Editing Hobbit (section)

=== Moral significance ===

The Tolkien critic [[Paul H. Kocher]] notes that Tolkien's literary techniques require readers to view hobbits as like humans, especially when placed under moral pressure to survive a war that threatens to devastate their land.{{sfn|Kocher|1974|pp=106, 119}} [[Frodo Baggins|Frodo]] becomes in some ways the symbolic representation of the conscience of hobbits, a point made explicitly in the story "[[Leaf by Niggle]]" which Tolkien wrote at the same time as the first nine chapters of ''The Lord of the Rings''.{{sfn|Kocher|1974|pp=144–151}} Niggle is a painter struggling against the summons of death to complete his one great canvas, a picture of a tree with a background of forest and distant mountains. He dies with the work incomplete, undone by his imperfectly generous heart: "it made him uncomfortable more often than it made him do anything".<ref name="Dublin Leaf" group=T>{{cite journal |author=Anon |title=[Review:] Tolkien, J. R. R. ''Leaf by Niggle'' |journal=[[The Dublin Review]] |year=1945 |issue=January 1945 |page=216}}</ref> After discipline in [[Purgatory]], however, Niggle finds himself in the very landscape depicted by his painting which he is now able to finish with the assistance of a neighbour who obstructed him during life. The picture complete, Niggle is free to journey to the distant mountains which represent the highest stage of his spiritual development.<ref name="Dublin Leaf" group=T/> Thus, upon recovery from the wound inflicted by the Witch-King of Angmar on [[Weathertop]], [[Gandalf]] speculates that the hobbit Frodo "may become like a glass filled with a clear light for eyes to see that can".{{sfn|Kocher|1974|p=108}} Similarly, as Frodo nears [[Mount Doom]] he casts aside weapons and refuses to fight others with physical force: "For him struggles for the right must hereafter be waged only on the moral plane".{{sfn|Kocher|1974|p=108}}