Week 6

I had seen the Hobbit many times on the screen before with the animated movies, and the new live action movies that recently released. But I never really sat down and just read through the book so this class gave me a great opportunity to do just that. The book was very easy to become absorbed into, thanks to its believable environment and vast cast of characters. Everything, from the descriptive writing, the thought put into the elven language and other languages in the book, the lore/history of the world Tolkien had created for us, made the book so easy to become invested in and believable. I really felt like I was “escaping “ when I was reading it, just like the first time I read Harry Potter books, or Narnia, or the Eragon books. The reason the Hobbit makes a great fantasy story is due the mythical element that Tolkien created so well for us, along with Bilbo’s development in the hero’s journey of the book. Although the book may seem to have unnecessary parts that drag on, the small “unnecessary” details are, to me, what make the story feel epic and worth reading. It wouldn’t really be such an epic journey for the main character and the reads if everything that happened was just a plot point or something of major importance. Reading through the small parts gave the big parts that much more value, which in turn made it more epic for me. Like when I read through a small boring passage before getting to the part where Bilbo finds the ring or answers the riddle, or meets Smaug, it just made it so much more heroic and intense for me.