This 2025 reread thing started with a wish to reread The Lord of the Rings, but shortly after I finished The Eyes of the Dragon and picked up The Fellowship of the Ring, I got about a page in before I thought to myself "no, no, no, this isn't right...LOTR starts with The Hobbit!" So I put it back down and started on The Hobbit instead.
This turned out to be a very good idea.
I won't bore anyone with recapping any details of The Hobbit, and I knew the basic story off by heart once again. But one thing that surprised me, reading it over a decade later, was how much depth there was to the setting, I could understand why Tolkien wanted to make the most of it and wrote The Lord of the Rings in it. I appreciate how it never seems unnecessary: the Iron Hills don't appear in the story, but they're fleshed out enough for the reader to understand their significance to the dwarves. The mines of Moria don't appear either, but they do even more to flesh out dwarf lore.
The settings that are depicted are done very richly, while avoiding being overcomplicated. The Shire is a vividly quaint little town and Bilbo Baggins feels very much "from there", the Elvenking's realm feels like something out of a fae story, and the Lonely Mountain feels haunted by dragon-sickness. My favourite would have to be Lake-town, which I found genuinely complex and intriguing...the people there are, by and large, good, but they live in the shadow of destroyed Dale, the Master is like a G-rated corrupt politician, and Tolkien sets its dreary tone very well.
As for the secondary characters depicted along the way...I loved Gollum as usual, but special mention has to go to Beorn, who I had, by and large, forgotten from my first read, and i found him very interesting, as well as the Eagles. There was a convincing answer to the infamous question "why don't the Eagles just take them everywhere?" Bard the Bowman feels like Tolkien's precursor to Aragorn in LOTR, and I remember thinking he came out of nowhere the first time, but on reread I liked him more...to me he felt like a good representation of how Bilbo is just one hobbit in a larger world, and other heroes like Bard are a part of it, his story crossing over with Bilbo's on occasion (and I did like it when the two met face-to-face).
The villains seemed different on reread too. Gollum was fantastic, of course, and other minor villains like the trolls and the spiders of Mirkwood I thought were fun roadblocks on the company's journey. The Great Goblin was rather bland, but he was cut out of the story (heh) in short order, and I liked how the story kept bringing up the repercussions of killing him. Bolg, at the end, has a tie-in to the old Azog lore (more on Azog in a bit), but he's another "just kind of there" bad guy to crop up at the end and make everyone work together. Smaug was the one I was interested in rereading: I could see his death coming off as anticlimactic, but I also liked how, much like the rest of the story, it wasn't really about Smaug, and Bilbo played a vital role in bringing the dragon down, so I liked that again. My favourite villain, though, was the Master of Lake-town, and I thought his fate at the end was very interesting and fit the themes of the story perfectly.
The main question I had on reread was the matter of the film trilogy, which stretched a children's book shorter than Fellowship out to three movies, so when I went back over the book, I wondered how that was even remotely possible. As it turns out, a lot of material from the movies is there...kind of. Gandalf pops in and out of the story seemingly at whim, leaving whenever he'd seem overpowered, and showing up when Thorin and Company are in mortal danger. At the end of the book, though, he explains what he was doing (and this is something I don't remember from the first time): he went to a council of wizards and then into the woods to oppose the Necromancer and drive him out of the region. I'm not doing it justice here, but Gandalf's epic quest sounds awesome, and it makes Bilbo's journey to the Lonely Mountain seem not insignificant at all, but just one part of this larger world.
In the book, that's all off-page. But in the movies, you get to see Gandalf going to Dol Guldur and fighting the Necromancer and all of that, and his meeting with the council with Saruman present. The way I see it, in the book it makes sense, because the power of the reader's imagination is infinitely greater than any words put to page to describe Gandalf's quest. But in a medium like film, there's a good chance it would've come off as silly, with Gandalf being a recurring deus ex machina and disappearing whenever convenient. Plus, moviegoers went in with memories of the more serious tone of Peter Jackson's LOTR movies (the book isn't outright goofy by any means but is certainly lighter and funnier than I remember LOTR being, like a fun adventure), and the foreknowledge of LOTR lore, so they knew the head of the wizard council would be Saruman and that the Necromancer is Sauron. When we, the audience, know what's there, it's different compared to the mystery of the book where "the Necromancer" is just some bad guy and "the wizard council" could be anyone.
I said I would get to Azog again: I think the choice to have Azog as a recurring villain in the movies makes a lot of sense. In the book, the villains along the way either don't stick around for too long (Gollum) or are just kind of there (Bolg), so having Azog as a regular antagonist throughout the story makes sense to me and builds up to the Battle of the Five Armies in a good way. Having him be a legendary villain "Azog the Defiler" who killed Thorin's grandfather also adds to his menace and builds him up to be a strong threat, and his being a servant of Sauron / the Necromancer ties Gandalf's stuff in as well, so the Battle of the Five Armies really feels like a proper conclusion to it all rather than a big fight coming out of nowhere to make everyone work together (which was fine in the book as Bilbo was a small part of a big world, but in film might've seemed like a bizarre ending).
In short, I loved reading The Hobbit again, and I wound up gaining not only a new appreciation for the book, but also a bit more appreciation for the film trilogy adaptation and understanding a lot of why they were made the way they were. Next up is The Fellowship of the Ring!
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