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Livebloggy notes while reading The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, chapter 2. These are notes I'm making in the process of assembling a proper chapter-by-chapter review of the book. There was some indication of interest in seeing a liveblog-style thing when I asked on Tumblr, so I'm posting my notes.

Chapter 2: ‘Roast Mutton’ Haha! I know what that is! I clapped when I saw it!

The chapter opens with Bilbo waking up to find that all the dwarves left and left a massive mountain of dirty dishes behind them and he decides to just let them leave without him… he cleans up the entire big mountain of dirty dishes and then Gandalf comes in and says ‘geez why didn’t you dust the mantelpiece? You would have found this note’ and Gandald is somehow the most infuriating and also most likeable character I’ve ever encountered. I want to be like him someday. Or right now.

There’s a deliciously passive-aggressive note from Thorin who says ‘show up at 11 and if you die on the way we’ll pay for your funeral’. Gandalf goes with ‘well they told you to do it and now you have to do it’. I am just looking forward to Bilbo-just-agreeing-to-things to reach the peak of absurdity in chapter 5.

Bilbo ‘could never remember how he found himself running to the inn’, it says, and I will amuse myself by imagining Gandalf did just a teeny little spell on him called the ‘run hobbit run’ spell. He shows up without his handkerchief, his hat, or his money and the dwarves tell him to deal with it. I would think the money would be a little bit of a concern, but the note did mention they’d pay for traveling expenses.

Gandalf rides up with extra pocket handkerchiefs but no hat. Maybe he foresaw that Bilbo would be given a traveling hood.

Some of the land they pass through just has random evil castles here and there. Interesting.

P32. “I don’t know what river it was” But you wrote the story?!?! Maybe Peter S. Beagle had a point in that foreword after all.

And then they notice Gandalf has just disappeared and there’s a note that he had ‘eaten most’ on the trip. So not only does Gandalf vanish at random, which he will continue to do for the rest of the narrative, but he was also freeloading significantly. He out-consumed the hobbit in the party. Again: Goals.

There’s an enjoyable description of how much this journey is starting to suck. I notice at random that my thrift-store paperback has ‘Byerly’ written inside the front cover.

They spot a light ahead (which with re-reading foresight we all know is going to be trolls) and there’s an argument about what to do that ends with sending Bilbo ahead and apparently was only resolved by Oin and Gloin fighting each other.

One of the trolls says ‘What the ‘ell’.’ I think that’s the closest we ever come to getting a swear word in The Hobbit.

Bilbo tries picking their pockets and… he gets caught because the troll’s wallet TALKS, which I had completely forgotten. Now, that doesn’t seem fair.

The trolls have been sketched as obvious, simplistic monsters so I find it interesting that one of them immediately goes ‘Aww, let’s just let him go’ and then they start fighting which is exactly what the dwarves were just doing. Overall I tend to think Tolkien does not entirely deserve the reputation he’s been given for writing one-dimensional black and white morality with no nuance. His work is just very clear about which faction you should want to win, which is not a bad thing at all, as his plots hinge on a villain being defeated and we need to know why we should root for that to happen. Unless you’re being very experimental, your readers should understand what your story’s stakes are.

The dwarves start turning up and all get put into sacks. Essentially, Bilbo has just failed, and if Gandalf did not turn up to save him he would have gotten a ‘game over’ or what is more commonly known as an ‘unalive’. This is a very classic story beat in a hero’s journey plot. The hero fails his first obstacle (or barely wins, or has an unsatisfying victory) to show the amount of growth he needs to do. What’s unique about this one is:

1) It’s just so much fun

2) The tone is so light that your mind almost skips over ‘hey, they were all going to die just then’

Now that the trolls are dead, everyone robs their den. Bilbo picks up a random knife, which will have a mini character arc of its own later. And that’s essentially it- it ends with Gandalf introducing the idea of Rivendell.

I’m noticing something about the general vibe of the story that intrigues me, which is that although Tolkien and LOTR were a massive inspiration for the ‘righteous quest’ fantasy genre, The Hobbit is almost the opposite of that. It does feel like it’s almost a parody of the hero’s journey fairy tale. The dwarves are just grumpy people doing an errand they think is probably doomed, Bilbo doesn’t know what he’s doing, and the wizard keeps wandering off. The first enemy was just kind of chilling and drinking beer.

It has the chaotic feeling of a DnD campaign before DnD was invented.