Visit The *EVEN NEWER* Barrow-Downs Photo Page |
06-11-2012, 03:32 PM | #1 |
Princess of Skwerlz
Join Date: Jan 2002
Location: where the Sea is eastwards (WtR: 6060 miles)
Posts: 7,535
|
Hobbit2 - Chapter 06 - Out of the Frying-Pan into the Fire
Goblins and wargs and eagles, oh my! There's not much respite from escaping one danger before the next one comes.
I posted a number of questions and observations on the previous discussion thread, so I will merely invite you all to share your thoughts and opinions here. What parts of the chapter impress or amuse you? How does the danger affect our heroes, and is their unusual rescue a moment of eucatastrophe?
__________________
'Mercy!' cried Gandalf. 'If the giving of information is to be the cure of your inquisitiveness, I shall spend all the rest of my days in answering you. What more do you want to know?' 'The whole history of Middle-earth...' |
06-12-2012, 06:42 PM | #2 |
Gruesome Spectre
Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: Heaven's doorstep
Posts: 8,046
|
Overall the chapter is well done, and things like the goblins' song and the descriptions of the dwarves in the trees are chuckle-worthy.
Some brief observations and thoughts: 1.It seems Gandalf is practiced in knowing when someone is lying. He didn't believe Bilbo's explanation of how he escaped from the goblins, even without knowing of the Ring and its potential influence. 2. Gandalf was apparently ready to give his physical life for his friends, as he later did in Moria. 3. The way G. gets after the Wargs has its own callback moment when the Fellowship is attacked by wolves on the way to Moria. 4. Bilbo's reaction to the eagles is rather like a wild animal's, in line with his being said by one to even look like a rabbit in the next chapter. 5.The deus ex machina of the eagles' rescue is plausibly explained, and Tolkien knew just how often he could use them without the reader rolling his eyes.
__________________
Music alone proves the existence of God. |
06-12-2012, 11:17 PM | #3 |
Laconic Loreman
|
Eh, the Eagles may have only been used once here, but each dangerous situation the company has been in, there's been a type of deus ex machina to get them out; either the Eagles or Gandalf. I mean we are a third of the way through the story, and we know almost nothing about any of the dwarves, except they get into difficult situations, only to be rescued by some sort of magical device. I believe it gets better when Gandalf goes away for a bit, but I've only read The Hobbit once, and that was a long time ago. I've been quite disappointed there still seems to not be much individuality separating the Dwarves (and I wonder now if PJ could really have cut out some of them for the movies). Bilbo is developing nicely though.
__________________
Fenris Penguin
|
06-13-2012, 08:45 AM | #4 |
Blossom of Dwimordene
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: The realm of forgotten words
Posts: 10,311
|
I think my favourite part in this chapter is how Dori saves Bilbo, at risk for his own life. The Dwarves could be clumsy, grumpy, and all that, but they do have a second side that is very contrasting.
Gandalf's almost-sacrifice is just as touching.
__________________
You passed from under darkened dome, you enter now the secret land. - Take me to Finrod's fabled home!... ~ Finrod: The Rock Opera |
06-14-2012, 12:57 PM | #5 |
Cryptic Aura
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 6,046
|
I too think the goblins' song is well done. Notionally of course it is nasty bragging and fear-mongering. Yet it is well written, linguistically good, the sort of thing that Tolkien praises in "A Secret Vice", the play of language that can give pleasure.
However, it makes me ponder something about the mythology. If the elves are praised for their love of creating beauty (ignoring the tra-la-la-lally ones for now), why are the goblins also being shown as creating something that has aesthetic merit or beauty? Or does the subject matter absolve that issue, so it is merely "a horrible song" as the narrator claims?
__________________
I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. |
06-14-2012, 01:36 PM | #6 | |
Gruesome Spectre
Join Date: Dec 2000
Location: Heaven's doorstep
Posts: 8,046
|
Quote:
__________________
Music alone proves the existence of God. |
|
06-14-2012, 08:57 PM | #7 | ||
Cryptic Aura
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 6,046
|
Quote:
Quote:
This fascination with sound is I think a major characteristic of the Goblins' song, its alliteration, its beat and emphasis and the way in which certain sounds are used very deliberately to suggest the sound of roaring fire. The poem even concludes with some 'created' words, "Ya hey!/Ya-harri-hey!/ Ya hoy!". This isn't orcish grunting but suggests a delight in sound music. Maybe it's meant to suggest the goblins' delight in slaughter, but nonetheless, I think there is here something close to the linguistic pleasure that Tolkien speaks of. And when we consider it beside the songs Bilbo makes up (in the chapter "Flies and Spiders'), on the spur of the moment, to attract and anger the spiders, I'm not sure how much the songs differ, other than the explicit details of being burnt in the goblin song. The same applies to the elves' song in "Barrels out of Bond". I guess what I might be suggesting is that Tolkien enjoyed very much writing the goblin song and finding sounds to fit their nasty threats. It might not demonstrate the characteristics he ascribed to his own elven poetry of being "over-pretty" and "phonetically and semantically sentimental" but I do think it shows great pleasure and delight in linguistic form, "pleasure in articulate sound".
