
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien (1937; revised 1951 and 1966).
The Hobbit film trilogy: An Unexpected Journey (2012); The Desolation of Smaug (2013); The Battle of Five Armies (2014). Directed by Peter Jackson.
“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit”: That’s certainly an inauspicious beginning for a literary series that would eventually include one of the twentieth century’s best-known fantasy epics, even if the tale did, as its author J.R.R. Tolkien admitted, “grow in the telling.”
The Hobbit was published in 1937 and awarded a prize from The New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile fiction. I first read it when I was 7 years old, and it was the first book I remember reading without any pictures in it. To say I loved it would be an understatement—in many ways it was my first literary experience, along with the Alice and Oz books (none of which were as obviously “novels”). Bilbo Baggins (half a Took) would appear on the face of it an unlikely protagonist for a children’s novel, being a stout snob in his late fifties or thereabouts and inclined to a mild-mannered but clear disapproval of unexpected visitors—but I was entranced by his story and his growing role in it, by the way that this unimaginative and sensible person managed, convincingly and without too much butter, to get the best of a half-dozen terrors of increasing complexity and size. The mutton-gobbling trolls, the goblins of the Misty Mountains, Gollum (“I don’t know where he came from or who or what he was”), the giant spiders, the wood elves (ostensibly not villains but you could have fooled me), the dragon—it was an ever-swelling bestiary of increasingly unpleasant things from under the bed, and Bilbo’s generally commonsensical approach to dealing with them was a revelation.
The Hobbit’s protagonist is an unlikely protagonist; he sets off well after middle age has arrived and when he returns, he is less changed than tempered: Bilbo’s travails open up and illuminate his already formed character. By the book’s end, he has earned the cozy chair and garden whence he set forth, and the retiring aspects of his personality are reaffirmed as basic life values, those of home, hearth, and the happiness that comes with passing one’s old friends the tobacco jar—whether or not those old friends be wizards or dwarves. He is more resilient and more poetically minded, and he has lost his complacency (and, we are informed, his social reputation) but not at the cost of his essential nature. It is a telling detail that the novel’s subtitle is There and Back Again.
If Bilbo winds up Back Again pretty much where he started out from, the travels to There, at least, are among the most memorable in popular fiction. Tolkien spins a remarkably light and brightly colored skein with elements of George MacDonald, William Morris, and the Poetic Edda, interwoven with Norse mythology and the Brothers Grimm, and does so with a deft sense of timing and a matter-of-fact narrative tone that knits the details pretty much seamlessly together. Traditional motifs straight out of the classic fairy tale (the treasure-hoarding dragon, the various talking animals both good and bad) are bolstered with less familiar ones (the shape-shifting were-bear, Beorn) and, in the person (?) of Gollum, a completely new sort of antivillain. The “Riddles in the Dark” chapter, with Gollum’s hissing and sputtering and the increasingly frightening implications of the riddles themselves, provides the novel with both its fulcrum point and its strongest yet most subtly ironic encounter: a hobbit, a creature none of the other characters past Gandalf and Elrond seem to know exists, meets another creature absolutely no one knows exists and whose identity stumps even the narrator. What could these two small, lost beings discuss but riddles?
The book is not without its troubling elements: the lack of a single named female character is the most immediately noticeable of these, although perhaps less damaging than the portrayal of the dwarves, which comes uncomfortably close towards the end of the book to perpetuating various anti-Semitic stereotypes. There is also a tendency for Tolkien to introduce characters, places, and things only when we are right on top of them, and although this is much in keeping with the conventions of fables, it seems like a cheat in the case of the dragon-killing Bard of Dale. But the directness of the story, the elemental settings, and the sympathetic irony of the narrator’s voice minimize these flaws, and the work overall has a lantern-lit winsomeness that later readings have done surprisingly little to dim.
