Let's Read Tolkien 8: Flies and spiders

They walked in single file.

I talked about Tolkien's attention to geography in an earlier installment. It's generally agreed that mountains were a bit of a thing for him, and this chapter is our first encounter with another major theme: forests. Mind you, there have been plenty of trees earlier: the trolls' camp was on a wooded hill, there were trees and forested valleys on the way to Rivendell, as well as on both sides of the Misty Mountains. But those were forests; Mirkwood is a Forest. As anyone who's read the Lord of the Rings knows, a forest is just a place with some trees, while a Forest proper is a dark, foreboding, awe-inspiring place. Entering one is an occasion and a considerable, and very dangerous, undertaking.

As a personal aside, I should point out that I come from a culture that fondly harbors utterly pseudo-historical notions (pdf) of its supposed recent descent from some kind of moody Cimmerian forest-dwellers and eagerly deploys these to explain everything from our political beliefs and imagined military prowess to our drinking habits. Part of the reason this series of blog posts is progressing with such glacial speed is that I'm working on a Master's thesis on the military ramifications of these notions. But for that reason, and I suspect ultimately because of the small stretches of woodland near where I grew up, forests fascinate me. Having been born in Switzerland, I'm also somewhat subject to Tolkien's romance with mountains, but in the Hobbit at least, mountains aren't nearly as spectacular as forests.

Indeed, if you compare the mountains in chapter 4 to Mirkwood, the mountains are basically benign until a thunderstorm strikes. The forest, on the other hand, is unequivocally hostile: a hateful, dark place.

It was not long before they grew to hate the forest as heartily as they had hated the tunnels of the goblins, and it seemed to offer even less hope of any ending. But they had to go in and on, long after they were sick for a sight of the sun and of the sky, and longed for the feel of wind on their faces. There was no movement of air down under the forest-roof, and it was everlastingly still and dark and stuffy. Even the dwarves felt it, who were used to tunneling, and lived at times for long whiles without the light of the sun; but the hobbit, who liked holes to make a house in but not to spend summer days in, felt that he was being slowly suffocated.

Seriously, by the description, it is worse than the goblin-tunnels! But on they trudge nonetheless. I've pointed out before that on re-reading the Hobbit, what's really striking is how badly this entire dragonslaying caravan seems to be organized, and last time (admittedly a while ago!) I felt that Gandalf leaving the dwarves on their own seemed like an absolutely terrible idea. As the dwarves and Bilbo make their way deeper into Mirkwood, they're not only constantly spooked by the woods, but their provisions start to run out, most crucially the water. Eventually they arrive at a stream, have a hell of a time getting over as the bridge is gone, and Bombur falls in and drops into some kind of magical forest coma. So now they're hauling along a sleeping dwarf, their food is running out, and they've wasted all the arrows Beorn gave them firing mindlessly after various animals they've run across.

At this point the reader is wondering how anyone could have thought it was a good idea to let these morons out on their own. The narrator helpfully points out that if the dwarves had only persevered a bit longer, they would have made it to the edge if the woods. Surely someone could have told them this? Although one also wonders why it matters, since based on what we've seen of the party's wilderness survival skills so far, they'd still have been far from civilization and starving. Looking at the whole thing from the outside, so to speak, the whole project just seems completely absurd.

They get Bilbo to climb a tree to have a look around, but he can't see the edge of the woods because they're actually in a valley at the moment, so when he comes down and the food runs out, the dwarves are feeling a bit desperate. Again, it's slightly difficult to square the abject misery of Mirkwood with the notion of Tolkien's stories as happy-go-lucky Boy's Own adventures, but this is a recurring problem anyway. Bombur eventually wakes up and starts talking about the magical woodland feast he'd dreamed about and the various foods on offer there. It's a miracle they didn't strangle him. As night is falling, they spot a glimmer of light in the woods, and drawing closer to it they see torches and fires among the trees. You remember what Gandalf and Beorn reminded the dwarves to never ever even think about doing? That's right, leave the path. But honestly, at this point they're pretty much facing starvation because they ventured into a giant goddamn haunted magic forest with far too little food, so I don't really blame them for thinking "fuck those guys, let's eat".

