Search Results for: the hobbit

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 7: Queer Lodgings

In which we are introduced to a rather alarming character named Beorn.

The name Beorn is actually an Old English word for “man” or “warrior” but it originally meant “bear.” Beorn, the next helper that Bilbo and the dwarves find, is a man/bear. Gandalf calls hims a “skin-changer.”

“At any rate he is under no enchantment but his own. He lives in an oak-wood and has a great wooden house; and as a man he keeps cattle and horses which are nearly as marvellous as himself. They work for him and talk to him. He does not eat them; neither does he hunt or eat wild animals. He keeps hives and hives of great fierce bees, and lives most on cream and honey. As a bear he ranges far and wide. I once saw him sitting all alone on the top of the Carrock at night watching the moon sinking towards the Misty Mountains, and I heard him growl in the tongue of bears: ‘The day will come when they will perish and I shall go back!’ That is why I believe he once came from the mountains himself.”

Shapeshifting, according to Wikipedia, is a common theme in folk tales and mythology. Sometimes voluntary (as with Beorn) and at other times inflicted upon an unwilling subject by a sorcerer or god (Beauty and the Beast), shapeshifting from man, or woman, to animal gives the shifter both new abilities and new limitations. With Beorn, the advantages of being a bear are emphasized: he can travel far and rapidly in his bear-shape and defeat powerful enemies like the Wargs and the goblins. Gandalf seems to think that the visit to Beorn’s house is both perilous and necessary. Z-baby says that Beorn is a “creepy” character. She said, “What if he got mad and decided to turn into a bear and eat them?” I guess that’s the danger you run when you’re dealing with a bear-man.

Beorn can and does help the dwarves and Bilbo, but he can also be a bad enemy if he is annoyed or crossed.

“A goblin’s head was nailed to a tree just outside the ate and a warg-skin was nailed to a tree just beyond. Beorn was a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend, and Gandalf thought it wise to tell him their whole story and the reason of their journey, so that they could get the most help he could offer.”

At the end of this chapter, Gandalf goes off to other business, leaving the dwarves and Bilbo to enter the forest of Mirkwood by themselves. As he is leaving, Gandalf mentions, in an off-hand way, the Necromancer, an early incarnation of Sauron, the powerful satanic villain of The Lord of the Rings. The enemy that Bilbo and his companions have to deal with, eventually, in The Hobbit is the dragon Smaug, but first they must face the perils of Mirkwood.

A biographical sketch of Beorn.

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 6: Out of the Frying Pan into the Fire

Jun15

Bilbo had escaped the goblins, but he did not know where he was. He had lost hood, cloak, food, pony, his buttons and his friends.

Into the fire, indeed. Bilbo and the dwarves bounce from one fix to the next, each a little more perilous than the one before. In this chapter, they have escaped the goblins only to be treed by Wargs. My annotated version of The Hobbit has a few notes on the origins of various names of creatures that Tolkien introduces in the course of his tale:

Hobbit— Tolkien said, “I don’t know where the word came from. You can’t catch your mind out. It might have been associated with SInclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think.
But he also wrote elsewhere, “I must admit that its faint suggestion of rabbit appealed to me. Not that hobbits at all resemble rabbits, unless it be in burrowing.”

Goblins— Tolkien’s goblins resemble the goblins of author George Macdonald in The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie, except that Macdonald’s goblins had soft and easily injured feet, which Tolkien said he “never believed in.”

Warg—Tolkien in a letter to author Gene Wolfe, 11/7/66, “It is an old word for wolf, which also had the sense of an outlaw or hunted criminal. This is its usual sense in surviving texts. I adopted the word, which had a good sound for the meaning, as a name for this particular brand of demonic wolf in the story.”

Orcs— are barely mentioned in The Hobbit, but rather the term “goblin” is used for all the creatures that live in the mountains and serve evil. By the time Tolkien wrote LOTR, he had switched to calling all of Sauron’s creatures orcs. In Tolkien’s Middle Earth, goblins and orcs are approximately the same or related creatures.

