So, I really don't buy "Bilbo is an unreliable narrator," but I
do like playing the devil's advocate, so let's see if we can make some plausible counter-arguments:
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Originally Posted by Arvegil145
2) the Giants! Even though Gandalf himself mentions finding a 'more or less decent' Giant to help him close the Goblin trap-door
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Ah, but it's the narrator who tells us what Gandalf says! If the narrator can lie in the narration, why can't he lie in what he recounts other people said?
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Originally Posted by Arvegil145
3) Sassy, singing Elves - again, even though in the LOTR you find both sassy and singing Elves
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If sassiness or singing is the argument, I don't think there's a single thing Tolkien wrote that wouldn't impute these traits to the Elves... so let's give a little credibility to the Unreliable Narrator people: they're not complaining that Elves aren't singing or sassy: they're specifically complaining about "tra-la-la-lally."
The Unreliable Narrator explanation for
that: Bilbo didn't speak much Sindarin at the time of his adventure and rather than cop to that when writing his account, he just pretended all the text he didn't understand actually WERE nonsense syllables.
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Originally Posted by Arvegil145
4) anthropomorphized 'animals' - such as those found in the house of Beorn; or Carc the raven...and, at the risk of repeating myself, you can find such 'animals' in both the LOTR and The Silmarillion (I'm putting the airquotes around the term animals because I don't think they were just ordinary animals to begin with)
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Well, there's animals with a clear metaphysical explanation (Thorondir), and then there's the fox in LotR... but on that note, where did Bilbo stop being the narrator? We know he attempted to write Frodo's adventures down before he ran out of steam and Frodo took over the task. Maybe Bilbo got as a far as the fox (or--more seriously--as far as whatever point in FotR you think the resemblance to
The Hobbit's style lasts).
Do I really think Bilbo is unreliable? No. But it's a fun game to play.