Middle-earth Journeys

June 26, TA 2941
Monday. They are captured by the Goblins during the night.

After leaving Rivendell, the company ventures into the Misty Mountains. A storm comes a few days into the journey and Kili and Fili are sent to find shelter. They find a cave and claim to have checked it thoroughly. While in the cave, Gandalf amuses the dwarves and hobbit with smoke rings and then they all fall asleep, except Bilbo. He cannot sleep and when he does finally fall asleep, he has horrible dreams.

"It was the last night they used the ponies, packages, baggages, tools and paraphernalia they had brought with them. It turned out a good thing, that night, that they had brought little Bilbo with them after all. For somehow,he could not go to sleep for a long while, and when he did sleep, he had very nasty dreams. He dreamed that crack at the wall of the back of the cave got bigger and bigger and opened wider and wider and he was very afraid but could not call out or do anything but lie and look. then he dreamed that the floor of the cave was giving way and he was slipping beginning to fall down, down, goodness knows where to! At that he woke up with a horrible start and found that part of his dream was true! A crack had opened at the back of the cave and was already a wide passage. He was just in time to see the last of the ponies tails disappearing into it. of course he gave a very loud yell, as loud a yell a hobbit can give, which is surprising for their size. Out jumped the goblins!"

In the chaos, and in a flash, the Goblins carry off the dwarves and Bilbo, but Bilbo's scream alerted Gandalf and he escaped, which allowed him to later free the others from the Goblins.

So, Bilbo served a great purpose, because without his dream and scream, they all would have been captured and the journey would have ended. Who knows who would have ended up with the Ring and how Middle-earth would have faired?

This event also marks the second capture of the company by the enemy. The capture is a result of dwarf mistakes. The capture leads the company deep under the mountains, which essentially leads Bilbo to the Ring, which would not have happened otherwise, thus affecting the future of all Middle-earth.

Artwork

© Alan Lee: The Great Goblin gave a truly awful howl of rage...

Very nice elen! I agree...this is the day that something BIG started.

I remain fascinated by Tolkien’s mind. When he wrote this chapter, did he already have a plan for the importance of the Ring at some distant time? I suspect he did, with his knowledge of Nordic lore and The Volsunga Saga. But still…was he already planning a Hobbit sequel that centered on the Ring, or did his grounding in lore lead him to go back to The Hobbit and snatch the Ring plot to build his next gigantic tale around? Methinks that both scenarios played a part.

Nice entry! I have always thought Tolkien left poor Gimli with a lot of foolishness to live down after the dwarves of The Hobbit, ! In truth, though, Bilbo's dwarves have begun to mature by the end of the story--the Lonely Mountain company is hardly recognizable as the same group after the Battle of Five Armies. Their experiences are part of the different tone the Professor takes at the end of his ostensible children's story, which after all, was always so much more....

Nice work, elentivarda .

Now for that ring.... I thought that a larger plot for the Ring hadn't entered Tolkien's mind at all at the time of writing, hence his need to go back and revise The Hobbit? I remember he wrote in one of his letters that he realised that it was inconceivable that Gollum would give away his ring once the ring had, if you like, become The Ring. And that it was now a major plot weakness that he had to rectify. The fact that even Tolkien hadn't, like Gandalf, an inkling what it was/could be, makes it's usefulness as the centrepoint of LotR even more remarkable! He couldn't have come up with something better if he'd spent years planning it.

Sometimes I think Tolkien must had a remarkable Muse watching over him .

I'm posting this now because it's ready, and because I may not have much chance to do so before the due date:


008hoblee.jpg"It's got to ask uss a question, my preciouss, yes, yess, yesss."

July 19: Gandalf and the dwarves escape. Bilbo finds the ring, meets Gollum, escapes. The company is trapped by wolves and rescued by eagles.

This eventful day starts badly for Bilbo. As we discover later, Gandalf’s magic has enabled the others to escape the goblins, but Bilbo is accidentally left behind, unconscious on the tunnel floor. On waking, he crawls around looking for a way out.

And then he finds the ring.

In fact, his hand “meets” it - has the ring chosen a new owner? “It was a turning point in his career, although he did not know it” - Tolkien is talking about Bilbo but this applies equally to himself.