Yet if The Hobbit was my first literary experience, it also led directly to my first literary disappointment: on hearing that the book I had just finished had three immense volumes that followed, I was overjoyed at the prospect of returning to Middle-Earth. But when I cracked open The Fellowship of the Ring, I found it a humorless and sinister slog—Bilbo abruptly packed off to the backstory and the adventure full of ignorant armies clashing all too laboriously by night. The perils were remote and oracular, the poems dirges: only the first chapter retained The Hobbit’s affectionate sense of avuncular half-satire, with the enraged Lobelia Sackville-Baggins determined to get her hands on Bilbo’s spoons. Tom Bombadil might have fit comfortably into Bilbo’s world, but by the time that chapter rolled around, it was too little, too late for the expectations and attention span of 7-year-old me.
As I grew older, I returned to The Lord of the Rings and discovered the sonorous quality of its language and pacing, based on the ancient poetic and narrative forms that Tolkien studied and taught—but for all my later admiration for the work, there is somehow nothing in it that matches the fanciful poignancy of The Hobbit’s sojourning mishmash. The Hobbit is a classic in part because of what it is expressly not—a muscle-bound, episodic saga of the sort popularized by Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories for Weird Tales, which began to appear only a few years prior to The Hobbit—which is why the later development of Middle-Earth was to prove, for Tolkien as much as his readers, something of an unexpected journey in and of itself.
In the wake of The Hobbit’s great success, Tolkien’s publishers asked for a sequel: when Tolkien submitted chapters of what would later become The Silmarillion, they were rejected with the explanation that the public wanted more hobbits. Tolkien obliged with the outline of a work he titled The New Hobbit, which later became The Lord of the Rings. The new work was a popular success, and The Hobbit became an example of a work outpaced by its sequels to the extent that it can be difficult to see them as sharing more than a few coincidental details as regards names and places. Surely the Gandalf of The Hobbit with his “long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat” is a challenge to reconcile with the powerful seer of The Lord of the Rings, while the elves of Rivendell and the goblins of the Misty Mountains are so changed in the later works that one might think one must have imagined all those previous comic verse interludes.
The Lord of the Rings never quite operates at Cimmerian levels, but it is a true sword-hewn epic nonetheless, with its characters responding to a threat of apocalyptic evil. Frodo Baggins, when roused from Bag End, does not return to it the way Bilbo does, and his adventures are far more perilous to his sanity and sense of self. Compared with the lofty heroism of its sequel, The Hobbit can seem an exercise in bumbling venality—an attempt to regain a treasure for the mere sake of the cash. There is no question that Thorin Oakenshield, un-throned heir to the line of Thror, possesses a legitimate claim to both the halls and hoards of Erebor, but his willingness to engage a “burglar” in order to secure that claim, even one as grocer-like at first as Bilbo, puts him and his company on rather shifty moral ground. None of this bothered me at first reading, and none of it bothers me now, but the juxtaposition of Thorin’s aims and means with those employed in The Lord of the Rings were and are jarring enough that Tolkien himself set out to bring the first work more into line with its successor.
His first attempt at what we, in a less cohesive and constant age, call a retcon (“retroactive continuity”) was a stroke of understated genius. The 1937 first edition of The Hobbit had Gollum offer the ring that conferred invisibility to Bilbo as a prize for winning the riddle competition (if there was ever an unlikelier display of good sportsmanship...). Obviously, this would upset the course of later events greatly and Tolkien reworked the chapter—brilliantly—for the revised 1951 edition. Here the climax of the riddle game ends with “Thief! Thief, thief, Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!” Now there’s a send-off you can build a three-volume sequel on.
Yet for all the superiority of the revised chapter, it wasn’t until the new edition came out that Tolkien realized that his publisher had included it, while his attempt to completely rewrite the entirety of Bilbo’s story in 1960 to adjust it fully to the tone of the later books was abandoned after the third chapter when the publisher responded to Tolkien’s efforts with the opinion that “it just wasn’t The Hobbit.” (Tolkien did make minor changes for the third and final edition of The Hobbit in 1966, which accompanied the revision of The Lord of the Rings that he created to secure the American copyright.)