As the chapter closes, the eagles rescue Bilbo and Gandalf and the dwarves from their predicament in the trees. And Bilbo gets the dubious pleasure of spending the night in an eagle’s eyrie.

“So ended the adventures of the Misty Mountains. Soon Bilbo’s stomach was feeling full and comfortable again, and he felt he could sleep contentedly, though really he would have liked a loaf and butter rather than bits of meat toasted on sticks. He slept curled up on the hard rock more soundly than ever he had done on his featherbed in his own little hole at home. But all night he dreamed of his own house and wandered in his sleep into all his different rooms looking for something that he could not find nor remember what it looked like.”

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party
Chapter 2, Roast Mutton.
Chapter 3, A Short Rest.
Chapter 4, Over Hill and Under Hill.
Chapter 5, Riddles in the Dark.

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 5: Riddles in the Dark

Jun4

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party
Chapter 2, Roast Mutton.
Chapter 3, A Short Rest.
Chapter 4, Over Hill and Under Hill.

What’s your favorite riddle? Do you ever tell riddles in your family? Can you answer the riddles in this post?

In chapter five of The Hobbit, we are introduced to the creature Gollum, a sort of ancient and seedy hobbit-like character who has come down in the world, both figuratively and literally speaking. Gollum lives deep under the Misty Mountains, in the dark and the damp, wandering tunnels, talking to himself, and eating raw fish and other unsavory foods.

Bilbo and Gollum play The Riddle Game, a game of who can stump whom with a riddle. The stakes are high: Bilbo’s life and freedom. Unfortunately for Gollum, he, too, is risking something that is more precious to him than life: a very special ring. There’s more about that ring in The Lord of the Rings.

For now, let’s stick with the riddles.

1. What has roots as nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up it goes,
Yet never grows?

2. Voiceless it cries,
Wingless flutters,
Toothless bites,
Mouthless mutters.

3. It cannot be seen, cannot be felt,
Cannot be heard, cannot be smelt.
It lies behind stars and under hills,
And empty holes it fills.
It comes first, and follows after,
Ends life, kills laughter.

4. This thing all things devours:
Birds, beasts, trees, flowers;
Gnaws iron, bites steel;
Grinds hard stones to meal;
Slays king, ruins town,
And beats high mountain down.

5. What has every person seen and will never see again?

6. An architect had a brother and the brother died; the man who died had no brother. Who was the architect?

7. What is put on the table and cut, but never eaten?

8. Unable to think, unable to speak, yet it presents a true picture to every person. What is it?

And, finally, what did Bilbo have in his pocketeses, eh, precious?

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 4: Over Hill and Under Hill

Jun1

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party
Chapter 2, Roast Mutton.
Chapter 3, A Short Rest.

We were surprised to start out chapter four with a “thunder-battle” and “stone-giants”, both of which are entities not encountered in LOTR. Z-baby asked what stone giants were, to which I replied that my annotations indicate that “it seems probable that they can be interpreted as a type of troll.” Tolkien himself said that the thunder-battle and the stone-giants throwing their boulders about carelessly were “based on a bad night during his 1911 walking tour in the mountains of Switzerland.”

“There is nothing like looking, if you want to find something (or so Thorin said to the young dwarves). You certainly find something, if you look, but it is not always quite the something you were after. So it proved on this occasion.”

What the dwarves are looking for is safety from the storm and the stones, but what they find, of course, are goblins. They are all captured by goblins, their poor ponies most likely eaten by goblins, and then Gandalf comes to the rescue again with a bit of fireworks and blue smoke and then later, the sword Orcrist, Goblin-cleaver, or simply, Biter.

In the course of the action, the company more or less escape from the goblins, and Gandalf kills the Great Goblin king. However, the chapter ends with Bilbo being knocked off of Dori’s shoulders by a sneaky goblin into the darkness with a head bump that renders him unconscious.

