On the topic of The Hobbit: I am very pleased to say that I absolutely loved it. The themes of the story are almost prophetic if looked at from a certain perspective. It is easy to discover ideas within the story that are representative of the world we currently live in, or at the very least, parts of it. Allow me to elaborate on this idea as best as I can.
The story takes place in a world much like ours. Regions are separated and several races exist (not always harmoniously). The Hobbits are rather shy and reserved. They enjoy their beer and food and pipe weed and don't generally go on too many adventures. The coming of Gandalf in the first chapter is symbolic of the call to adventure that we all face at some point. In saying that, I mean that people always have a conflict that we must face in our lives, and that call to adventure is nothing more than the start of something larger. After this first visit, Bilbo Baggins needs some convincing, as we all do before taking a risk. He ends up going out on this adventure and facing all the hardships that can be thrown at him by the world he lives in. He must fight for his life against forces of evil with the intent to inhibit him and his company from reaching their ultimate goal: The capture of the Dwarven city that was taken over by the dragon, Smaug the Magnificent. My opinion is that we all have dragons to fight in our lives. We need our friends, our band of dwarves to stand at our backs and fight with us. We are all corrupted by our personal rings. Things that we received, perhaps by unfortunate mistake, and must deal with for the rest of our lives as we struggle with addiction, love, loneliness and obsession. In that sense, The Hobbit is a book containing many symbolic clues about the nature of human beings.
Now, I said in my opening paragraph that I found The Hobbit to be prophetic. I will explain why I got this vibe from the story. Hear me out on this. The idea that everything is always going to be okay is a blatantly ignorant notion. Nothing ever remains as happy or easy as we want them to. Life in the shire was an obvious representative of this. Bilbo's live could not simply stay the same, because nothing ever does. There is always a corrupt force such as Smaug or, in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, Sauron. Bilbo embarks on his journey with expectations that he will not be too badly injured by the world around him. He expects that he will not be corrupted and forever changed as we all are in our lives. The ring is just wealth.Wealth is an idea created only for the mass control of entire populations. In the book, it was introduced by Golem and quickly became a sickness. Wealth, just as the ring did, corrupts people and rots us from the cores of our being to the surface and manifests it's self in expensive clothes to show our social class and monetary status.
In the end, there is always a battle. That battle is also the start of something new. Smaug stole everything. He took all the wealth and he took all the land. Just as our governments do to us on a daily basis. In the end, it was imperative that he was overthrown. The company of 14, though small, had to fight something much bigger than themselves as individuals. They did so in the name of an idea, and a very righteous idea. This is what we must do. Overthrow and take what belongs to us.
Those are ideas that I will not be shaken from and will not apologize for. Forgive me if you found them offensive, or rather, stop reading my blog if you found them offensive. I see not one logical reason to give a solitary damn about opinions spawned from uninformed thoughts. If your intelligence is questionable, your time is wasted in reading intelligent thought.
The first chapter is "Economy". It tells of the ills of society as they relate to money and social class. In our modern world, people judge the character of an individual and anchor their opinions of him or her in the clothes worn or car driven. About 20 pages into the book, you can find a quote that will stick with me for the remaining years of my life:
Often, if an accident happens to a man's legs, it can be fixed; but if a similar accident happens to the legs of his pantaloons, there is no helping it, for he considers not what is truly respectable, but what is respected.
