The Hobbit

J.R.R. Tolkien

Sep 2020 · Lord of the Rings Book 0.5 · RB Media · Narrated by Andy Serkis

About this audiobook

THE GREAT MODERN CLASSIC AND PRELUDE TO THE LORD OF THE RINGS Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum—as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. He had a little boat, and he rowed about quite quietly on the lake; for lake it was, wide and deep and deadly cold. Whisked away from his comfortable, unambitious life in his hobbit-hole in Bag End by Gandalf the wizard and a band of dwarves, Bilbo Baggins finds himself caught up in a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon. This brand-new unabridged recording is narrated by the acclaimed actor, director and author, Andy Serkis.

Ratings and reviews

Serkis' reading is true to the original tone of the work... not the literary classic it has become, but the tale to excite children that it started out as. The energy and genuine tongue-in-cheek FUN he puts into this performance is a joy to listen to. Of course his performance of Gollum puts this over the top as THE audio version of this fantastic work to listen to. (He's done a very accessible version of The Silmarillion too, highly recommended!)

Serkis does a fantastic job of maintaining the conversational flow of Tolkien's storytelling. This goes a massive way in conveying the emotional and fantastical tone of the Hobbit, while highlighting the feeling of sitting down with JRR over a spot of afternoon tea while he tells you about the funny little story he heard concerning a Hobbit, a Wizard and 13 Dwarves getting up to mischief! An excellent production without a doubt!

Andy Serkis is absolutely enthralling and phenomenal. This audiobook is incredibly well done, and I can't wait for the Lord of the Rings coming out later this year read by him!

About the author

A writer of fantasies, Tolkien, a professor of language and literature at Oxford University, was always intrigued by early English and the imaginative use of language. In his greatest story, the trilogy The Lord of the Rings (1954--56), Tolkien invented a language with vocabulary, grammar, syntax, even poetry of its own. Though readers have created various possible allegorical interpretations, Tolkien has said: "It is not about anything but itself. (Certainly it has no allegorical intentions, general, particular or topical, moral, religious or political.)" In The Adventures of Tom Bombadil (1962), Tolkien tells the story of the "master of wood, water, and hill," a jolly teller of tales and singer of songs, one of the multitude of characters in his romance, saga, epic, or fairy tales about his country of the Hobbits. Tolkien was also a formidable medieval scholar, as evidenced by his work, Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics (1936) and his edition of Anciene Wisse: English Text of the Anciene Riwle. Among his works published posthumously, are The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún and The Fall of Arthur, which was edited by his son, Christopher. In 2013, his title, The Hobbit (Movie Tie-In) made The New York Times Best Seller List.