Online Lord Of The Rings Or The Hobbit Groups

How do the Hobbit and Lord of Rings books work?

The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, are , to my mind, some of the best written works of the last hundred years.  I have read them repeatedly and enjoyed every single word.  I have memorised a huge part of them, I have tried to understand the history and philosophy of the whole invented universe, and consider myself sort of an unofficial expert.As to how they work, well in this day and age, they are a tad anachronistic, but effective nevertheless.  I shall try to explain.When you first get a copy of one (Let's say The Hobbit) you will find that it is a small pile of paper sheets, with heavier paper (or perhaps card) at the top and bottom; these may be considered the front and back.  At the left hand side, the whole lot is stuck together with some sort of paste and stitching effort, so that the top cover may be lifted and folded back to the left, exposing the paper sheet beneath.  This effort may be repeated until one finds a sheet of paper with a decent block of printed letters upon it.  At the top of the page it may say "The Hobbit" or "There and Back Again" or some such.  Sheets prior to this one, with fanciful runic characters, or with small groups of printed letters indicating perhaps the title of the book, or the publisher's information, may at this point be ignored.Your next step is to have a look at the printed characters, and read them.  Miracle of miracles, they form a sort of narrative exposition, which is in effect a story.  It has a folksy tone, and you may feel it is being addressed to children.  The narrator inserts his own presence all over it, and introduces concepts alien to the actual subject matter, such as clocks, watches, steam trains etc. which have no place in the actual story.But you don't worry about that.  What you do is continue reading, gradually, like someone walking across a beach into shallow water which becomes progressively deeper and deeper, you are drawn into the world of the story, until it becomes reality, and your own pathetic life is somewhat of  a dream.That's how they work.

Is it necessary to read The Hobbit before The Lord of the Rings?

I strongly recommend Stephen Benedetti’s answer. I do know people who never read LOTR because they were so disgusted by the very first sentence, which more resembles the quaint and child-like quality you find in ‘The Hobbit’:“When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence . . .”One of the remarkable and delicious aspects of LOTR is that the story begins as a parochial children’s comedy about every day hobbit folk in their home counties of the Shire, but as the canvas gradually enlarges to encompass a huge and exotic continental vista, it becomes darker, more epic and more psychologically complex. It is as if we have been taken from childhood, through adolescence to adulthood.In my opinion, it really does not do to read the Hobbit first, unless you actually are a youngish child, around 7 or 8. Tolkien did not intend us to read the Hobbit first; unlike the films, in which Peter Jackson rather unsuccessfully attempts to match the two styles, the Hobbit is very definitely written for children of a young age. We even know who they were, since Tolkien had his own family circle in mind.Also, Tolkien had no plans to write LOTR when he wrote the Hobbit. The idea of LOTR as a ‘sequel’ is misguided. It is not like Harry Potter, where there may always have been an idea of future volumes, and therefore a consistent style. It is more the product of a reverse process, having been written as a newly conceived story, but with a backward eye, to make it seem historically consistent with the earlier book. Tolkien was persuaded to write LOTR later, after the unexpected success of the Hobbit, and made it up, using some of the characters and ideas in the Hobbit. This was easy for him to do, since both draw on a much larger common history.Because it evolved this way, there is absolutely no need to read the Hobbit first; LOTR covers all the things you need to know about the earlier story, but in more appropriate grown-up language. It can be disappointing to go back, after reading LOTR, to read the Hobbit, because of the differences, although I found it charming also; but it is not half so disappointing as setting yourself to read an 8 year old’s adventure story, when you are really ready for the great epic that is LOTR. That is enough to put you off entirely.

What reading level would The Hobbit be considered to be?

Scholastic rates The Hobbit at a 6.6 grade-level equivalency (11 years old) and a Lexile level of 1000L. I remember reading The Hobbit in a fifth-grade G&T reading class and being able to follow along but finding parts of it more challenging than the books I chose to read independently.Tolkien wrote the book for his children, and it is clearly intended for a younger audience.

Why do orcs in “The Hobbit” look different than in “The Lord of the Rings”? Does being from a different area create a different looking Orc?

Tolkien had several subspecies of orcs in the Lord of the Rings, you get to see three separate races of them in the Two Towers (the book) when Merry and Pippin are prisoners, which was the reason behind a lot of the fighting and lack of discipline among Ugluk's company. Those three were Uruk-hai, Moria orcs, and Mordor "rats", which all had different dialects, body structures, strengths and weaknesses--Uruk-hai were bred by Saruman to be superior, so they were bigger, stonger, and could run in daylight, with very short, efficient names and words. Moria orcs were whiny, whimpy, with more dwarvish-sounding language from their long history of turf wars under the mountains with dwarves. Mordor orcs were sharper, more sinister, meaner, and had long, hissing words in their language. Te orcs from the Hobbit were (in the books) actually goblins, but the Elvish word "yrch", meaning "orc", I think also means goblin. The passage through the Misty Mountains in the Hobbit actually is located much farther north than Moria, however, and so the orcs you see in the Hobbit could look and sound different because they come from the northern half of Middle Earth (the goblin king/Gundabad), not from the south were you have Moria, Isengard, and Mordor. Again, this is all book-canon, it may just be that PJ's Hobbit had different orcs because they used different means of filming. Hope it helps!