Working Class Trolls

In this episode we look at Chapter 2 of The Hobbit, "Roast Mutton." We talk about they mythic history of trolls and how the many incarnations they have had through the millennia. We talk about the opening stages of Bilbo's journey towards the Lonely Mountain, and how it looked when Tolkien first wrote it versus how he would have liked for it to look at the end of his life, we talk about Bilbo's incredible luck and we play with the idea that, by chapter 2, the story still really hasn't finished growing up yet.

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Chapter 2 – Working Class Trolls
1. The Hobbit has such an iconic beginning - the fantastic opening first line, the wonderful introduction of Gandalf and of the Dwarves, the history of Hobbits, and the dwarves’ mystical song. But as great as the opening chapter of the Hobbit is, it is the second chapter that each of J.R.R. Tolkien’s son’s claimed having been their favorite at some point in their lives. And, although it is not my favorite anymore, as I try to take myself back in time to when I first read the Hobbit somewhere in the early 1990s, I remember myself having a special place in my heart for it too. Michael Tolkien is supposed to have said that “We thought there was something rather nice about trolls, and it was a pity that they had to be turned into stone at all.” And while I’m sure I would rather have the trolls as stone than Bilbo as Jelly, there is something endearing about these everyman, workingclass trolls with their Eliza Doolittle English, complaining about their lack of good fortune and tired of all of this Roast Mutton.

Hi, I’m Stephen Westbrook, and you’re listening to West of Valinor.

Leaving without Pocket Handkerchiefs
Chapter 2 of The Hobbit, at least at the beginning of it, feels like it’s just a continuation of chapter 1. Now, I know that sounds obvious - that’s what chapters are and thats how numbers work. But for a lot of the first half of the Hobbit, it actually doesn’t feel that way. The first half of the Hobbit is very episodic, it reads very much as a “monsters of the week” special. Chapter 1 is dwarves
1. Trolls
2. Elves
3. Goblins
4. Gollums
5. Wargs and Eagles
6. Bears
7. Spiders
8. etc.
But the beginning of Chapter 2 isn’t really like that. It’s just a continuation of Chapter 1. At the end of Chapter 1 Bilbo goes to sleep. At the beginning of Chapter 2, he wakes up.
And the adventure, or at least, his perception of the adventure, is nothing more sinister than dirty dishes. The dwarves are gone, and Bilbo is left with, for the second time in as many days, with the task of cleaning every dish he owns. This, actually, seems rather undwarvish to me. In Chapter 1 when the dwarves made a mess, they cleaned it up. They even sang a song about it. Chip the glasses, crack the plates and all that. But this morning the dwarves have made a mess in the kitchen and left it for Bilbo. It’s such a big mess that afterwards Bilbo feels spent and has to sit down to a nice second-breakfast.
1. Side Note:
  1. I love the Peter Jackson films. Fellowship is in my top 3 films of all time. (Maybe one day you and I will be close enough that I’ll tell you the other two on my top 3 list.) I love the moment in the Fellowship of the Ring where Strider is guiding the hobbits through the wild and Pippin wants to stop for Second Breakfast, and then proceeds to ask Merry if Strider knows about the other meals of the day:
    1. Elevenses
    2. Luncheon
    3. Afternoon Tea
    4. Dinner
    5. Supper
  2. Hilarious stuff. But that is a Peter Jackson invention. Second Breakfast is mentioned only once by Tolkien, and it isn’t a standardized meal. Bilbo, here, isn’t sitting down to Second Breakfast the way one sits down to dinner, he is sitting down for A second breakfast. Indefinite article. Whether or not he normally does this, it is not presented as a standard thing. Bilbo had his breakfast, cleaned up the dwarves’ massive mess, and then, feeling peckish, noticed that there were some leftover bacon and eggs on the stove and felt like he deserved it. So he had seconds.
In any case, Gandalf bursts in - apparently doesn’t even knock - and freaks out. Great Elephants, you haven’t dusted your mantlepiece. And again, side note: am I supposed to be dusting my mantlepiece every day? Is that a thing people do? If so, someone let me know because all of my guests are probably judging me on my extremely undusted mantle. So now I read from the book. Here is the note that the dwarves left Bilbo, and a few lines after the note:
1. "Thorin and Company to Burglar Bilbo greeting!
2. For your hospitality our sincerest thanks, and for your offer of professional assistance our grateful acceptance. Terms: cash on delivery, up to and not exceeding one fourteenth of total profits (if any); all travelling expenses guaranteed in any event; funeral expenses to be defrayed by us or our representatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for.

