How long does it take to read The Hobbit, or There and Back Again?
by J.R.R. Tolkien
5h 3m
75,625 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 11 days.
That is 10 sessions with The Hobbit, or There and Back Again.
45 minutes a day would finish it in about 7 days.
How we worked this out
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is about 75,625 words, estimated from its 275 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 5 hours 3 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished The Hobbit, or There and Back Again, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
The Hobbit, or There and Back Again at a glance
- Pages
- 275
- Author
- J.R.R. Tolkien
- Series
- Middle-Earth Universe
- Genre
- fantasy, paranormal
Knowing the number is the easy part.
The hours are the hard part, and they are easier with company. ReadersGuild is where people read The Hobbit, or There and Back Again alongside each other, one session at a time.
See who is reading right now