Sixty years before Frodo ever touched the Ring, a hobbit who valued his doilies more than his courage ran out of his front door without a handkerchief. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey follows that mistake all the way to a cave beneath the Misty Mountains, where a riddle game decides the fate of the world. Peter Jackson returns to Middle-earth with thirteen dwarves, a pale orc, and a dragon’s single open eye. Every spoiler sits below.
Detailed Summary
Erebor and the Dragon
Old Bilbo, played again by Ian Holm, sits down on the morning of his 111th birthday to write the true story of his adventure for Frodo. His tale begins in the dwarf kingdom of Erebor, carved into the Lonely Mountain and swollen with gold under King Thrór.
Thrór’s greed draws Smaug. The dragon burns the nearby town of Dale, drives the dwarves from the mountain and claims the hoard. Thranduil’s elves arrive, look down at the refugees, and turn away. Thrór’s grandson Thorin never forgets it.
Good Morning
Sixty years earlier, Gandalf stops at Bag End and asks a bewildered young Bilbo Baggins if he wants to share in an adventure. Bilbo wants nothing of the sort and retreats inside. Gandalf scratches a rune on the green door anyway.
That evening, dwarves pour into Bilbo’s home. Dwalin arrives first, Balin second, and Fíli and Kíli track mud across the rug. Then eight more tumble through the door in a heap, raid the pantry, and juggle Bilbo’s dishes while singing about blunting his knives.
Thorin Oakenshield
The leader arrives last. Thorin Oakenshield, heir to Erebor, looks at Bilbo and sees a grocer, not a burglar. He explains the plan: a secret door into the mountain, a key handed to him by Gandalf, and a map with a riddle nobody can read.
The dwarves sing of the Misty Mountains in low voices by the fire. Bilbo reads a contract that lists lacerations, evisceration and incineration among the risks, and faints. In the morning, the house is empty. Bilbo stares at the contract, signs it, and sprints through Hobbiton shouting that he is going on an adventure.
Azog and the Battle of Azanulbizar
On the road, Balin tells Bilbo how Thorin earned his name. After Erebor fell, the dwarves tried to retake Moria. At its gates, the pale orc Azog the Defiler beheaded Thrór, and Thorin, armed with nothing but an oak branch for a shield, hacked off the orc’s arm.
Thorin believes Azog crawled off and died. He is wrong. Azog, fitted with an iron claw, has placed a bounty on Thorin’s head and hunts him with a pack of Wargs.
Three Trolls
Bilbo investigates missing ponies and finds three trolls arguing over how to cook them. He tries to free the animals and ends up as a handkerchief. The dwarves charge in and lose, and the trolls tie them up in sacks over a fire.
Bilbo stalls with cooking advice about skinning and seasoning dwarves. Dawn creeps closer. Gandalf splits a boulder with his staff, sunlight floods the clearing, and the trolls turn to stone mid-argument.
In the troll hoard, Gandalf takes the elven sword Glamdring and Thorin takes Orcrist. Bilbo receives a small blade that glows blue when orcs approach. He has not named it yet.
Radagast the Brown
Radagast, the wizard of the woods, arrives on a sled pulled by rabbits with bird droppings down his face. He tells Gandalf that Greenwood is sick, giant spiders spawn in its south, and a sorcerer called the Necromancer has taken the fortress of Dol Guldur. He hands over a Morgul blade pulled from a tomb that should have stayed sealed.
Wargs attack. Radagast leads the pack on a chase across the hills while the company runs for a hidden passage. They tumble down a crevice and emerge above the valley of Rivendell, which was Gandalf’s plan all along.
Rivendell and the Moon Runes
Thorin bristles at accepting elven hospitality, but Elrond reads the map anyway. Moon runes reveal that the secret door will show itself only on Durin’s Day, as the last light of the sun strikes the keyhole. The window is narrow.
Meanwhile, the White Council meets. Saruman dismisses Radagast as a mushroom-addled fool and the Necromancer as a mere sorcerer. Galadriel speaks silently with Gandalf and asks why he chose the halfling. Small acts of kindness and love keep the darkness at bay, he answers, and he is afraid, and that is why he picked Bilbo.
Stone Giants
The dwarves slip out of Rivendell without Gandalf and climb into the Misty Mountains. In a thunderstorm, the cliff itself moves: stone giants tear chunks from the peaks and hurl them at each other. The company rides one giant’s knee as it swings through the storm.
Bilbo nearly slips off the ledge, and Thorin hauls him back. His thanks come as a snarl: Bilbo has been lost since he left home and has no place among them. In the cave that night, Bilbo packs to leave.
