Who is the Narrator in The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien?

          The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien is about a fantasy world in which elves, dwarves and dragons roam. The main character is named Bilbo Baggins and he is a creature called a hobbit. And along with the help of Gandalf a wizard, he decides to go on an adventure with 13 dwarves so that he can help them get back their gold. The reason this is an issue is that, Bilbo Baggins and the vast majority of hobbits are very peaceful and not fond of adventures, but as the adventure progresses, Bilbo realizes that he is not part of that majority any longer. We, the readers, are brought through this adventure by a narrator that always knows what is going and knows what is going to happen next. But we actually never know who this narrator is. We get a partly clear personality that has led me to believe that this mystery narrator is either Bilbo Baggins after all of his adventures or J.R.R. Tolkien himself.

          One reason that I think it might be Bilbo Baggins after he is retired and settled down is that this is the way that the movie "The Hobbit" ( part 1 ) depicted the narrator. In the beginning and end of the Movie, it shows old Bilbo Baggins writing a book called, "There and Back Again" which is another name for the book in discussion, The Hobbit!!! Also, the narrator talks as if they were actually there, which of course being the main character, Bilbo was. And finally, the narrator talks as if they were an old person telling a story, like possibly Bilbo telling Frodo ( the main character from The Lord of The Rings) a story. And when Tolkien wrote this book, he was only 45 years old, which is not particularly old.

         One reason that the narrator might be J.R.R. Tolkien is that when the narrator explains what a hobbit is , he says " they rather shy of Big People, as they call us" on page 4. The word us gives away that the narrator is infact a "Big Person" or human and not a Hobbit. And J.R.R. Tolkien was a human, although it is confusing because the narrator spoke as if hobbits existed within the world that he lives in, and there are no hobbits in the 20th century that Tolkien lived in. But this also brings up the question of how does Tolkien know what was going to happened? Well, it is possible that Tolkien (if he was living in Middle Earth) heard the story from someone else and then wrote this book, because it is supposed to seem like everything that occurred within it's pages were true and aactually happened.

      But overall, whether the narrator is Tolkien or Bilbo, it will not effect the story much because whoever the narrator is, does a good job at drawing the reader in, making them want to read more, and helping the reader understand what is happening. So in a way, the narrator could be anyone and it wouldn't matter.