I’d much rather follow someone like Bilbo than Frodo or Samwise, precisely because Frodo and Samwise are a bit dull sometimes and often lack complexity. He’s a joy to follow, whether he’s battling Gollum in a game of riddles, or being captured by orcs, or even selling out his fellow companions. Instead, Bilbo is opportunistic, arrogant, selfish, untruthful, and so much more. He’s not selfless, he’s not tortured, he isn’t perfect. In The Hobbit, however, Bilbo is a truly fascinating character. Aragorn is the perfect prince, the heir to the throne Frodo is the tortured soul doing something he wasn’t interested in Samwise is the loyal, and kind, servant who helps selflessly all the time, etc. This isn’t to say that the characters in Lord of the Rings are bad necessarily, but they’re certainly much more vanilla. Now, another reason that The Hobbit is better is because the characters are better. All of these places are new, and they’re all fascinating.

From the Misty Mountains with their Stone Giants, to the beautiful Rivendell with Elrond, to the Lonely Mountain which the dwarves pine for constantly. The world Bilbo is in is one that’s new, one that nobody had ever been to before, the beginning of something great. It’s such a basic story, but Tolkien makes it feel fresh. The mission is to defeat Smaug the Dragon, take back the dwarves home, and recoup their gold (in Tolkien’s universe, dragons are greedy and attracted to gold and other types of wealth). Bilbo Baggins leaves home to go on an adventure with a troop of dwarves (the start of the Hero’s Journey). A page turner, never lacking in action, but at the same time thoughtful.

The Hobbit was originally written as a children’s book, and that’s why when you read it it’s so easy to get through. (To clarify, that is not to say that I don’t love Lord of the Rings as well.) For far too long, people have been looking at The Hobbit in conjunction with Lord of the Rings, when in fact it should be studied on its own, as a work of literature as well as fantasy. In fact, for years I’ve been saying that The Hobbit is by far a superior novel. But, Lord of the Rings is not Tolkien’s best work. Robert Plant even went as far as to name his dog Aragorn. Rowling, or bands, like Led Zeppelin, or numerous others have been inspired by Lord of the Rings. “Names always suggest a story in my mind eventually I thought I’d better find out what hobbits are like.”įor years, The Hobbit has been overshadowed by Tolkien’s most famous work The Lord of the Rings. and I wrote on it: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit,’” he said. “One of the candidates had mercifully left one of the pages with no writing on it.

The way Tolkien remembered it, he had the idea one day while he was grading examination. Tolkien’s first published work, The Hobbit was written as a children’s book. Eighty years ago last Thursday, The Hobbit by J.R.R.

Hobbit and lord of the rings books