Goblin Town
The floor opens, and the dwarves drop into Goblin Town, a ramshackle city of bridges hanging over a chasm. The Great Goblin, a bloated monster with a wattle of neck flesh, demands to know who they are. He recognizes Orcrist and sends word to Azog.
Bilbo falls in a separate fight and lands in a cave far below. A gold ring slips from a goblin’s pocket. Bilbo picks it up without knowing what it is.
Riddles in the Dark
A creature paddles out of the water on a tiny boat. Gollum argues with himself about whether to eat the hobbit or play a game. They trade riddles, with Bilbo’s life as the stake and the way out as the prize.
Bilbo stumbles on his last turn and asks what he has in his pocket. Gollum guesses wrong three times, then reaches for his Precious and finds it missing. Bilbo runs, trips, and slips the Ring on his finger by accident. He vanishes.
Gandalf’s Rescue
Up above, Gandalf blasts into the throne room with a flash of light. He cuts his way through, slices the Great Goblin’s belly open and finishes him with a quip. The bridges collapse, and the dwarves ride the wreckage down the chasm.
Invisible, Bilbo follows Gollum to the exit. He raises his blade to kill him, then sees the misery in the creature’s eyes and steps over him instead. Gollum howls that Baggins has stolen from him. Bilbo squeezes through the gate and into the sunlight.
Out of the Frying Pan
Outside, the dwarves count heads and find Bilbo missing. Thorin sneers that the hobbit ran home. Bilbo steps out, pulls off the Ring unseen, and explains why he came back: they have no home, and he wants to help them take it.
Azog arrives with his Wargs. The company climbs pine trees on a cliff edge, and Gandalf lights pinecones and tosses them down. Trees topple one by one until everyone hangs from the last trunk over the abyss.
Movie Ending
Thorin sees Azog through the flames and walks down the burning trunk alone. His charge ends fast. Azog’s Warg takes him in its jaws and flings him across the rock, and the orc lifts his mace for the kill. Thorin cannot even reach his sword.
Bilbo, who an hour earlier could barely hold a blade, leaps off the tree. He tackles the orc about to behead Thorin and stabs it to death. Then he stands over the unconscious king with his little sword shaking, and Azog smiles.
The dwarves drop from the tree and pile into the fight. Just as the Wargs close in, Eagles sweep down from the sky. They snatch the company off the cliff and carry Thorin in their talons while Azog roars below.
On the Carrock, Gandalf heals Thorin, who wakes and demands to see the halfling. He asks what Bilbo thought he was doing and admits he could have died. Then he pulls Bilbo into an embrace and confesses he has never been so wrong in all his life.
From the rock, the company sees the Lonely Mountain on the horizon. Bilbo says the worst is behind them, and Gandalf’s expression suggests otherwise. A thrush flies to the mountain and cracks a snail on the stone of the secret door.
Inside Erebor, coins shift. Smaug’s eye opens under a sea of gold, and the film cuts to black.
Audiences usually walk out asking the same things. Why does Thorin change his mind? Because Bilbo proved he would risk his life for someone who despised him, which is the loyalty Thorin claimed to value. Is Azog supposed to be alive? Not in the book; Jackson resurrected him to give the trilogy a physical villain before Smaug speaks. Who is the Necromancer? Sauron, regaining strength in secret, which the sequels confirm.
The Ring matters most. Bilbo’s choice not to kill Gollum echoes forward sixty years to Gandalf’s speech in The Fellowship of the Ring about pity staying Bilbo’s hand. Without it, Gollum never reaches Mount Doom.
Are There Post-Credits Scenes?
No. An Unexpected Journey has no mid-credits or post-credits scene. The credits roll over Neil Finn‘s “Song of the Lonely Mountain”, which reworks the dwarves’ theme, and then the screen goes dark.
The Extended Edition restores footage inside the film itself, not after the credits.
Type of Movie
This is fantasy adventure with a lighter, more comic tone than The Lord of the Rings. Dish-juggling dwarves, cooking trolls and a flatulent Goblin King sit beside a genuinely eerie riddle contest.
It runs 169 minutes in theaters and about 182 minutes in the Extended Edition. Jackson also shot it in 3D at 48 frames per second, the first major studio film released at that frame rate.