Over a half-century and one exceedingly troubled film history later, Peter Jackson’s latest trilogy is also not The Hobbit, although it comes close to showing what Tolkien may have attempted to do in 1960. A much-expanded version, bolstered with details from Tolkien’s various appendixes and shot through with foreshadowing of the events in Jackson’s own version of Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit has been segmented into three films each around two and a half-hours long: An Unexpected Journey, The Desolation of Smaug, and The Battle of the Five Armies. In taking this path, Jackson has faced down the great Catch-22 of his career: either film The Hobbit in the style of the book and create a tale wildly at odds with both Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and his previous treatment of same or attempt to bring the first book into the world of the later epic in terms of detail, structure, and mood. He has chosen, perhaps understandably, the latter path, and the results are a curate’s egg of roclike proportions. Jackson’s Hobbit is an exercise in gargantuan scale and pell-mell pacing that also features an affinity for the characters and their context that buttresses the whole from descending, at least immediately, into fiasco.
The change in tone is evident from the first time we see Thorin Oakenshield, heir of Thror of Erebor (played by Richard Armitage), here a noble young dwarf prince in place of the beard-wagging great-uncle type of the book, rousing the dwarves in the face of the dragon Smaug’s attack; this catastrophe is linked to the abandonment of the stricken dwarves by the Elvenking, Thranduil (Lee Pace), who refuses to come to their aid for fear of the dragon (and possibly out of resentment for the tribute of diamonds previously demanded of him by the court of Thror). This prologue sequence is a brisk and effective account of the collapse of a civilization: any snide asides about the dragon having “a good notion of the market value” of Erebor’s treasures are pinched well and truly in the bud, and as for elves greeting visitors with “O! Tra la la lalley! Down in the valley!”, you’d sooner find Winnie the Pooh and Piglet meeting them coming the other way.
So An Unexpected Journey continues with the droll tone of the book largely discarded in favor of a strange but not unappealing mix of rickety valor and gruesome prankishness. The dwarves are no bleating cowards in this version—the mildest of them, the grannyish Dori (Mark Hadlow) and his slightly lope-brained younger brother, Ori (Adam Brown), are brutally tough customers when necessary. They also act as if they’ve had past histories with each other, with the rough Dwalin (Gavin McTavish) and the kindly Balin (a wonderful performance from Ken Stott) literally butting heads in brotherhood. The quest for Erebor is more clearly a quest for repatriation rather than treasure, and the Arkenstone, a last-minute MacGuffin in the original, is here from the start a legal proof of kingly authority. Gandalf, equal parts vagrant, scallywag, and showman in the book, is here completely at one with the character we have seen in Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films (although certainly Ian McKellen contributes the lion’s share of making this so), and his absences from the narrative are grounded in Tolkien’s own later writing, including a visit to the White Council (Hugo Weaving, Cate Blanchett, and Christopher Lee, reprising their roles as Elrond, Galadriel, and Saruman, respectively). Bilbo himself may or may not be middle-aged, but as played by Martin Freeman, he is more physically adroit and less unthinkingly gluttonous than one is apt to picture the Bilbo of the book, and his relationships with the dwarves are varied from friendliness with the mischievous and rabbity Bofur (James Nesbitt), who returns his camaraderie and seems to see himself as Bilbo’s protector, to flinching in the face of the ill-disguised contempt with which the gruff Dwalin—and Thorin—initially regard him.
So far, so good, inasmuch as changes are to be made at all—the trilogy’s screenplays are by Jackson, Fran Walsh, Philippa Boyens, and Guillermo del Toro (who was originally set to direct), and An Unexpected Journey is an uneven but startling mix of psychological acuity and broad effects with its best parts coming in two stripes. The first, unsurprisingly enough, is when Jackson stays true to Tolkien’s original material. The “unexpected party” sequence with the arrival of the dwarves; their Brueghel-like feasting at Bilbo’s expense; their discussion of Smaug and their lost homeland; Bilbo’s annoyance, discomfiture and gradually awakening curiosity—all the components are present if not given line-for-line as in Tolkien’s text and culminate with the dwarves’ song of the fall of Erebor, a beautiful rendition alight with the wistful semi-spookiness that infused the same chapter in the book.
