ach_sss_no

Livebloggy notes while reading The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien, chapter 4. 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.

Time for ORCS!

We get a nice bit of roving POV into Gandalf’s thoughts of danger. There’s quite a bit of omniscient narrator here, we’re not locked into Bilbo’s POV (despite the fact that he allegedly wrote the thing in-universe). I think one of the things that Tokien is particularly good at, and probably one of the things that’s contributed to making his work so successful, is the gradually building unease and the progression of danger. ‘We are getting farther from home. Things are more wild here and more dangerous. There will be more danger the farther we go’. And the really important thing is that Tolkien delivers on this, and we grow to trust the storytelling. By the time we reach an important climax we’re invested and all in.

Here, there are stone-giants that just show up and start throwing rocks. I forgot they existed.

The end of their argument was that they sent Fill and Kili to look for a better shelter. They had very sharp eyes, and being the youngest of the dwarves by some fifty years they usually got these sort of jobs (when everybody could see that it was absolutely no use sending Bilbo).

This sound like ‘Bilbo got the crap jobs unless he was so incompetent they couldn’t use him’ lol
I enjoy knowing, from the magic of re-reading, that by the end of the book the dwarves will essentially view Bilbo as a magic wish-granting genie, he's become so competent. Much to his annoyance.

Gandalf: are you sure there’s nothing in that cave you found

Fili and Kili: Sure!

The narrator: They all knew that Fili and Kili had no time to actually check the cave.

Gandalf does search the cave thoroughly but yeah this is the secret door orc ambush cave. They’re called ‘goblins’ here, but I read on the wiki that ‘goblins’ and ‘orcs’ are two terms for the same thing. Orcs is less to type :)

I like the detail of Gandalf checking the cave for two reasons:
1) It's just enough of a bait and switch to be surprising without being frustrated. Gandalf checked the cave it's fine oh wait a secret door
2) If everyone accepted Fili and Kili saying the cave was safe after the narrator/Jirt/Bilbo? pointed out that they shouldn't do that, we would be frustrated with Gandalf if he didn't check for orcs. But he did, and it's no one's fault that the cave turns out to be the secret enemy cave (there's even another, even secreter level with an end of level boss on it!)

the goblins knew their way, as well as you do to the nearest post-office

oh they're hopelessly lost then, I was raised on GPS and have no innate sense of where anything is (help me)

The goblins take their stuff and just touch everything and paw at it and are as obnoxious as possible.

No!!! All the ponies die here! Remember that bit in LOTR where there’s a little aside to tell you the ponies all went home and were OK? I guess that was atonement for this part where all the ponies die, including the extra nice pony Elrond loaned to Gandalf. Darn.

They did not hate dwarves especially, no more than they hated everybody and everything, and particularly the orderly and prosperous; in some parts wicked dwarves had even made alliances with them.

…I still think Tolkien gets unfair criticism for using oversimplistic morality. It looks to me like he’s painting more of a ‘everyone is fallible and vulnerable to falling into evil but some people are just more obviously and blatantly evil than others ’ picture.

But they had a special grudge against Thorin's people, because of the war which you have heard mentioned, but which does not come into this tale

Well, that sounds like an obvious jumpoff point for anyone who wanted to pad out the story, so I’m going to put it on my ‘will be in the movies’ predictions.

The yells and yammering, croaking, jibbering and jabbering; howls, growls and curses; shrieking and skriking, that followed were beyond description. Several hundred wild cats and wolves being roasted slowly alive together would not have compared with it.

That sure is a metaphor.

We are still early enough in the hero’s journey that Gandalf shows up to fix everything (almost everything haha)

So Gandalf busts them out, they run from the goblins and then… Bilbo is dropped on his head and knocked out. Um… *leafs ahead*

Yeah, it doesn’t come up until later, but they have a battle while he’s knocked out.

OFFSCREEN BATTLES: 1

That’s the end of the chapter. The next chapter is 50% longer, very eventful, and one I have only normal feelings about.

I'm enjoying the structure of this book, where so far every chapter is a different encounter. It just so happens to lend itself really well to me picking it up once every other day or so and reading a single chapter.