Book #66: The Hobbit

[miyyu]

I listened to The Hobbit as an audio book. It's been years, and I was a little saddened that the story didn't quite live up to my memories. I found the dwarves both annoying and a little stupid. Thorin was especially difficult. It was hard to see him as an inspirational but misguided leader. Rather, he came across more as a pompous, entitled

Comments

Singer, not the song?

[ed_rex]

Or rather, reader? I agree that among The Hobbit's weaknesses were the Dwarves' rather implausible incompetence (not to mention the narrative's huge reliance on coincidence and luck to get Bilbo from one scrape to the next, but I wonder if your problem with Thorin doesn't at least in part lie with the reader.

To my mind, Thorin's part in the story was among its best elements; he was inspirational to the Dwarves, but I think Tolkien meant him to seem "a pompous, entitled windbag".

When you think of it, The Hobbit is almost as strange a novel as The Lord of the Rings. Most of the action takes place off-stage, including the killing of Smaug (by a bit-player, no less!) and Bilbo's most heroic act is to betray his erstwhile employers in the name of stopping a battle.

Tolkien was still working on his craft as a story-teller, but I think a lot of what bothers a reader now (besides the fact he wrote it for children) was that he was trying for a moral complexity that confuses hell out of those of us expecting a straight-ahead adventure

Re: Singer, not the song?

[miyyu]

You make a good point. It's like any other pivotal work - when you're the first to do something, in retrospect things look trite or overly simple because of everything else that has come after.

[miyyu]

I wished I could have skipped them with this. Not only did he sing them, he sang the slowly. Ugh.