But as we learn in The Hobbit, Gandalf used to have a much more favorable opinion of the Tooks: He recruits Bilbo for the movie’s central quest - to help a band of exiled dwarves retake their homeland from dragon Smaug - because Bilbo’s mother Belladonna was a Took, who Gandalf says are always game for an adventure.

And since Merry and especially Pippin started off as comedic relief in Fellowship, it left the impression that the Took line is notorious for its foolishness. In Fellowship, Gandalf referred to Pippin as a “Fool of a Took” when, in Moria, he knocked a skeleton and gear very noisily down a well, alerting the orcs. All I did was give your uncle a nudge out the door.” The Hobbit essentially is that incident, and the movie will show that the word “nudge” is a bit of a euphemism. In Fellowship, Gandalf talked to Frodo about his habit of taking Hobbits on great adventures: “If you’re referring to the incident with the dragon,” Gandalf said, “I was barely involved. Bilbo tells Frodo that his greatest party-related fear is an unwanted appearance by his distant relatives, the hated Sackville-Bagginses - who, you’ll recall, do show up in the party in Fellowship. In this Hobbit prologue, Bilbo is procrastinating his party prep by working on his memoir, There and Back Again, which is also the subtitle of J.R.R. In it, Elijah Wood returns as Frodo to chat with old Bilbo (Ian Holm) about the elder Hobbit’s upcoming 111th birthday party - the one that Gandalf arrives for at the beginning of Fellowship. The Hobbit takes place 60 years before the Lord of the Rings adventure, save for the new film’s prologue, which unfolds about twenty minutes before The Fellowship of the Ring begins. (Wait, not presaged: What do you call foreshadowing if it’s to a prequel? Post-saged? What is this, Looper?) Here is a list of references big and small in this first entry of the new Hobbit trilogy that were presaged in the LOTR films. But if you are not an obsessive Tolkien-head or haven’t recently rewatched the earlier films, they may go over your heads. In the new film there are many nods or foreshadowing to adventures or characters seen in LOTR, and connections to be made. Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is a prequel to his Lord of the Rings trilogy, which most people rushing to The Hobbit will have already seen.

Lord of the rings trilogy book order