Читать книгу An A-Z of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit - Sarah Oliver - Страница 32

Tolkien found the epic poem Beowulf one of his ‘most valued sources’. Several comparisons can be made between what happens in The Hobbit and what takes place in Beowulf.

Some scholars and Tolkien fans see The Hobbit as being a parable of the First World War. When directing the movies, Guillermo del Toro spent weeks doing as much research as he could on World War I to understand Tolkien’s mindset. Some people think of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books as being fantasy novels, but Peter Jackson confided in Mirror journalist Sasha Stone: ‘Tolkien never thought he was making fantasy. He loved English sagas and the Norse sagas, and he found that England had lost its mythology.’

After The Hobbit was released, Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis wrote in The Times: ‘The truth is that in this book a number of good things, never before united, have come together: a fund of humour, an understanding of children, and a happy fusion of the scholar’s with the poet’s grasp of mythology. The professor has the air of inventing nothing. He has studied trolls and dragons at first hand and describes them with that fidelity that is worth oceans of glib “originality”.’

W.H. Auden felt it was ‘one of the best children’s stories of this century.’

There have been many Hobbit adaptations over the years. The first stage adaptation took place in March 1953 at St Margaret’s School, Edinburgh. It was performed by girls, which is rather strange as there are no female characters in the book. There was a BBC Radio 4 adaptation in 1968 and a year later the first movie adaptation came out (it was 12 minutes long, with cartoon stills). A comic-book adaptation was released in 1989 and the following year a one-volume edition was published. In 1977, an animated TV movie version was released and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. In the past three decades, there have been numerous video and computer games based on The Hobbit.

It is thought that as many as 100 million copies of The Hobbit could have been sold since the very first print run in 1937. First editions are so highly sought after that a signed copy can go for over £60,000 ($94,212) at auction.

During an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Guillermo del Toro summed up The Hobbit book. He said: ‘It is a very different book than the trilogy. It is a book that is written from a start of innocence and an ending of disappointment. The ending of The Hobbit is quite bittersweet, quite melancholic in a way. The exposure of Bilbo to the war is the exposure of a generation of English men to World War I.

‘The reason why I connect with The Hobbit is because it’s all seen from a really humble, honest, little guy point of view. I’m not saying Bilbo is a child, I don’t think he is, but he is a very sheltered character and I love the journey.’

In an interview with Total Film, Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh also summed up The Hobbit and discussed how it differs from The Lord of the Rings books. Peter said: ‘The Hobbit is very much a children’s book and The Lord of the Rings is something else; it’s not really aimed at children at all. I realised the characters of the dwarves are the difference – their energy and disdain of anything politically correct brings a new kind of spirit to it. The dwarves give it a kind of childish, comedic quality that gives us a very different tone from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.’

Fran added: ‘We always saw The Hobbit more in the golden light of a fairytale; it’s more playful. But by the time you get to the end, Tolkien is writing himself into that place where he can begin that epic journey of writing LOTR [Lord of the Rings], which took, as he put it, his life’s blood. All those heavier, darker themes which are so prevalent in the later trilogy start to come [more] into play in There and Back Again.’