As it turns out, though, elven parties aren't that easy to crash. Every time Bilbo and the dwarves make it to the elves' torchlit forest party, the lights go out and the elves vanish. After their third attempt, the dwarves get hopelessly lost and separated from each other and Bilbo, who's left by himself in the middle of the pitch-black Mirkwood. Figuring, unlike the dwarves, that running in a random direction and screaming might not be the best wilderness survival strategy, Bilbo decides to settle down and wait for dawn to get his bearings. If it's more than a little surprising to find Bilbo making better outdoor decisions than the dwarves, it gets plenty more surprising when he wakes up from a snooze to find a giant fucking spider trying to coccoon him in a web, and promptly kills it with his sword.

Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and pit it back into its sheath. "I will give you a name," he said to it, "and I shall call you Sting".

This is very much the moment when Bilbo makes the transition from screaming and fainting bourgeois Mr. Baggins to the world of Norse epic, monster-slaying and naming ancient magic swords. Again, because things aren't that simple with Tolkien, the transformation is anything but complete and irreversible, but a pivotal moment is had nonetheless. Feeling dead butch, Bilbo promptly goes off and rescues the dwarves from certain death by outwitting the entire local population of giant spiders with an invisibility ring, some thrown rocks and a mocking song. I have to take a moment to quote one of my favorite sentences in all of Tolkien:

Quite apart from the stones no spider has ever liked being called Attercop, and Tomnoddy of course is insulting to anybody.

Attercop, it turns out, is an Old English word for spider, as are Lob and Cob, the two other insults Bilbo hurls at them. Somehow I just thoroughly enjoy the fact that we've been told which nickname spiders particularly detest.

Having freed the dwarves, Bilbo then distracts the spiders again to let them make their getaway, and they all succeed in escaping. Bilbo's definitely moved up in the world from useless, occasionally screaming baggage. The dwarves gain a new respect for Bilbo as they press him for details of his escapade and the magic ring, and eventually they fall asleep sheltering in one of the elves' clearings, which the spiders seem unwilling to enter. But in the meantime, Thorin has been captured by the Wood-Elves, who very much want to know why there are suddenly dwarf hobos in their woods. As Thorin dwarvishly refuses to tell them why, exactly, it is that he's come all this way to starve in a forest, they lock him in a cell until he talks.

**

There's a lot going on in this chapter, which I'd also like to use as an excuse for having taken ages to finish this post. We go from dreary forest-slogging to elf-chasing and spider-fighting, and end up with an extended description of the Wood-Elves and Thorin's interrogation. It's difficult to not think that the elf-exposition at the end of the chapter couldn't have been saved for the next one. But there's action, an excellent mocking song and starving despair in a horrible forest. I don't think I'd ever properly realized just how awful Tolkien makes Mirkwood; if you accept the logic that the biting cold of The Mountains of Madness arose from Lovecraft's terror of freezing temperatures, then surely Tolkien must've had some truly terrible arboreal experiences at some point in his life.

Next time: elves, burglary and barrels.

Seventh anniversary

I cannot believe I've had this damn blog for seven years. What's wrong with me? By my count, this is the 858th post published on this blog since 2007. You'd think I'd have had better things to do.

The truth is, I haven't. Back in 2007 I was still a dropout with no life whatsoever. I started my university studies in 2002, managed three years and then just sort of dropped out. I can't really remember anything from, say, 2005 to 2008 or 2009. I don't remember starting this blog. It's just here. I think it was because I'd lost my job writing, and wanted to keep my hand in at least a little. I'd also fallen out of the habit of writing in English. Having a blog also let me pretend I was doing something. I was suffering from fairly severe depression and social anxiety, and being able to put together a blog post was an achievement. I very badly needed achievements. Of any kind. But this is speculation; I genuinely can't remember.

I do remember that I've always felt I've written for an audience of two people. Looking at the statistics, that's still pretty much true, and I'm actually quite happy with that. My opinions on current affairs tend to be wildly unpopular; I can't even begin to imagine what would happen if I told people what I think of the TTIP treaty, for instance. As I do think it sharpens the mind to work out one's opinions in writing, and I wouldn't take writing seriously if it wasn't at least nominally public, I've appreciated having an opportunity to air my views to an audience that barely qualifies as one in terms of numbers.

