Melissa Haworth-Cox
Assistant yeardisc editor
The movie “The Hobbit” covered the first six chapters of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel of the same name.
Overall, after reading the novel, I discovered that the movie was overall very accurate in its portrayal of Tolkien’s work.
The movie follows the novel very closely, therefore creating positive merit for the film in the eyes of Tolkien’s avid fans.
The story is about a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins who goes on an adventure with a party of dwarves and a wizard names Gandalf. In the adventure the party journeys to find The Lonely Mountain.
The Lonely Mountain was once the Great Dwarven Kingdom but fell to a mighty dragon now using it as its lair.
On their journey they encountered many dangerous creatures including: trolls, goblins and orcs.
The movie makes two characters more prominent in the story than the book.
Throughout the movie Azog is searching for Thorin, but in the book Azog is not mentioned more than once in passing at the beginning and never appears again.
In the movie the party met Radagast the Brown and he helped them in their escape from orcs. Radagast never appears and is only mentioned in passing in chapter seven of the book, which occurs after the events in the movie.
The film contradicts the book in several situations. The first is that in the film there is an explanation of the dwarves’ dislike of the elves. The dislike is that the elves did not come to the dwarves’ aid when their city collapsed however, this is not the explanation given in “The Hobbit” or any other Tolkien books.
The idea of the dwarves’ dislike of elves is explained by Tolkien in the novel “Children of Hurin” as a natural misunderstanding of the two species due to their differing interests.
Another contradiction was when the party made it to Rivendell in the film in which they portrayed as angering all the dwarves in the party; however in the book the whole party is relieved and happy to reach Rivendell safely.