Thorin Oakenshield: The Dwarf King of The Hobbit Films

Thorin Oakenshield is the leader of the thirteen dwarves who set out to win back the dwarf homeland beneath the Lonely Mountain, and he is credited under that name in all three Hobbit films. Richard Armitage plays him, billed third in each film: behind Martin Freeman as Bilbo and Ian McKellen as Gandalf in the first, and behind McKellen and Freeman in the second and third.

In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012), directed by Peter Jackson, Thorin is the one who explains the plan to the gathered company: reach the Lonely Mountain and take it back from the dragon Smaug. Gandalf has chosen the hobbit Bilbo Baggins as the company's burglar, and Bilbo, though unsure, leaves his home to join them.

The company he leads is a large ensemble. Among the top billed cast, the dwarves are Balin (Ken Stott), Dwalin (Graham McTavish), Fili (Dean O'Gorman), Kili (Aidan Turner), Bofur (James Nesbitt), Ori (Adam Brown), Gloin (Peter Hambleton), Oin (John Callen), Dori (Mark Hadlow) and Nori (Jed Brophy). Those ten names plus Thorin make eleven of the thirteen dwarves.

Thorin also carries a personal enemy, since the Orc chieftain Azog holds a grudge against him and hunts the company from the first film onward. If you are new to the saga, the Hobbit films come first in chronological order but arrive after the original trilogy in release order, which our Lord of the Rings movies in order guide sets out in full.

Thorin's key relationships are with Bilbo, Gandalf, his company, the elf king Thranduil and the Orc chieftain Azog, and each one shapes a different stage of his arc.

Bilbo is the central bond. Thorin begins as Bilbo's doubter and ends as his friend, and the turning point is the Carrock in the first film, where Thorin admits he was wrong. The bond is tested in the third film when Bilbo hands the Arkenstone to Thranduil and Bard to try to prevent a war. The films present it as a friendship that survives that betrayal and ends in peace between the two.

Gandalf sets the quest in motion by bringing the dwarves to Bilbo's door and choosing the hobbit as burglar. He guides the company to Rivendell and to Beorn, and he is absent for long stretches of the later films, held prisoner in Dol Guldur while Thorin's judgment worsens. For more on the wizard, see Gandalf.

Thranduil is the rival. In the second film he imprisons Thorin after a tense confrontation, and in the third he stands at the mountain with the elves, wanting a claim to the treasure. Lee Pace plays him.

Azog is the enemy who hunts Thorin from the start, and the grudge is personal. Bolg, Azog's son, takes up the hunt in the second film.

The dwarf king after Thorin is Dain Ironfoot, played by Billy Connolly, who takes the throne at the end of the third film. Fili and Kili, two of Thorin's company, stay close to him through the quest.

In my opinion, Thorin's best scenes are the ones where the film lets his pride crack, and four of them stand out across the trilogy.

The first is the Carrock in An Unexpected Journey. After the eagles set the company down, Thorin admits he was wrong to doubt Bilbo, and it works because the film has made that doubt understandable up to that point. It is the moment the relationship becomes the spine of the trilogy.

The second is the confrontation with Thranduil in The Desolation of Smaug. Thorin is imprisoned, and the scene sets up the old grievance between dwarves and elves that returns, at full strength, outside the mountain in the third film. It could be argued that this is where Armitage most clearly plays Thorin as a leader who would rather lose everything than ask for help.

The third is the sealing of the dwarves inside the mountain in The Battle of the Five Armies. Thorin's fixation on the Arkenstone is the cleanest picture of the greed sickness the film is about, and it makes his later return to the fight more than a rescue.

The fourth is his farewell to Bilbo. Perhaps the most telling detail is how small the scene is compared with the battle around it. For production context, the trilogy's principal photography ran 266 days and ended on 6 July 2012, according to RNZ, and the three films were shot back to back, which may help explain how consistent Armitage's Thorin feels across them. Paradoxically, the character who is hardest to like for most of the third film is the one the ending asks you to miss.