This is followed by a moment of the second stripe: when Jackson and his writers use the original material as a framework for a possibly more subtle exploration of the action. In Tolkien’s book Bilbo is relieved to be left behind by the dwarves the day following his unexpected party; Gandalf arrives, hat in hand, to more or less chase him into formation. The upshot of this is that Bilbo seems less to have joined the dwarves than to have been coerced by a wizard. In the film, Bilbo awakes to an empty (and spotless) house and there is a lovely moment when his relief gives way for just a few seconds to sadness: you can see his realization of his own loneliness and the dullness of his life stretching out before him. It makes his joining the troop more than the exhilarating rush out the door the next scene plays as—it makes it a conscious decision to move forward.
This balance of the original material with a more motivation-oriented interpretation of the characters leads to the best moment in all three films—the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum (Andy Serkis). Other than Gandalf, Gollum is the most significant character in The Hobbit to have a role in The Lord of the Rings, and the screenplay opens up his thought process astoundingly well, in part due to Serkis’s outstanding acting, to the uncanny design and animation of Gollum (who is more childlike here than in the Lord of the Rings films), and to a striking understanding of Gollum as a pathological type. The explicit division of the character into the needy, narcissistic, but lonely and oddly innocent Smeagol and the vicious, always conniving Gollum links Tolkien’s original account to Gollum/Smeagol’s later appearance in The Lord of the Rings without disturbing the riddle game itself as a gem-like set piece.
If the entire film trilogy had played out at this level, the most fervent admirer of the book might grudgingly concede a hard-won victory for Thorin & Company on the part of Jackson & Company and forgive what might otherwise have seemed a cynical decision to extend the length of the project to increase its ultimate box office. Unfortunately, the films are increasingly larded with action sequence trickery obviously there to keep the 3D punters marching in. In An Unexpected Journey, the Great Goblin (Barry Humphries) is a delight as is his sadistic parrying with Thorin, but the ensuing battle through the goblin city comes close to looking as if the participants get free gas with every Wilhelm scream. The famous fir tree sequence is here recast as an orgy of nightmarish violence between Thorin and an ancient foe, a massive, pale orc named Azog the Defiler (Manu Bennett). It’s an important moment in the story, showing both Gandalf’s limitations and Bilbo’s willingness to enter the fray sword-first, but it simply goes on too long for what it accomplishes, even if the rescue by the eagles gives us a hauntingly ethereal close to the battle.
By The Desolation of Smaug, we’re stuck in a nonstop and increasingly ludicrous demolition derby of dwarves, spiders, elves, and orcs that suggests nothing so much as a headache-inducing video game with points scored for every time elf warrior Legolas (Orlando Bloom) breaks the laws of physics. The subtle details, beautiful scenery, and ongoing character development of the first film are swept away, and, beyond a star turn by Lee Pace as the malicious Thranduil, nothing takes their place save motion sickness. In Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, the battle scenes were strategically conceived and shown as unfolding to complex but concrete plans; as Helm’s Deep was breached and siege laid to Gondor, it was possible to believe that the fate of nations hung in the balance. The eponymous Battle of Five Armies shows some of this sense of both enormousness and enormity, but the films in general and the second film in particular sag under needless assaults that often seem to go on longer than the interludes between them.
This ceaseless action in The Desolation of Smaug also kills what should have been the most terrifying sequence in all three films: the long trek through Mirkwood. This is one of the great Bad Places in fantastic fiction, the equal of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Great Grimpen Mire and Shirley Jackson’s Hill House, and the opening paragraph of the chapter where Thorin & Company enter the forest is worth quoting in full:
They walked in single file. The entrance to the path was like the sort of arch leading into a gloomy tunnel made by two great trees that leant together, too old and strangled with ivy and hung with lichen to bear more than a few blackened leaves. The path itself was narrow and wound in and out among the trunks. Soon the light at the gate was like a little bright hole far behind, and the quiet was so deep that their feet seemed to thump along while all the trees leaned over them and listened.