Cast
- Martin Freeman – Bilbo Baggins
- Ian McKellen – Gandalf the Grey
- Richard Armitage – Thorin Oakenshield
- Ken Stott – Balin
- Graham McTavish – Dwalin
- Dean O’Gorman – Fíli
- Aidan Turner – Kíli
- James Nesbitt – Bofur
- Stephen Hunter – Bombur
- William Kircher – Bifur
- Mark Hadlow – Dori
- Jed Brophy – Nori
- Adam Brown – Ori
- John Callen – Óin
- Peter Hambleton – Glóin
- Andy Serkis – Gollum
- Sylvester McCoy – Radagast the Brown
- Barry Humphries – The Great Goblin
- Manu Bennett – Azog the Defiler
- Hugo Weaving – Elrond
- Cate Blanchett – Galadriel
- Christopher Lee – Saruman
- Lee Pace – Thranduil
- Ian Holm – Old Bilbo
- Elijah Wood – Frodo Baggins
- Bret McKenzie – Lindir
Film Music and Composer
Howard Shore returns and builds the score around one new melody: the dwarves’ song “Misty Mountains”, which the cast sings in Bag End and which becomes Thorin’s theme for the rest of the trilogy. The vocal arrangement came from the New Zealand group Plan 9, with Richard Armitage leading the dwarf actors.
Familiar themes come back too. The Shire music plays over Hobbiton, the Ring’s sinister motif creeps in when Bilbo finds the gold band, and Rivendell gets its old shimmering strings. Radagast and the Goblin Town sequence receive bouncier, stranger material than anything in the earlier films.
“Song of the Lonely Mountain”, written and performed by Crowded House frontman Neil Finn, plays over the end credits. Shore’s score earned no Oscar nomination this time, in contrast to his three wins on the first trilogy.
Filming Locations
Jackson rebuilt Hobbiton near Matamata in permanent materials for this film, which is why the set survives today as a tourist attraction. The original Lord of the Rings version had been made of plywood and torn down.
The troll clearing stands at Denize Bluffs near Piopio in the Waikato, a sheep farm of limestone outcrops that lends the scene its gloomy, shadowed look. Earnslaw Burn, a glacial valley near Glenorchy, provided the wild country the dwarves cross after leaving Rivendell.
Goblin Town, the riddle cave, Bag End’s interior and Rivendell all came together on stages at Stone Street Studios in Wellington, where green screens allowed the dwarves to share scenes with the towering Gandalf.
Awards and Nominations
The film earned three Academy Award nominations: Best Visual Effects, Best Makeup and Hairstyling, and Best Production Design. It won none, losing Visual Effects to Life of Pi.
At the BAFTAs it received nominations for Special Visual Effects and Makeup and Hair, again without a win. Its most consistent recognition came from the visual effects community for Gollum and the Goblin Town sequence.
Behind the Scenes Insights
- Guillermo del Toro spent two years developing the films as director before leaving in 2010 over MGM’s financial delays. Jackson, who had planned only to produce, stepped in.
- The project began as two films. Jackson announced the expansion to three in mid-2012, after principal photography had wrapped.
- Ian McKellen broke down in tears on set while acting alone against green screen, since the scale trick required Gandalf and the dwarves to perform on separate stages.
- Martin Freeman almost lost the role to his commitment to Sherlock. Jackson paused the shoot so Freeman could film the show’s second season.
- Conan Stevens originally played Azog in prosthetics. Jackson recast the role with Manu Bennett in motion capture and redesigned the character late in production.
- Andy Serkis directed the second unit on all three films besides playing Gollum.
- The dwarf actors spent weeks in a movement boot camp learning to walk and fight in heavy prosthetics.
- Jackson cameos in the prologue as a dwarf fleeing Erebor.
- A dispute with New Zealand’s actors’ unions in 2010 nearly moved the production overseas, prompting the government to change its labor laws.
Inspirations and References
The source is J.R.R. Tolkien‘s The Hobbit, published in 1937 as a children’s book. Jackson also drew on the appendices of The Lord of the Rings for the Battle of Azanulbizar, the White Council and the Necromancer, since the filmmakers held no rights to Tolkien’s other writings.
Tolkien lifted the dwarf names, and Gandalf’s, from the Dvergatal, a list of dwarves in the Old Norse poem Völuspá. The riddle contest follows a tradition of riddle duels in Old English and Norse literature. Bilbo’s song in Bag End uses Tolkien’s own poem “Far over the Misty Mountains Cold”.
Visually, Alan Lee and John Howe returned as concept artists. Jackson has also cited the 1977 Rankin/Bass animated film as part of his own childhood memory of the story.
Alternate Endings and Deleted Scenes
The Extended Edition adds roughly thirteen minutes. Highlights include a longer look at Hobbiton, the dwarves bathing naked in a Rivendell fountain, and Bofur singing a tavern song on a dinner table while Nori pockets the silverware. Kíli winks at an elf who turns out to be male.
The Great Goblin also gets a full musical number, “Down to Goblin Town”, which Barry Humphries performs with gusto. Elrond and Gandalf share more conversation about Thorin’s lineage and the madness of his grandfather.
