Abigail Nussbaum continues her “Great Tolkien Reread” with The Hobbit. “Tolkien’s celebrated affinity for worldbuilding means that The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings clearly take place in the same invented world, but it’s precisely at those points that the two works overlap that the differences between their Middle Earths are most apparent. There is danger in The Hobbit, and the characters face many merciless, amoral foes. But evil, which drives the antagonists in The Lord of the Rings, is absent from the book. Its villains are merely bad. There is, as well, no sense of grandeur in The Hobbit, nor of the high stakes that are perpetually in the background, and finally the foreground, of The Lord of the Rings.”

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