Bilbo’s heroic deeds are all the more remarkable because they fail to change him. He possesses a new confidence and a drastically widened perspective on the world, to the point that he now prefers the company of elves and wizards to that of other hobbits. Much of The Hobbit explores the contrast between the world in ancient epics that Tolkien studied as a scholar and the modern, English world in which he lived. The novel closes with a compromise between the two worlds: Bilbo goes on living amid the comforts of Bag End, but he passes his time reading and writing about adventure and conversing with characters from his heroic quest. In a way, this image is a concise symbol of Tolkien himself, living his comfortable life at Oxford while immersed in the grim violent imaginative realm of heroic literature, which he both studied and wrote.