Not very profound thoughts upon re-reading "The Hobbit"

[mmcirvin]

 I hadn't actually read The Hobbit in several decades and had forgotten how some of it goes. Some observations:

Tolkien sets us up to believe that the defeat of the dragon Smaug will be the climax of the story, but it actually only opens the last act, which I'd largely forgotten the details of, but which was the most interesting part on this reading. For a while, Tolkien seems to be setting up the tragedy of Thorin Oakenshield: the would-be King under the Mountain's unwillingness to give up any of the mountain's treasure, even a reasonable amount as aid in the wake of a disaster he was involved in causing, to help the people who actually killed the dragon, comes very close to starting a new war with the Men and Elves. If Shakespeare were writing this, that is how it would go. Instead, Tolkien seems to want to avert it at the last minute by a kind of diabolus ex machina: they all get attacked by goblins and wargs, and end up uniting after all in the Battle of Five Armies. Thorin still dies, but it's straightforwardly heroic, rather than as the tragic hero, and he's clearly come to his senses. I suppose Tolkien wants to dial back on the tragedy because it's a kid's book, but it's interesting that he actually does this by increasing the amount of violence.

Fili and Kili also die at the end, but this gets tossed off almost in an aside. It might have been a mistake to put so many dwarves in there. Most of them don't get strongly differentiated as characters.

I'd forgotten how many talking animals are in this story--it gives it a more fairy-tale quality than The Lord of the Rings, which goes a bit lighter on them. It's been observed many times that ubiquitous cell phones killed a lot of thriller plots because people can communicate, and even before that was true in the real world, the writers on Star Trek kept having to come up with contrivances to separate the away team from their communicators. But here, Tolkien really seems to want his characters to carry cell phones--a lot of things require the rapid transmission of information to distant people, and he uses... talking birds! In particular, it's how Bilbo can be crucially involved in the killing of Smaug even though he's nowhere near the guy who does it and hasn't met him.

Comments

[jwgh]

I remember that my dad told his (current) wife that he thought this book and one or two others were kind of perfect kid's books (unfortunately I don't remember what the others were), and she pointed out that none of the books had female characters, which made him sort of sit and think about things for a bit.

I think it's neat that Bilbo's ultimate act of heroism in this book is also an act of betrayal -- instead of giving the Arkenstone to Thorin, he gives it to the Dale folks, in an attempt to avert a war. It doesn't seem like it would necessarily have actually worked (invasion of the goblins and wargs aside), but that's life sometimes, I guess. (But Gandalf respects this move, which is worth something!) The War of the Five Armies is a bit of an anticlimax after that, which is emphasized by Bilbo being unconscious for a fair chunk of it.

One of my prized possession as a kid was a glass doorknob that I called the Arkenstone.

[mmcirvin]

This is definitely another one of those old F/SF boys' stories that takes place in a 100% male universe. Even The Lord of the Rings does a far better job of acknowledging that women exist--I was going to say that Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is a character at the end, trying to auction off Bilbo's possessions, but even she is onstage more in the opening chapter of The Lord of the Rings than here.

I never saw Peter Jackson's Hobbit movie trilogy so I don't have a sense of how he tried to inflate all this into an immense epic. I read somewhere that the movies depict Thorin's stubbornness as more explicitly supernatural in origin, having him start hissing like Smaug and so forth. I guess that's consistent with how he depicts other things like Theoden and Denethor's confusion in LOTR. In the book, though, there are mentions of a dragon-spell but it came across to me as as much pride as avarice: Thorin sees his royal claim as superseding all other moral considerations, and anyone asking for a share he didn't already grant as a threat to his legitimacy, even though this is a bigger pile of treasure than anyone could reasonably make use of.

[mmcirvin]

...Also, it's amusing to go from this to the opening of LOTR in which Bilbo, arguing with Gandalf over the Ring and Bilbo's fake narrative of how he got it (which is itself a metatextual allusion to Tolkien's revisions of The Hobbit), says "I'm not a thief" and Gandalf says "I never called you one", even though Gandalf spent the entire previous book extolling Bilbo's skill as a burglar before Bilbo has even gotten up to any actual burglary.

[thewayne]

There are definitely some interesting structures within The Hobbit, such as, as you point out, the death of Smaug not being the climax of the book, just the opening of the final act.

One of the songs I want to do in Lord of the Rings Online involves a rewrite of the lyrics to Chicago's 25 or 6 to 4 as Five Armies Battle At My Door. Had the idea months ago, haven't really pursued it. I'll get there eventually. Converting/remixing the music isn't too difficult, but getting the words to work well and convey a good story is another thing entirely.

[mmcirvin]

The idea that having a big-ass mound of treasure for the taking could turn out to be as big a problem as having a dragon around is very, very Tolkien.