Pros: wonderful characters particularly Bilbo and Gollum, not entirely predictable, witty, some breathtaking passages
Cons: it ended
The Bottom Line: We all sometimes yearn for an adventure, that one chance to break out of the humdrum and ordinary, to be brave and exciting and cool. Here's your chance.
In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or eat: it was a hobbit-hole and that means comfort.
And so it begins, ordinarily enough. A legendary journey into Middle Earth, a foray into a new type of magical tale, a land filled with hobbits and dwarves and wizards, elves and bear-men and lake dwellers, goblins and orcs and giant man-eating spiders, an odd creature named Gollum and fierce fire-breathing dragon named Smaug.
But all of that comes later. First, we must meet Mr. Bilbo Baggins, a rather respectable hobbit who does what all other hobbits do - he eats, he drinks, he sleeps, he blows smoke rings from his tobacco pipe, he keeps to his routine, he remains unfailingly polite in the face of just about everything, which to a hobbit means the same things that happened yesterday and the day before and the day before that. In short, he is all that a hobbit should be.
But then, on an ordinary day like any other, although perhaps a bit brighter and warmer than most, Bilbo runs into an old man with a white beard while sorting through his mail. It may have been an ordinary day but this was no ordinary old man; rather it was Gandalf the wizard, the same Gandalf who gave Bilbo's grandfather a pair of magical earrings that fastened themselves, the same Gandalf who managed to send so many normal folks off on strange adventures. Like anyone else who suddenly meets the object of childhood stories, Bilbo gushes a bit and thus seals his fate. Amused at the uncharacteristic enthusiasm, Gandalf choses Bilbo for the next adventure.
The horrified hobbit declines as politely as he can manage and scurries back to his hobbit hole grateful for the escape. But then something odd happens, only the first of many odd things that will happen, but being the first it seems stranger than most. The next day just before tea-time the doorbell rings and Bilbo finds a green-hooded dwarf at the door. Not knowing what else to do, and being the ever-polite hobbit he was, Bilbo asked the dwarf Dwalin to tea. They were barely on their third cake, just getting started really, when the scarlet-hooded dwarf Balin arrives and joins the growing tea party. He was hardly situated when the blue-hooded Kili and Fili arrive, followed by Dori, Nori, Ori, Oin, and Gloin then by Bifur, Bofur, Bompur, and Thorin and finally Gandalf himself. Yes, Bilbo found his entry hall beseiged by hoods of all different colors and found himself waiting on a table full of thirteen dwarves and one wizard, feeding them apple tarts and eggs and cold chicken and pickles and cake-seed cakes and just about everything else he had in his well-stocked larder.
Severely put off by all of these odd folks who had pretty much taken over his home, Bilbo sat off in a corner and waited for them to leave. As he waited they sang, sang of olden times and the dragon who stole their treasure, sang of a mission to exact revenge on the dragon and recover the gold, sang of journeys and plans and adventures too sweeping for a poor adventureless hobbit to follow closely. Had he been a truly respectable hobbit, one who yearns for comfort above all else, Bilbo would have stayed off in the corner or perhaps gone to sleep and remained so until everyone vacated his home. But Bilbo was after all the grandson of an adventurer, and that long buried Tookish part of him grabbed hold and did something unexpected. It made him yearn, momentarily at least, for this adventure. In fact, the hobbit so recently resigned to waiting out his guests found himself actively arguing his suitability and commitment to the mission he didn't fully understand. Which was a good thing, because Gandalf was determined he go and become the official burglar of the group, and everyone knows that it is bad form indeed to cross a wizard.
And so it was that the next morning Bilbo found himself racing to the Green Dragon Inn at Bywater without a single possession, not a hat or a walking stick or any money, and having hardly had any breakfast. And there the adventure truly begins.