Z-baby begged me to continue reading, but my voice was tired, and Bilbo “remembered nothing more” for the moment. So it was a place to leave him, if not exactly safe, at least not knowing his predicament. Resolution and rescue would have to wait for another day and chapter five.

I’m so excited: we’re about to meet Gollum.

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 3: A Short Rest

May31

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party
Chapter 2, Roast Mutton.

In chapter three, Bilbo and the dwarves and Gandalf have a brief respite in Elrond’s country, the Last Homely House west of the Mountains, or Rivendell.

“Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway. They stayed long in that good house, fourteen days at least, and they found it hard to leave. Bilbo would gladly have stopped there for ever and ever—even supposing a wish would have taken him right back to his hobbit-hole without trouble. Yet there is little to tell about their stay.”

So this chapter really is a rest and a sort of a bridge to the next adventure (goblins). And yet, a few things happen that will be important later on in the story. Gandalf and Thorin learn that the swords that they took from the trolls’ treasure trove are “very old swords of the High Elves of the West,” made to cleave goblins. And the entire company learns that Thror’s map has runes that can only be seen on a midsummer’s eve in a crescent moon:“Stand by the grey stone when the thrush knocks, and the setting sun with the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the keyhole.”

Z-baby keeps trying to connect the places and people we read about in The Hobbit to the places and people and events in the LOTR movies. She asked if Elrond was the same Elrond who presided over the Council in LOTR. She connected Gloin, one of the dwarves who is in Bilbo’s company, with Gimli, son of Gloin, one of the Nine in LOTR. We looked at a map to try to distinguish Bilbo’s journey to the Lonely Mountain from Frodo’s journey to Mordor. They both started out from Hobbiton and went across the Wilderlands to Rivendell. After that, I believe they parted ways, with Bilbo headed more directly east or a bit northeast across (under) the Misty Mountains and through Mirkwood toward the Lonely Mountain and Frodo going more south and then southeast to the mines of Moria and then to Rohan and eventually to Mordor.

We are very much enjoying our Hobbit-time each day, or at least each day that we can manage to work it into the schedule. And I would very much like to spend a fortnight in Rivendell, if anyone knows how that could be arranged.

“All of them, the ponies as well, grew refreshed and strong in a few days there. Their clothes were mended as well as their bruises, their tempers and their hopes. Their bags were filled with food and provisions light to carry but strong to bring them over the mountain passes. Their plans were improved with the best advice. So the time came to midsummer eve, and they were to go on again with the early sun on midsummer morning.”

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 2: Roast Mutton

May30

Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party

In a 1977 speech to the Tolkien Society in England, Tolkien’s second son, Michael, said that as children, he, his two brothers, and his sister had each, at some point in their development, thought that the Troll chapter was the best chapter in the book. He continued, “We thought there was something rather nice about Trolls, and it was a pity they had to be turned to stone at all.” ~The Annotated Hobbit, annotated by Douglas A. Anderson.

Z-baby says it’s “the kind of story that you remember whenever you think about it later.”

Indeed. In this chapter, the dwarves and Bilbo get into their first fix, Gandalf rescues them (not for the last time), Bilbo tries his hand at petty burglary, and we are introduced to trolls, the first villains of the Wild places that Bilbo and his friends have chosen to traverse.

At first they had passed through hobbit-lands, a wide respectable country inhabited by decent folk, with good roads, an inn or two, and now and then a dwarf or a farmer ambling by on business. Then they came to lands where people spoke strangely, and sang songs Bilbo had never heard before. Now they had gone on far into the Lone-lands, where there were no people left, no inns, and the roads grew steadily worse. Not far ahead were dreary hills, rising higher and higher, dark with trees.

Sometimes an Adventure doesn’t feel much like an Adventure anymore, but rather more like a dreariness and a muchness of a slough. It’s how I’ve been feeling a lot these days: no people, no inns, and muddy, mucky road ahead. And if I were a pessimist (which I sometimes am), I would predict Trolls on the horizon, too. In the words of Bilbo Baggins:”‘Bother burgling and everything to do with it! I wish I was at home in my nice hole by the fire, with the kettle just beginning to sing!’ It was not the last time that he wished that!”

