The Hobbit Summary: Bilbo Baggins, Thorin's Company and the Road to the Lonely Mountain
What The Hobbit is about
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again was published in 1937 and is J.R.R. Tolkien's children's fantasy novel set in Middle-earth. It follows Bilbo Baggins, a comfortable, home-loving hobbit who wants nothing at all to do with adventures. The wizard Gandalf tricks him into hosting a party for Thorin Oakenshield and twelve dwarves, who are planning to reclaim their ancient home, the Lonely Mountain, and the treasure inside it from the dragon Smaug. Gandalf produces Thror's map, which shows a secret door into the Mountain, and proposes that Bilbo join the expedition as its burglar. The dwarves laugh at the idea. Bilbo, stung by it, goes anyway.
The structure is picaresque, a chain of episodes rather than a single tightening plot. Each stage of the road introduces a new kind of threat. Trolls on the way out. Elrond and Rivendell as a pause for breath. Goblins under the Misty Mountains. Giant spiders and the dungeons of the Wood-elves in Mirkwood. The pattern is deliberate, and it is how the book measures Bilbo's growth: each new danger finds him slightly more capable than the last.
The turning point comes underground. Separated from the company while fleeing the goblins, Bilbo stumbles across a mysterious ring and then meets Gollum, who challenges him to a riddle contest with his life as the stake. The ring confers invisibility. Bilbo escapes, rejoins the dwarves, and from that point his standing with them steadily rises. By the time the company reaches the Lonely Mountain, it is Bilbo who goes down the secret passage alone to scout the dragon's lair.
The main characters
Bilbo Baggins is the heart of it. He begins as a respectable hobbit with no appetite for risk and ends as something closer to a hero, though a very unusual one. He wins by wits, nerve and plain common sense rather than by strength. Tolkien's point is that Bilbo gains maturity and wisdom by accepting the disreputable, romantic and adventurous side of his own nature, the part he had spent his life keeping quiet.
Gandalf is the instigator. He sets the quest moving, saves the company more than once, then leaves them at the edge of Mirkwood because he has other responsibilities, which forces Bilbo to grow up fast.
Thorin Oakenshield leads the thirteen dwarves (Dwalin, Balin, Kili, Fili, Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, Gloin, Bifur, Bofur and Bombur). He is proud, dispossessed and increasingly dangerous to himself as the treasure comes within reach.
Smaug is the great ancient dragon holding the Mountain, vain enough to be flattered into conversation and so to reveal a gap in his armour. Around them stand Beorn the skin-changer, Elrond, Bard of Lake-town, the Wood-elves and Gollum.
The themes
Personal growth and the different shapes heroism can take are the central concerns. Bilbo is small, unarmoured and unwarlike, and the book keeps insisting that this is not a disqualification.
Greed is the counterweight. Treasure is the stated goal from the first chapter, and the closer the company gets to it, the more it corrodes them. The question of who has a rightful claim on the hoard, and what any claim is worth against the lives of other people, drives the final act.
Warfare runs underneath the whole thing. Critics have long connected the book's motifs of conflict to Tolkien's own experience in the First World War. His scholarly background in Germanic philology and his interest in mythology and fairy tales shaped the world, though more recent adventure fiction and the work of William Morris fed into it too.
How it ends
Skip this paragraph if you want the ending left alone. Smaug, realising Lake-town has helped the intruders, flies off to burn it. A thrush carries Bilbo's report of the dragon's weak spot to Bard, who shoots an arrow into the chink and kills him. The dwarves take the Mountain, and Bilbo quietly pockets the Arkenstone, Thorin's most treasured family heirloom. When elves and men besiege the Mountain seeking compensation, Bilbo hands the jewel to the besiegers hoping to prevent a war. Thorin, seeing betrayal, banishes him. Then Gandalf arrives with news of an approaching goblin and Warg army, and dwarves, men and elves fight together in the Battle of Five Armies, won with the late help of the eagles and Beorn. Thorin is fatally wounded and reconciles with Bilbo before he dies. Bilbo takes only a small share of the treasure and returns home a year and a month after setting out.
Why it still matters
The Hobbit was acclaimed on publication, nominated for the Carnegie Medal and given a New York Herald Tribune prize for best juvenile fiction. It has sold over 100 million copies and has never been out of print. Its success prompted the publisher to ask for a sequel, which became The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien later revised parts of The Hobbit to fit that larger story. Adaptations for stage, screen, radio, board games and video games have followed, several winning recognition in their own right.
It suits readers who want a quest with warmth and humour in it, anyone coming to Middle-earth for the first time, and adults returning to a book they met as children and finding the greed and grief in it sharper than they remembered.
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