Stephen started out acting in school plays and then he began recording radio ads before moving to Sydney seven years ago to become an actor. At first he stayed with friends before getting his own place. He found himself an agent and auditioned unsuccessfully for a role in The Lord of the Rings. To pay the bills, he started doing ads and voiceover jobs, but financially times were tough – he couldn’t get a part-time job because he had to be available in case his agent rang with an acting job.
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Like many of the actors playing dwarves, Stephen had read The Hobbit as a child but he didn’t get to read The Lord of the Rings trilogy until he was in his twenties – and it took him a year to get through it!
When Stephen was told about The Hobbit auditions he was excited but nearly messed up on the day because he followed a friend’s advice and did some exercises before going in. He did some press-ups but felt out of breath and nearly didn’t make it in. Once the audition was over, he had to wait a whole two months before he got the call telling him that he’d landed the part of Bombur. His pregnant partner Laura was at home at the time and she thought something bad had happened to someone they knew because Stephen went deathly pale with shock. There were so many famous actors lined up to be in The Hobbit movies and now he was about to rub shoulders with them!
Stephen admitted in Production Video 6: ‘I think my favourite day on set unquestionably was floating down the Pelorus River in barrels. That was way cool and if they ever make that a ride, life-time pass, please!’
Another highlight was his very first day on set because he got to see Bilbo’s hobbit home and do a walk-through with Jackson and the rest of the dwarves. When they were filming there the police arrived and warned them that they were about to issue a severe weather warning so they had to pack everything up as quickly as they could. It’s a good job they did because just a few hours later, the whole area was flooded. The river water level rose approximately 20–30 feet!
Books
J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of The Hobbit, was an author, poet, university lecturer and philologist. His book, The Hobbit, is one of the world’s bestselling books of all time. Its full title is The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. It was first published on 21 September 1937 and all 1,500 copies from the initial print run had sold by the December. The following year, it was released in America. It was a big hit, winning a Best Juvenile Fiction award from the New York Tribune, as well as being nominated for a prestigious Carnegie Medal. Over the years, it has won lots of other awards, too.
The book was published by George Allen & Unwin, who asked Tolkien to write a sequel in the December of that year; he sent them a draft of The Silmarillion but they wanted a book about hobbits instead. He then wrote The Lord of the Rings between 1937 and 1949, but had to make changes to some aspects of The Hobbit, so a few more editions were published over the years. The Lord of the Rings books are less humorous and aimed at an older audience than The Hobbit.
Bravery, personal growth and war are the major themes in The Hobbit. Tolkien had experience of war having been a soldier in World War I. When writing The Hobbit, he was also influenced by fairy tales and Anglo-Saxon literature.
After leaving the army, he became a professor at Oxford University. Two of his poems were published; the first was called The Car and the Fiddle: A Nursery Rhyme Undone and its Scandalous Secret Unlocked and the second was Goblin Feet.
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Tolkien enjoyed sending his children letters from Father Christmas, but with his own unique slant. Often they included a polar bear, goblins and gnomes.
The story behind how J.R.R. Tolkien began writing The Hobbit is rather interesting. He was marking School Certificate papers in the early 1930s when out of the blue he decided to write ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ on a blank page. It wasn’t until late 1932 when he had finished the story that he decided to send it to some of his friends for feedback. One such friend was C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. He also loaned a copy of the manuscript to one of his students, Elaine Griffiths.
In 1936, during a visit from Susan Dagnall from the publisher George Allen & Unwin, Elaine suggested that Susan read Tolkien’s manuscript. She promptly did so and, suitably impressed, took it to her boss, Stanley Unwin. He enjoyed it but before making a decision, he handed it to his son Rayner, who was ten at the time. He gave it the thumbs-up and the rest is history.
As well as writing The Hobbit, all the dust jackets, maps and illustrations were designed by Tolkien, too. He knew precisely how he wanted The Hobbit to look and sent his publisher lots of letters before it was published. Rayner Unwin wrote in his publishing memoir: ‘In 1937 alone Tolkien wrote 26 letters to George Allen & Unwin, detailed, fluent, often pungent, but infinitely polite and exasperatingly precise. I doubt any author today, however famous, would get such scrupulous attention.’
Tolkien’s original dust jacket design had four colours but because of the associated costs, his publishers decided not to have a red sun.
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Tolkien found the epic poem Beowulf one of his ‘most valued sources’. Several comparisons can be made between what happens in The Hobbit and what takes place in Beowulf.
Some scholars and Tolkien fans see The Hobbit as being a parable of the First World War. When directing the movies, Guillermo del Toro spent weeks doing as much research as he could on World War I to understand Tolkien’s mindset. Some people think of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books as being fantasy novels, but Peter Jackson confided in Mirror journalist Sasha Stone: ‘Tolkien never thought he was making fantasy. He loved English sagas and the Norse sagas, and he found that England had lost its mythology.’
After The Hobbit was released, Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis wrote in The Times: ‘The truth is that in this book a number of good things, never before united, have come together: a fund of humour, an understanding of children, and a happy fusion of the scholar’s with the poet’s grasp of mythology. The professor has the air of inventing nothing. He has studied trolls and dragons at first hand and describes them with that fidelity that is worth oceans of glib “originality”.’
W.H. Auden felt it was ‘one of the best children’s stories of this century.’
There have been many Hobbit adaptations over the years. The first stage adaptation took place in March 1953 at St Margaret’s School, Edinburgh. It was performed by girls, which is rather strange as there are no female characters in the book. There was a BBC Radio 4 adaptation in 1968 and a year later the first movie adaptation came out (it was 12 minutes long, with cartoon stills). A comic-book adaptation was released in 1989 and the following year a one-volume edition was published. In 1977, an animated TV movie version was released and was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. In the past three decades, there have been numerous video and computer games based on The Hobbit.
It is thought that as many as 100 million copies of The Hobbit could have been sold since the very first print run in 1937. First editions are so highly sought after that a signed copy can go for over £60,000 ($94,212) at auction.
During an interview with Rotten Tomatoes, Guillermo del Toro summed up The Hobbit book. He said: ‘It is a very different book than the trilogy. It is a book that is written from a start of innocence and an ending of disappointment. The ending of The Hobbit is quite bittersweet, quite melancholic in a way. The exposure of Bilbo to the war is the exposure of a generation of English men to World War I.
‘The reason why I connect with The Hobbit is because it’s all seen from a really humble, honest, little guy point of view. I’m not saying Bilbo is a child,