Riddles in the Dark

When I first heard about The Hobbit, I heard that it was a book written specifically for children. After seeing the movie, I couldn't believe that the book would be appropriate for small children! I would be scared out of my mind! It didn't take me long while actually reading it, though, to realize that the book is vastly different than the movie. First of all, the dwarves are described as a lot more colorful in the book, which is probably what would make kids feel like they could connect to the dwarves much easier. Plus, there are a lot of references to Bilbo's character being small, which is something that a child can relate to easily. Children are often told what they can or can't do because of their age and height, so a story about a very small and scared character going on an adventure and ultimately doing something great sounds like a huge fantasy for a child.

Since the last movie hasn't come out yet, I was unaware of just how many unexpected deaths there are in this "children's book."

Children's book or not, I still find Gollum to be one of the most interestingly creepy characters to ever have been created. Granted, that's after having seen all of the Lord of the Rings movies a dozen times. I feel like reading the description of Gollum in The Hobbit would have been far less creepy if i hadn't already had a preconceived visual of him. I do appreciate, however, that the Riddles in the Dark scene was almost verbatim how the book was originally written, and it was adapted as an adult film really well. I also appreciated the fact that even though they wanted to go for a more "adult" movie, they still managed to make the scenes where the dwarves sing work for the adaptation. In fact, it's one of my favorite scenes.

As a side note, here's the Riddles in the Dark scene from the 1977 cartoon of The Hobbit, which was made for children. Gollum's look is much more animal-like than human-like, but somehow he's still just as creepy.

As a concluding point, these examples are seriously just grazing the surface of how many differences there are between the book and the movies. Many of the scenes in the movies came out of the back of The Return of the King, which, by the way, was clearly NOT written for children.