At times, I have actually managed to reach wider. I continue to be amused that people are still coming across my Ancient Aliens post; given how short and limited in scope it is, I'm a bit surprised it elicited even that much comment. In the early days of the blag, I also got into a bunch of fights with people over racism, because back then that was what you did if you were Finnish and on the internet: get into fights with strangers over whether Muslims are people and does it count as racism if you make up a fancy word for it. Then we had an election and something like 20% of us voted for a vaguely anthropomorphic Catholic Innsmouth frog and his party of gibbering racists, so apparently this is a thing for us now. The gibbering racists are opposed by a cabal of left-wing loonies who think that Finland's multi-billion euro deficit either a) doesn't exist or b) will go away if we print enough money. You see why I don't like to talk about current affairs.

I also find it harder and harder to see the point. I think Farhad Manjoo hit the nail on the head in True Enough: the Internet does allow for an unprecedented transmission of information, but also gives people the ability to seek out information that matches their pre-existing biases and create ideological echo chambers by networking with the like-minded. When someone momentarily leaves their echo chamber and encounters someone who disagrees with them, the echo chamber has so completely naturalized their ideology that they simply cannot deal with any dissent and immediately resort to strawmen and childish vitriol. Having mentioned the gibbering racists, it needs to be said that there are people with whom it is not reasonable to have a civil discussion. I don't feel it's morally defensible to have a nice, calm, and friendly little chat with brutal neo-Nazis advocating white supremacism, or the particular variety of antifeminist who thinks the real problems in society all have to do with his dick. Fuck those people. But even with perfectly reasonable folks, it feels almost impossible to have a civilized exchange of opinions. It's as if we treat the Internet as some kind of collective subconscious where none of the conventions of ordinary society apply and we can give free rein to our thymoeides, which I suppose is geographically appropriate, but hardly makes for good conversation. If C. G. Jung traveled in time to today and saw the comments section of a major newspaper, he'd be astounded that we've invented a machine that prints out the id.

So my impression increasingly is that one can either preach to the choir or argue at people who aren't even listening in the first place. I'm sure they feel the same way about me. So I don't really see the point. I'm not sure I ever did; years ago, I think I got into this business of arguing with people on the Internet out of sheer loneliness and a burning need for anything even vaguely meaningful to do with my life. I think I can safely say that online arguments weren't very meaningful. People don't usually believe me when I say this, but I don't like to get into fights. I'm very conflict-averse. Being raised as a boy just means you have to get good at pretending you're not. This is also what has led me to question my use of the social media. I increasingly feel that there, too, you can toe the party line in terms of acceptable political and cultural opinions in your particular circle of online acquaintances, and get your likes or your favs or your whatnot, or break with consensus and suddenly the same people who seconds ago were liking your posts and recommending you to their friends want nothing more to do with you. I genuinely worry that we're becoming less tolerant of diversity, in ways far more commonplace than fascists with torches. Which, of course, we also have in Finland again these days.

Now that I'm on the topic, I really must add that I harbor a special dislike for the kind of people who use the social media for nothing except complaining and finding fault with everything. If every single social media post you make that isn't a vacation picture or an inanity can be fairly summarized as "look how much smarter I am than all these other people", consider the probability that you are an asshole. (A blog, in case you're wondering, doesn't count as a social medium.)

Since 2007, I've gotten a lot better. I went to prison, lost quite a bit of weight, got to collaborate with my brother on his game, returned to university and got a bachelor's degree - in theology, of all things. Comparative religion, to be exact. I studied conversion narratives on Finland's biggest online racist forum for my bachelor's thesis, and I'm currently working on a master's in contemporary history, with my thesis there on the development of Finnish armored doctrine in the 1920's and 30's. So in a sense, I'm now writing things that feel meaningful, and they're taking up quite a bit of my time. I also finally managed to get a pen-and-paper roleplaying campaign started again; I'm running a Rogue Trader game, and so far, it's been a terrifying, but rewarding, experience.

When I say I'm better, I don't mean that I'm well. Returning to some semblance of normal life has been very difficult, and although recovering from my near-debilitating social anxiety has gone better than I had ever hoped it would, it's still massively stressful for me to go through a normal university semester. On top of that, I got into a relationship last spring that made me happier than I ever remember being, and that was then ended brutally and suddenly by the other person. I still don't understand what happened or why, and it still hurts. A lot. I may be up and about and at times managing to pretend I'm something like a normal person, but my mind was completely unprepared for the level of emotional violence that that breakup was for me. I'm not remotely over it.

