White Deer
 

In the Hobbit when the dwarves were crossing the river. A dark deer jumped out. Seconds later a white one appeared. The dwarves shot at it but they either missed or the arrows had no effect on the deer. Who was the second deer? I always thought the deer was:

1) A spirit of good. I always thought that the black deer might have been bad. The white deer was the good that came to drive the darkness from the forest.


2) Or it was a symbol. Much like the above the white dwarf was a symbol of good, and the black was a symbol evil. It showed how both groups were strong but it was like a prophecy foretelling the fact that good would one day prevail over evil and none can stop it.

What do you think? Am I just in too way too much?

Hm. Perhaps we are over analyzing? Or maybe one was male and the other was female? Or they were a mere plot device to waste some of the dwarves arrows?

Iarwain

Reach for they sky, don't dig in the dirt.

I think it was just a deer. This is "The Hobbit" after all, not something intended to be deeper. It was just a deer.

[ May 18, 2003: Message edited by: ainur ]

I think that it could just as easily have been a deer as a symbol of some sort, and that we will never know, as Tolkien doesn't mention any more about them, I believe, but it was an interesting thing to notice [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

~Menelien

Earwen, forgive the sarcasm but I've gotten it. The black deer was a projection of Sauron's sleeping mind on the night before the attack on Dol-Goldur. The white deer, on the other hand was the White council, chasing Sauron away from Dol-Goldur so that he would in the end cause more evil in Mordor (displayed by the loss of the dwarves' final arrows).

[img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]
Iarwain

Iarwain,
That sounds about as right as I can think it to be, but would Tolkien really have wanted to flex his foreshadowing muscles so much in a children's tale? I suppose he could've been doing so just because he could.
I always took it to just go along with the theme of nothing ever being able to harm the good. In the same context as "I am the keeper of the Flame of Anor...etc." type passages. Hmmm.

'Over-analyze'? Tolkien? Have you read his letters? Everything had [has] purpose. Even if there was no intended meaning, this is quite certainly the place for 'over-analyzation' of Tolkien's work - anything and everything about them (within good taste). [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

Back to the topic...

Perhaps it was a little Gandalf foreshadowing. Think about it!

[ May 19, 2003: Message edited by: Legolas ]

A white hart appears at the marriage of Arthur and Guenever and leads Sir Gawaine on a rather reckless adventure in which he inadvertently kills a maiden due to his refusal to give quarter to a vanquished knight.

Perhaps more pertinent, the color white was favored by the Celts to designate supernatural animals. According to Irish myth, Finn goes into the otherworld, a place ruled by the Tuatha de Danann, after chasing a white stag. The Tuatha de Danann and their Otherworld, sidhe, which according to most myths is hidden underground, could have been an inspiration for Tolkien’s wood elves and their underground home in Mirkwood. The white dear may be Tolkien recalling this Celtic myth by making a connection between the dwarves fruitlessly attempting to chase down a white deer and their coming adventure in the home of the wood elves.

Its the deer that Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy Pevensie hunt at the end of the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe!

Some of us had fun a while back examining the symbolism of this scene in this thread. See especially Sharkey's erudite analysis in the last post of the thread.