The Hobbit, or, There and Back Again Themes

There clearly is Good and Evil in Tolkien's world. He even bothers to capitalize that the elves are Good People. "Good" races like the elves and "bad" races like the Wargs seem to suggest that mora...

Cunning and cleverness are major parts of Norse mythology – just consider the trickster god, Loki – so we aren't surprised that it plays a big part in the Norse-inspired Hobbit. At the...

Loyalty in The Hobbit is often based on race. The goblins swear revenge against the dwarves because the dwarves have killed the Great Goblin. The elves and the dwarves have a long-standing mutual h...

The first thing we know about Bilbo (and Elrond and Beorn) is that they have homes. And one of the defining characteristics of Thorin and Gollum is that they do not have permanent homes (or else, t...

There are big, brave guys in The Hobbit like Bard who seem to have no doubts about their courage or ability in this world. Bard represents the human armies of Lake-town, he directly confronts Thori...

In his preface to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien writes: I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and have always done so since I grew old and wary enough to de...

The famous director Alfred Hitchcock coined a term that is still widely used today: the MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is the thing that the hero or heroine of a film is looking for. It could be anything:...

The setting of The Hobbit is intimately connected to its tone and plot developments. So when Bilbo moves out of his home territory and into foreign lands, the landscape gets dark, dreary, and cold....