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How Tolkien’s scrapped material will super-size The Hobbit


It’s a little-known fact that J.R.R. Tolkien began a rewrite of The Hobbit in the 1960s. Following in the success of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien decided he would try his hand at reworking his earlier novel to better fit into the universe he had created, both tonally and canonically. The project was scrapped […]

It’s a little-known fact that J.R.R. Tolkien began a rewrite of The Hobbit in the 1960s. Following in the success of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien decided he would try his hand at reworking his earlier novel to better fit into the universe he had created, both tonally and canonically. The project was scrapped after only a few short chapters, but many of his notes eventually made their way into the appendices of The Return of the King. When the time came to finally make the Hobbit films, Peter Jackson decided to implement these proposed changes into his adaptation in order to create the consistency between the two books (or, in his case, the five films), which Tolkien once attempted to achieve. “Tolkien himself started to expand The Hobbit around the time that The Lord of the Rings was released,” Jackson explains to IGN, “and there’s 125 pages of additional Hobbit material in the appendices of The Return of the King, so we had the rights to use that material, as well.” In spite of fans’ concerns that The Hobbit novel might not be substantial enough to warrant two (or three!) films, Jackson merely points to this additional material as to how he’ll flesh out the narratives; not with his own contrivances, but with stories drawn right from the source, saying, “This is The Hobbit super-sized, but super-sized with Tolkien’s own material.”  ~Devin Garabedian

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