I still struggle with depression and a deep feeling of loneliness. I feel so petty complaining about that, as by just about any criteria I have a whole bunch of friends and some loved ones, but I have an incredibly hard time being able to accept that people care about me. Especially since the last time I did, I got hurt very, very badly for it. In retrospect, I suppose I expected too much from my recovery. My life is now so much better than it was when I started blogging, and I'm far less depressed than I was then. But I'm still not well, nor do I think I ever will be. I vacillate between wanting to engage with the world and feeling thoroughly alienated from it. In many ways I think trying to be socially active is futile, but I'm haunted by a desperate loneliness that I don't know if I can live with. I keep going, not from any sense of purpose or meaningfulness, but because I don't know what else to do. I hope things will get better. I try to make them better. I'm just really bad at, well, everything. Nor do I know what to do if things don't look up.

So, to sum up, I'm very much in the middle of re-examining my relationship to society and public life in general. Right now, everything feels so completely pointless that I despair. In politics, we face a continuing European economic crisis and the rise of fascism, along with an aggressive and increasingly desperate Russia. While our economy and defense decay, our public debate consists of hordes of wingnuts and moonbats locked in a race to the lowest common denominator of moronic populism. I don't believe there's anything I can do to make a difference. In terms of my personal life, I'm finally getting somewhere, but none of it feels like it means anything. I'm still desperately, at times unbearably, lonely, and that doesn't seem to be changing. But I don't feel quite ready to give up, either. So I have no idea what to do. I guess I keep going. But I have no idea how much longer I can do this.

Comparative religion: the Daedric Princes and the Chaos gods

Now that I've got a degree in comparative religion, I feel I ought to do some. Let's get the easy ones out of the way first!

Hermaeus Mora = Tzeentch

The Daedra of fate and knowledge, Lord of Secrets, is clearly Tzeentch.

Sanguine = Slaanesh

Similarly obvious is the connection between the Daedric Lord of debauchery and the Prince of Pleasure.

Namira = Nurgle

The Lady of Decay is most definitely Nurgle.

**

The Four Corners of the House of Troubles

It would be extremely pleasing if each of the Four Corners could be matched to a Chaos God. And they can!

Malacath = Khorne

Malacath, who spurns physical weakness and is depicted holding a very large weapon, suggests Khorne to me.

Mehrunes Dagon = Tzeentch

Mehrunes Dagon, like Tzeentch, represents change.

Sheogorath = Slaanesh

I chose to identify Sheogorath with Slaanesh mostly because Dark Seducers serve Sheogorath, and because Slaanesh was the one Chaos god left over after the three easier matches.

Molag Bal = Nurgle

His realm is desecrated and ruined, his enemy is Boethiath.

**

The Anticipations

Azura = Tzeentch

The goddess of the magical realms of dusk and dawn, who interferes subtly in the affairs of mortals: Tzeentch.

Boethiath = Tzeentch

The Daedra of secret plots and conspiracies has a fairly easy match in Tzeentch.

Mephala = Khaine = Khorne

Mephala has aspects that could easily be matched with Slaanesh or Tzeentch, but founding an order of elven assassins to serve her makes her very much Khaine, and therefore Khorne.

**

Clavicus Vile = Tzeentch

Pacts and machinations are hardly alien to any of the Chaos gods, but are most emblematic of Tzeentch.

Hircine = Khorne

Hunting and werecreatures are something I would associate with Khorne, as one of the characteristics of werewolves is their inability to control their rage.

Jyggalag = Nurgle

As Tzeentch is the Lord of Change, so his opposite is the equivalent of the Daedric Prince of Order.

Meridia = Tzeentch

Meridia, Lady of Infinite Energies, has no direct counterpart in the Chaos pantheon, but if I had to associate the undead with a Chaos god, it would be Nurgle. Therefore, the enemy of the undead is Tzeentch.

Nocturnal = Tzeentch

For want of a Chaos god especially dedicated to thieves and the night, Tzeentch's interest in deception is the best match.

Peryite = Nurgle

Peryite's spheres are pestilence and order.

