Quantifying Emotional Tone in Tolkien's The Hobbit: Dialogue Sentiment Analysis with RegEx, NRC-VAD, and Python

TL;DR

This paper employs computational text analysis to quantify and visualize the emotional tone and its progression in Tolkien's The Hobbit, revealing patterns of emotional modulation that underpin the narrative structure.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of regex extraction, NRC-VAD lexicon scoring, and visualization techniques to analyze emotional dynamics in literary dialogue.

Findings

Dialogue is generally positive and calm throughout the novel.

Emotional intensity increases gradually as the story progresses.

Visualizations reveal cycles of tension and comfort in the narrative.

Abstract

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.