Already in 1930, Tolkien gave a lecture entitled, "A Secret Vice," discoursing about the value of invented languages. At that time, he was busy creating his mythology and his Elvish languages. He asked his audience to bear with him, since these matters had only been created for personal use and enjoyment: "It's just a hobby."

Some time later, Tolkien was marking student essays, and suddenly, without knowing why, he scribbled, "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit," - the opening sentence of The Hobbit.

Understandably, there have been many speculations regarding the etymology of the word hobbit, since Tolkien was always so careful with his choice of words. But here, I simply suggest that the hobbit is the spontaneous personification of Tolkien’s hobby.

The hobbit is the unexpected fruit of a synthesis between Tolkien's conscious and long-standing work on his invented languages and mythology, and a creative reaction from his Unconscious. Without the hobbits and their mediating function, there would simply never have been a story to tell. Hobbits represent essential human qualities which influence their environment wherever they go.

By the time we have read Tolkien's foreword, a long prologue entitled "Concerning Hobbits and Other Matters," and seventeen uneventful years following Bilbo's birthday party have passed, Frodo has turned fifty, Sam thirty-five, Merry thirty-two, and Pippin twenty-eight. Hobbits are not considered to be adults until the age of thirty-three, and they often live to be one hundred years old.

Each of the four hobbits have their own goal of individuation within the trilogy: Pippin and Merry are transformed from young boys to men, Sam develops from being a young man to becoming a mature individual with the capacity to marry and have a family, and finally, Frodo experiences a mid-life crisis, culminating in an acceptance of mortality. These three stages are aspects of an archetypal Ego- model, with Frodo as the dominating figure at the beginning of the tale.

Each of the hobbits has a numinous experience, which activates the beginning of their individuation process. For Frodo, this happens as he understands the special qualities of the Ring. Sam's individuation process is activated by his first encounter with the Elves. Meeting Treebeard is decisive for Merry and Pippin. In each case, a special contact with a symbol of the Self alters the consciousness of the hobbits.

In Volume One, all of the events are experienced through the eyes of Frodo, from the time where Bilbo has left the scene, to the last pages of the first volume, where Sam follows Frodo across the River of Anduin.

In Volume Two, the Fellowship is broken up, first in three, then in four groups, and the Ego-consciousness is now shared between all four hobbits. Sam's consciousness becomes active and begins to alternate with Frodo's consciousness, and on the long journey to Mordor, we increasingly follow Sam's thoughts and feelings, and his observations of the suffering that Frodo is going through. At the end of Volume Two, after the dramatic battle with the giant monster-spider Shelob, Sam's consciousness takes over definitively. By Volume Three, we no longer experience the story from the inside of Frodo's mind.

Remarkably often, a chapter or a passage ends when one of the hobbits falls asleep or faints and/or a new chapter begins by one of them waking up to a new situation. Old Man Willow casts a sleeping-spell on Frodo, and later, he is over-powered by the barrow-wight: "Then a grip stronger and colder than iron seized him. The icy touch froze his bones, and he remembered no more." (1: 140)

He also loses consciousness while confronting The Black Rider on Weathertop on the 6th of October: "At the same time he struck at the feet of his enemy. A shrill cry rang out in the night, and he felt a pain like a dart of poisoned ice pierce his left shoulder."

-- and again, after crossing the ford at Rivendell:

"Then Frodo felt himself falling, and the roaring and confusion seemed to rise and engulf him together with his enemies. He heard and saw no more."

In the next chapter, Frodo wakes up comfortably in the House of Elrond. Here, he experiences a far more pleasant version of the dissolution of consciousness in the unconscious after a banquet in honour of his own healing. After the meal, the party retires to the Hall of Fire, where the Elves sing and play:

"At first, the beauty of the melodies and of the interwoven words in elventongues, even though he understood them little, held him in a spell, as soon as he began to attend to them. Almost it seemed that the words took shape, and visions of far lands and bright things that he had never yet imagined opened out before him; and the firelit hall became like a golden mist above seas of foam that sighed upon the margins of the world. Then the enchantment became more and more dreamlike, until he felt that an endless river of swelling gold and silver was flowing over him, too multitudinous for his pattern to be comprehended; it became part of the throbbing air about him, and it drenched and drowned him. Swiftly he sank under its shining weight into a deep realm of sleep."