For a while Bilbo despairs. Then, heartened by the idea that his sword was forged in Gondolin, he continues through the darkness and finds Gollum - a small, dark, slimy creature living near an underground lake, who will eat him - given the chance! Trapped, Bilbo makes a pact with Gollum: they will trade riddles. If Bilbo wins, Gollum shows him the way out. If he loses, Gollum eats him . . .

Tolkien’s children would have recognised Bilbo’s riddles, which are drawn from popular fairy tales, while Gollum’s go back to Anglo-Saxon times. Tolkien is amusing himself here by incorporating oral tradition, having already called his “rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves*” after characters in the Norse saga Völuspá - and ‘Gandalf’ means ‘elf with a staff’ (gand-aelf)**.

As the riddles get harder, Bilbo panics; he guesses the last one by “pure luck” (Bilbo has a lot of “luck” throughout his adventures, which suggests that fate is at work). Unable to think of another, he absent-mindedly touches the ring and cries “What have I got in my pocket?”. Gollum thinks it’s part of the game, and is stumped. There is no cheating - this is a children’s story!

Reluctantly Gollum agrees to show Bilbo the way out, secretly planning to use the ring - which he doesn’t realise he’s lost - to become invisible, and kill Bilbo. Of course, he can’t find it, and,suspecting the truth, attacks. Bilbo flees, the ring slips onto his finger, and he discovers that he can follow Gollum to the exit without being seen. Gollum, talking wildly to himself, veers between searching for the ring and luring Bilbo back to the goblins. Yet Bilbo pities Gollum and chooses not to kill him before escaping. Shippey** points out that Bilbo empathises with Gollum because he has far more in common with him than he does with the dwarves . This display of mercy, along with the discovery of the ring, has great significance for the future of Middle-Earth.

Bilbo catches up with Gandalf and the dwarves, but when they swap escape stories, Bilbo decides not to mention the ring. They resume their journey but are forced to climb trees to escape wolves. Gandalf bombards the wolves with flaming pine cones, which attracts the goblins, but also the eagles, who arrive as the goblins and wolves set fire to the tree trunks. The eagles carry Thorin’s company to their eyrie and once again Bilbo is nearly left behind, clinging desperately to Dori’s legs.

In Tolkien’s wider mythology the eagles are a manifestation of the Thought of Manwë, a force for good. Here they effect a vital rescue and will do so again in The Hobbit and LOTR. But for now we leave Bilbo and his companions in the eyrie, resting before they carry on towards the Lonely Mountain.

*source: Christopher Tolkien, HoME The Return of the Shadow, HarperCollins 1988
** source: Tom Shippey, Roots & Branches, Walking Tree Publishers 2007

Great entry, Marbretherese! I think it's fascinating how the Ring got a foothold in Bilbo's psyche almost at once--causing or prompting him to hide the Ring from the Dwarves until he could not any longer, and later to alter the truth of its finding when he talked to Gandalf. If he had not been as good in nature and character as he was. . . shudder. It's this sort of insidious, creeping evil that Tolkien can do so well, and scare us more than any graphic horror. He can create a horror in the soul.

Fabulous entry marbretherese! Tolkien truly interweaves so much that again I have to ask...was LOTR already hatching in his brain? Was The Hobbit already merely the introduction?

Great entry, Marbretherese, there is so much going on that day to pack into the calendar - not only for Bilbo but, it turns out, for the whole of Middle-earth. It's the turning point of the book where Bilbo's fortune changes - seemingly for good to start with.

I love your observation that he 'meets' the Ring. I've just compared the original version with the revised version to see if Bilbo had always 'met' the Ring, and this is one of Tolkien's changes where he deliberately changes 'find' to 'met'. Interesting that Tolkien's eye was on such a tiny detail. Just by changing that one word he's given the Ring a personality from the very first moment we encounter it. Clever old JRR!!

Riv, to answer your question about whether Tolkien already had LOTR in mind when he wrote The Hobbit, I'm pretty sure the answer is "No." LOTR didn't occur to him until his publishers asked him to write a sequel to his unexpectedly popular The Hobbit. As LOTR took shape with the Ring as the connecting factor, Tolkien realized that he would have to go back and somewhat rewrite the chapter in which Bilbo "finds" the Ring in order to setup what will follow in LOTR.

