Smaug Is Not a Bookworm

[Galadriel55]

There certainly is a lack of pleasure reading in any of the ME cultures. There are people who take pleasure in reading - bookish hobbits and Gondor scholars among others - but no recreational literature as such. Any story for story's sake is passed down as oral tradition. Most cultures we meet have an abundance of tales, songs, ballads, lays, prose and poetry by whatever name it goes. These are sometimes based on historical events, but sometimes are made up or too muddled to trace directly to real history (especially hobbit stuff). It's interesting that Men and Elves (at least those that we see) tend to tell stories of legends of historical figures, and hobbits, while they can still tell some good hobbit history, seem to prefer the stuff of myth for their bedtime stories. Take two simple instances from LOTR - an Elf of Lorien climbing up a tree and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gilmi chasing after the hobbits - absurdly simple for any real story, but taken to make an example. A Man seems more likely to make a ballad of the three hunters and say a couple sentences about the magic ways of the Fair Folk. A hobbit would summarize the chase in a couple sentences and shrug it off, but pay much greater attention to any detail one can think of to stick onto the bare description of an Elf climbing a tree. Difference in attitude? Heroic versus mundane? Just skewed perspective and inaccurate representation of their respective lore? Is there really a difference, or am I just imagining it?

Originally Posted by Inziladun

What about that? Why would Bilbo make a written record of his adventures? Not for his heir, apparently, as he was already working on it when Gandalf and Balin came to call long before Frodo was born. Is there any merit to the author's claim?

But that's the cool part: Bilbo did not write a recreational story. There is nothing out of character for either Bilbo or the general ideas of ME writers. All great heroes of Middle-earth eventually have songs sung and legends told of them, and many end up in written records. History is recorded by Elves, hobbits, and some Men. Bilbo, true to his larger than life persona, simply became his own historian. Unprecedented? Sure, but then Bilbo is quite an unusual fellow. Embellished? He did enjoy a boast or two, and what's the point of being your own historian if you can't claim that "the fish was this big"? I feel like he was amusing himself by living in his own story again, but this time making it much more glorious and amusing than perhaps he really felt at the time. He knew the difference during the Council of Elrond, but I can't say for sure about Grey Havens. In any case, I suppose Bilbo was too impatient to become the stuff of legends generations past - he wanted to become the stuff of legend now, so he wrote the legend. Except he's also a hobbit, so his legend turned out to be less of an Elven or Man epic, and more of a hobbit fireplace tale (that is, if we take The Hobbit to be a representation of Bilbo's part of the book).

It's also interesting that Frodo, when writing his part, almost completely loses touch with that part of his hobbit identity (again, assuming that LOTR is an accurate parallel). It's a good reflection of both of these hobbits' inner states at the end of their respective journeys. But then the question comes up: did the journey shape the authors, or did the authors shape the journey?



EDIT: As a less romanticized and more real-world answer, is it just possible that books were kind of hard to make, sometimes hard to keep safe, and for many folks hard to come by? Why would you waste the time and paper (parchment?) on some made-up gibberish? Or on a story that everyone knows by heart anyways? What's the point? It only makes sense to write down what you think is important to remember, what you otherwise would not remember.