Vaermina = Slaanesh

This one isn't so obvious, as dreams aren't the exclusive sphere of any Chaos God; in the fluff, they all use dreams to communicate with their followers. Based on her relationships to the other Daedra, however, Vaermina can be identified with Slaanesh: her only ally is Sanguine, previously found to be Slaanesh, and her enemies include Ebonarm, Peryite and Hermaeus Mora, i.e. war, pestilence and knowledge.

Let's Read Tolkien 7: Queer Lodgings

The next morning Bilbo woke up with the early sun in his eyes.

We rejoin Thorin and company in the eagles' eyries, from where they're airlifted to a great big rock in the middle of Anduin, the Great River of Wilderland. It's actually a bit odd how little attention flying gets in the story; we're rather matter-of-factly told that an eagle grabbed Bilbo and they flew off, and then later he rode an eagle in another direction. As bourgeois as Bilbo is, I still don't think he can possible ever have flown before, so you'd really think that it would be a bigger deal, but for some reason Tolkien doesn't seem to think so. "What is finer than flying?" asks the eagle, and it's tough to reply, because we have very little idea what flying is like. Hell, we don't even get a landscape description. I'm a bit disappointed.

But land on the Carrock they do. The classic problem of airborne operations is supply, and that's true here as well: the dwarves have no food and no transport. To arrange some, Gandalf proposes to introduce them to one of his colleague Radagast's friends, a crazed hippie berserker. This is all the more necessary because Gandalf is going to be leaving Thorin and company to attend to business elsewhere, which, given their track record so far, honestly seems like a terrible idea. One gets the impression that dwarven expeditions that set off without wizards aren't going to get much farther than the first troll, who will probably see them less as a glorious adventuring party and more like a convenient food delivery.

But Gandalf is still with Bilbo and the dwarves, and he concocts a plot to get around the werebear Beorn's irascibility: he'll go up to Beorn's place with Bilbo, start telling him the story of how they got there, and sort of gradually work up to revealing that they have a bunch of dwarves with them as well. This is done, with Gandalf making the occasional off-hand reference to his traveling companions, at which point a couple more dwarves show up, until Gandalf has effectively tricked Beorn into letting the whole bunch of them into his hall. It's a particularly well-written scene, and Beorn enjoys the story and maybe even the subterfuge enough to make the travelers his guests for the night.

Memorable dialogue from Beorn: "Troop of ponies? What were you - a traveling circus?" Honestly? Pretty much.

This chapter is our first glimpse of Tolkien the environmentalist: Beorn lives with a bunch of animals he talks with, keeps bee-pastures and apparently doesn't take at all kindly to people who kill animals. The food at his table is vegetarian. It's an unexpected combination with the fact that the one thing that made Beorn well-disposed to the dwarves more than anything else was that they'd murdered orcs. But like I said, hippie berserker. Bechdel test update: I don't even think any of Beorn's animals were female.

The traveling circus hangs out at Beorn's for another day, and having ascertained that they really did murder hella orcs Beorn gives them vegetarian provisions and lends them ponies to ride to Mirkwood. He strongly entreats them to both send the ponies back when they reach the woods, and under no conditions whatsoever leave the path once they get there. They ride up to the edge of the forest, send the ponies back and say goodbye to Gandalf, who tells them several times that they have to remember that once they get into the forest, they must on no account leave the path ever.

Next time: you had one job.

RIP Jim Thompson (1964-2014)

So yesterday evening Helsingin Sanomat told me that Jim Thompson passed away. Me, my significant other and Jim were first-years together at the University of Helsinki English department back when such a thing still existed. Unlike me, he graduated and went on to be a succesful author. We didn't really keep in touch; we exchanged some tweets a couple of times but that was it, and now I'm beating myself up a bit that I didn't get back in contact with him properly when I got over the worst of my problems.

My enduring memory of Jim is a Contemporary American Short Story class we took together. The course material was a short story anthology I've still got somewhere, and we would all read a story at home and show up in class to discuss it. The teacher would sort of shepherd the class toward the canonically accepted interpretation of the novel, which I totally understand, but it started getting a bit exasperating for me and Jim, and at some point we had kind of both decided to put up a fight. The occasion - if I recall correctly - was a story by Amy Tan, where the canonical interpretation was that the protagonist was struggling with their Chinese-American identity and needed to embrace her roots. We both felt that it was equally possible to read the story in the opposite way, that the obsession with "roots" was in fact what was causing the protagonist's problems. Purely on the principle that literature can and must be interpreted in different ways, and there isn't one "correct" interpretation of any damn text, we got into a debate with the entire rest of the class and the teacher. Next week, we did the same with a Paul Bowles story, and actually had fellow students complaining to us after class about why we were being so difficult and couldn't we just accept what the teacher said. I recall answering no, we couldn't. The teacher obviously understood what we were doing, and overall I thought we had some good debates.

