ach_sss_no

Livebloggy notes while reading The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, chapter 3. 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.

Bilbo sees a random mountain and does a very heartfelt and genuine and awestruck “Are we there yet?” The answer is no. We’re about 15% of the way through the book. Sorry, Bilbo.

“Hmmm! It smells like elves!” thought Bilbo

Well, okay then! Gonna tell us what elves smell like? No? Okay.

Here’s the somewhat-infamous tra-la-lally song and then the elves make fun of Bilbo. I have begun to roll my eyes somewhat when I see fantasy fiction that goes ‘oh, hur hur, what if we had Tolkien elves but they were snobby and annoying?’ It’s the sign of someone who isn’t as well acquainted with the thing they’re referencing as they seem to think they are, because Tolkien seems to be quite aware that his elves are insular and occasionally quite rude.

Like, they show up and immediately start calling Bilbo fat.

They’ve never even seen him before.

Imagine you have a yellow duck in your story. The duck is yellow. Later on, someone writes a story inspired by your story and has a bit of metafiction in it that essentially says: ‘But what if the duck was… yellow?’ And then a lot of other people do that, and they all act like they were the first people to think of this, and they all seem to think that either the original duck wasn’t yellow or you as the author somehow didn’t notice it was yellow, and generations of readers (because this hypothetical book is also the best-selling novel in the entire confusticated and bebothered world and a lot of people have read it) also didn’t notice the duck was yellow. No, Booky McFirstnovel was the first to think of the duck being yellow. Wouldn’t that be aggravating? I’d be aggravated. Especially if the original duck was a sort of soft yellow with lovingly rendered feathers, and Booky McFirstnovel’s duck was full-saturation neon yellow and drawn entirely with the MS Paint spray can tool.

Tolkien basically sums up the stay in Rivendell with ‘it was pleasant and that made it boring so I won’t tell you about it.’ Elrond is here. Tolkien alludes to his storied past, and it’s an interesting moment because in another book this would be a bit of detail to make the character sound important and there might not be anything actually behind it. But the Silmarillion exists so in fact Elrond has an entire biography. It’s quite detailed and really rather tragic. But none of that is important here. He’s just ‘nice dude with house’.

As an aside: There is a very odd, old text-adventure game based on The Hobbit- you play as Bilbo and you can kill absolutely everyone in the story if you want to, to no apparent purpose. Why mention it here? Because ‘everyone’ does indeed include Elrond, possibly the least problematic character in the legendarium, and the character I would think a sane person would have the least motivation to kill out of everyone in The Hobbit. Here’s gameplay footage. It’s just words, mostly.

Elrond’s time in the story is brief (at least at this point, I think we do see him again later when Gandalf and Bilbo are on the way back) and he only hosts the company for a little while and… discovers the moon runes on the map… which is amusing because all he does is go ‘oh, there is invisible ink on this map that is apparently only visible RIGHT NOW’ in a very non-self-aggrandizing way, and both Thorin and Gandalf immediately get annoyed that he found this and they didn’t.

And they leave and… now the chapter’s done! That was a short one. I don’t really want to combine chapters into multi-chapter posts, but this is going to end up being a short review post. It might be a good idea to include an aside about that text adventure game, or something like that.