The Northernness of The Hobbit and its Structure

Structural Patterns in  The Hobbit

There are a number of ways to organize the structure of the novel. Which do you find most convincing?

• "There and back again"--Bilbo enters upon an adventure and then returns, though changed. The structure is cyclical in that sense. He undergoes a kind of pilgrimage to return a different hobbit.
• Continual eucatastrophe with the final end of the dragon always ahead. The plot moves ahead through a series of complications, each one resolved by either Gandalf, Bilbo, or others, such as the Eagles. At the same time, the ultimate encounter with Smaug is introduced in the first chapter and kept before the reader.
• Gandalf, No Gandalf, Gandalf, No Gandalf, Gandalf: Bilbo learns to fill the leadership gap left by Gandalf's absence--first when he is separated with Gollum, and then once Gandalf leaves to face the Necromancer.
• Geographic displacement. Bilbo moves from the assurance of Hobbiton to Mountain, Wilderness, Mirkwood, and places increasingly strange and uninviting with Rivendale and Beorn's House the refuges in the midst of them.
• The discovery of the Tookish side of Bilbo, with Bilbo moving from burgher to burglar, from hole-dweller to hole-explorer.
• A change in tone, from humor to seriousness, especially as the evil draws nearer. Evil as treated as more damaging and threatening with each new encounter.
• A movement from one world to another, from Edwardian fairy story to Northern epic. At first the Northern world derived from Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, and Old Norse sources is experienced in the safe world of Gandalf's protection, but as the story advances the world becomes more heroic, ending in the Battle of Five Armies.

Teutonic and Celtic Blending in  The Hobbit--The Two Norths

[W]hatever the success of the imported languages, the inhabitants of Britian, during recorded history, must have been in large part neither Celtic nor Germanic: that is,  not derived physically from the original speakers of those varieties of language, nor even from the already racially more mixed invaders who planted them in Britain .

In that case they are and were not either 'Celts' or 'Teutons' according to the modern myth that still holds such an attraction for many minds. In this legend Celts and Teutons are primeval and immutable creatures, like a triceratops and a stegosaurus (bigger than a rhinoceros and more pugnacious, as popular palaeontologists depict them, (fixed not only in shape but in innate and mutual hostility, and endowed even in the mists of antiquity, as ever since, with the peculiarities of mind and temper which can be still observed in the Irish or the Welsh on the one hand the English on the other: the wild incalculable poetic Celt, full of vague and misty imaginations, and the Saxon, solid and practical when not under the influence of beer. Unlike most myths this myth seems to have no value at all.
--"English and Welsh" (1955)

It is always dangerous to deal too comfortably in stereotypes of an ethic or cultural nature. As the above passage from his lecture shows, Tolkien understood that the types of the harsh, pragmatic, pessimistic Norse and the sensitive, poetic, fanciful Celt could not hold up under repeated investigation; nonetheless, he was willing to deal with them in part because they did suggest large cultural patterns that he felt had thoroughly blended in Welsh, Cornish, and English character. Marjorie Burns has argued his hobbits represent this blending, or at least that they have the possibility in a character like Bilbo of discovering that mixture. These two Norths, one with its "theory of courage" and the other with its sensuous sense of the magical and love of kingship, he held were merged in ways that made them difficult to tease apart. Even though Tolkien clearly preferred the Norse/Teutonic strains, his work with the Celtic strain in  Sir Gawain, as well as other works by the Pearl poet, as well as  Sir Orfeo, indicates the dual debt he had to these cultures.