Hobbit2 - Chapter 02 - Roast Mutton

[Estelyn Telcontar]

The adventure begins: this chapter moves Bilbo and the reader from the safety - and boredom! - of Bag End to the realisation that "adventures are not all pony-rides in May-sunshine" and the first time his life and that of his comrades is in danger. It also adds a name for him that incorporates his new function with the old identity - what do you think of the burrahobbit?


(Link to the previous discussion, for those who wish to read it.)

[Pomegranate]

I think Roast Mutton is a lovely, and yet very somewhat unfitting chapter. That is, unfitting to the regular idea of Middle Earth - isn't there, for example, talking wallets (which is probably one of the most confusing things in the whole book, where did that come from? What is it related to?), trolls that turn into stone with sunlight, the complete lack of understanding from the side of dwarves as to what Bilbo is capable of (the owl calls are sweet and fairytale-like, but just don't match with anything else I 'know' about dwarves).

This is a very much children's book -like chapter. Things happen fast and they don't have to be fully explained. Also Gandalf's appearance and the unexpected solution for the mortal danger.

[jallanite]

I can’t recall any authentic folk tale with a talking purse or a talking wallet but it feel perfectly right to me.

In Jack and the Beanstalk the harp calls out, “Master, master!” when Jack takes it and that wakes up the giant.

Also, evil magical beings in folk tales often roam about at night but are turned to stone at dawn. Tolkien only uniquely make this a characteristic of the monsters known as trolls.

This works, for me, in part, because Tolkien presents these magical characteristics as though the reader really ought to know about them and most readers accept that, at least for this story.

The effete and city-bred character who is ridiculed because he cannot do bird calls is a common motif in tales. The point of Thorin urging that Bilbo ought to “hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl” is surely to point out that the dwarves have previously been involved in many adventures so that the could not imagine that anyone, especially a supposed professional burglar, could not do something so simple. But Bilbo can’t.

Bilbo makes a mess of his first adventure, and he knows it. Bilbo understands what a legendary burglar ought to do but it is simply beyond his capability. Gandalf is necessary to save the dwarves by the simple folk tale method of distracting the evil creatures until dawn comes, like the hero of the Grimm Brothers’ “The Brave Little Tailor” near the end of that tale: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm020.html . The tailor tricks the giants into fighting just as Gandalf tricks the trolls.

The difference in Tolkien’s tale as compared to most (but not all) traditional tales is that usually the protagonist may start out as an apparent failure but beginning with his first adventure he triumphs over whatever he comes across. It is a more modern technique to actually show the protagonist as a failure to allow a build-up to his latter success.

[Galadriel55]

I think it's funny that trolls have last names. That's what "Huggins" is supposed to be, in context. In the LOTR-Middle Earth, last names are a purely hobbitish thing. Men, Elves, and Dwarves do not have them, and creatures of evil barely have first names. And here's a typical troll standing about with a last name. Seems that Tolkien had a much more "human" conception of trolls, and a more modern one.

Also, about Bilbo not knowing the "basic" skills of immitating birds -

But there are no legends of their deeds, for it is said that they do little, and avoid the sight of men, being able to vanish in a twinkling; and they can change their voices to resemble to piping of birds. ~Theoden, The Road to Isengard

Since Merry and Pippin don't gainsay Theoden, I assumed this is true; what an author gives as a character's opinion is fact to the reader, unless contradicted by another fact or opinion. I never realized any problem here until this discussion took place. By LOTR logic Bilboo shouldn't have found it that difficult to immitate an owl. To make different owl hoots - that's understandable, this was probably added by the Professor as a hyperbole, but not to immitate birds. The "typical hobbit" of TH seems much more "modernised" and "city-people" than the LOTR hobbits...

Yeah, yeah, TH and LOTR are to be considered separate stories, they shouldn't be compared for canonicity, etc, ok, I'm going.

[Tuor in Gondolin]

There are several interesting notes in Chapter 2 of the
Annotated Hobbit.

1)

It is traditional in fairy tales for the sight of the sun
to be fatal to trolls. In the Norse folk tales collected by Peter Christen
Anbjornsen and Jorgen Moe, translated into English by George Webbe
Dasent as Popular Tales from the Norse (1859), trolls caught in
the sunlight burst into pieces.

2) [QUOTE]In 1977, Tolkien's second son Michael told the Tolkien Society in
Great Britain that as children, he, his two brothers, and his sister had each,
at some point in their development, thought that the Troll chapter was the
best chapter in the book. He continued, "We thought there was something
rather nice about Trolls, and it was a pity they had to be turned to stone
at all."/QUOTE]

It's also noted that Tolkien's having the trolls use lower class speech is akin to
that of Chaucer using the Middle English northern dialect as a source of humor for his
southern English audience, in a 1931 paper presented to the Philological Society
of Oxford, entitled "Chaucer as a philologist: The Reeve's Tale."

