in: Featured, Leisure, Living

Brett and Kate McKay • May 31, 2016 • Last updated: October 29, 2021

Against the Cult of

Travel, or What Everyone
Gets Wrong About the
Hobbit

Modern culture is in the throes of a real love affair with travel.

It’s become a central element of our zeitgeist, a main tenet in
living a fulfilled, non-pedestrian life. Everywhere you turn, and
no matter the dilemma, travel is offered as the cure.

Don’t know what you want to do after graduating college?

Take a year off to travel.
Spark gone out of your relationship? Take more trips with your
significant other.

Feeling restless and generally bored with life? Set off on an

epic adventure around the globe.

Travel isn’t just framed as a cure-all for what ails us, either,
but as a goal around which to build the other elements of
one’s life. Don’t have children, the thinking goes, because
they’ll hinder your ability to travel. Work for yourself and
create passive income, so you can jaunt off to exotic locales
whenever you want.

In a relatively safe and prosperous time, in a society that

lacks many built-in challenges and hardships, travel has
become the way to have an adventure, to demonstrate a kind
of bravery — a cosmopolitan courage where one ventures
into unfamiliar territory and undergoes a rite of passage to
become an enlightened global citizen.

Travel is thus seen as both a tool of personal development

and an almost altruistic moral good.

In short, as the old religious sources of guidance and identity

have fallen away, a kind of “cult of travel” has developed in
their place.

But is our faith in travel justified? Or have we forced it to bear

the weight of far heavier expectations than it should be made
to carry?

In an Oxford Suburb,
There Lived a Creator of
Hobbits
If travel has developed into a kind of cult, one of its sacred
texts is surely The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. The plot has
been cited by many (including ourselves!) as a parallel to the
way moderns should strive to escape the orbit of a boring,
conventional life and get out and see the world: Bilbo lives a
safe, comfortable, bourgeoisie existence, snug in his wood-
paneled, fireplace-heated, well-stocked hobbit hole, until he is
fairly dragged along on an adventure by a bunch of dwarves.
He experiences a call to greatness he never knew he
possessed, demonstrates courage and leadership, grows his
perspective, and eventually returns to his suburban shire a
changed hobbit. Here, it seems, is the story of the modern,
domesticated, drone-turned-world-traveler, acted out in the
realm of fantasy.

Seeing the book as inspiration to travel may work

convincingly for many. But it didn’t move the behavior of one
prominent exception: the author himself.

Tolkien’s own life was one of quiet, ordinary, unvarying

domestic routine. He lived in a series of modest, very
conventional suburban homes, and spent his days as
professor, husband, and father. A typical day for Tolkien
consisted of bicycling (he didn’t own a car for most of his life)
with his children to early morning Mass, lecturing at Oxford’s
Pembroke College, coming home for lunch, tutoring students,
having an afternoon tea with his family, and puttering around
the garden. In the evenings he’d do some writing, grade
exams from other universities to earn extra money, or attend
the Inklings, a kind of literary club. He rarely traveled, almost
never went abroad, and when he did vacation, he took his
family to thoroughly conventional, thoroughly touristy resorts
along the English coast.

Between serving in WWI as a 20-something and the success

of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in middle-age,
nothing major or really exciting happened to Tolkien, and even
after his books became international bestsellers, his lifestyle
remained almost entirely the same.

“I am in fact a Hobbit,” he admitted, “in all but size”:

 “I like gardens, trees, and
unmechanized farmlands; I
smoke a pipe, and like good plain
food (unrefrigerated), but detest
French cooking; I like, and even
dare to wear in these dull days,
ornamental waistcoats. I am fond
of mushrooms (out of a field);
have a very simple sense of
humour (which even my
appreciative critics find tiresome);
I go to bed late and get up late
(when possible). I do not travel
much.”

The juxtaposition between Tolkien’s imaginative work and his

domestic routine is encapsulated well in one of the short
reports he sent his son in 1944 on the progress he was
making writing The Lord of the Rings: “I managed to get an
hour or two’s writing, and have brought Frodo nearly to the
gates of Mordor. Afternoon lawn-mowing. Term begins next
week, and proofs of Wales papers have come. Still I am going
to continue ‘Ring’ in every salvable moment.”

So what do we make of the fact that a man who lived such a

narrow, limited, conventional life, also produced works
featuring epic, expansive adventures filled with characters
who leave behind their ordinary creature comforts to embark
on great, risky, challenging quests?

Was Tolkien a hypocrite? Were his books merely a form of

wish-fulfillment, a chance to live out in fantasy the kinds of
things he was too timid to enact in his own life?
Not if you understand what Tolkien was truly trying to do with
his stories, and what he considered the most important kind of
adventure.