The biggest alternate version never reached cameras. Del Toro’s two-film plan featured different creature designs and a darker palette, and the early two-film structure would have ended this installment at a different point in the story. Jackson’s decision to go to three films pushed Beorn and the spiders into the sequel.
Book Adaptations and Differences
Tolkien’s novel is slim, so Jackson expands almost every chapter. The biggest addition is Azog. In the book, Dáin killed him at Azanulbizar decades earlier, and his son Bolg leads the orcs at the climax; the film keeps Azog alive as a recurring hunter.
Radagast appears in the book only in passing. The White Council, Dol Guldur and the Morgul blade all come from the appendices, where Tolkien summarized them in a few paragraphs. Thranduil’s refusal to help at Erebor is an invention.
Smaller changes pile up. In the book, Bilbo tries to pickpocket a troll and gets caught when the purse talks, and Gandalf tricks the trolls by mimicking their voices. The stone giants are glimpsed throwing rocks rather than wrestling. Thorin never doubts Bilbo so openly, and Bilbo never saves his life on the cliff.
Even the Ring differs. Tolkien’s 1937 edition had Gollum offer the Ring as a prize and apologize when he could not find it; Tolkien rewrote the chapter in 1951 to match The Lord of the Rings. The film follows the revised version.
Memorable Scenes and Quotes
Key Scenes
- Smaug’s attack on Erebor and Dale, told entirely in glimpses of fire and shadow.
- Thirteen dwarves demolishing Bilbo’s pantry, then singing “Misty Mountains” by the fire.
- Bilbo signing the contract and running through Hobbiton without a handkerchief.
- Three trolls bickering over how to cook thirteen dwarves.
- Galadriel and Gandalf speaking without words in Rivendell.
- The stone giants clashing in the storm.
- Gollum’s riddle game, shifting from playful to murderous in a single blink.
- Bilbo choosing not to kill Gollum.
- Thorin’s walk down the burning tree.
Iconic Quotes
- “I’m going on an adventure!”
- “What have I got in my pocket?”
- “I have found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay.”
- “True courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one.”
- “Home is now behind you. The world is ahead.”
- “I have never been so wrong in all my life.”
- “If this is to end in fire, then we will all burn together!”
- “Loyalty, honor, a willing heart. I can ask no more than that.”
Easter Eggs and Hidden Details
- Frodo leaves Bag End to wait for Gandalf on the road, which connects this film directly to the opening of The Fellowship of the Ring.
- Bret McKenzie, who played the fan-favorite background elf nicknamed Figwit in the first trilogy, returns as the named elf Lindir.
- Gandalf credits Bullroarer Took with inventing golf by knocking a goblin’s head into a hole, a joke straight from Tolkien’s text.
- Bilbo’s sword stays unnamed here; he will call it Sting after the spiders in the sequel.
- The rune Gandalf scratches on Bilbo’s door is the dwarvish letter for G.
- Gollum’s riddle cave uses the same lighting style as his introduction in The Two Towers.
- The thrush cracking a snail on the door echoes a key moment from the book, where a thrush’s knock signals the keyhole.
- Thorin’s oak-branch shield appears in the Azanulbizar flashback, explaining the name Oakenshield before anyone says it.
Trivia
- The film grossed over one billion dollars worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing films of 2012.
- Its 48 frames per second presentation divided critics, with some praising the clarity and others comparing it to television.
- The world premiere took place in Wellington on November 28, 2012, and the film opened in the United States on December 14.
- All thirteen dwarves received distinct hair, beard and costume designs so audiences could tell them apart, a problem Tolkien’s book never solved.
- Martin Freeman and Ian Holm, playing the same character sixty years apart, never share a scene.
- Christopher Lee filmed his Saruman scenes in England, since he could no longer travel to New Zealand.
- Barry Humphries, famous as Dame Edna, performed the Great Goblin in motion capture.
- Andy Serkis had not played Gollum in nearly a decade before returning for the riddle scene.
Why Watch?
Bag End has never felt cozier, and the riddle game has never felt more dangerous. An Unexpected Journey gives Martin Freeman the role of a lifetime and reintroduces Gollum at his most pitiful and terrifying. Fans of Middle-earth will find the road home still open.
Director’s Other Movies
- Bad Taste (1987)
- Meet the Feebles (1989)
- Braindead (1992)
- Heavenly Creatures (1994)
- The Frighteners (1996)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
- King Kong (2005)
- The Lovely Bones (2009)
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
- They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
Recommended Films for Fans
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013)
- The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies (2014)
- The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
- Willow (1988)
- The Princess Bride (1987)
- Labyrinth (1986)
- Warcraft (2016)
- Stardust (2007)
- The Golden Compass (2007)
- How to Train Your Dragon (2010)
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001)
- Dragonslayer (1981)
