Reply To: WHtOW boxed set

[onlyonepinman 18060xp 0]

I don’t think that’s entirely true.  I would say that a small group of Hobbits could be considered heroes.  But Aragorn’s journey with Gimli and Legolas takes up at least as much of the book as Frodo’s journey.  During that entire half of the story, Gimli and Legolas are pretty much the only members of their respective peoples who are shown to have played any sort of part in the war.  The entire war is fought by men from Gondor and Rohan, the Elves and Dwarfs don’t play any part in the story, even though they are clearly shown to exist in the world.  Humans play such a significant part for more reasons than simply that’s the route the Fellowship took; Sauron invades Gondor and Saruman invades Rohan.  Those events take up huge parts of the books long after Frodo and Sam have passed by.  Those events are depicted in the book because they are relevant to the story.  Events in the north during the same period are notably absent and while we are given some information in the appendices, the important thing to note is that they are for all intents and purposes an afterthought by the author and have little bearing on the story itself.

And the key difference between Hobbit and Lord of the Rings is that the Hobbit is and always was a children’s story about Bilbo Baggins going on an adventure.  The Lord of the Rings is and Epic story about the battle for Middle Earth.  The context, scope and focus of the two are completely different and it could be argued that the Hobbit is almost a story within a larger story.  Lord of the Rings is a much better analogy to Warhammer than the Hobbit, the Hobbit is almost the Tolkien equivalent of a Black Library novel set within a larger setting.  Lord of the Rings and Warhammer Fantasy Battle are two vehicles achieving similar ends – they both tell the story, albeit in different ways, of an epic battle for the fate of a fantasy world.  And in both cases, humans are the main protagonist.