hobbits are real.

My sister had eleven pages left of the first chapter of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit when my mom began to get excited about hobbits and dwarves.

That's when my sister looked up and asked sincerely, "Are they real?"

I giggled, not intending to make fun of her thought process, but because I wanted to (and almost did) reply, "Yes. Of course."

Of course, there are such things as hobbits with furry feet that live in a beautiful and magical place called The Shire.  Of course, there are such things as wise wizards and dwarves and dragons.

Beneath and on and under and in between the pages of a book are creatures and adventures and entire worlds.  In fact...

In Cornelia Funke's Inkspell, Orpheus explains, "This book taught me, once and for all, how easily you can escape this world with the help of words!  You can find friends between the page of a book, wonderful friends!  Friends like you, fire-eaters, giants, fairies..." 

And Mo teaches Meggie that "[s]tories never really end . . . even if the books like to pretend they do. Stories always go on.  They don't end on the last page, any more than they begin on the first page . . . Isn't it odd how much fatter a book gets when you've read it several times? . . . As if something were left between the pages every time you read it.  Feelings, thoughts, sounds, smells . . . and then, when you look at the book again many years later, you find yourself there, too, a slightly younger self, slightly different, as if the book had preserved you like a pressed flower . . . both strange and familiar."

My sister was right in her thinking.  I hope she continues to believe in hobbits and learns to love jumping into the pages of books just like me.