At first poor Bilbo turned out to be a poor adventurer, lacking somewhat in judgement. But we must forgive him for he was new at this adventuring thing and trying to impress his companions as anyone newly engaged in an activity and being observed by experts (or those the person engaged considers experts) is wont to do. It wasn't for lack of trying that Bilbo found himself held by trolls, but by an excess of effort, for had Bilbo not tried to pick their pockets we would probably never have even learned of these trolls, for surely many creatures were met and and not recorded in these proceedings since many days passed without comment. But burglar he was, so burgling he tried, and being his first attempt he failed which lead to his capture and that of most of the company. Indeed, had Gandalf not been around, that may very well have been the end of this tale, over before it really had a chance to begin and the name Bilbo Baggins may never have been known to us at all. Thankfully that did not come to pass and we are able to experience a full adventure not cut short at the first trouble encountered.
Indeed, instead our crew moved on, out of the clutches of the trolls, continuing on its way. I won't bore you with all of the details, for those can be read in the book itself, and are described there quite prettily with an attention to detail I could not hope to muster here and a mastery of language I can only hope to one day attain. Rather, here I will mention but a few highlights, a few morsels to whet your appetite and ensure you do not miss the rest of the tale out of boredom or the mistaken idea that nothing interesting happens.
And so sometime later Bilbo found himself quite alone, somehow separated from his compatriots, in a mountain filled with goblins quite ready to eat him (if you aren't sensing a theme yet, you should be. Middle Earth is filled will all sorts of fanciful creatures, most of whom seem quite determined to eat poor Bilbo as if he were a seed cake or some other suitable food rather than a somewhat overwhelmed and out of his element hobbit). And it was there he found a ring. It was quite a special ring, a ring of power, a ring many yearned for but few ever found. This ring spawned many adventures, some of which you may be fortunate enough to read about later in other stories but none of which are particularly important for our purposes. Indeed all you need to know about this ring is that it renders its wearer invisible. But Bilbo did not yet know that, so he just pocketed the ring and mostly forgot about it. Then he met Gollum.
"What is a Gollum?" you ask, and rightly so, for I am not sure anyone actually knows the answer to that question. Let me just say that Gollum is a most memorable creature, perhaps the most memorable creature you will meet on any of your literary wanderings. Mostly sad and depressed, very curious, always hungry, spending its life in solitude hiding from goblins in the middle of a dark and gloomy lake inside the mountains, hissing Gollum considers Bilbo a prime morsel and yearns to eat him, but first the lonely creature engages in a game of riddles. If he wins, Bilbo becomes dinner. If he loses, he shows Bilbo the exit.
Riddle after riddle they exchange in a brilliantly written descriptive passage, both hungry and becoming more disheartened as they somehow manage to guess the correct answers to the riddles asked until finally Bilbo blurts out a rather stupid riddle which luckily happened to be a rather difficult to answer question and even more luckily one Gollum could not answer (there is a difference between a riddle and a question - a riddle is a puzzle that can be figured out through thought or logical leaps of intuition but a question is something that you either know the answer to or do not like "What did I eat for dinner?" or "What color shoes am I wearing?" or in this particular case, "What do I have in my pocket?").
Of course, being a hungry creature has its disadvantages, for it sometimes makes you do things that perhaps you might not do were your belly full. I am only guessing that a well-fed Gollum would have been better behaved, for I know a starving one reneged on its promise and chased after the now escaping hobbit who somehow slipped on the ring and realized he was invisible only when Gollum passed him by. And thus he followed Gollum out, inadvertently helping the poor creature keep its word, and then left him there inside the mountain never to be heard from again, at least not in this adventure. A real shame, for although a miserable lying creature for sure, Gollum amused me to no end.
And so the tale continues without Gollum, and Bilbo met up with the rest of his cohorts and with his new found ability to become invisible and, more importantly, his new found experience in escaping from danger, Bilbo manages to rescue his friends from dire circumstances on not one but two separate occasions all while drawing ever closer to the goal of the dwarf treasures guarded by Smaug. Quite a turn around for the little fellow, showing that even the most bungling of adventurers can improve over time given enough experience and incentive. You can read all the details in the book itself, and they are wondrous indeed, complete with stone tossing and giant spiders and wood-elves and bold escape from a magical castle with enchanted doors.
