Skip to main content

The Hobbit

The reading for this week, under the category of the Heroic Journey, was The Hobbit by J.R. Tolkein. The most memorable aspect of this novel is the mythical creatures. Every part of this novel is filled to the brim of interesting and unusual characters, including hobbits, dwarves, goblins, gollums, and many other talking animals as well as shape-shifting creatures. Each creature has it's own set of interesting characteristics in the way they, talk, act, and think. The main character, the hobbit, for example, is very nervous-minded and is constantly comparing his situation to how it would be more comfortable at home. The wizard, Gandolf, is depicted as wise and stern in his manner, and purely set on his one objective of guiding the troop of dwarves and Bilbo. The goblins are depicted as nasty creatures that rule part of the land, and hunt ferociously. These descriptions are what lead the story, keeping you interested in what creature might appear next along their journey. Particularly the personification of the animals was interesting and something that I enjoyed reading. The eagles were another great example of that personification, because they were described as being able to communicate with the dwarves, hobbit, and wizard. They were seen as strong yet terrifying to all of the other creatures of the land, including the tribe of travelers, as well as the goblins and wolves. This personification of the animals, and their unusual character are a defining part to the fantasy genre as a whole. It seems as though many of these types of stories have dwarves, elves, wizards, goblins, fairies, or talking animals, shape-shifters, or even dogs that can fully stand and serve food on their own. These characters are what gives the genre a mystical and intriguing storyline to follow. Overall, I liked the novel and the fact that it was unlike most of what I've read before (since I haven't read much fantasy), but I found it a bit slow even though it was a short novel.

Comments

  1. Backstory BenOctober 8, 2019 at 5:47 AM

    The world-building in The Hobbit is legendary for sure! That's one thing about the franchise that I love as well! I didn't pick up that the different characteristics of each of the species actually had story relevance though, so that's an interesting find.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Mona Lisa Overdrive

Discuss the types of reality rendered in the works you read and watched for this week's assignment. Describe the effects of this reality on the narrative and the implications for the presumed reader.  Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson is a multi-narrative science fiction novel that takes place in what seems like the distant future. Like many other novels of this genre, the reader is thrown in without explanation and is constantly trying to keep up and figure out what's happening. While this was new and intriguing at the beginning of the novel, I found this very hard to follow throughout and stay interested in. The realities in this novel seem very convoluted and obscure, with terms like cyberspace and stims filling the scene. Every narrative in this novel has a completely different setting, and tone that for a long time in the book it seems as though they are not connected at all. I think that the effects of this technologically enhanced reality opens a lot of ideas fo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Bloodchild

Discuss how the text(s) you read for this week's assignment did or did not reflect the values and perspectives of majoritarian culture. This piece did not reflect the values and perspective of majoritarian culture in the ways that it was portrayed as distinctly alien, and that humans were the invaders of another planet, and that in order to survive, humans had to have relationships with alien creatures that laid eggs inside of our intestines and organs. This storyline specifically is not something that people tend to think of on an everyday basis. The young main character of the story being chosen as the one to carry the alien babies, and going back and forth on whether to go through with it or not, is ultimately somehow a little bit closer to how we think. If there is any major decision we have to make as humans, it is often dragged out and thought over the possibilities many times before finalizing anything, let alone if other people's lives are at stake. This piece does re...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Aquatic Uncle

This week we are attempting to distinguish between writing in genre and writing that may use elements of the genre but that is essentially literary. Discuss this question in relation to the work(s) you read for this week. Do you think this is an important or necessary distinction, or not? Is your experience of the text affected by these questions? This short story to say the least was, disturbing. However, I do not think that disturbing, in this case, is necessarily bad. In The Aquatic Uncle by Italo Calvino, there are many boundaries and limits being pushed and bent. While this piece can likely be considered science fiction or fantasy short story, there is a certain amount of glory and risk in that it doesn't try that hard to be either of these things. It has the elements in science fiction through the biological nature of the story, and how much of it is based on a singular scientific theory. How this information is applied and reused is a completely different story. The disti...
Post a Comment
Read more