Martin Freedman as the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins sets out on an adventure in THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY
Great stories are timeless, seamlessly crossing generational lines.
One such story is J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy novel The Hobbit, which has sold 150 million copies, and its sequel, the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which has been made into three highly successful and entertaining movies.
I’m not sure who is more excited about the upcoming Hobbit movie, my wife and I, or my grandson who pre-purchased tickets so he and his girlfriend could go to Tulsa’s first showing of the new film at midnight Thursday.
We will go, but it’ll definitely be before midnight, and after the initial surge in the theaters has quieted.
Tolkien has been big in our household for decades. When my kids were still in grade school, we made a nightly ritual of reading first The Hobbit, and then Lord of the Rings Trilogy.
We spent years in Middle Earth, a world inhabited by stout-hearted but fun-loving little men and women called Hobbits, humans, elves, devilish orcs, talking trees, wizards and trolls. They were years not just of family bonding, but of imprinting young minds with eternal values.
God never shows up in Middle Earth, but it is a world with remarkable parallels to the spiritual struggles found in another world, Planet Earth. In Middle Earth, good and evil are pitted against one another in a cosmic struggle for control. Evil relies on deception, cruelty, enslavement, domination of others. Good relies on courage, loyalty to friends, honesty and perseverance. And on faith that the battle can be won, even against overwhelming odds.
In the early years of our reading the books, no movie could capture the sweeping grandeur of their magic forests and mountains, or the plumb the depths of their wicked and cunning villains. But along came digitized special effects, and the ability to create on film anything the human mind can imagine.
And so now stories like The Hobbit can be made into movies, easily accessible to a new generation of young people.
But my kids still insist the books are far better.