And then there was Smaug. Smaug is all things an evil dragon should be: avaricious, fiercely protective of his treasure, constantly bragging about former conquests, living amid his riches in a winding dark cave embedded in a mountain. Bilbo alone meets Smaug, for if you remember back to the beginning (which I know is difficult at this point) it was as burglar he joined the adventure and his official duty to the party was to steal the treasure back from the dragon. And so it is Bilbo who learns the terrible history of the dragon and Bilbo who cleverly learns its secrets and weaknesses. But seeing as how most great things cannot be accomplished by one man alone, even someone as interesting and important to the story as this hobbit has become, it is not Bilbo who defeats the dragon, nor is it Thorin or Balin or Oin or any of our other dwarf friends. No, indeed it is someone most unexpected who managed to kill the dragon. So remember, the expected may always happen in a tale of this sort, which is why I felt no compunction about telling you the dragon dies, but in a good story such as this one it rarely happens as you expect it to happen or at the hands of the people you most expect to make it happen.
Remember too that gold and riches often bring out the worst in dwarves as in people, and sometimes by not sharing whatever wealth you manage to obtain you can lose it all. I am not saying that is what happens here, mind you, but providing a kind reminder to be careful of how you treat success, for your own success may engender someone else's revenge. After all, the dragon was successful in stealing the treasures that ended up being his downfall.
You might expect that the death of Smaug would bring our adventure to its end, for it was Smaug that they set out to kill and once the goals of an endeavor are met it usually ends. But here it is not quite the end. Our travelers must reap the consequences of their actions both long past and recent. Only then will our story be over. To satisfy the bloodthirsty and the literary historians who know all epics must end in a battle, a battle draws this tale to its close. I will not tell you who fought whom, or whether the good guys won (although the fact that this is a fantasy story and epic adventure should give you a nice hint) or even in this case who the good guys were, for they may not always be who you expect them to be either. Suffice it to say there was a battle. Blood was shed. Some died, some lived. Then it was over.
And although there were fifteen on this adventure, for fourteen of them it was merely an adventure. But for Bilbo and for us, who hang on Tolkien's every word, it was more. It was about choices and learning to make our own decisions. Every single one of us has to decide whether to leave the comfort of the known to venture out of our element to the scary but exciting something else. Do we follow our dreams and risk failure or bumble along with the humdrum known? We each also have that moment of decision when we realize that doing what we think is best may not be something our friends agree with. Do we do it anyway, knowing that perhaps we will lose that friendship, or do we put the needs and desires of those we care about above our own? There are no easy answers, although I often wish I could make these decisions as easily as Bilbo did, even though he struggled with some, and have the same rate of chosing the right answer or at least a successful one. Of course, in real life, the right thing isn't usually as cut and dried as it was in this tale.
Just to muddle things a bit, or perhaps to keep from being too predictable or easy to figure out, just when the tale concludes, we are tossed a different idea: choices they may seem to us, but how do we know they aren't pre-ordained. I am not going to get this whole debate in any detail. I firmly believe that I make my own choices, and as such I must live with the results and take responsibility for my own actions. It might be comforting to think that I had no control over the bad things that happen, but that would also mean I had no way of affecting change which would make my life pretty pointless. I cannot agree with the implications of Gandalf's words at the very end of the tale:
Surely you don't disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? You don't really suppose do you that all of your adventures and escapes were mananged by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!
And so it ends my friends, a tale woefully short, for if you ask me it should go on forever, immersing me ever more in the lands of the shire and of the mountains, of the elven forest and the southlands now devoid of the Necromancer. But the days are short, and hobbits do like their sleep and their bellies full, so I suppose anything more would have been a boring tale filled with seed cakes and crumb cakes and honey cakes and all of those other cakes that fill the larder of a well-stocked hobbit and soon I would have become bored to tears. So I leave you, having just left one of the most enjoyable characters ever put to the page in his hobbit hole, a character I've been visiting often since I was quite young, the only thing saving me from abject misery being the knowledge that he will be there blowing smoke rings whenever I or you or anyone else pick up this glorious recounting of his adventure.
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