What Tolkien really wanted them to publish was The Silmarillion, but it contained no hobbits!

Thanks Lindariel, that I can understand. But there are so many other coincidences...Gandalf leaving the company fit so nicely with his need to flesh out the truth about Saruman...and in the last chapter, Gandalf mentions the Necromancer and Dol Guldur and both he and Elrond hint at bad times to come.

Do you know? Were these parts added or edited as well? It certainly seems like the set up for more adventures to come.

I'm not sure. It may be that in writing LOTR, Tolkien went back and made something out of these utterances, which at the time were simply handy elements to get Gandalf out of the picture for the sake of driving forward the narrative and propelling our reluctant hero into a position of leadership with the dwarves.

Our beloved Professor was certainly a master story-weaver, and no doubt there was always some unconscious portion of his brain working on his great story. Who knows? Even when he thought he was working on an unrelated children's story about hobbits, perhaps inwardly his muse was guiding him to ultimately build it back into the Great Tale. He did always maintain in his letters that he wrote LOTR not really knowing where it was going to go, allowing the story to tell itself. Remember? He didn't even know about Faramir until the man walked up to Frodo in Ithilien.

At any rate, I think he wrote The Hobbit first and then began making connections back to the Great Tale later when faced with the request for a Hobbit sequel. In a way, I believe he hoped that by connecting The Hobbit to his greater story about elves through LOTR that he could ultimately bring about the publication of his first and greatest love -- the elvish tales that make up The Silmarillion. And what do you know? Ultimately he was right, even though publication occurred posthumously.

Here's a longer quote from Christopher Tolkien's The Return of the Shadow which might shed some light on the current discussion.  The bits in square brackets are mine, but the rest of the italics are his:

How my father saw The Hobbit - especially in relation to 'The Silmarillion' [by which CT means the entire mythology, not the book itself] - at the time of its publication is shown clearly in the letter that he wrote to G E Selby on 14 December 1937:

I don't much approve of The Hobbit myself, preferring my own mythology (which is just touched on) with its consistent nomenclature - ELrond, Gondolin, and Esgaroth have escaped out of it - and organized history, to this rabble of Eddaic-named dwarves out of Völuspá, newfangled hobbits and gollums (invented in an idle hour) and Anglo-Saxon runes.

The importance of The Hobbit in the history of the evolution of Middle-earth lies then, at this time, in the fact that it was published, and that a sequel to it was demanded.  As a result, from the nature of The Lord of the Rings as it evolved, The Hobbit was drawn into Middle-earth - and transformed it; but as it stood in 1937 it was not a part of it.  Its significance for Middle-earth lies in what it would do, not in what it was.

Later, The Lord of the Rings in turn reacted upon The Hobbit itself, in published and in (far more extensive) unpublished revisions of the text; but all that lies of course far in the future at the point which this History [ie The History of Middle Earth] has reached.

Interesting that Tolkien's main reason for 'not approving' of The Hobbit is to do with the names he's used . . .

Yes, great point! Yet Tolkien's legendarium is now known as a kind of model of multiculturalism, way ahead of its time for that, among other things.

That's a fascinating snippet! Christopher T really sums it up with 'The Hobbit was drawn into Middle-earth - and transformed it'. It's a process that Tolkien couldn't have imagined while idly writing a children's story. It's all kinda perfect - the way LotR is born out of the tension between child-friendly hobbits and his larger legendarium. By pulling stuff in from both directions he ended up with something both majestically deep and hugely accessible. It's pretty astonishing really and I tend to Lindariel's view that:

lindariel wrote:Even when he thought he was working on an unrelated children's story about hobbits, perhaps inwardly his muse was guiding him to ultimately build it back into the Great Tale.

'newfangled hobbits and gollums' - that's just hilarious .

Iolanthe wrote:It's all kinda perfect - the way LotR is born out of the tension between child-friendly hobbits and his larger legendarium. By pulling stuff in from both directions he ended up with something both majestically deep and hugely accessible.

I think that sums up the genius of Tolkien.