That's one of my best memories of my short time majoring in English, and a dear memory of Jim. Rest in peace, friend. We'll miss you.

Let's Read Tolkien 6: Out of the Frying-Pan Into the Fire

Bilbo had escaped the goblins, but he did not know where he was.

We find Bilbo alone in the wilderness, having escaped the goblin dungeons but lost his fellow travelers. Like the previous one, this is a considerably longer chapter than usual so far, and quite a bit happens in it. As the sun sets, Bilbo realizes it's setting behind the mountains, meaning he's accidentally made it across the whole of the Misty Mountains. Soon he finds the dwarves, and still having his invisibility ring on, decides to sneak up on them. They're currently in a debate with Gandalf over whether or not to go back and look for Bilbo, who they assume is still lost in the goblin caves. Some of the dwarves are questioning why they brought Bilbo along in the first place, as he seems to them to be a completely useless burglar. Bilbo startles them by removing his ring and stepping into their midst quite literally out of nowhere, and the dwarves' opinion of his burglarizing abilities is considerably improved.

Having found each other again, Thorin and company exchange stories and move on; their baggage and ponies were lost to the goblins, so they have no supplies, and they anticipate that the goblins will send someone after them for having killed the Great Goblin and generally made an impact on the local goblin community, so to speak. So down they go into the foothills of the mountains, until sudenly they hear wolves. This prompts the company to quickly climb some trees for safety, and they find themselves surrounded by a pack of Wargs: evil, talking wolves that hang out with the goblins. It's mentioned that occasionally goblins will even ride wolves, which is probably the genesis of the finest light cavalry in 4th-to-6th-edition Warhammer Fantasy, the Goblin Wolf Riders. Remember, the short bows do nothing.

With the wolves intending to besiege the dwarves in their trees until the goblins turn up, Gandalf tries a bit of fire magic and sets a whole bunch of them on fire. Unfortunately, the goblins arrive and turn the fire against Thorin & co., threatening to burn them alive with the trees. At the last moment before Gandalf launches a suicidal attack on the goblins, the eagles arrive and whisk everyone off to safety, where Bilbo is momentarily worried they'll be eaten, but everything turns out all right, they have dinner and hitch a lift from the eagles to their next destination.

**

It took me ages to get this written up, partly because of annoyances such as starting a Rogue Trader role-playing campaign, moving and finally graduating college, but more because I just wasn't that thrilled with this chapter. It's all a bit meh for me; yay across the mountains! Oh no, wolves! Yay fire! Oh no, goblins! Yay eagles! Oh no, eating! Yay eating! Thus conclude the adventures of the Misty Mountains. I already pointed out before that the deus ex machina is the weakest point of fairytales for the adult reader, and the eagles play that role here. Beyond that, I thought the chapter wasn't particularly well paced, and the episode with the eagles somehow comes off as a bit awkward.

To stick with some of our themes, the eagles also buck the supposedly straightforward division of Tolkien's world into good and evil. They become involved in the story because they consider the goblins their enemies and because Gandalf had at one time helped their leader, but they won't give Thorin & Co. a lift all the way to where the woodmen live, as they would - at other times quite rightly - think that the eagles were there to prey on their livestock; the same thing that the wolves did. So from the woodmen's perspective, I'm not at all sure that the eagles and wolves appear as particularly different in terms of ethics. The Lord of the Eagles, by the way, is also known as the Great Eagle, who I'm sure must be a colleague of the Head Beagle.