It is worth pointing out how well Tolkien manages this scene: all of the comfort of the previous chapter, an encounter with the rough but friendly skin-changer Beorn, is cast ruthlessly aside with the blunt isolation of the first sentence while the anthropomorphization of the trees in the final sentence is stripped entirely of whimsical or metaphoric association. We are in for a bad time in Mirkwood, and Bilbo and the dwarves know it from the start.
In place of this dread wilderness, the film gives us an all too visible forest topped up with zany acid-trip effects where the dwarves lose their way and then their heads in what seems like the first five minutes after entering. A crown of butterflies provides a dash of visual glitter, and then we’re back on the roller coaster. The giant spiders are marvelously realized—and more so when we realize that their voices, which Tolkien described as “thin and creaking,” are audible to Bilbo only once he slips on the ring. Alas, the sequence where he rescues the dwarves here consists of no more than his cutting them down from the cobwebs, at which point the dwarves defend themselves from the enraged monsters so effectively one wonders how they were caught off-guard in the first place.
The same problem mars the escape from the Elvenking’s halls. In the book, it is a true test of Bilbo’s endurance and wits. In the film Bilbo effects the initial barrel escape but all for naught: the guards are alerted, and the portals to the stream are closed. Had a subsequent orc attack not occurred, the dwarves would have again been prisoners, and what could have been a lyrical piece of light comedy becomes another tiresome battle.
The worst thing about this continual substitution of theme-park thrills—in place of the book’s actual honest-to-god burglary—is that in each case Bilbo’s determination and personal heroism are disastrously downplayed. By the time he finally comes face to face with Smaug (a wonderful creation, well voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch), Bilbo seems more of a quivering wreck than he was in the beginning; his hard-won accomplishments have been erased, and his badinage with the dragon, while reproduced almost entirely intact from the book, has been completely reversed in effect with Smaug clearly having the upper hand (or in this case, saurian claw). It is to Martin Freeman’s credit that he continues to make this version of Bilbo both believable and sympathetic, but he does not and cannot make him the focal point of the trilogy. His Bilbo may be one of the few fantasy heroes whose burst of initial derring-do devolves into basically knowing when to duck: if he’s not quite “the load,” he is certainly Bilbo Baggage.
Less corrosive on the whole, but far more offensive, is the addition of a romance subplot between Kili and a wholly invented character, Tauriel, a female captain of the elven guard in the court of Mirkwood. Evangeline Lilly does what she can with both the role and the dialogue as does Kili’s Aidan Turner, but neither of them can manage to avoid the preemptory dashes into bathos that their relationship involves, and Lilly, especially, looks as if she knows it. The Lady Arwen was a welcome addition to The Lord of the Rings’s male-dominated world and convincingly pulled her own weight on more than one occasion, but Tauriel’s sentimental inconstancy and soppy longing for Kili make the character a surprisingly reactionary and chauvinistic creation for all her ability with the sword and bow. When the addition of a female character is made simply as a love interest for a male character, the screenwriters may have done better to leave well enough alone.
In The Battle of Five Armies, the films regain their footing somewhat, even if a tag-team assault on Sauron at the ruined fortress of Dol Goldur on the part of Elrond, Galadriel, and Saruman suggests The Legend of Zelda more than it does The Hobbit. The destruction of Esgoroth, the death of Smaug, and the wretched aftermath of both are thrilling for all the right reasons. The gradual massing of the five armies is a respite from the random hacking and slashing going on and involves actual forces, distances, and strategies, including a brilliantly realized appeal to Thorin for peace from Bard the Bowman (Luke Evans, who brings a sense of reluctant experience to the role). Lee Pace’s Thranduil grows ever more glacially wrathful; if there was ever a nominal “good guy” who behaved more like a villain, it is hard to imagine it. In a refreshing change of affairs, Azog does not enter battle himself but commands it ably from a ruined tower. A scanty snowstorm lends an oddly calming touch without being overplayed visually or symbolically. Bilbo pulls off a nifty bit of larceny regarding the Arkenstone and handles himself admirably in a few scrapes (although never regaining his central role). A final battle between Thorin and Azog is handled with split-second timing and a moment of brilliant brinkmanship on Thorin’s part involving the properties of an ice floe. But even so there is a sense that the filmmakers have found the story only to lose the plot.
