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Bilbo’s understated charisma is a quality common to many protagonists in children’s literature. Another quality he shares with many heroes of children’s literature is his small size: as a hobbit, Bilbo is only half the size of a man. At the beginning of the novel, Bilbo is, like most hobbits, comfortable and complacent.
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Where Smaug is the clear-cut antagonist, Thorin is the...
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The Hobbit revisits many of these ancient conventions with a...
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- The Hobbit
Bilbo unwittingly chooses two significant objects—the mithril shirt and the Arkenstone. Aware that Thorin wants the stone above all other things, Bilbo hides it, revealing Bilbo’s distrust of the gold-greedy dwarves. As Bilbo’s wisdom grows, the dwarves become more reckless. Greed surrounds Bilbo as the novel reaches its climax.
Like most hobbits, Bilbo is fond of the comforts of home and hearth: He loves good, simple food in abundance, and he loves his pipe and well-furnished hobbit-hole. The book opens, in fact, with Bilbo's smoking a pipe one morning just outside his home; shortly afterward, he finds himself serving high tea — including coffee, cakes, scones, jam, tart, and pies — to thirteen dwarves.
Arguably, Bilbo shows courage just by deciding to go on the quest in the first place. In Tolkien's mythos, hobbits are the everyman figures; they're homebodies who appreciate the good things in ...
The Hobbit is often compared to its sequels, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. The latter three novels were written after and directed towards the readers of The Hobbit who had grown up and were now prepared to read a much darker story about Middle-earth. These novels lack the same lighthearted and fun tone that J.R.R Tolkien uses in The Hobbit.
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The Hobbit: plot summary. Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit (a species of small creature which Tolkien invented) who lives in Bag End, in the rural loveliness of The Shire. The wizard Gandalf turns up one day, accompanied by thirteen dwarves, who are on a mission to reclaim their gold, as well as their kingdom, from beneath the Lonely Mountain.
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Books Related to The Hobbit. When readers think of The Hobbit it’s likely that they immediately connect it to The Lord of the Rings series for which Tolkien is best known. It takes place in the same universe, approximately 80 years before Frodo leaves on his own journey.