Oh, for nice hobbit-hole, with a library of books, and a bit of jolly conversation and music for when it’s cold outside or when I’m feeling lonesome, but no dirt or danger or bad decisions or sore muscles or Wild Trolls. It sounds heavenly, doesn’t it? But then again, God didn’t make this world a safe, little hobbit-hole, and maybe it’s best He didn’t. We were made for home and for heaven, but we were also built for adventure and challenge. Who ever said that heaven, although sometimes the metaphor is “rest” and “peace”, isn’t a place where we will still have mountains to climb and even trolls to fight? In Lewis’s The Last Battle, the heavenly travelers are called to go “further up and further in.” The adventure continues.

So maybe all I need is a miracle or two (where is Gandalf when you need him?), and a short rest, which happens to be the title of the next chapter.

Oh, and I agree that the story of the trolls is one of the best and most memorable parts of the book. However, I prefer my trolls turned to stone at the break of dawn.

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien, chapter 1, An Unexpected Party

May19

We’re reading The Hobbit in May, aloud to Z-baby, and Betsy-Bee is reading it to herself. I thought I’d blog about our journey from the Shire to the Lonely Mountain and home again along with Bilbo and the twelve dwarves and Gandalf the Wizard.

I found a few old favorite quotations as we read the first chapter:

Of course, there the opening line, which my annotated edition of The Hobbit tells me is now so famous that it’s included in Bartlett’s: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.”

I’ve always enjoyed this exchange between Bilbo and Gandalf:
“Good morning!” said Bilbo, and he meant it. The sun was shining, and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under long bushy eyebrows that stuck out further than the brim of his shady hat.
“What do you mean?” he said. “Do you wish me a good morning, or mean that it is a good morning whether I want it or not; or that you feel good this morning; or that it is a morning to be good on?”
“All of them at once,” said Bilbo. “And a very fine morning for a pipe of tobacco out of doors, into the bargain.”

Then there’s this lovely exclamation from Bilbo: “Confusticate and bebother these dwarves! Why don’t they come and lend a hand?” Such a useful but fairly gentle imprecation!

This chapter also features two classic Tolkien songs: Chip the glasses and crack the plates! and Far over the Misty Mountains cold. I think Tolkien was, if not a poet, at least a competent and enjoyable lyricist. I wish I knew a really good tune to each of these songs. I’ve heard them sung on our cassette tapes of The Hobbit, but the tune there doesn’t stick in the mind.

Z-baby said that if all those dwarves showed up at her house, uninvited, she would have told them to get lost. Z-baby is not usually at a loss for words or suffering from any lack of confidence. Perhaps her assertiveness comes from being the youngest of eight. She has no choice but to assert herself.

Did you know that Belladonna Took, Bilbo’s mother, is the only female character named in The Hobbit? I wonder what Peter Jackson, et. al., will do with that lack of female characters in the movie? I’d just as soon they left it alone and made an all-male movie, but isn’t that against the Rules of Hollywood? Even war movies have to have a romantic interlude, right?

Bilbo serves seed-cake at his “unexpected party,” a delicacy that the book tells me is “a sweetened cake flavored with caraway seeds.” I poked about a bit for a recipe and found out that seed cake is an old British bread that originally did not have any sugar in it. However, I think a poppy seed cake, even if it’s not so authentic, sounds better than one with caraway seeds, so I think we might try out this recipe.

The girls, of course, had questions as we read:
Who is the Necromancer?
Answer: Sauron

What are smoke rings?
Answer: RIngs of smoke that come out of a pipe. But I have no idea how to produce them since I don’t smoke a pipe.

What are runes?
Answer: Elvish writing that looks like calligraphy and is somewhat mysterious. I was able to connect the word “runes” to the poem we are memorizing, The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe, in which Poe says the bells are ringing in a “sort of runic rhyme.”

Z-baby wanted me to print out a copy of Thror’s map for her since she likes maps “just like the hobbits do.”
Maps of Middle Earth, including Thror’s Map.

