There and Back Again

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There and Back Again is also an album by Vertical Horizon.

There and Back Again, A Hobbit's Holiday is a fictional book-within-a-book(-within-a-book) from J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. First mentioned as Bilbo Baggins's memoirs written in his diary, it describes the events in The Hobbit from his point of view.

Along with Frodo Baggins's memoirs, his own Translations from the Elvish, and some Hobbit-lore and background information, it comprised The Downfall of the Lord of the Rings and the Return of the King, also known as the Red Book of Westmarch.

Tolkien "translated" There and Back Again and came up with The Hobbit, and turned the other parts into The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil and the appendices to The Lord of the Rings respectively.

The title represents an archetypal Hobbit outlook on adventures. Frodo looks upon the going "there and back again" as an ideal throughout The Lord of the Rings similar to the Greek concept of nostos.

The phrase may be borrowed from a line in Vergil's Aeneid, Book V:

Nate dea, quo fata trahunt retrahuntque, sequamur

"Let us follow wherever the fates take us, there and back again."

The full title of The Hobbit is The Hobbit or There and Back Again.

[edit] In adaptations

In Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring, There and Back Again comprised the basis for the voice over for the scene "Concerning Hobbits" which was massively extended in the extended edition. Bilbo's writing of it provides Bilbo's motive for wanting privacy in the film, substituting for a more complicated situation in the books. After Bilbo gives up the One Ring, he announced to Gandalf that he has been able to think up an ending for the book, symbolizing the great weight of the ring having been removed from Bilbo's character — he is now free to choose his own 'ending'.

The title of Bilbo's writings is There and Back Again: A Hobbit's Tale by Bilbo Baggins, while Frodo's is simply titled The Lord of the Rings by Frodo Baggins.

[edit] Other Uses

There And Back Again is also the title of a 1999 novel by the American author Pat Murphy, which reuses (and openly acknowledges) the plot of The Hobbit in a galaxy-spanning science-fiction setting.