"Three is Company" (II)

The older I get, the more poignant I find this part. Frodo is saying goodbye to his home, to his cozy hobbit-hole, and Lobelia and Lotho do not even have the decency to wait until he's gone before they assert their ownership of the place. They, of course, don't know the perils awaiting Frodo - not even Frodo knows; the poignancy, for me, resides particularly in seeing Frodo say farewell to the comforts of him home to embark in a quest to destroy a very powerful and evil weapon.

Tolkien, however, also manages to bring home to the reader the thrill accompanying the beginning of a new adventure, of walking in the fresh air of the night, with a starry sky and mild weather. The hobbits are still in the heart of the Shire, where they can feel safe, but the odd voice asking about Frodo makes us as uneasy as it makes Frodo, happy that the stranger did not cross him.

In this chapter there is one of the most revealing instances of the fact that Tolkien was still working on a sequel for The Hobbit, having that same audience in mind: the lines that he devoted to sharing with us the fox's thoughts when seeing the hobbits sleeping. 

"A fox passing through the wood on business of his own stopped several minutes and sniffed.
"'Hobbits!' he thought. 'Well, what next? I have heard of strange doings in this land, but I have seldom heard of a hobbit sleeping out of doors under a tree. Three of them! There's something mighty queer behind this.' He was quite right, but he never found out any more about it."