The Hidden Dimensions

of a Hobbit Hole
Part of what inspired Tolkien’s characterization of hobbits,
besides his personal life, was the general character of his
fellow countrymen. As he told one interviewer, “The Hobbits
are just rustic English people, made small in size because it
reflects the generally small reach of their imagination — not
the small reach of their courage or latent power [emphasis
mine].”

Tolkien never doubted that his neighbors had physical

courage in spades — in the trenches of WWI, he had
witnessed the steadfastness of enlisted soldiers firsthand.
When asked to rise to the occasion, they did so splendidly
and without reservation.

Tolkien in fact saw such courage as one of the defining

characteristics of hobbits. When his son Christopher was
flying planes for the Royal Air Force during the Second World
War and anxiously faced deadly risk and fearsome enemies,
he encouraged him to “Keep up your hobbitry in heart!”

No, the thing Tolkien thought the average hobbit, or

Englishman, lacked was not bravery, but a thoroughly
vitalized imagination — the desire to entertain new ideas and
perspectives, to leave behind the status quo and take a
journey of faith, personal growth, and moral challenge.

For Tolkien, nothing in this world — not its culture, knowledge,

assumptions, and expectations, nor its rocks, trees, and
people — was entirely as it seemed. Hidden behind what the
poet P.B. Shelley called “the veil of familiarity” existed other
layers and dimensions. While such realms cannot normally be
seen with the eye, they are sensed through poignant pangs of
longing for something more — the occasional, fleeting feeling
of being on the threshold of something greater.
Not enough people, Tolkien felt, had the imagination to
consider this idea seriously, nor the courage to follow their
longing beyond the surface of things. The average bloke was
like the Bagginses of The Hobbit, where you know what he
“would say on any question without the bother of asking him.”
Most folks don’t attempt to draw back the curtain on another
realm of meaning — can’t be bothered to penetrate the
conventional, comfortable, respectable notions of the way
things are in order to discover deeper truths.

For Tolkien, those important truths included the idea that all of
life — whether in suburbia or on an actual battlefield —
constitutes an epic, heroic clash between good and evil, dark
and light; that everyone’s choices, no matter how “little” of a
person they are, matter; and that each individual’s small story
is part of a larger, cosmic narrative. Everyone has a part to
play and a pilgrimage to make — not necessarily a physical
journey, but a moral and spiritual one.

Tolkien further believed that reading myths was one of the

surest ways to begin such a journey. In myths one finds
fantastical explanations of who we are, how we got here, and
what we’re capable of. Such stories, Tolkien held, are filled
with echoes of Truth with a capital T – “a sudden glimpse of
the underlying reality” that was truer than anything strictly
factual. A good myth, in departing from reality, paradoxically
helps us rediscover it — reminding us that beneath the
blandness and busyness of our day-to-day lives, lies heroic
and mythic potential.

It’s for this reason Tolkien wished to develop his own

mythology, and successfully did so in The Hobbit and his
other works. Bilbo takes an adventure that runs much deeper
than the external landscapes and enemies described on the
page; his is a pilgrimage through an epic mythological world
in which he battles the forces of darkness, discovers his
destiny, and, as the author of Bilbo’s Journey puts it,
undergoes, a “rite of passage from wisdom to ignorance and
from bourgeois vice to heroic virtue.”

By vicariously and imaginatively following along on Bilbo’s

quest, the reader ends up taking a there-and-back-again
journey of his own. As Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis wrote in his
review of The Hobbit, the story admits the reader to a world
that “becomes indispensable to him…You cannot anticipate it
before you go there, as you cannot forget it once you have
gone.”

Both Lewis and Tolkien believed ardently in the power of “fairy

stories” to, as the latter put it, offer “sensations we never had
before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible
experience.” Lewis explained the effect of imaginative tales on
the reader:

“Fairy land arouses a longing for

he knows not what. It stirs and
troubles him (to his life-long
enrichment) with the dim sense of
something beyond his reach and,
far from dulling or emptying the
actual world, gives it a new
dimension of depth. He does not
despise real woods because he
has read of enchanted woods: the
reading makes all real woods a
little enchanted.”

