ABSTRACT
At a bit over 95,000 words, The Hobbit is approximately one-fifth of the length of The Lord of the Rings. If the impulse to epicize necessarily entailed a different sort of adaptation process with regard to The Hobbit than with regard to The Lord of the Rings, so too did the modal shift toward the action film take a different form in the two cinematic trilogies. In most ways, the scores for the Hobbit trilogy are fully consistent with the approach that Howard Shore takes in the Lord of the Rings films, in which a complex network of leitmotifs gives emotional weight to the richness and diversity of Jackson’s cinematic Middle-earth. As Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films show, action sequences are not necessarily incompatible with the epic mode. The action sequences in the Hobbit films might be viewed as analogues of the comic vignettes.
