Tag: Hobbit
-
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…
-
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…
-
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.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…