In other words, books like The Hobbit are not necessarily

supposed to inspire trips to far-flung lands, but rather to
restore the freshness of familiar surroundings right in front of
our faces. Once you discover this doorway to realms beyond,
you’re able to see the world through a mythological lens, and
find that there are hidden dimensions even within the walls of
one’s hobbit hole. Once you’ve been there and back
again, your perspective is forever changed; you begin to see
things as they really are. Everything from the view outside
your apartment to your commute to work can become more
meaningful, even magical.
That Tolkien could step through this threshold whenever he
desired, his otherwise bourgeoisie lifestyle notwithstanding, is
what set him apart from other “hobbits.” And it is what
accounts for his obliviousness to the allure of physical travel.
As one of his biographers put it, “his imagination did not need
to be stimulated by unfamiliar landscapes and cultures”; that
he could simply sit down at his desk and immediately begin
exploring the terrain of Middle-earth explains why he “did not
altogether care very much where he was.” For Tolkien, his
domestic routine, no matter how familiar, remained
perennially fresh.

Tolkien’s immersion in his imagination did not represent an

escape from reality, but a reacquaintance with it. He saw
clearer than most the way in which even the most ordinary life
is filed with epic quests, wrenching conflicts, and the heroic
choice between courage and compassion, and greed and
selfishness. So that despite the “narrow” scope of his life, one
cannot help feeling it was far more expansive than those who
fill their Instagram profiles with photos of their globe-trotting
travels.

What Tolkien understood is that when it comes to life’s most

important journeys — quests of spirituality, self-discovery, and
self-mastery — location is irrelevant.

The greatest adventures don’t require a passport.

In fact, our outer journeys can inhibit our inner ones.

Many Who Wander, Are

Indeed Lost
“For I measure distance inward
and not outward. Within the
compass of a man’s ribs there is
space and scene enough for any
biography.” –Henry David
Thoreau
Certainly there is absolutely nothing wrong with travel when
it’s given its proper weight and is stripped of undue moral
significance, exaggerated powers, and inflated expectations.

The recalibration of those expectations begins with the

acknowledgement that there is nothing inherently valuable
about travel. The benefits associated with it, like the chance to
expand one’s perspective, grow in maturity, and learn how to
handle uncertainty, are certainly real, but do not automatically
accrue simply by moving from point A to point B. If they did,
the author of Eat, Pray, Love, who began her globe-trotting
adventure flaky and narcissistic, would have ended her trip a
better person, and yet — spoiler alert — she seems no less
self-absorbed by the journey’s end.

The value that can be derived from travel only comes to those
who engage it with the right mindset and a preexisting self-
sufficiency — qualities that can be developed anywhere, and
must be formed before you start out.

Many people hope that traveling will help them change or find
themselves, but if you can’t become the person you want to
be right where you are, then you won’t be able to do it when
you’re 5,000 miles distant. Because, of course, wherever you
go, you bring yourself along with you. As Ralph Waldo
Emerson put it, folks who are unhappy with their lives, and
look for fulfillment in exotic and ancient lands, merely carry
“ruins to ruins”:
“It is for want of self-culture that
the superstition of Travelling,
whose idols are Italy, England,
Egypt, retains its fascination for all
educated Americans. They who
made England, Italy, or Greece
venerable in the imagination did
so by sticking fast where they
were, like an axis of the earth. In
manly hours, we feel that duty is
our place. The soul is no traveller;
the wise man stays at home, and
when his necessities, his duties,
on any occasion call him from his
house, or into foreign lands, he is
at home still, and shall make men
sensible by the expression of his
countenance, that he goes the
missionary of wisdom and virtue,
and visits cities and men like a
sovereign, and not like an
interloper or a valet.

I have no churlish objection to the

circumnavigation of the globe, for
the purposes of art, of study, and
benevolence, so that the man is
first domesticated, or does not go
abroad with the hope of finding
 somewhat
Or as the greater
Stoic philosopher than
Seneca he knows.
observed two-
thousand
Heyears
who ago:
travels to be amused, or
to get somewhat which he does
“[Travelers] makeaway
not carry, travels one journey
from
after another
himself, and change
and grows old even in
spectacle for spectacle.
youth among old things.As
In
Lucretius
Thebes, insays, ‘Thushis
Palmyra, each
willman
and
flees
mind himself.’ But toold
have become what end if
and
he does notas
dilapidated escape himself?
they. He carriesHe
pursues
ruins and dogs himself as his
to ruins.
own most tedious companion.
Travelling is a fool’s paradise. Our
And so we must realize that our
first journeys discover to us the
difficulty is not the fault of the
indifference of places. At home I
places but of ourselves.”
dream that at Naples, at Rome, I
Those can be intoxicated
who travel with beauty,
in search of something they lack, find that
whatever was holding them back from attaining it at home, is
and lose my sadness. I pack my
waiting for them at the airport when they land.
trunk, embrace my friends,
If one feels that they cannot find themselves or fulfillment
embark on the sea, and at last
without making a certain trip, then they may know for certain
wake
that they up in
are setting outNaples, andmindset
with the wrong there— the one
that says, “If I just had/did X, everything would change.” It’s
beside me is the stern fact, the
the same mindset that makes you feel that if you just found
sad
the right diet,self,
you’d unrelenting,
lose weight; if youidentical,
just got the right

