The Hobbit is the definition of the classic Hero’s Journey, and what makes it stand out from almost everything else, is how it balances between a typical fairy tale and a teenage fantasy adventure. To the most part it is a silly journey through dangers that feel insignificant because of heavy doses of plot armor, before the last third subverts everything and becomes an internal conflict where major characters die.
But until that part came, I wasn’t enjoying it. To this day I have no idea why Gandalf chose Bilbo as a burglar when he didn’t have any experience or showed any interest to go on adventures. The characterization of the dwarves was awful, since there were so many of them and had no individuality. You could remove all of them but the leader and it wouldn’t make a difference, besides taking out a lot of filler. The monsters they encounter were always being outsmarted by Gandalf and nobody from the good guys was getting hurt. The songs were stupid, the riddles made no sense, and the eagles were the laziest deus ex machina ever.
My interest began to peak after Bilbo found the ring that made him invisible and Gandalf left the team to go investigate some ruins. Up until then, Bilbo was excess baggage; only after he was given magic powers and removing the other magic user from the scene, he was allowed to be useful. It was a cheap combo of a power up filling the spot of an absent power house, but it definitely made the story more engaging.
The subversion I mentioned has to do with the seemingly final boss, the dragon guarding the treasure inside the mountain. You would think the story will end with Bilbo outsmarting Smaug and everybody sharing the loot, but turns out the dragon began burning down the town nearby, before getting killed by someone not in the main team. And if that wasn’t enough, everybody was about kill each other over who gets to keep all of the treasure. Now that’s some serious shit.
Unfortunately, that situation is resolved when some orcs begin to attack and everybody needs to work together for defeating them. Yeah, just throw in a common enemy so the power of friendship can save the day. At least some characters finally died in the finale to prove this wasn’t a playground. Hobbit is as a whole a very uneven in style book but it became a great opening for the following trilogy.
The Lord of the Rings is the best epic fantasy story ever told, and screw anyone who still thinks the Game of Thrones is better. It is taking the Hobbit and improves everything about it. Frodo had all the reason to leave his home, the ring has a super negative effect every time you use it, everybody can become corrupted at any moment, and every member of the team has his own personal contribution to the story. The world building is fantastic, the plot is not linear, the roster of characters is huge, and most of them are very memorable.
Is it a perfect story? No it’s not. The bad guys like Sauron and his ring wraiths have no characterization, the descriptions of the areas tend to be way too long, the Eagles are still there to ruin all the fun, and Gandalf’s resurrection was bullshit. If you don’t dig the world building, the lore, and the rather simple internal struggles of the main characters, you are not going to enjoy this.
This counts double for if you ever bother to read the Silmarillion, which is essentially an anthology of the most important events in the history of Middle Earth, from its creation, and up until the end of the third age. There is plot continuity but the characters change all the time and there are hundreds of weird names of locations, people, and various terminologies concerning the cosmology, and the theology of this setting.
Speaking of which, it’s nice to see how Tolkien was heavily inspired by his country. Christianity, the lifestyle of Great Britain, and Scandinavian folklore and obvious pools of imagination to draw from. Hell, he spent his life creating his own language based on it. But he also threw in a lot of events from his life as well, such as the destructive technology used in WW2, nature that is slowly dying for resources, and the ever present eagles being the saviors of the war in the form of the American army. He merged his lifestyle and life experiences into a story that connected with people of his generation, just like Harry Potter did decades later. The only difference is, Harry Potter is garbage, while Middle Earth is amazing.
And as I said, it’s not a perfect story, it’s just that the pros outnumber the cons by a lot. I didn’t like how the bad guys were evil for the sake of it, and how little characterization they had because of that, but compared to the convoluted motivations other stories have, were all characters are stupid assholes who change sides every ten pages, I prefer the straightforward personalities of Middle Earth. There is a lot of magic and it’s usually used for convenience but it is consistent on how it works. They do not forget how to use it, or change the rules in later events. There is no instant mind control spell, or time travel to turn everything into a joke.
Reading Middle Earth is about empowerment fantasy, as it is about the genuine feelings of a man who dedicated his life in creating the basis of modern fantasy. There is no pretence in it, nothing that betrays its initial vision, or to make the reader feel cheated when it’s over. It has issues that could have been fixed rather easily, but they are not enough to dethrone it from being the best fantasy story ever told. I tried out dozens others, none of which was remotely as memorable or captivating.