Reread last year. The book is still on my headboard shelf. That's the reading that really brought home the incongruous mix of elements. What's kind of cool, though, is that a similar mix of elements worked in LOTR. Practice makes perfect.Frelga wrote:I think anyone who thinks Hobbit is a children's bedtime story has unusually nightmare-proof children. And is overdue for a re-read.axordil wrote:See, I like the more competent, less passive dwarves in the movies better than the marginally competent figures of comic fun that suddenly turn into capital D dwarves for two pages in the Bo5A. Each are fine in their setting: one in a children's bedtime story with a heroic ending tacked on, one in an overlong fantasy epic.Smaug smiting the mountain, and dwarves pulling up Bombur in the nick of time, and the tension of having to shut the door and know there was no way out except through the dragon's lair.
Tolkien's dwarves are more or less a single character with few exceptions. I like PJ's approach to making them more distinguishable without overwhelming us with thirteen leading characters. However, I do think that the source material could have been applied in a way that made them more competent, without fireproof dwarves, rides over molten metal (ouch!) and improbable statues.
Most "bedtime story" material of years past had some...issues. Cautionary tales are rarely pretty.