The Hobbit Text
Introduction
In studying Tolkien this month, I have come to learn that he is careful about the decisions he makes in his texts. Perhaps even to the point of fanatical, Tolkien creates every aspect of his world with extreme precision. Because of this, we know that word choice must have been very important in The Hobbit. In this textual analysis of The Hobbit I will explore the most frequently used words before I move on to explore the characters role in the text and finally the overall sentiment of the book and how it progresses.
Word Frequency
There are some interesting things to notice about the word frequency plots. Perhaps the most obvious standouts are the character names. The prevalance of the characters are very important because of the setup of The Hobbit as a text, which is as a translated story that Tolkien is not the author of, but rather he is a medium of passing the story on to the reader. Other words that jump out to me include “dragon”, “goblins”, “hobbit”, and “dwarves”. These words are clear examples of Tolkien’s creation of the faerie in that the all demonstrate making strange within the world. The last word that makes the top chart that I think is very important to any analysis of The Hobbit is “mountain”. During our discussions of this text we explored the significance of specific objects and how the story is told using objects. One of the crucial objects we discussed was the Lonely Mountain. The word “mountain” is key because it symbolizes the entire quest. Acting as the home of dwarves, the home of Smaug, and the home of the treasure, the Lonely Mountain can be viewed as a sort of mecca of the greed and desire for treasure that runs deep throughout the story of The Hobbit.
Character appearances
Character appearance importance
The plots above show the frequency of each of the main characters of the story (I determined the “main” characters simply by which ones were mentioned the most) along with the placement of each of their mentions throughout the text. I think these plots are very interesting and they raised a few very intriguing thoughts regarding The Hobbit as a stand alone text vs as a prequel to the LOTR series that we know and love. Specifically, I think of that the fact that Gollum receives more mentions than all the dwarves but Thorin, is strange considering he is only present in one chapter. I think this speaks to the revisions of The Hobbit and it’s developed role as a prequel story to the “main” story of Middle Earth. There are obvious explanations for why Gollum is mentioned so often, including the fact that Gollum himself says “gollum” constantly while speaking and his chapter is stock full of dialog. That being said, I believe Tolkien knew exactly what he was doing with the introduction of this character and it is not a coincidence that Gollum ends up being one of the most mentioned characters. However, Bilbo and Thorin taking the top spots of frequency charts demonstrate to us that The Hobbit stays within the story being retold and even with the creation of the faerie and the maintaining of the inner consistencies, The Hobbit functions well as a stand alone text. I also find it very interesting to look at the appearance timeline of Gandalf. After looking into The Quest of Erebor and learning about the incomplete third revision of The Hobbit, I found myself understanding a little better why Gandalf completely disappears during large portions of this story.
These plots simply provide a breakdown of the role that each of the dwarves play within the story. One of the most frequent conversations I’ve had about The Hobbit with my fellow readers is in regards to which dwarf plays the biggest role. While this chart does not exactly answer that question because there are still arguments to be had regarding quality over quantity, it is still interesting to observe how often we see each dwarf.
Sentiment Analysis
Analyzing sentiment using NRC package
Comparing the emotions throughout the book
This sentiment analysis uses the nrc sentiment package in R. This package identifies different “emotions” and finds all the words that relate to a certain emotion. For my analysis of The Hobbit I split the book up into chunks of 500 words, instead of analyzing by chapter. The three emotions I selected to analyze were joy, fear, and trust. I wanted to look how trust develops through the series because I was interested in if there seems to be more trust sentiment later in the book but surprisingly there doesn’t seem to be that pattern.
Examples of each emotions
Joy
Fear
Trust
Sentiment analysis using AFINN
The next sentiment analysis uses the AFINN dictionary which assigns a value between -5 and 5, the lower the number the more negative the word is seen to be. After removing the stop-words that have little to no impact the sentiment, we can see that the overall mood of the book is fairly negative which makes sense.
Sources
The Hobbit text file and mining was obtained from Fisher Ankney on GitHub