Welcome to the Lord of the Rings lorecast, the show that explores the background of Tolkien's amazing world from the very beginning. In a hole in the ground In a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit.

I've heard it said that among writers, one of the most important things to do with your story

is to focus on the very first sentence and the very last sentence of the story.

And I have to wonder how much did J.R.R. Tolkien focus on this.

I know that he was a stickler for basically every word that went into anything that he wrote.

So he would have fussed a bit about pretty much everything.

But I have to wonder, did he put extra emphasis on figuring out what would be the very first line and the very last line of his stories?

And my guess here with The Hobbit, at least with this line, is that it just came to him, and it was perfect when it did.

I mentioned in the last episode that as he was grading some papers, he just jotted this line down.

So it did just come to him, but I think it survived from that moment on to the final version of the book.

And hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit, not a nasty, dirty, wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozing smell,

nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat.

It was a hobbit hole, and that means comfort.

In the very first line here, he's doing something, very specific.

He's subverting our expectations.

And we already get a few things that play out in this very first paragraph that set the tone and the expectations for this story.

We have the voice of the author.

And this author's voice is very specific to the Hobbit.

There's this thing we do with language where the words we choose and how we choose to present ideas

can betray our perspective on the person that we're talking to.

If I decide that I want to explain things in very simplistic terms,

then it's assumed that the person I'm talking to is either a novice at the very thing that I'm talking about

...