The conversation the dwarves have with Gandalf over Bilbo is interesting because as near as the reader can tell, the dwarves are right: Bilbo really has been pretty much completely useless, and it isn't at all clear why Gandalf recruited him for the job at all. It just seems strange that Gandalf is so insistent on him coming along. I don't know if we're intended to think that Bilbo is really a Proper British Gentleman®, who might not get off to the best start but can be trusted to Muddle Through™ and keep his Chin Up, Old Boy™ because he's a Dashed Good Egg Really™ or something, or if it's just that he's the protagonist and that's it. Certainly the profession of burglar doesn't sit very well at all with the solidly civilized, middle-class Mr. Baggins, whose class credentials are enhanced in this chapter when we learn that he isn't even of any use in preparing food since he's used to having his meat delivered to him by a butcher, not having to butcher the animals he eats himself.

But the story moves on: the nickel-and-dime dragon-hunting operation stumbles from one random encounter to another. Next time, a rural interlude.

Let's Read Tolkien 5: Riddles in the Dark

When Bilbo opened his eyes, he wondered if he had; for it was just as dark with them shut.

We left Bilbo lying out cold on the floor of one of the goblins' tunnels. It has to be said that one possible reason for the complete lack of female characters in the story is that in traditional patriarchal and heterosexist terms, Bilbo has been playing the female lead: so far, his accomplishments are pretty much limited to screaming, fainting and being carried around. When he wakes up alone in a dark underground tunnel, however, Tolkien reminds us that this isn't quite as terrifying a situation for Bilbo as it might be for us. After all, hobbits live in tunnels, and eventually, cheered up a bit by the thought of having a blade from fabled Gondolin with him, Bilbo gathers his wits and gets moving. Oh, and incidentally, happens to accidentally come across the One Ring to Rule Them All. You know, ash nazg durbatulûk, ash nazg gimbatul, ash nazg thrakatulûk agh burzum-ishi krimpatul and so on.

Of course, at this point we have no idea that that's what Bilbo just found lying around on the floor of the tunnel. As far as I know, neither did Tolkien. Later, in the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien develops a sort of theology of the finding of the Ring, which I'll go into when I get to it. it involves questions of what, exactly, luck and things that happen "by accident" are. But it's interesting to consider whether any notion of these things can be found in the Hobbit, especially in this chapter. I do use the word "theology" quite deliberately, as it bears reminding that Tolkien was a devout Catholic and expressed his faith in his writing. Ultimately the questions of luck and accident that Tolkien comes to deal with in this context later are so fundamental to faith that I don't think it's unreasonable to look for some unformed notions of his later ideas, as it were, here.

So Bilbo decides, quite reasonably, that the only way out is forward and sets off. And onward and downward along the tunnel he goes, past a plethora of side passages until he walks right into an underground lake. I love the way Tolkien sets the scene here as Bilbo makes his way further down, into the mountain. All the stuff about the "original owners" of the caves the goblins inhabit and the things "that have sneaked in from outside to lie up in the dark" is as good as anything by Lovecraft. Especially when one of those things comes paddling across the underground lake, its eyes glowing like witchfires in the dark: Gollum.

In terms of the larger story, especially the Lord of the Rings, this is a pretty heavy chapter: Bilbo gets his hands on the One Ring and meets Gollum. This basically sets the scene for everything that happens in the Lord of the Rings, so much so that in the context of the later work, everything else up to and including Smaug himself is a footnote. The Hobbit really suffers from this kind of hindsight, and for that reason I'll leave any discussion of Gollum or the Ring beyond what happens in this chapter for later, barring a few notes.

For now, here's who we meet:

Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don't know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was Gollum - as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. He had a little boat, and he rowed about quite quietly on the lake; for lake it was, wide and deep and deadly cold. He paddled it with large feet dangling over the side, but never a ripple did he make. Not he. He was looking out of his pale lamp-like eyes for blind fish, which he grabbed with his long fingers as quick as thinking. He liked meat too. Goblin he thought good, when he could get it; but he took care they never found him out. He just throttled them from behind, if they ever came down alone anywhere near the edge of the water, while he was prowling about. They very seldom did, for they had a feeling that something unpleasant was lurking down there, down at the very roots of the mountain. They had come on the lake, when they were tunneling down long ago, and they found they could go no further; so there their road ended in that direction, and there was no reason to go that way - unless the Great Goblin sent them. Sometimes he took a fancy for fish from the lake, and sometimes neither goblin nor fish came back.

