This is definitely another one of those old F/SF boys' stories that takes place in a 100% male universe. Even The Lord of the Rings does a far better job of acknowledging that women exist--I was going to say that Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is a character at the end, trying to auction off Bilbo's possessions, but even she is onstage more in the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings than here.
I never saw Peter Jackson's Hobbit movie trilogy so I don't have a sense of how he tried to inflate all this into an immense epic. I read somewhere that the movies depict Thorin's stubbornness as more explicitly supernatural in origin, having him start hissing like Smaug and so forth. I guess that's consistent with how he depicts other things like Theoden and Denethor's confusion in LOTR. In the book, though, there are mentions of a dragon-spell but it came across to me as as much pride as avarice: Thorin sees his royal claim as superseding all other moral considerations, and anyone asking for a share he didn't already grant as a threat to his legitimacy, even though this is a bigger pile of treasure than anyone could reasonably make use of.
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Date: 2021-03-24 11:32 am (UTC)I never saw Peter Jackson's Hobbit movie trilogy so I don't have a sense of how he tried to inflate all this into an immense epic. I read somewhere that the movies depict Thorin's stubbornness as more explicitly supernatural in origin, having him start hissing like Smaug and so forth. I guess that's consistent with how he depicts other things like Theoden and Denethor's confusion in LOTR. In the book, though, there are mentions of a dragon-spell but it came across to me as as much pride as avarice: Thorin sees his royal claim as superseding all other moral considerations, and anyone asking for a share he didn't already grant as a threat to his legitimacy, even though this is a bigger pile of treasure than anyone could reasonably make use of.