Is Legolas In The Hobbit? The Book & Movie

So the question we are looking at here will be, is Legolas in the Hobbit? We will answer this in two ways, we will see if Legolas is in the actual Tolkien book The Hobbit and then if he features in Peter Jackson’s remake of the book, The Hobbit movie. We will take a look at these questions and then give you a little extra information.

Legolas is one of the main characters in J.R.R Tolkien’s Lord Of The Rings books. He was one of the original fellowship of nine who set out from Rivendell with Frodo to destroy the One Ring. In the film version of the book we see plenty of Legolas who is played in the films by the actor Orlando Bloom. We all assumed we had seen the last of Bloom playing Legolas, but we may have been wrong. First of all then, let’s take a look at the original book.

So quite simply, the character Legolas does not appear in The Hobbit by J.R.R Tolkien. There is no mention of his character and the only reference to him at all is where his father is mentioned. Unlike The Lord Of The Rings the elves do not play a big part in the story in The Hobbit, it is mainly the Dwarves who feature.

When Tolkien was writing The Hobbit he may well never have even dreamed up the character Legolas. Although it is true that Tolkien had already done much work building up his fantasy world, it is assumed that characters such as Legolas and others mentioned in The Lord Of The Rings were not thought up until well over a decade after the publication of The Hobbit.

So as you can see it is pretty clear that Legolas was in no way involved in the original version of Tolkien’s The Hobbit. However, with the release of the 2012 version of The Hobbit, An Unexpected Journey and then a year later the release of part two, There And Back Again, the question may have a different answer.

Does Legolas Feature In The Hobbit Movies

After reviewing the first question the answer to the second question, rather surprisingly is yes! Legolas does feature in The Hobbit movies. Obviously this will be a big surprise to fans of the book as Peter Jackson the director is moving away from the original story and adding to it.

The revelation first came to light in the summer of 2011 when Peter Jackson announced that Legolas would again feature. Yet again Orlando Bloom plays the role and so we will be seeing more of him. Currently it is unknown how exactly Jackson will write the character into the story, will he be given a major role or will it just be a small cameo? At the moment we obviously do not know, but it is unlikely that Jackson will stray too far from the original story and so we are only expecting a small role for Bloom.

The most likely place we will encounter Legolas in the story is when Bilbo and his company of Dwarves pass through Mirkwood. Here they meet the elves of Mirkwood, there king is Thranduil who is the farther of Legolas, so this would be a logical place for his inclusion. Obviously we shall just have to wait and see.

Fans of Tolkien may be a little disappointed with Jackson at the inclusion of Legolas in the Hobbit. The fact is though that he used some artistic licence in the LOTR movies as well. We saw the omission of Tom Bombadil in the first movie and then we saw far more of Arwen that we should have. In reality though Jackson said himself he tried to stick as close to the original writing as possible, but when translating Tolkien’s work onto the big screen it was necessary to make a few adjustments. The same is no doubt true of The Hobbit, some will argue that the inclusion of Legolas goes against what Tolkien put down in writing, but ultimately if we get a good quality movie that stays close to the original book, does it really matter?