If I said in the previous chapter that the goblins are hardly introduced to us as pure videogame villains, here that notion is completely subverted: how can you not feel a little bad for the goblin sent to fish in Gollum's cold lake at his master's whim? Here's something the previous chapter's villains are scared of.

The description of Gollum is just excellent. Really, there's almost a horror aspect to this, especially as Gollum spots Bilbo and glides out from his island on a little boat, in complete silence, curious as to who Bilbo is and anticipating that he'll make a very tasty meal. Having said this, though, when Bilbo finally spots Gollum, what breaks out is a conversation. It's interesting that as dangerous as we've seen the world Bilbo travels through is, it's remarkably civilized in that so far, everyone but the storm giants has at least had the courtesy of talking to people they meet, no matter what their ultimate intentions may have been. The giants, we can imagine, just didn't notice the poor shivering dwarves. So it isn't really surprising at all that Gollum and Bilbo should have a reasonably civil conversation; unless, that is, one has subscribed to the vulgar interpretation of Tolkien's stories as morally unambiguous orc-murdering epics. I realize I keep going on about that, but frankly, it's always annoyed me.

A startled Bilbo quite politely introduces himself to Gollum, blade prudently in hand, and a combination of curiosity and unease with the elven dagger makes Gollum positively convivial. He suggests a game of riddles:

Riddles were all he could think of. Asking them, and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny creatures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago, before he lost all his friends and was driven away, alone, and crept down, down, into the dark under the mountains.

There's characterization in a sentence for you.

The two of them riddle away, with high stakes: if Bilbo wins, Gollum will show him the way out, but if Bilbo loses, Gollum eats him. They both exchange fairly similar riddles, with Gollum's usually having rather darker themes than Bilbo's. A few times Bilbo is saved by what seems to be pure luck: when he can't guess that the answer is fish, one jumps out of the lake at him, and when he tries to beg for more time he inadvertently gives the correct answer. Lastly Bilbo wins the entire contest by muttering "What have I got in my pockets" out loud, which Gollum can't guess. Defeated, he agrees to show Bilbo the way out, only he just has to pop back to his little island for a bit.

Of course, Gollum's plan is to fetch his magical invisibility ring, murder Bilbo and eat him. He doesn't find "his precious", though, and has a bit of a fit over it. Bilbo hears Gollum screaming about what it has in its pocketses and decides to slip the ring onto his finger. He's rather surprised when Gollum charges right past him, and realizes the ring he picked up earlier is indeed Gollum's magical ring of invisibility. He then follows the enraged Gollum to the exit of the cave, and after a tight squeeze makes it out into the sunlight. So in the end, Gollum did do what he promised!

**

Let's sum up. First Bilbo falls down and knocks his head, both basically by chance; they were being pursued but no-one was making an effort to knock him out. He's then left behind in the fighting and missed by the goblins, purely by luck as he's unconscious at the time. As he's recovering his wits, he tries to light his pipe, which the narrator points out really doesn't seem like a good idea, but luckily he's lost his matches. He then sets off further into the caves, and luckily doesn't get eaten by anything until he runs into Gollum. He gets lucky three times with the riddles, and the ring he lucked into finding saves him from Gollum and eventually gets him out of the caves altogether.

In the context of the story, this string of lucky coincidences is believable and makes an amount of sense, even. Tolkien will return to this theme of luck in the Lord of the Rings, so I'm leaving this summary here for later reference. But to answer my question: is there some notion present here that maybe this sequence of events is more than a fairy-story telling of a hero's customary luck? I have to say no. I didn't really see any signs of Tolkien's later "theology of luck" here.

In more general terms this underground escapade is the first time we see Bilbo venturing out on his own for a longer stint as something other than baggage for the dwarves, and through luck he in fact does quite well. I'm sure psychoanalytical types would make much of this journey deep underground and all it signifies, but I'd really rather not. Certainly it marks an important step in Bilbo's personal story. And at this point that's really all it is. On re-reading this chapter, there's very little to hint at any of this being any more than an interlude in Bilbo's story: he's met adversity, prevailed and been rewarded with a magic item; an item whose origins are a mystery, and the history of its previous owner even more so. Said previous owner is also left screaming Bilbo's last name in a vengeful rage, so there's something there to hang a sequel on. Having said that, though, this is definitely a part of the Hobbit that's very much worth reading on its own merits, not just as a "prequel" to later events.