Filling in Gaps in "The Hobbit"

            According to reader-response theory, a text holds no inherent meaning. It is only when the reader meets the text that meaning is constructed. The reader interacts with the text in many ways, one such way being filling in gaps. No text is absolutely complete; there’s always something missing—a physical description, a telling of certain events, etc.—that we fill in for ourselves. As I continued to read the week, I looked for such gaps. One glaring gap we have already discussed in class is the way the narrator glosses over “un-narratable” events. Some of us might have followed the narrator forward, but some of us might have imagined what, for example, those two weeks were like at the Last Homely House (see chapter 3). And those individuals would all have a different answer. There are also gaps in the secondary world itself, but only as measured against our primary world, from which, try as we might, we cannot separate ourselves. (Even when reading fantasy, we cannot fully escape our horizon of expectations, as Jauss put it, our prejudices and personal histories.) Here are some such gaps: sex, religion, law, women, the narrator’s character and authority, science, etc. Not all of these are complete gaps. For example, we have a few female characters. But they are open enough to call us to make sense of them. There are countless more; gaps are as numerous and varied as the readers who fill them. They are what keep the text from dictating its meaning to us, which is one of the reasons we invest so deeply in certain texts. Here’s my question to you: what gaps do you fill, and what does that process do for your reading of The Hobbit?