As for me, I’m feeling rather Tookish today after reading the first chapter of this old favorite. How about you? Any adventures in your life this fine May?

The Warden’s Walk, The Hobbit Read-along, Chapter 1, An Unexpected Party.

Sunday Salon: Happy Hobbit Day

Sep22

Hobbit Day is the birthday of the hobbits Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. In the books by JRR Tolkien, both Bilbo and Frodo celebrated their birthdays on September 22, but they were born in different years. Bilbo was born in the year 2890 and Frodo in the year 2968 in the Third Age.

Hobbit Day is also the birthday, in these modern times, of my very special Drama Daughter, who is celebrating no doubt, in grand style, at her college in faraway Pennsylvania. If I drank beer like the hobbits or any other kind of alcohol, I would lift a toast to Frodo and to Bilbo and to Drama Daughter. In lieu of that, I give you The Piano Guys:

Happy Hobbit Day, and Happy Birthday, Drama Daughter!

Farmer Giles of Ham by JRR Tolkien

Jul13

“Farmer Giles of Ham, like Roverandom, was invented by J.R.R. Tolkien to entertain his children, and was originally an oral tale. . . . Tolkien’s eldest son, John, has recalled that the tale was first told when the family was caught in a rainstorm after a picnic and took shelter under a bridge.” (Introduction to Farmer Giles of Ham by Christina Scull and Wayne G. Hammond)

“Farmer Giles had a dog. The dog’s name was Garm. . . . Neither of them gave much thought to the Wide World outside their fields, the village and the nearest market.” The story of how Farmer Giles gets drawn into the affairs of the wide world, to the extent of dealing with a marauding giant and fighting a dragon, parallels that of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the hobbits who become entangled in world affairs, too, somewhat against their will. But Farmer Giles is not a hobbit, although he may be something of a proto-hobbit, with a hobbit’s desire for both comfort and adventure and a hobbit’s knack for blundering his way into and out of trouble.

Giles accidentally scares off the giant with his blunderbuss, and “all seemed set fair–until the dragon came.” The dragon, Chrysophylax Dives, is not quite so easy to deter as the giant had been, but the people of the village think that since Giles was able to deal with the giant, surely he can get rid of a dragon, too. And Giles does have a secret weapon, an old sword, Tailbiter, that the king of that land gave him. So the story continues through the interactions between Giles and Chrysophylax and Garm and the village people and the King, as the dragon is hounded and harried and blackmailed and eventually tamed.

As a bedtime (or picnic-time) story, I would recommend Farmer Giles of Ham for any family looking for a read aloud for all ages. Tolkien said that the published version was not a story for children, although children might enjoy it, but it did start out as a tale told to amuse the children. And it retains that childlike, fairy tale feel. So, read it as an amusing fairy tale, or like Farmer Giles himself, dig in to find the deeper treasures, but do read it, if you’re a Tolkien fan. And why would you be here, reading this blog post. if you were not?

Preparing for the Preparation Days of Lent

Feb22

Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, is Wednesday, March 2nd, this year. Easter Sunday falls on April 17th. One good thing to do for the Lenten days of fasting and preparation leading up to Resurrection Sunday is to choose a book (or two) to read, one that prepares your heart and leads you into repentance and celebration.

Julie at Happy Catholic has a list of fiction books that would help to form your heart and mind during this time of year.

Observing Lent, a Semicolon list. Not a book list, this post just gives some ideas for observing Lent as a family. It makes me nostalgic for the days when I had children at home with whom to observe these activities and reminders.

Inspirational Classics. This link goes to a set of posts that I set out to write in 2011. It was supposed to be 40 Inspirational Classics for Lent, but I only managed to write about 15 or so books. Still, the ones I did write about are some of the greats.

What are you reading for Lent? I’m continuing with my Cultivating Beauty and Truth study, re-reading The Hobbit and reading Hearts of Fire, a book of stories of modern day persecuted Christian women who are amazing in the courage they demonstrate. Only God.