overactive imagination, it was pure magic.

The event began with us all clustered in the lobby of a big old house, shouting out the list of names we’d learned. At the end we had to yell, “Bilbo Baggins!” at the tops of our voices, at which point an actress dressed as a hobbit bounded in and whisked us away on our adventure. I didn’t care that Bilbo was a woman. After all, isn’t that what pantomime is all about?

In each room we met different characters from Tolkien’s classic story, acted out scenes, and moved around to creepy music. We stumbled terrified through a blackout to avoid the spiders of Mirkwood. We played riddles in the dark with Gollum. We even managed to steal Smaug’s gold.

By the time I’d been there and back again, I’d had the time of my little life.