"Do not speak to me of dragon fire"

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

It does defy logic. How would they possibly have had ample warning to assemble a force and go to the Mountain in time to see Smaug in action? And that leaves aside the question of why they'd go.

The scene in question seems to have the Elves pointlessly hanging around just out of sight of the gate of Erebor; they pop up, Thorin sees them and asks them to help, and then they go away again. Why were they there in the first place? Perhaps in the films it's a big conspiracy and they knew Smaug was going to attack the whole time!

In actual fact it might have something to do with an idea in the films (which is apparently expanded on in the Extended Edition) that Thranduil used to go and do homage to Thrór because he was the most powerful ruler in that part of the world (while resenting doing so and secretly coveting his treasures) and perhaps he was on his way to some kind of political visit to Erebor when he saw Smaug attacking and decided "let them burn" as it were. That's an awful lot of film embellishment coupled with interpolation on my part though.

It's also possible that he was on his way to attack the mountain to recover those jewels he covets from the novel, which are embellished in the films to have belonged to the wife who was killed by dragons (which gave him the scar which was part of the original point of the thread). That's another thing that only exists in the filmmakers' heads, however.

Either way, it doesn't look like he and his Elves were en route; it looks like they were just waiting around for no reason, an example of the clumsiness in the visual language of the films that is very common.

In the rest of the films, Mirkwood is still several days' march from the Mountain as it is in the book.

[Kuruharan]

Originally Posted by Zigûr

"His people neither mined nor worked metals or jewels, nor did they bother much with trade or with tilling the earth."

"Nor did they bother much" doesn't mean they didn't do it at all. I think it probably means they did it exactly to the level that it supplied their necessities but did not engage in trade for profit or base their entire way of life around it.

Originally Posted by Inziladun

It does defy logic. How would they possibly have had ample warning to assemble a force and go to the Mountain in time to see Smaug in action? And that leaves aside the question of why they'd go.

It just makes me less and less rueful that I haven't seen the films.

Originally Posted by Zigûr

In the rest of the films, Mirkwood is still several days' march from the Mountain as it is in the book.

My memory of the landscape shots in the movie is that they universally asserted that all of Middle earth is about 5 miles square. Of course, consistent travel times was not a strong point in the films.

[Zigûr]

Originally Posted by Kuruharan

"Nor did they bother much" doesn't mean they didn't do it at all. I think it probably means they did it exactly to the level that it supplied their necessities but did not engage in trade for profit or base their entire way of life around it.

That's a good point, and perhaps it's something of an effort on Professor Tolkien's part to foreshadow the greedy Master and Thorin and contrast the way of life the Professor preferred (which the Wood Elves at least evoke to an extent, if not wholly – they certainly still have negative traits, "more dangerous and less wise") to the possessive attitudes the novel criticises.

That is to say, why Thranduil and his people certainly aren't perfect, they are "good people" and in some degree that is because they are not to the same degree affected by the traits upon which the novel looks unfavourably.

[William Cloud Hicklin]

Of course, when Tolkien wrote them they were Avari: not evil, but certainly eerie, "primitive" and dangerous. As much as anything he was differentiating them from the "civilized" Eldar of Beleriand.