Themes In The Hobbit By J. R. R. Tolkien

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The Hobbit is a treasured and cherished children’s book, but the work is frequently ignored by adults who demote it to the nursery bookshelf and hand it down to younger siblings or store it away for the next generation. J.R.R. Tolkien was so successful at alluring to children through The Hobbit that it has a tendency to stay locked into the genre of children’s stories and sometimes even devoted Tolkien fans abandon it when they mature and so they move on to The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. It is true that The Hobbit was written with an audience of children primarily in mind. The Hobbit was originally told as a bedtime story for J.R.R. Tolkien’s children. However, it should not be assumed that it is just a child’s book. In The Hobbit, Tolkien deals with a …show more content…

One theme is the prejudice against the other races and their mutual hatreds. There are seven races mentioned in the book: hobbits, dwarves, elves, humans, trolls, goblins, and wargs. Thorin and his posse, composed of Fili, Kili, Dwalin, Balin, Oin, Gloin, Ori, Dori, Nori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur, are dwarves. The narrator portrays dwarves unfavorably in Chapter 12, noting their greed and trickery. Some, however, are “decent enough people like Thorin and Company, if you don’t expect too much” (Tolkien 235). Another race are the elves, who were the first creatures in Middle-earth. Elves are immortal unless killed in battle, they are fair-faced, with beautiful voices, and have a close communion with nature. There are actually two different types of elves: the wood elves and the high elves. Humans appear in the settlement of Lake Town near the Lonely Mountain. Tolkien emphasizes their mortality, their lack of wisdom, their discordance with nature, and their rampant feuding, but he does not describe humans as inherently evil in the same way that he characterizes goblins and

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