Bilbo´s treachery

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Ivriniel

Hello Pitchwife good to see you.

Hi, Ivriniel! A fine mess you've made of this thread, if I may say so; but I think we've cleared it up by now. At the very least your ideas have the merit of being fresh and unorthodox.

Unlikemost readers, I first read The Hobbit after The Lord of the Rings, so it would be natural for my perception to be somewhat coloured by the later book. Still I didn't find much of LotR's darker tones and themes in it, except in the character of Gollum (who was already poor Sméagol to me) and in the Battle of Five Armies which echoed (or rather foreshadowed) the great battles of Helm's Deep and the Pelennor.

The invisibility thing in itself didn't strike me as particularly wrong - it's a common fairytale trope, and the scenes in which Bilbo uses the ring are IMO written totally different from those where Frodo uses it in LotR, a lot lighter and largely devoid of the ominous overtones we find there. We don't get that sense of him passing into another world or dimension.

What did strike me as wrong in a Gollumish sense was Bilbo's secrecy about the ring, never mentioning it to his friends until he's practically forced to. And this is, of course, where Gandalf's sideway glance comes into play, which you've been mentioning:

Originally Posted by The Hobbit Ch. 6, Out of the Frying Pan Into the Fire

The dwarves looked at him with quite a new respect, when he talked about dodging guards, jumping over Gollum, and squeezing through, as if it was not very difficult or very alarming.
'What did I tell you?' said Gandalf laughing. 'Mr. Baggins has more about him than you guess.' He gave Bilbo a queer look from under his bushy eyebrows, as he said this, and the hobbit wondered if he guessed at the part of his tale that he had left out.

OIbviously Gandalf guessed that Bilbo hadn't performed all these feats unaided but was hiding something; and he may have pondered that such secrecy wasn't quite in character for the hobbit. Looking back from LotR, it may have been here that Gandalf first got an inkling that all wasn't right with Bilbo after his encounter with Gollum.

On the other hand, it's hardly reprehensible that Bilbo wanted to make himself look daring and dashing in the eyes of the Dwarves after having been belittled and denigrated by them for most of the journey so far, and the Ring, we could say, used and maybe amplified this innocent desire in its own desire to remain hidden from such as Gandalf. But we have to consider that Bilbo only used the Ring for the benefit of his companions, much unlike Gollum, who had a long headstart on his path into evil even when he first found it.

(By the way, since you speak of a "The Land kind of wrongness", I wonder: did you in your reading history come from Tolkien to Donaldson or vice versa? You sometimes seem to see Tolkien's characters through a Donaldsonian lens which, in my opinion, tends to distort them, amplifying darkness and wrongness at the expense of other aspects. Same in your Frodo thread.)

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

I think that the main act of Bilbo's "treachery" was not taking of the Arkenstone or keeping it secret from the Dwarves. The betrayal of trust really came in when Bilbo gave the stone away to an outsider - moreover, on outsider on the opposite side of the friendship line. And Bilbo knew that no amount of legal twists and loops can justify the dishonesty of his act at this point. And yet this act - the biggest breaking of trust - was quite clearly not something the Ring would have had a hand in.

Right. His greatest betrayal was also his most unselfish and, in its outcome, an act of great goodness and wisdom. Totally un-Ringy.

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

it is possible that the Ring took Bilbo's own curiosity and adventurousness and a touch of greed and pulled them in just the right direction. However, I still would not agree to a "the Ring made me do it!" argument. I think all the major components were already present in Bilbo, and if the Ring had any influence at all, it was more to give him a push in the right direction

No, the Ring didn't make him do it, it may just have added a pinch of "Ooh, shiny! We wants it!" to what was already there. If there were no chinks in our characters to begin with, the Ring would have nothing to work with. But you're right, he would have taken it anyway - the text even says so, now I reread it:

Originally Posted by The Hobbit Ch.3, Not at Home

Suddenly Bilbo's arm went towards it drawn by its enchantment.

My emphasis: its enchantment, i.e. the Arkenstone's own. No need for the Ring. So much for thinking I had a case.

As for telling or not telling the Dwarves, I think if he had presented to Thorin "The Arkenstone, discovered for you by your faithful servant Bilbo Baggins, esq., master burglar" they might have carried him around on their hands - or not. You make some very cogent points about their mental state at the time. In any case the need for a grain of salt when making retrospective interpretations has just been demonstrated.

Originally Posted by Morthoron

So what does Tolkien do after publishing The Hobbit? In writing a sequel, he magnifies the tale of Bilbo Baggins and the other characters.

Exactly. Looking back from LotR, The Hobbit isn't so much a prequel as a miniature model, like a rehearsal acted out in a sandbox of much smaller scale and with much smaller stakes.