As The Hobbit ends, we read of the Misty Mountains, the range of mountains once unruled, now governed by Beorn, the shape-shifing man/bear. The return of the king and the death of Smaug bring revolution to Middle-earth. If the great dragon falls and the true king returns, all other foes are doomed. The great dragon Smaug must be struck down, and he will be, and rumors of his death will unleash waves of lesser evils, all vying for the wealth of the Lonely Mountain.Īll these evil, greedy marauders must be driven from the Lonely Mountain, and such victory is tied to kingship.
The Hobbit should be read (or viewed) as a clash of competing kings, and when the rightful king returns, evil is imperiled. He wasn’t, but his false claim sets up a climactic declaration later in The Hobbit: “I am Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King under the Mountain! I return!” When we enter the story, Thorin has been displaced by a wicked usurper, a liar and a stealer, the dragon named Smaug who is “the Chiefest and Greatest of Calamities.” Smaug’s mutiny is driven by his wrongful claim to be, in his own words, “the real King under the Mountain.” The kings must return, and the returning king in The Hobbit is Thorin, the true king of the Lonely Mountain and its vast caverns of golden wealth. No foot treads casually through realms unruled. From the outset of their journey together, the wise wizard knows full well that to travel “over those great tall mountains with lonely peaks and valleys where no king ruled,” meant danger and “fearful adventure.” This is what makes the Misty Mountains so treacherous for the company of Bilbo, the dwarves, and Gandalf, the travelers in The Hobbit. But there remains in kingship an enduring significance that is inescapable, something deeply burned into our souls, something telling us the world will only prosper when it’s ruled by the true king. Today, kings are mostly marginalized to meaningless pageantry. On a massive scale in The Lord of the Rings, and on a smaller, but no less significant, scale in The Hobbit, we encounter the longing for the right king to emerge from the shadows and to recapture his rightful empire, an ancient yearning older than mythical kings like King Arthur.
Tolkien draws on themes of glory and majesty and kingship - intangible and abstract realities not easy to tap in art - and deeply embeds those themes into Middle-earth. Partly, Tolkien’s enduring popularity can be explained by the way he artfully touches the greatest themes of our collective experience of this world. This week, theaters prepare for Friday’s opening of the acclaimed new movie The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, the glory and majesty of Middle-earth continues to draw millions of readers, and more recently, moviegoers. More than seventy-five years after J.R.R.
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