Every Version of The Hobbit: a cross-media guide

A children's book that became a mythology

The Hobbit began as a story J.R.R. Tolkien told his children, scribbled into a manuscript left sitting in a drawer at Oxford. A colleague passed it to the publisher George Allen and Unwin, and in September 1937 it appeared in print as The Hobbit, or There and Back Again. It sold out its first edition before Christmas.

The plot is spare: Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, unadventurous hobbit, is dragooned by the wizard Gandalf and thirteen dwarves into a quest to reclaim a mountain stronghold from the dragon Smaug. What gave the book its staying power was Tolkien's habit of treating his invented world as an actual place with history, language and weight. The book was not allegory or moral fable. It was geography.

Adaptations followed across every decade and medium. American television arrived first with a Rankin/Bass animated special in 1977. A Soviet Leningrad studio produced a film version in 1985. The BBC had dramatised it for radio in 1968. Then in the 2010s Peter Jackson turned a 300-page children's novel into three feature films totalling nearly nine hours. Radio plays, stage productions, a licensed video game that many fans consider underrated, illustrated editions that reinterpret Tolkien's own drawings: The Hobbit has been every size: pocket book, IMAX blockbuster, tabletop game, orchestral score.

The Hobbit Through Time

1937Tolkien's novel published by Allen and Unwin The Hobbit

1966Gene Deitch animated short, produced to retain rights, rarely screened The Hobbit

1968BBC Radio 4 dramatisation in eight parts

1977Rankin/Bass animated TV special, first widely seen screen version

1985Soviet animated film from Leningrad studio, faithful and stylised The Hobbit

2003Vivendi licensed video game for PS2 and GBA, covers the book chapter by chapter LEGO The Hobbit

2012Peter Jackson's An Unexpected Journey opens the trilogy The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

2013The Desolation of Smaug; Benedict Cumberbatch voices Smaug The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

2014The Battle of the Five Armies concludes the Jackson trilogy The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

2014LEGO The Hobbit video game covers the first two films LEGO The Hobbit

The 2003 video game is the most faithful adaptation most people have never played

Sierra's 2003 The Hobbit for PS2 and Game Boy Advance is a chapter-by-chapter platformer that follows the book beginning to end, in roughly the order Tolkien wrote it. It was dismissed at release as a licensed tie-in and has since been overshadowed by the Jackson-era game adaptations. But the writing sticks close to the novel, the level design maps to the geography of each chapter, and it treats the source material with a quiet seriousness that the later, flashier games do not.

It is not a great game. The camera is awkward, the combat repetitive. But as an adaptation it is the one that actually tried to tell the story Tolkien wrote, and that counts for something.

Peter Jackson's trilogy is spectacular and you should watch the theatrical cuts only

The extended cuts of Peter Jackson's trilogy run close to nine hours. The first film is genuinely good: the Shire sequences have warmth, and the Riddles in the Dark scene with Martin Freeman and Andy Serkis is the best thing in all six of Jackson's Middle-earth films. The second stumbles badly with an invented romance and barrel-chase action sequences that go on long past any narrative purpose. The third almost completely abandons the book.

The visual craft throughout is extraordinary. If you want spectacle and scale there is nothing else like it. But the theatrical cuts are sharper, better paced and closer to the story. Watch those first. If you still want more, the extended editions will be there.