“There is more in you of good than you know, child of the kindly West. Some courage and some wisdom, blended in measure. If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”
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Somehow Tolkien continues to take my breath away. I’ve been reading a lot more novels lately, across a wide variety of genres, but I decided to go back to my “reading-roots” and dive in The Hobbit, which I hadn’t read over ten years. And immediately I remembered why I liked Tolkien so much. When it comes to writing and world-building, no one does it better than Tolkien, not before, and certainly not after him. Stepping into The Hobbit was like stepping into my childhood all over again. It was like hearing Howard Shore’s Concerning Hobbits, you know, that iconic song from the film franchise that starts up with the warbling flute that flutters over the Shire and causes goosebumps to lick up your spine and all the hair on your arms to stand on end. Man… there’s nothing like Tolkien.
I have absolutely no complaints about The Hobbit, but I will say (and probably to much controversy) that I enjoy The Hobbit films more than the book. The films just tie the world in a little tighter with the one fleshed out in The Lord of the Rings. It delves deeper into the characters of Bilbo, Thorin, and Fili, but most importantly the films portrays the Attack on Dol Guldur, in which the White Council confronts the “Necromancer” in the south of Mirkwood, discovers him to be Sauron, and drives him out. It features Galadriel (one of my favourite characters of all time) using her full power to drive back the evil Maia and it is glorious. A lot of people aren’t fans of the liberties director Peter Jackson took with The Hobbit movies, but I loved them. Just like I loved this book.
This won’t be the last time I read The Hobbit, and definitely won’t be my last visit to Middle Earth.
