Like many fantasy fans out there, I was eager to see Peter Jackson’s adaptation of The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien. I had some misgivings, though, since he had had to condense the weighty Lord of the Rings in many ways to make it fit into three still-epic movies (which I enjoyed), and seemed to be doing the opposite with The Hobbit — a slight volume aimed at children — by expanding it into, well… three epic movies.
Posts Tagged with Hobbit
Small folk, big decisions: Tolkien’s hobbits change the world
J.R.R. Tolkien may have created a vast fantasy world in which the footsteps of gods and monsters made its history tremble, but when it came down to the works he is best known for, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, the choices that carried the most weight were ultimately made by some of the smallest people in it: hobbits.
Although Tolkien began his rich history, cosmology, languages, and geography of Middle-earth in the myths that would be published posthumously as The Silmarillion, he gave special attention when writing The Hobbit to a scene which could have been just one of many episodes in the story.
Middle-earth music: The Return of the King
Composer Howard Shore draws from the themes he created for previous films in Peter Jackson’s adaptations of The Lord of the Rings for The Return of the King, and this score caps the trilogy off superbly.
Of barrow-wights and the Balrog: Tolkien brings horror to Middle-earth
Much is made of the differences in tone between J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and its eventual sequel, The Lord of the Rings. One was written for children, the other clearly was not. But what is the defining characteristic of Tolkien’s epic (and there may be more than one) that sets it apart from its child-friendly origins?
I’d venture to say it’s that Tolkien brings horror to Middle-earth.
Tolkien’s dwarvish (not dwarfish) names
For all that Tolkien devoted The Silmarillion to the vast history of the Elves (and, to a lesser extent, Men), it’s clear from The Hobbit (and in the characterization of Gimli in The Lord of the Rings) that he had a soft spot for Dwarves.
In the first place, Thorin Oakenshield isn’t the leader of a band of three or seven or even nine dwarves, but thirteen; and, remarkably, they all have personalities and relationships and are pretty well fleshed out for secondary characters.
But where did Tolkien find such distinctive dwarvish names as Fili, Kili, Dwalin, Oin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur, among others?
The total-nerd Tolkien reading plan
If you’ve never read Tolkien, you may be wondering where the ideal place is to start. Ironically, it’s not at the beginning.
Tolkien began working on the stories that would form the history and mythology of his Middle-earth while still a young man; he even worked on it sporadically as a soldier in the First World War. So those tales, eventually collected posthumously as The Silmarillion, are properly the beginning of the story of Middle-earth.
However, the first of the books to be published was The Hobbit, which is set in the Third Age of Tolkien’s world. (The Silmarillion, including the later portions which deal with Númenor, is mainly concerned with the First Age and Second Age, as well as the vast period before recorded history.)