__________________
I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. Last edited by Bęthberry; 06-15-2012 at 07:35 PM. Reason: typos and coding |
||
06-14-2012, 10:26 PM | #8 | ||
Blossom of Dwimordene
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: The realm of forgotten words
Posts: 10,311
|
Quote:
There's no contradiction, as far as I can see. Tolkien never takes the approach that "bad guys" are 100% evil (which might make some sense, once you think about it). Tolkien doesn't write in a black and white world, not even in The Hobbit, where everything seems as basic/simple as it can get. Directly or indirectly, Tolkien gives evil characters their due. He doesn't dismiss them as completely evil and therefore not worth appreciating. Instead, throughout his books he aknowledges the strength/strengths of the enemy, even lets us sometimes admire their evilness/cunning/whatever - but never forgetting, as Mandos said, that all those things remain evil. Not because someone said that (for example) Sauron is evil and therefore whatever he does is also, but because he chooses to direct his deeds to it. It's like there's beauty in a fire whenever it is there, but you would prefer that beauty to be staying nicely under control than having it consume your house - in a very beautiful and majestic way. So Elves are being shown as creating beauty to praise it, to make more of it, to do good. Goblins create beauty to demolish other beauty, but what they don't realise is that they do so in a beautiful way...but still an evil one. To sum everything up, there's beauty in an orc sword just as much aas an Elf sword; the difference lies in how this beauty is used. So in their attempt to destroy some good(=Thorin & co) the goblins do so by subconsciously making a different kind of beauty, something they cannot avoid. Yet this new beauty doesn't make their deed less evil. My, this is one long and convoluted answer for something that could have been said in a paragraph!
__________________
You passed from under darkened dome, you enter now the secret land. - Take me to Finrod's fabled home!... ~ Finrod: The Rock Opera |
||
06-15-2012, 06:55 AM | #9 |
Dead Serious
|
While considering the goblin song, I think it's worth remembering that the literary genre of The Hobbit is (at least ostensibly) a tale for children. Rather than looking at the goblin-song with an eye towards reconciling it completely with what is said about orks in The Lord of the Rings and subsequent works, it seems to me that this might be a good point to remember the author and audience instead.
After all, The Hobbit has a distinct narrator--certainly more so than The Lord of the Rings--and the Conceit is that we're reading a retold version of Bilbo's memoirs. Even "within the story" then, it might be fair to suggest that the goblin song, as we have it, isn't an entirely accurate representation of what the goblins were actually singing (or chanting... or screeching... or screaming... or whatnot). It could just as easily be conceived as Bilbo whimsically taking the rather unpleasant experience and using it as interpretation to write one of his trademark poems. Certainly, the author of "the Cat Jumped over the Moon" seems a better author for this poem than the orks of the Misty Mountains--however clever the they (and the lyrics) are. Ignoring the Translator Conceit entirely, it seems to me that the poem is Tolkien's way of keeping the danger and fear of the scene to a level a younger child could handle. As far as that goes, it's quite clever, because it uses the threat that the goblins pose as its subject, but its form makes it more of a laughing matter for the audience than one of dread. In other words, Tolkien is able to deepen our sense of danger while simultaneously easing the possible nightmares--and, at the same time, indulging his own creative whimsy.
__________________
I prefer history, true or feigned.
|
06-17-2012, 09:18 PM | #10 | |||
Cryptic Aura
Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 6,046
|
Forgive the tardy reply, please. I'm really happy to see some discussion of this issue as it's good to see some of the old "back and forth".
Quote:
I will throw a wrench into the works, though, and suggest that 'reading backwards' from The Silm to TH won't work. Certainly Tolkien must have been working on his mythology as he was writing TH, but there's nary a mention of hobbits in The Silm which Christopher Tolkien produced, nor in HoMe. TH was an independent story from the Legendarium, as far as I know (and I could be wrong as I'm not the strongest on Silm history.) While the percolation of ideas which Tolkien went through might well have held all stories in balance, I'm not sure we can take things in CT's The Silm and read them into TH. Tolkien certainly struggled after the fact to work TH consistently into LotR, but I'm not sure we can take The Silm to explicate areas which might seem inconsistent with LotR. Quote:
As for the Translator Conceit, that hasn't appeared directly in the story yet, although we do have a variable narrator, so on a naive first reading, I'm not sure that's something we can legitimately consider--although if this thread is about naive first readings I'm of course not sure.
__________________
I’ll sing his roots off. I’ll sing a wind up and blow leaf and branch away. |
|||
06-17-2012, 10:03 PM | #11 | |
Blossom of Dwimordene
Join Date: Oct 2010
Location: The realm of forgotten words
Posts: 10,311
|
Quote:
__________________
You passed from under darkened dome, you enter now the secret land. - Take me to Finrod's fabled home!... ~ Finrod: The Rock Opera |
|
|
|