"Thinking it unnecessary to disturb your esteemed repose, we have proceeded in advance to make requisite preparations, and shall await your respected person at the Green Dragon Inn, Bywater, at II a.m. sharp. Trusting that you will be punctual.

"We have the honour to remain

"Yours deeply

"Thorin & Co."

"That leaves you just ten minutes. You will have to run," said Gandalf.

"But" said Bilbo.

"No time for it," said the wizard.

"But"said Bilbo again.

"No time for that either! Off you go!"

To the end of his days Bilbo could never remember how he found himself outside, without a hat, walkingstick or any money, or anything that he usually took when he went out; leaving his second breakfast halffinished and quite unwashedup, pushing his keys into Gandalf's hands, and running as fast as his furry feet could carry him down the lane, past the great Mill, across The Water, and then on for a whole mile or more. Very puffed he was, when he got to Bywater just on the stroke of eleven, and found he had come without a pocket handkerchief!

"Bravo!" said Balin who was standing at the inn door looking out for him.

Just then all the others came round the corner of the road from the village. They were on ponies, and each pony was slung about with all kinds of baggages, packages, parcels, and paraphernalia. There was a very small pony, apparently for Bilbo.

"Up you two get, and off we go!" said Thorin.

"I'm awfully sorry," said Bilbo, "but I have come without my hat, and I have left my pocket handkerchief behind, and I haven't got any money. I didn't get your note until after 10.45 to be precise."

"Don't be precise," said Dwalin, "and don't worry! You will have to manage without pocket handkerchiefs, and a good many other things, before you get to the journey's end.

