Although Bilbo is given a genealogy that accounts for the conflicts in his character and there are references to his deceased parents, there is no sexuality in The Hobbit. In fact, there are no female hobbits in The Hobbit. Romantic love does not exist, although friendship, affection, and respect are important values enacted among the male characters. In this sense, the story very much resembles traditional adventure stories for boys, like Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, and is markedly different from traditional English novels that ended in happy marriages — even novels that were also the stories of questing boys, like Charles Dickens's Great Expectations and David Copperfield.
There is magical power in The Hobbit, but not much divine power. Readers have commented on the fact that Tolkien presents in this book and in The Lord of the Rings trilogy a very complete, unified vision of the world, but there is no sense of a Judeo-Christian God — or any god — presiding over it. No religious worship is depicted, and while that may not necessarily seem odd, keep in mind that Tolkien's Catholicism was extremely important to him. In addition, the quest theme that forms the basis for The Hobbit traditionally has at least a spiritual component. Despite this, or perhaps because of it, The Hobbit depicts a coherent moral system in which good and evil are synonymous with easily understood human virtues and sins, characters exercise free will, and good triumphing triumphs, in the end.
Tolkien wrote The Hobbit in an effort to integrate two literary interests, a mythology of England and stories for his children. His academic expertise in ancient literatures and languages familiarized him thoroughly with the old northern myths and epics, including Beowulf and Icelandic sagas. He began writing a mythology of England in the 1920s; he was discouraged from publishing it and, although he continued to work on it throughout his life, it was not until after his death that The Silmarillion was published (1977), edited by his son. The stories he began telling his young children for simple entertainment were naturally elaborated with time and overlaid with details and patterns from the old literature he knew so well. These are the stories that were refined and published as The Hobbit, and it is thus not surprising that they resonate with hints and echoes of material beyond Tolkien's conscious control.