[Selmo]

“Hoot twice like a barn-owl and once like a screech-owl”.

Barn owl and screech-owl are two different names for the same bird.
They don't hoot, they screech.

Does this explain Bilbo's confusion or is Bilbo ignorant of all things pertaining to owls?
Is Thorin also ignorant or is it all down to a lapse of memory on Bilbo's part when he wrote down the story some years later?

Or, horror of horrors, is Tolkien wrong?

.

[Boromir88]

Originally Posted by Estelyn Telcontar

what do you think of the burrahobbit?

Anytime I see that word, my head has programmed me to think about the long time member of the 'Downs. So, in an attempt of being like the burrahobbit...

clumsy.

Originally Posted by mark12_30

It seems to me that Gimli comes as a warrior resplendant, fresh from the gloriously rebuilt and refortified Lonely Mountain, wealthy, self-confident, and bold. In contrast, what we have in The Hobbit are a rag-tag assemblage of -- excuse me, but they admitted it-- coal-diggers and iron-miners. Thorin's thirteen are not all dwarves at the peak of their culture and glory. They are slummers; survivors; stubborn dreamers; and rather unlikely adventurers.

Wow, not joking when I say my mind has been blown, because I never paid attention to those details, and the backgrounds of the 13 dwarves. I have been so used to thinking pretty much every non-hobbit character was royalty, or had some kind of royal pedigree. Aside from hobbits, Beregond, Hama, and a few others in LOTR, the characters come from noble bloodlines. So, I've been assuming all these years it was the same for the dwarves who went with Thorin...but they are a very rag-tag bunch.

I went to bed wondering why the dwarves all approach the troll camp one at a time, because that was such a terrible strategy if they all wanted to avoid capture. I think your post has inadvertently been a partial answer, but it's still something I'm wondering. Approaching the trolls one-by-one (granted they didn't know whose camp it was) just seemed a strange way to not get everyone sacked.

[Boromir88]

I agree with the previous discussions that this is a bleak and dreary chapter. It starts off light and humorous. Bilbo gets his handkerchief after all, and the beginning of the adventure Bilbo thinks adventuring isn't all that bad. But then things take a turn for the worst, when the weather turns and they can't find a dry place to get cover from the rain. Gandalf mysteriously disappears and I wonder is this going to be a recurring thing for the wizard?

I do think Bilbo is mostly to blame for the plight with the trolls in this chapter. It is in the previous chapter when we learn about a hobbits ability to conceal and get past trouble unnoticed:

There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when large stupid folk like you and me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off.~An Unexpected Party

And Bilbo (as do all hobbits it seems) takes pride in being able to move through woods quickly and quietly.

Off Bilbo had to go, before he could explain that he could not hoot even once like any kind of owl any more than fly like a bat. But at any rate hobbits can move quietly in woods, absolutely quietly. They take pride in it, and Bilbo has sniffed more than once at what he called "all this dwarven racket," as they went along, though I don't suppose you or I would have noticed anything at all on a windy night, not if the whole cavalcade had passed two feet off. As for Bilbo walking primly towards the red light, I don't suppose even a weasel would have stirred a whisker at it. So, naturally he got right up to the fire -...~Roast Mutton

Thorin just asks Bilbo to find out about the fire and come back after doing so. After all, it is how Bilbo fits/the services as the company's burglar. He quite successfully gets right up to the fire and the trolls. It's entirely his fault he gets over confident to try his hand at showing the dwarves that he's an excellent burglar.

Now yes, it is the dwarves fault that they themselves get captured too, as the only one that finds something off and prepared for trouble was Thorin.

The continuing log of dwarves...

Balin is always the look out dwarf, he's the oldest dwarf, but must have the sharpest eyes. He is the first dwarf to come into the campfire and get captured by the trolls. It's also noted that his concern is to find where Bilbo is in the commotion of the trolls fighting each other. This is I believe the first dwarf to show concern for our hobbit.

Oin and Gloin can build the best fires, and quarrel a lot. Twice in this chapter it mentions the two arguing/quarrelling.

Dori and Nori shared Bilbo's opinion of meals "plenty and often."

Thorin, his leadership so far appears to be he's too important to risk himself on tasks of the common folk...he doesn't cook the meals, he doesn't start fires, he doesn't investigate the fire. However, he is the only one who approached the fire cautiously, wasn't caught off guard and put up a fight with a tree branch until he gets sacked.