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Old 09-10-2012, 01:55 AM   #1
Estelyn Telcontar
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Boots Hobbit2 - Chapter 11 - On the Doorstep

This is a transitional chapter, taking Bilbo and the dwarves from Laketown to the Lonely Mountain. It's not very long, and not a lot happens in it, though there is a good bit of description.

I actually like the fact that the waiting process is central here. So many books just race from one highlight to the next, but the drudgery of walking there is neglected. This makes the story feel realistic.

Once again the dwarves are less mindful of their own heritage and the prophecy than Bilbo is. Combined with their previous bumbling and their seeming lack of courage this gives us a different kind of dwarf than we see in the Silmarillion and in LotR. I wonder how they will be depicted in the movies...

As for Durin's Day, I remember once reading that it happened very rarely - does anyone have more information on that?

How does this chapter feel to you? Is it tedious to read, paralleling the plodding progress of the group?


Previous discussion here.
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Old 09-11-2012, 06:16 PM   #2
jallanite
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According to Thorin:
“The first day of the dwarves’ New Year,” said Thorin, “is as all should know the first day of the last moon of Autumn on the threshold of Winter. We still call it Durin’s Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together. But this will not help us much, I fear, for it passes our skill in these days to guess when such a time will come again.”
This is confusing.

On every dwarves’ New Year the sun and moon will be very close together and therefore in the sky together.

But Bilbo actually sees a new crescent moon:
Soon he saw the orange ball of the sun sinking toward the level of his eyes. He went to the opening and there pale and faint was a thin new moon above the rim of Earth.
This at least establishes that the story is not considering the day when the moon is entirely invisible. On the following day the moon indeed appears as a thin crescent above the sun, and will so appear every dwarves’ New Year. But the crescent will be so close to the sun that the sun’s light will blot it out until the sun begins to redden and dim at sundown. The reader is supposed to understand that the tradition is about the sun and moon being visibly in the sky together.

If the sky is clear at sundown, and depending on the amount of haze in the air, and depending on how far the new crescent moon is from the moment of complete invisibility, and depending on latitude, and depending on the eyesight of the observer, the crescent moon may or may not be visible.

The crescent moon may be barely seen by one person and not seen by a person standing close by.

Presumably the dwarvish year was computed by a mixture of calculation and observation so that the calendar could be kept working in case of overcast. When working with a full moon or one near full the problems of whether a moon was actually seen would be greatly minimized. Then the dwarvish New Year could be calculated. And if at sundown observers saw the crescent moon before the sun had completely set, then it was Durin’s Day.

But then comes the problem of what is “completely set”. Assuming a seascape horizon to the west, does it still count if the crescent can be glimpsed when the sun has half set? What if the sun has three-quarters set? And what if the viewer is in a mountain valley? It is really impossible to tell how often Durin’s Day might occur without more information than Tolkien gives.

The dwarves must have had rules which Tolkien does not tell. All we know is that on this particular day the crescent moon was sufficiently far from the setting sun as seen from the valley on the Lonely Mountain that there was no question that it was Durin’s Day.

The dwarves and Bilbo would of course be able to tell when the dwarves’ New Year will come by noting the size of the decreasing crescent of the moon and be right within about two or three days. Yet though finding the door is the chief concern of the dwarves and Bilbo, unbelievably none give the matter of the dwarves’ New Year a single thought, so far as we are told, until Bilbo sees the thrush cracking a snail just before sundown.

Stupid, stupid, stupid dwarves! Stupid, stupid, stupid Bilbo!

Still this is a nice change-of-pace chapter without any enemies and sets everything up for the forthcoming explosion.

Last edited by jallanite; 09-12-2012 at 05:50 PM.
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Old 09-21-2012, 03:09 PM   #3
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A couple of things to note about Durin's Day

1) The definition given is the "first day of the last moon of autumn."

2) As noted above, "first day" must refer to the first visible crescent, not the astronomical New Moon which is invisible

3) Here's where it gets odd: the text has, the day prior, "Tomorrow begins the last week of autumn." But don't the Dwarves use a lunar calendar? At least their New Year is defined in lunar terms: the first day of the last moon of Autumn. Do they define their seasons on a solar basis? It seems the only way to make it work, if the season is held to begin just a week after the new moon.

4) However, if the Dwarves are using a mixed solar/lunar calendar it might at least help explain how "it passes our skill in these days" to forecast Durin's Day occurring.

5) Nonetheless, surely one of the brighter bulbs among the 13 would understand that even though one can't forecast that DD will occur in any given year, one certainly can predict on which day of the year it must happen if it happens at all: to wit, the first day of the last autumn moon.

So, yes, stupid Dwarves: one would think they would have been lurking eagerly around the stone on that day, key in hand, from late afternoon onward.
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Old 09-22-2012, 09:03 AM   #4
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Quote:
Originally Posted by William Cloud Hicklin View Post
Here's where it gets odd: the text has, the day prior, "Tomorrow begins the last week of autumn." But don't the Dwarves use a lunar calendar? At least their New Year is defined in lunar terms: the first day of the last moon of Autumn. Do they define their seasons on a solar basis? It seems the only way to make it work, if the season is held to begin just a week after the new moon.
Agreed that it is obvious that the dwarves must use a solar calendar when calculating seasons. But nowhere that I can find is it indicated that “the season is held to begin just a week after the new moon.” That would link the season to a lunar calendar (at least for purposes of calculating the new year). But, as is obvious, the season is not so linked. In the text Durin’s Day and the dwarves’ new year actually occurs the following day after Thorin’s remark that “Tomorrow begins the last week of autumn”, not a week later.

As Rateliff points out in The History of the Hobbit, pp. 480–81, this dating makes the subsequent chronology either impossible or at least very unlikely as Bilbo supposedly spends Yule with Beorn on his journey back home. If Yule is to be identified with New Years Day as in the Númenórean calendar, rather than Christmas, it only becomes barely possible.

The early text rendered by Rateliff is (475):
‘Autumn will be in tomorrow’ said Thorin one day.
‘And winter comes after autumn’ said Bifur.
The First Typescript is given by Rateliff on page 481:
“Tomorrow begins the last month [> week] of Autumn” said Thorin one day. “And winter comes after autumn” said Bifur.
Tolkien later remarks in Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings:
The seasons usually named were tuilë spring, lairë summer, yávië autumn (or harvest), hrívë winter; but these had no exact definitions, and quellë (or lasselanta) was also used for the latter part of autumn and the beginning of winter.
By indicating that seasons had no precise definitions Tolkien may be attempting to cover The Hobbit chronology as published indicating that “the last week of autumn and the beginning of winter″ is to be imagined to occur earlier in the chronology of The Hobbit than the names of the seasons suggests using our terminology.
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Old 09-22-2012, 06:52 PM   #5
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I never suggested that the seasons were linked to the moon or resulted from a joint lunar-solar calculation; rather than, oddly, we seem to have a lunar New Year overlaid with solar (or sidereal?) seasons.

The oddity I was pointing out was that no single system could have a New Year and the end of autumn a mere week (or 6 days) apart, which is what Thorin says. Thus they must somehow derive from different systems, or at least there's no other way to account for the published text.

---------

But I think you may have hit upon the key to the puzzle: the correction to the First Typescript.
“Tomorrow begins the last month [> week] of Autumn” said Thorin one day. “And winter comes after autumn” said Bifur.
As originally written, the last month of autumn began the next day, the day upon which the Durin's Day new moon rose; in other words, the first appearance of the moon which defines autumn's last (lunar) month. It all works.

Changing that to "week" throws all that off (as well as the later chronology). So why did T do it?
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