There is a lot that I want to talk about just in that little passage. First off - I love Gandalf and Bilbo’s banter. Bilbo wants to object - “But.” And Gandalf immediately cuts him off “No time for it.” Bilbo objects again “But” and again Gandalf stops him “No time for that either.” And Gandalf’s responses seem to indicate that he knows what Bilbo is going to ask for each time - he has a preternatural insight into Bilbo’s desires. But I don’t think he actually does. I don’t think Bilbo was going to say “But I need to dust the mantlepiece before I go. But I need to get a hat and pocket handkerchief.” I think Bilbo was going to say “But I’m not going on any adventures. But I don’t want to.” And Gandalf’s replies are just wildy inapt and only there to get Bilbo out the door. Gandalf is the best, man.
The language in the dwarves’ note is weird for them. Hobbits are prosey; hobbits are specific. Bagginses most of all. You know what a Baggins will say to any question without the bother of asking them. But dwarves are usually poetic - maybe not as poetic as elves, but poetic still. They don’t tell Bilbo about the lonely mountain, they sing it for him, they use poetry to subcreate the entire thing in front of his eyes so successfully that he can almost literally see it. But this note here is not poetic; this note is prosey. The most prosey thing we are going to get in the entire book. It is a legal document. They define their terms, they discuss fractions, they talk about “us or our representatives” as though dwarves have attorneys or agents. Why are they so prosey? Are they translating their normally poetic selves into a language that Bilbo can understand? Are they mocking him? Tolkien, late in life, would have said that that is what it is. The 1960 re-write of the Hobbit that Tolkien never finished, has Thorin being openly contemptuous of Bilbo. But I think that the 1930 Tolkien, as he was originally creating the story, just used formal language as something that would sound silly to his children’s ears. It also, by the way, is going to come back and be a major plot point later in the story.
We also get another really interesting anachronism here. We have talked about this before, in the inaugural episode we talked about how hobbits and Hobbiton are really a representation of Late Victorian or Edwardian society - an homage to the English countryside of 1890 or 1900 or 1910 - but that the rest of Middle Earth outside of the Shire is a throwback to a much earlier time - a cultural equivalent of Anglo Saxons, of Mercia or North Umbria. Hobbits have tobacco and tea and golf and no one else seems to. Here, we can add clocks to that list.
Clocks are ancient things - water clocks go back millenia. The Tower of Winds in Athens was built in around 200 BC, making it the world’s first clock tower. But clocks that can accurately tell time to the minute and are small enough to fit inside your house - those are much more modern. Spring Clocks date to the mid 1400s, but really clocks didn’t start accurately telling time down to the minute until pendulum clocks in the mid-to-late 1600s. The period of a pendulum never changes, no matter how far it swings. If it swings farther, it moves faster, and if it swings slower, it’s arc is shorter, but the time it takes to make the swing - its period - never changes. The period is controlled by two and only two things - the length of the pendulum, and the force of gravity. But this fact wasn’t discovered until Galileo. Almost more anachronistic than the existence of clocks in the Shire is that Bilbo would even have one. The modern world runs on a tight schedule of minutes and seconds, but the ancient world certainly did not. It was not until the advent of Trains that consistent and measured time even became an important thing. If someone is coming or going by horse or by carriage or by ship, they get there when they get there - the wind blows the ship at an inconsistent speed, the horses trot at inconsistent speeds. But trains - trains run with consistence. And so it became a thing that people needed to know exactly what time it was. Exactly.
So it makes sense that clocks don’t seem to exist outside of the Shire. Bilbo has a clock on the mantelpiece, gets the note at 10:45 in the morning, and is expected to arrive at the Green Dragon at 11:00. But outside of references to this particular clock, ordered time does not occur in The Hobbit. Indeed, Hobbits are the only characters in either the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings to ever mention what time it is specifically. The specific time is mentioned in the first few chapters of the Fellowship of the Ring - they wake up at half-past four when leaving Crickhollow and get on the road at six am., or leaving Bree they didn’t hit the road until close on ten o’clock - and it is mentioned as a guess at the time by Sam when he is walking through Ithilian, or by Pippin when he is stuck in Minas Tirith. But the only non-Hobbit to ever say what it was o’clock is Gandalf, once in Roast Mutton, and once when Frodo wakes up in Rivendell.
So it makes total sense when Bilbo arrives and tells Dwalin that he didn’t the note until 10:45 to be precise that Dwalin’s response is, “Don’t be precise.” Precision is a Hobbit thing, a Baggins thing, a Victorian era thing. But by leaving the Shire Bilbo is leaving the ordered “modern” world for the relative disorder of a much older world. One in which precision about time is no concern at all.
And Bilbo feels conflicted about this leaving. He goes on the adventure, it is true. He rides the pony, wears a hood, etcetera, but he says that his one comfort is that he could not actually be mistaken for a dwarf. He feels torn in two - he wants to be a Baggins, and he wants to be a Took. And this, I think, is the brilliance of using Hobbits as protagonists. They do extraordinary things, but in the end, they are ordinary people. The Silmarillion is hard to read because no one in it is in any way shape or form like me. But Bilbo, Frodo, Sam? They are exactly like me. They want to be on the adventure (sometimes) but they also really don’t. They feel torn in two. Frodo laments with Sam several times at the end of the Return of the King on how the call to be adventurous and the call to be a homebody creates an uncomfortable duality. These characters are not whole, they are divided, and it makes them compelling. Sam’s story ends when he no longer feels this duality, and the story ends because he is no longer a divided character, he is no longer compelling. On the flip side, a character like Feanor in the Silmarillion is also not really compelling, because he goes all in on the adventurous side. He never doesn’t want to be chasing down the Silmarils. Again, he is not divided, and so he is not compelling.
One final SIDE NOTE on this section:
1. Tolkien tells us that Bilbo ran out the door leaving his second breakfast half finished and quite unwashed-up.
  1. Did Gandalf do the dishes?

