Quantifying Emotional Tone in Tolkien's The Hobbit: Dialogue Sentiment Analysis with RegEx, NRC-VAD, and Python
This work applies computational methods to literary analysis, offering insights into emotional structures in The Hobbit, but it is incremental as it uses existing tools on a specific text.
This study analyzed the emotional tone of dialogue in Tolkien's The Hobbit using computational text analysis, finding that the dialogue maintains a generally positive and calm tone with increasing agency as the story progresses, reflecting cycles of tension and comfort.
This study analyzes the emotional tone of dialogue in J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) using computational text analysis. Dialogue was extracted with regular expressions, then preprocessed, and scored using the NRC-VAD lexicon to quantify emotional dimensions. The results show that the dialogue maintains a generally positive (high valence) and calm (low arousal) tone, with a gradually increasing sense of agency (dominance) as the story progresses. These patterns reflect the novel's emotional rhythm: moments of danger and excitement are regularly balanced by humor, camaraderie, and relief. Visualizations -- including emotional trajectory graphs and word clouds -- highlight how Tolkien's language cycles between tension and comfort. By combining computational tools with literary interpretation, this study demonstrates how digital methods can uncover subtle emotional structures in literature, revealing the steady rhythm and emotional modulation that shape the storytelling in The Hobbit.