Dec 16, 2009

Hobbit; or, There and Back Again | Characters

At the beginning of The Hobbit most of the characters come across as comic and lightweight. Bilbo Baggins seems little more than a conservative but good-natured innocent. The dwarves are humorous, bumptious and a bit crusty. Even their leader, Thorin Oakenshield, King in exile, has at most a modicum of dignity. Gandalf, the wizard who is to become an almost allegorical symbol of good in The Lord of the Rings, is mysterious, but behaves more like a stage magician or flimflam man than a figure of real power. As the novel progresses, however, all of the characters, through...