thatapp,
organizing I fled
you’dfrom. I seek
get more done; ifthe
you Vatican,
just got a better
paying job, you’d be happy. In such cases, you’re not actually
and the palaces. I affect to be
looking for a tool to kick-start your goal, but a distraction from
havingintoxicated with
to work on it at all. sights and
suggestions,
If you can’t find satisfying but I aminnot
adventure exploring your own

intoxicated.
backyard, My giant
you won’t discover goes
long-lasting with
satisfaction
backpacking through Europe. If you can’t create a rich inner
me wherever I go.”
life in suburbia, you won’t develop one in the ashrams of
India. If you can’t find freshness in the familiar, and fulfillment
in the quests of self-mastery, spirituality, and virtue, then a
summer’s trek around the globe won’t ultimately save you
from a life of empty dullness.

Happiness, improvement, and fulfillment can be found in any

circumstance, or not at all.

A Round, and Round,

and Round Trip Ticket
Travel is often framed as an exercise in courage, and the
endeavor of the perennially curious. And yet it can also be an
excuse for the exact opposite. Needing the structure of a trip
to find excitement and adventure shows a lack of imagination,
rather than an abundance of it. And in cases where travel is
used to flee the mess, disappointments, and deficiencies of
one’s normal life, rather than facing them head on, nothing is
more cowardly.

And counterfeit.

Travel offers the same feeling of being on the threshold of

something strange and wonderful — of existing in an in-
between liminal state — that Tolkien was so fond of seeking,
but its effect is more temporary, and fails to point beyond itself
to something greater. The traveler who embarks without a
preexisting structure of self-knowledge and character,
intending instead to find it along the way, is set up like a sieve;
when the longings produced by his journey arise, they pass
right through him. During the trip itself, he feels invigorated,
purposeful, full of momentum, and on the path to bigger and
better things.

But he has merely mistaken movement for progress.

Once he arrives back home, these feelings dry up, and can
only be reinvigorated by undertaking another excursion, and
getting another hit of the travel rush. The threshold
experience, rather than being a doorway to greater things,
merely turns into a cycle of its own duplication, an empty
series of passport stamps.

Travel then, should ideally be approached the way one does a

healthy romantic relationship. Rather than looking for a
partner who will fulfill all your desires, you arrive as a fully
realized person yourself. Instead of looking for your lover to
complete you, they simply expand and enhance the robust
foundation of self you’ve already developed.

In the same way, travel should be seen not as a magic pill, a

cure-all, something necessary to your personal development,
but an optional enrichment for those already living purposeful,
fulfilled lives — an engaging pastime, a hobby like any other,
enjoyed by some, and not by all.

Travel should never be an escape from life; only an

enhancement of it.

Conclusion
“Our limbs have room enough but
it is our souls that rust in a corner.
Let us migrate interiorly without
intermission, and pitch our tent
each day nearer the western
horizon.” –Henry David Thoreau

How much one travels is presented these days as a kind of

litmus test: the more you travel, the more courageous,
cultured, and non-conventional your life is taken to be; the
less you travel, the more your life is assumed to be boring,
conventional, and narrow.

But the lines are not so easily drawn. A man who’s visited
every continent may have a soul as shallow as a thumbnail
scratch, while a man who’s never left his hometown may have
a spirit deeper than an oceanic trench; the man whose
Instragram profile is filled with images of ancient ruins and
beachside sunsets may have an extremely limited view of
life’s possibilities, while the man who lacks a single passport
stamp has cultivated an expansive and far-reaching mind; the
man who’s bravely ventured across the globe may be
frightened stiff of facing himself and grappling with the
ordinary, while the man who’s snug at home has bravely
faced up to exactly who he is and what his life has amounted
to.

And vice versa, of course.

Nor do these types have to be mutually exclusive.

But even if you wish to be a man whose travels are as rich as

his inner life, start with the latter, rather than the former.

Seek depth first, then width.

And know that life’s greatest, most important adventures can

be begun right where you’re sitting right now. Without even
packing your bags, you can set off on a pilgrimage to greater
self-discovery, epic excellence, and heroic virtue, so that, like
Bilbo, you’ll soon be “doing and saying things altogether
unexpected.”

__________________________________________

Sources:

J.R.R Tolkien: A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship by Colin Duriez

Bilbo’s Journey by Joseph Pearce

“How to Travel–Some Contrarian Advice” by Ryan Holiday

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