“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”who said to whom and why?

Thorin speaks these words in Chapter 18, just before he dies, asking Bilbo’s forgiveness for his harsh words to him before the Battle of the Five Armies. Thorin acknowledges that, though in his greed he has looked on Bilbo’s simple goodness with contempt, the world would be a better place with more Bilbos and fewer Thorins. This quotation places the book’s contrast between the simple life of modernity and the grim heroism of the ancient epic in a new light. Bilbo initially felt that the rigors of heroism would force him to abandon the complacency of his simple life at Hobbiton. At the conclusion of the novel, we see that if everyone led a simple, hobbitlike life, the world would be free of evil, and heroism would, in effect, be unnecessary. This new understanding lies behind Bilbo’s decision to return to Hobbiton at the end of the book and is Tolkien’s closing moral position in The Hobbit.