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Story Ideas – I Don’t Think We’re in Middle Earth Anymore, Frodo
By Deb Gallardo
Before there was the series “The Lord of the Rings,” there was a book called “The Hobbit,” which began this way:
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy 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.
It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green, with a shiny yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened on to a tube-shaped hall like a tunnel: a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, with paneled walls, and floors tiled and carpeted, provided with polished chairs, and lots of lots of pegs for hats and coats — the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly but not quite straight into the side of the hill — The Hill, as all the people for many miles round called it — and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage. The best rooms were all on the left hand side (going in), for these were the only ones to have windows, deep-set round windows looking over his garden, and meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.
Check out these photos and see if you don’t notice a resemblance:
Hobbit-like Home?
- Hobbit-like Interior?
Now the door is neither green nor perfectly round, and the doorknob is not in the exact center, but one could easily imagine Hobbits living in just such a place. It was actually built in Wales of all natural construction materials. Not only is this home a testament to the influence fiction can have on individuals, but I find it a fascinating concept that such a home exists.
So naturally my writer’s imagination started asking “What if?”
What if someone in the real world, perhaps on a walking tour in the British Isles, came upon such a house, but it was not built by humans in the 21st century but by beings from another realm? They could be leprechauns, hobbits, pixies, elves, dwarves, littles and the like. They could be talking animals. Or they could be something invented out of a writer’s imagination.
Think about this. What would YOUR reaction be? Perhaps your first thought would be that you were dreaming. When you decided you were NOT dreaming, you might think that the brownie you had at lunch was laced with a mind-altering chemical substance. When you had eliminated all rational explanations, only then would you (possibly) believe what you were experiencing was really happening.
Once you made that mental leap, then what? Would you totally buy into the experience, believing that you were, indeed, in another world? Would you keep looking for proof that it wasn’t real?
And if you did uncover proof, what would you do? But if, on the other hand, you saw incontrovertible proof that you had actually entered another realm, would you want to stay there or would you want to get back home somehow and do everything in your power, exhaust every avenue, to find a way back to the reality you know?
Just some creative food for thought for you today to stimulate the writing bug in you.
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