At first the adventure was rather pleasant.
Somewhere past Bree
The Hobbit takes about 400 words to get from leaving Hobbiton and reaching the Trolls (well, the Hoarwell, but who’s counting). The Fellowship of the RIng takes about 61000 to cover the same distance.
In his 1960 attempted re-write of the Hobbit, the 400 word, paragraph-and-a-half section of travel gets extended to six or seven pages worth of material, including reference to the Brandywine, a stay at Bree in the Prancing Pony, and the journey past the Forsaken Inn (or Last Inn). Tolkien also, in this version, gives an expanded explanation of how the ponies got in the river and lost the baggage. In this version, the bridge over the river (the Hoarwell, although I don’t think he actually uses that name) has been knocked down intentionally by the Trolls in order to lure travellers into the woods. The dwarves, and Gandalf (and Bilbo, riding with Gandalf on his horse) are required to ford the river underneath the wreck of the Bridge.
Hoot Twice like a Barn Owl and Once Like a Screech Owl
1. [find sound effects] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezaBqCf0hv0
And Bilbo gets sent off, sniffing at all the dwarvish racket, and gets right up to the trolls. Because, of course, that’s what they are.

Concerning Trolls
1. Of all of the fantastic creatures we have talked about so far - dwarves, wizards, hobbits - trolls are the most varied and the hardest to pin down. Monsters from their origin, chances are that most of us can picture several radically different incarnations of trolls at the drop of a hat: the large, vaguely stupid monster with a wand up its nose from Harry Potter, the bright-haired GoodLuck Troll dolls and the Anna Kendrick animated films about them, the rock-creatures from Frozen who try to play match-maker, the creature under the bridge in the Billy-Goats Gruff.
2. There’s a lot of contradiction there. Are trolls big or are they miniature? Are they evil or are they benevolent? Are they intelligent or dumb?
3. Well, as it turns out, that contradiction may be the most consistent thing about them.
4. In his encyclopedic Teutonic Mythology, Jacob Grimm writes that “the Old Norse had several words for giantess, besides the gygr. Skass, skessa, grior, mella, gifr, jyvri or gyvri, gurri, djurre. This Gifr seems to mean saucy, defiant, greedy. Troll, though often used for giants, is yet a more comprehensive term, including other spirits and beings possessed of magic power, and equivalent to our word “monster,” “spectre, or “unearthly being.” By the word Trold, the Danish folk-tales habitually understand beings of the elf kind.”
5. The term Troll, in Old Norse, appears to have been an adjective that is applied at one time or another to jötunn or mountain-dweller, a witch, an abnormally strong or ugly person, an evil spirit, a ghost, a heathen demi-god, a demon, etc.
6. Grimm continues, from later in Teutonic Mythology, “numerous approximations and overlappings between the giant-legend and those of dwarves… as the comprehensive name troll in Scandinavian tradition would itself indicate. Dwarves of the mountains are, like giants, liable to transform into stone, as indeed they have sprung out of stone.”

