The Hobbit

For the last two decades "The Hobbit" for me has been the "Jackson Hobbit." I knew that Peter took breathtaking liberties, but on the whole I was surprised at how different Tolkien's and Jackson's Hobbit were.

It has been said how our visual perception of the works have been overwhelmed by the Jackson films. Virtually anything drawn of the characters now bears a resemblance, wanted or no, I suspect, of their actors now. I had a similar, though interesting, aspect of this happen during my read-through of "The Annotated Hobbit."

One of the things I strongly remember from my first readings as a teenager is that Bilbo strongly changed as the journey went on. He started as a "silly hobbit" as the tale began, and grew into a much more noble and serious character. While I couldn't think that I was the only person to see that, no one ever mentioned it to me. In fairness, it probably didn't come up in conversation. Imagine my surprise, then, on reading Tolkien's Letter #131 where he says, "...and in fact [...] the tone and style change with the Hobbit's development, passing from fairy-tale to noble and high and relapsing with the return." I never saw any relapsing, but it was nice to know I wasn't imagining things.

How did this effect my current read-through? Well, as I and others have mentioned the Jackson films have largely taken over our mental imagery of the characters. However, interestingly, as my read-through began, it was not Martin Freeman's Bilbo I saw, but rather Orson Bean's Bilbo from the 1977 Rankin and Bass "The Hobbit." I actually tried to make myself see Freeman, but it always went back to Bean. Amazingly about halfway through Ch. X, "A Warm Welcome," and the Company's arrival in Lake-town, I realized that my mental image had shifted on its own to Freeman, and that this shift corresponded to me seeing the change in Bilbo's character.

The read-through worked out well. Now we're off to "The History of the Hobbit."