Bilbo explains to Frodo that staying awake in the Hall of Fire can be difficult, until you get used to it. Tolkien is here describing a psychological state where the consciousness approaches deep layers of the unconscious and its imagery- forming activity, which is so similar to the state of dreaming that Frodo falls asleep.

By the time Frodo is struck unconscious by the sting of Shelob at the end of Volume Two, the reader no longer experiences this attack from the inside of Frodo's mind. In Volumes Two and Three, other parts of the Ego-consciousness either wake up or loose consciousness on important thresholds.

The consciousness of Pippin wakes up while Merry and he are being carried away by orcs. Merry faints in Minas Tirith following his confrontation with the Nazgul King:

"Help me, Pippin! It's all going dark again, and my arm is so cold."

Pippin faints, looking into the Palentir: "Suddenly, the lights went out. He gave a gasp and struggled; but he remained bent, clasping the ball with both hands. Closer and closer he bent, and then became rigid; his lips moved soundlessly for a while. Then with a strangled cry he fell back and lay still."

And once more, on the Morannon during the last battle, "blackness and stench and crushing pain came upon Pippin, and his mind fell away into a great darkness... and his thought fled far away and his eyes saw no more."

Sam is the last to wake up. Hurling himself against the gates to The Tower of Cirith Ungol at the end of Volume Two, he is struck senseless and doesn't wake up until several hundred pages later: "Sam roused himself painfully from the ground. For a moment he wondered where he was, and then all the misery and despair returned to him."

This is a miserable moment for Sam, but later, it is Sam who wakes up to joy and delight in the land of Ithilien, under the green beech trees.

The hobbits tend to loose consciousness when the story has reached a point of "no-way-out", a situation where the plot is apparently stuck, while awakenings set a new scene.

The pattern described above is so striking that I feel it reveals how Tolkien struggled to get on with his story. According to Tom Shippey, Tolkien struggled along with his hobbits through many years. It seems that the final version of The Lord of the Rings as we know it, is very different from the many drafts that Tolkien worked out. When the Riders of Rohan suddenly appear on the plain, this seems just as surprising to the author's mind, as to his readers. This is a way of working that strongly resembles active imagination, the dream-like but conscious state where the unconscious is allowed to become active, and where conscious and critical reflection is first applied later, just like the way Tolkien described the realm of Fairy-story:

“And while he is there it is dangerous for him to ask too many questions, lest the gates should be shut and the keys be lost.”

A way to look at the hobbits as an Ego- model is to use Jung's psychological typology. Consciousness is primarily oriented by four basic, psychological functions: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. All four functions are to be found in every human being, but Jung felt that one of these functions would normally be more differentiated and conscious, two of the functions could become partially conscious while the fourth function would always remain unintegrated, and primarily unconscious.

The four hobbits could respresent the four psychological functions: thinking (Frodo), intuition (Pippin), sensation (Merry) and feeling (Sam). If we now view the waking-up-and-falling-asleep sequences from this angle, we see that the introverted thinking function in the beginning is dominant, and after some time the extraverted intuition and to some extent the sensation functions become active. This sequence is to be expected in the normal course of a psychological development, where consciousness is integrating more of former unconscious contents. The first and most differentiated function will be supplemented by the second and third. But then something very unexpected happens: The feeling function (Sam), which represents the fourth and therefore normally the most unconscious function, in the end becomes dominant in the ”hobbit-consciousness,” while the thinking function disappears altogether into the collective unconscious as Frodo sails away from Middle-earth.

In my clinical experience such a pattern only occur if the man in question from Nature’s hand was disposed as a feeling type. In Western societies there always was - and to this day still is - a strong pressure on boys to adapt to the ”normal” masculine gender role. A boy who is disposed as a feeling type, i.e. who is oriented towards values and relationships, will automatically be pushed in the opposite typological direction. If he in addition loves books and words and is highly intelligent, he will be perceived as a thinking type, and may well end up as a professor in Old English at Oxford, although he does not really “fit in”.

To a man like that it may happen later in life - as it often does during an analysis - that the repressed feeling function, which is related to his most healthy and creative qualities, will emerge during an individuation process. This is what seems to have happened to J.R.R. Tolkien as he travelled along with his hobbits for many long years, and his travail resulted in a wonderful gift to us all - The Lord of the Rings." (Page 28 f in the Danish Edition.)

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