There seemed to be two choices in front of Pittsburgh Public Theater Artistic Director Marya Sea Kaminski when she realized The Public’s second show for its 50th anniversary season fell during the 2024 presidential election cycle: to lean in or find a joyous escape.
“But then I realized that the story we’re telling with ‘The Hobbit’ is actually critical in times like these, and not just for the joy it brings,” Kaminski said.
J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the original text, began his writing career after serving in World War I. He began telling bedtime stories to his children and created tales of Hobbits, elves, dragons–with a few real-life implications.
“What his work does is provide a sort of magical, metaphorical version of real life, of real problems,” Tolkien expert and Pitt professor Lori Campbell-Tanner said. “You can insert whatever that problem is, whatever your dragon is that you have to slay, and you can fill it in.”
That’s why when students of her English literature course “J.R.R. Tolkien and Counterculture” try to draw parallels between Tolkien’s work and current events, she’ll encourage it. Students might make apt parallels between Tolkien’s series and historic events like the two World Wars, the industrialization of the workforce, or even the political turmoils we face today.
“I like to say that Tolkien’s books aren’t about World War I or World War II, they’re more broadly about war, or justice, or power … there are so many things that are symbolic of what happens in our mad situations, and power is an inherent aspect of government and society,” Campbell-Tanner said.
Tolkien and like-minded writers with armed forces experience spent the years after World War I in each other’s company writing fantastical stories. Some, like C.S. Lewis, known for “The Chronicles of Narnia,” were more direct in their writing and crafted allegories for the real world–a practice Tolkien avowed, preferring to allow the audience to make their own interpretations.
Still, Tolkien’s Middle Earth only became more relevant. In the wake of the Great Depression — and a global economic downturn which followed — stories of darkness, evil, and war flooded the covers of daily newspapers. When “The Hobbit” was first published in 1937, Hitler had risen to power in Nazi-ruled Germany, Mussolini had crystallized the contemporary fascist movement, and the world was on the brink of a second global war. Enter Bilbo Baggins.
“Bilbo is the perfect model of the folklore hero who isn’t expected to succeed, and who isn’t even interested in adventures on the surface until his heroism starts to come out,” Campbell-Tanner said. “In that way, ‘The Hobbit’ can be really relevant with its idea that everybody has a part to play, and it’s important to stand up and do something.”
Tolkien himself disliked when his work was characterized as escapist, a term he saw as diminutive when describing fantasy. His work, and even the subsequent cinematic interpretations of his stories by film director Peter Jackson, has always had an incisive relativity that is hard to ignore.
“When the Lord of The Rings films first came out in 2001, just after 9/11, the news stories were going on about how everyone was going to see the films because they wanted to forget about what happened in the world,” Campbell-Tanner said. “But it’s not about that. These stories are about a dark lord, they’re about terrorism, and there’s a lot of politics embedded in them.”
Perhaps this eternal relevance is among the reasons why Tolkien seems to be everywhere right now — why the current season of Amazon Prime series “The Rings of Power,” is among the top five most-watched television season on Prime Video, why Warner Bros. will release a new live-action movie in 2026, why Tolkien’s poems were recently published together for the first time as a collection, and why Pittsburgh Public Theater chose to present “The Hobbit” in its 50th season.
“The more I have learned about the time during which Tolkien wrote these epic sagas, the more I realize how prescient this show will be, how much it has to give to us as audiences, citizens, and performers alike,” Kaminski said. “And regardless of what you take away from it, we know you’ll enjoy our little slice of Middle Earth.”