Children's and Young Adult Literature Commons^™

Bilbo Baggins And The Forty Thieves: The Reworking Of Folktale Motifs In The Hobbit (And The Lord Of The Rings), Giovanni Carmine Costabile

Mythlore: A Journal of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and Mythopoeic Literature

The Hobbit is undisputedly influenced by Germanic sources such as Beowulf, the Völsunga Saga and both the Elder Edda and the Prose Edda. While there is no reason to deny this result of criticism, I argue that acknowledging the aforementioned sources should not constitute a reason to deny the potentiality of other sources from other cultural areas. The similarities between The Hobbit and a famous tale from the Arabian Nights, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, offer a chance to investigate a much wider potential field wherein to look for shared motifs when only …