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Dec. 26th, 2012 04:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bloodygranuaileSo, unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard that Peter Jackson has made a movie adaptation of the first third or so of The Hobbit, which I did see, and I do have Thoughts about it, but that's not what I'm writing here today. This here blog is primarily about books, and since I am a big ole nerd, I decided it was imperative that I reread The Hobbit so that I could nitpick with maximum accuracy, and I did so.
My main two impressions are as follows:
1: I still adore The Hobbit and think it is awesome.
2: This is so obviously not the kind of story Tolkien is comfortable writing, like, at all.
Tolkien is very lucky that Britishness in general reads as being totally adorable all the time, because the writing in The Hobbit is wicked stilted. Tolkien's attempts at being funny are always a little stiff, and frequently a bit obscure (does anyone know what "attercop" means and why it is insulting? Did you know WHEN YOU WERE EIGHT?). Thirteen dwarves is way the hell too many, and there isn't enough time to even begin characterizing half of them, so at the end the only ones I feel I have any idea who the hell they might be are Thorin, Fili, Kili, Bombur, Balin, and Dwalin, and even then Fili and Kili are basically a single unit. The elves in The Hobbit are way goofier than the ones in The Lord of the Rings, even when they are the same elves. I had forgotten that the trolls had silly alliterative common names--they are like Bert and Bill and Bob, or something--and that nearly every time our intrepid heroes are in mortal danger, SOMEBODY starts singing. The structure of the plot is actually fairly weak, which I never noticed before--the quest is full of random dangerous detours and getting-attacked-by-thingies and about 80% of them are resolved Gandalf ex machina. Thorin is frequently described as "basically decent" and as being on the side of Good rather than of Evil, but his actual shown-not-told characterization could charitably be described as "a complete dickbag."
All that said, The Hobbit is still cute and epic at the same time, and Bilbo Baggins is still one of the greatest Unlikely Heroes ever written. And I still think that joke about the invention of golf is hilarious.
My main two impressions are as follows:
1: I still adore The Hobbit and think it is awesome.
2: This is so obviously not the kind of story Tolkien is comfortable writing, like, at all.
Tolkien is very lucky that Britishness in general reads as being totally adorable all the time, because the writing in The Hobbit is wicked stilted. Tolkien's attempts at being funny are always a little stiff, and frequently a bit obscure (does anyone know what "attercop" means and why it is insulting? Did you know WHEN YOU WERE EIGHT?). Thirteen dwarves is way the hell too many, and there isn't enough time to even begin characterizing half of them, so at the end the only ones I feel I have any idea who the hell they might be are Thorin, Fili, Kili, Bombur, Balin, and Dwalin, and even then Fili and Kili are basically a single unit. The elves in The Hobbit are way goofier than the ones in The Lord of the Rings, even when they are the same elves. I had forgotten that the trolls had silly alliterative common names--they are like Bert and Bill and Bob, or something--and that nearly every time our intrepid heroes are in mortal danger, SOMEBODY starts singing. The structure of the plot is actually fairly weak, which I never noticed before--the quest is full of random dangerous detours and getting-attacked-by-thingies and about 80% of them are resolved Gandalf ex machina. Thorin is frequently described as "basically decent" and as being on the side of Good rather than of Evil, but his actual shown-not-told characterization could charitably be described as "a complete dickbag."
All that said, The Hobbit is still cute and epic at the same time, and Bilbo Baggins is still one of the greatest Unlikely Heroes ever written. And I still think that joke about the invention of golf is hilarious.