Epic Tolkien Bookclub: Week Four

[sigridhr]

  Epic Tolkien Bookclub: Week Four (The Hobbit)
Chapter VII: Queer Lodgings 
Chapter VIII: Flies and Spiders

Rules

I very much doubt we'll require much in the way of formal rules, but just for the sake of formality and clarity:

• Discussion is welcome and encouraged, as is disagreement. Name-calling and personal attacks will be punished by forced attendance at the Vogon-Orcish Poetry Recitation Competition in Minas Morgul.  
  
• There is no spoiler policy in place. Although we're reading the Hobbit, please feel free to bring in things from other Tolkien works, any of the films, the History of Middle Earth, the Letters of JRR Tolkien, and, if you should like, other literary sources. 
• There is no such thing as too much geekery. Or taking the text too seriously.  
• If you have any concerns at any point, I'm the closest thing this gong show has to a mod, so feel free to get in touch. I can be reached either by PM through this site, or directly by email at sigridhr.lokidottir@gmail.com. 

Discussion on this post will officially run from Friday 1st February 2013 to Friday 8th February 2013. However, the post will remain open after that point, so you're more than welcome to continue discussions on. 

Comments

[sigridhr]

That's very true. I'd forgotten that the only reason he didn't get fried when Smaug attacked is because he was out hooliganing (well, not really...) with his friends when the dragon attacked and was, for a dwarf, very young at the time.

He fails as a leader too, though, really even before Bard. He's defaulting to Bilbo already when they're outside the Lonely Mountain.

There's something really tragic about Thráin to me - who goes mad and essentially wanders off (I think it's implied this is at least in part due to his bearing of one of the seven?), leaving Thorin alone (with no knowledge of what had happened to him) and stripped of yet another heirloom of his family - and yet in all that time he'd never told Thorin of the backdoor to Erebor or the key.

I'm really really curious as to how Beorn knew Thorin's name and lineage but not Gandalf's. I suppose if his name proceeds him in that fashion it would contribute to his feeling like he had a greater purpose and life to fulfil than the one he'd been living.

[j_quadrifrons]

Thrain just kind of kills me. He goes off determined to retake Erebor alone (at least, given the direction they were heading, that's what I always assumed) and Balin and Dwalin go along, presumably to try to talk him out of it and get him to see sense, and then he up and disappears on them and no one ever knows what happened to him.

Except for Gandalf, who only figures it out years later, because it never occurred to him that the pathetic creature in the Necromancer's dungeons would be Thrain, son of Thror.

(I've always thought Gandalf very much redeemed of his frequent dick moves in The Hobbit simply for the fact that he never tells Thorin how he came by the map and key. Thorin does not need to know that.)

...I'd quite forgotten that, too. You're right, running across people who know his story like that can't be good for Thorin's ego. And since this is Tolkien, I do think that ego is a huge part of it. Thorin never succumbs to Tolkien's greatest sin, despair; his failure is much more like Boromir's, in that he has an idea of how the world is going to work and he doesn't let little things like the greater experience of wiser people get in his way. Both of them do learn, but they learn the hard way, and too late.

[sigridhr]

I really hope they put some of Thráin's arc in the films because OH GOD YES the fact that Gandalf can't get anything sensible out of him than his desperate desire for his son to have his heirlooms... geez.

Yeah, there are a lot of interesting parallels between Thorin and Boromir.

[j_quadrifrons]

PJ does love to start his movies off with flashbacks, so I have hopes that we'll get some of Thrain in the start of the second or third film.

(And by "hopes" I mean "oh god I already know I'm going to sob like a lost child at the end of the third movie, do they really have to do it to me more than once?" But y'know.)

[sigridhr]

Well, Thráin is listed on the IMDB page for the next film, so I'm really, really hoping we get something of his story. The thing is, since Gandalf hasn't been to Dol Goldur yet, I have a theory that Thrain is still there right now and Gandalf got the map and key somehow before he wound up in the clutches of Sauron. So it might not necessarily be a flashback.

Yeah. The waterworks will be out in full if they do include it, I think. And I'll probably just have a cardiac arrest in the theatre during the third film.