Loose endings are thicker than elf arrows: what becomes of the Arkenstone? What of Thrain, Thorin’s father, whom Thorin swears to Gandalf still lives? What becomes of Tauriel, bereft in the end of both love and homeland? Is Esgoroth rebuilt? What of the dragon’s curse on the treasure itself? Possibly these questions will be answered in the extended versions, but if so these “bonus scene” troves have become too much a repository for plot holes. Minor characters vanish into the chaos and are never seen again, while the dwarves have been reduced to a weirdy beardy blur. I don’t think even poor Bofur gets a chance to crack wise. Only Bilbo’s broken sob over the dying Thorin returns the films to the level of empathy with which they started.
Bilbo might well weep for the one thing that the films do bring home in a way that the book does not: that Thorin’s quest is profoundly a failure. Thorin himself is dead, and so are his sister’s sons, who would have continued his line; his court, such as it was, does not claim the Mountain—it passes to Thorin’s cousin, Dain. Beyond this every single character with the exception of Gandalf, Dain, Bilbo, and perhaps Radagast and Beorn, winds up dropped headfirst into the manure pile. Bard survives with his children, but whether Esgoroth rises again is left unclear; Thranduil never gets the diamonds he seeks and is estranged forever from his son, Legolas, who has lost Tauriel, who in turn has lost Kili. In their offensive against Sauron, Galadriel is weakened, Saruman is corrupted and Elrond given the mother of all migraines; the Master of Laketown, the Great Goblin, Smaug, Azog, and the spider colony are all wiped out along with countless elves, men, dwarves, and orcs; Gollum loses his precious, and Lobelia Sackville-Baggins never gets Bilbo’s spoons.
Are the Hobbit films failures as well? On the whole, I would say yes; despite the talent of the cast, the level of world building, and the clear affection (not to be confused with respect) which the writers and Jackson have for Tolkien overall, as it goes on The Hobbit trilogy feels an increasingly lumbering mess. Like the dwarves in Mirkwood, it begins by straying a short way from the original path and ends up unclear where or what it is. When the elderly Bilbo (Ian Holm, reprising his role from The Lord of the Rings) looks up in the last few seconds of the final film from his memoir at the sound of Gandalf’s voice, you could imagine his relief is that of the filmmakers—a return to the earlier film trilogy, when they were all on surer footing.
Yet there are enough details in the movies—the smoke dragon Gandalf sends flitting up Bilbo’s nose at the very start; the masterful riddle scene with Gollum; Thorin’s smoldering sorrow; Bofur’s cracked kindliness; Fili (Dean O’Gorman) and Kili sharing a crass joke at Bilbo’s expense and being reprimanded by Thorin; the tiny cackling scribe of the Goblin King, aloft on his little cable car; Balin’s tears of memory as the door to Erebor opens; Lee Pace’s spiteful Thranduil unmasking a hideous scar with which to cow Armitage’s equally defiant Thorin; the spiders gossiping among themselves; Smaug’s loathsomely aristocratic gloating; the horrendous destruction of Esgoroth—enough to make them, on the whole, a failure worthy of the attempt.
It may speak to the essential character of The Hobbit that Jackson was unable to bring it any further into alignment with Tolkien’s later works than Tolkien himself was. Certainly if Jackson can’t, it would be impossible to think who could—which means that the next time the book is adapted for film, whoever does so will be at liberty to stick to The Hobbit as The Hobbit and leave the appendices where they belong.
David Griffin lives in New York.
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