The Hobbit follows Bilbo Baggins and his encounters with industrious dwarves, cunning elves, and various monsters that would have made the Grimm brothers cringe, a strange wizard, and ultimately, the One Ring that serves as the basis for Tolkien’s literary giant trilogy The Lord of the Ring. Incidentally, The Hobbit is only the introduction to the Trilogy, but stands alone much better than other introductions to large artistic works like Lucas’s Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
Review
Tolkien’s books have an interesting dichotomy—some feel that they are books too difficult for many younger than college students to read, others feel that his tales of monsters, knights, magic and fairy-tale creatures are nothing other than blown up children’s stories. I have read The Hobbit, as well as the rest of the trilogy a total of five times. The first, my father read them aloud to me as a six-year-old. More recently, I read the entire trilogy plus The Hobbit over a long, cold weekend. Both times, as a young child, and a young adult, I was entranced by Tolkien’s tale, and I feel that anyone having not read the trilogy is missing out on a part of literary knowledge as large as perhaps a rudimentary understanding of Homer’s influence on Western literature.