And we saw this with dwarves back in episode one. We, in the 21st century, want to categorize fey creatures into taxonomic rank a la Carl Linneus - Kingdom, Phylum, Order, etc. etc. I can never remember the mnemonic to help me remember that. But we want to separate elves and dwarves and giants and trolls by genus and species. The peoples of the ancient world would not have had such inclinations at all. Dwarves and elves, Giants and Trolls were just all part of Faerie, they were the things that went bump in the night, the explanations for why men got lost in the woods or why widow’s sons seemed to have such extraordinary luck.
They were not all large or small, good or bad either. Dwarves are usually described as diminutive, but as we talked about in Episode 1, Alberich the dwarf was said to be large and have the strength of twelve men. Trolls were usually large, but an ancient Swedish myth tells of a man and his pregnant wife “accosted by a little man with a black face and old gray clothes…. Seeing he was a troll, such as the peasantry call wights, I prayed over my wife and blessed her.” A little man.
Giants are usually described as being bad - but the Norse also ascribe to them an ancient wisdom that is above and beyond mortals. They are often ugly, but they are described as having daughters of surpassing beauty.
We live an ordered world, with phylum and rank and genus and species. We live in a Judeo-Christian world of good and evil.
But the people who originally told these stories - as an oral tradition 1500, 2000 years ago - they didn’t organize their world and they were okay with the ambiguity of the Fey. They didn’t live with the Judeo-Christian duality of all things either being good or evil - of God or of the Devil - they were okay with Giants often being villainous but sometimes being good. With dwarves usually being tricksy but sometimes being the givers of prodigious gifts.
Trolls are mentioned half a dozen times between the two Eddas. But they almost never appear. In the Voluspa, it is described that one of Fenrir’s sons will “in the semblance of a troll” eat the moon, I believe. And in the Havamal, Odin claims that he knows a song or charm or rune to “If I see troll-wives in the air, I can make them lose their form and mind”. Again, IF I see them.
In the Prose Edda Thor is described three or four times as being off east fighting trolls, but we never actually see one of these trolls. The only troll we actually see in the Edda is in the Helgakviða Hjörvarðssonar, where a Troll-wife, riding a wolf and using snakes as a bridle, puts a curse on the hero, or possibly just foretells his death, its hard to tell which. But those are the only references to Trolls in traditional, Norse Mythology.

Now, as we move forward in the centuries, as mythology becomes folk-lore, and as people begin writing the stories down, we start seeing more definition. From stories written down and published a century or so before Tolkien began his writing, we see trolls in a more definitive light.
Soria Moria Castle
1. Soria Moria Castle was published in Peter Asbjørnsen’s Norweigen Fairytales in 1841. It tells the story of Halvor, a good for nothing kid who ends up setting out to sea and winds up at the magical Soria Moria Castle, wherein he meets a princess who tells him that she is being guarded by a three-headed troll. She gives Halvor a drink from a magic flask and a sword and he is able to kill the troll. Then he goes to the other levels of the castle and kills trolls of 6 and 9 heads, respectively.
  Halvor eventually gets a magic ring and wishes himself home to brag to all the old girls who used to never go out with him about how he is now dating this princess, but then he finds that he can’t get back to Soria Moria castle, and the rest of the story is about his expeditions to try to get back there.
2. Tolkien himself admitted that the name of the Mines of Moria came from the story of Soria Moria Castle.
Grimm’s “Der gelernte Jäger” (The Expert Huntsman)
1. Tell the story
2. Then he set out and found himself in a very large forest, which he could not get to the end of in one day. When evening came he seated himself in a high tree in order to escape from the wild beasts. Towards midnight, it seemed to him as if a tiny little light glimmered in the distance. Then he looked down through the branches towards it, and kept well in his mind where it was. But in the first place he took off his hat and threw it down in the direction of the light, so that he might go to the hat as a mark when he had descended. Then he got down and went to his hat, put it on again and went straight forwards. The farther he went, the larger the light grew, and when he got close to it he saw that it was an enormous fire, and that three giants were sitting by it, who had an ox on the spit, and were roasting it.
Grimm’s “Das tapfere Schneiderlein” (The Brave Little Tailor)
1. Tell the Story
2. "Just stay waiting here, I alone will soon finish off the giants."

Then he bounded into the forest and looked about right and left. After a while he perceived both giants. They lay sleeping under a tree, and snored so that the branches waved up and down. The little tailor, not idle, gathered two pocketsful of stones, and with these climbed up the tree. When he was half-way up, he slipped down by a branch, until he sat just above the sleepers, and then let one stone after another fall on the breast of one of the giants.

For a long time the giant felt nothing, but at last he awoke, pushed his comrade, and said, "Why are you knocking me?"

"You must be dreaming," said the other, "I am not knocking you."

They laid themselves down to sleep again, and then the tailor threw a stone down on the second.

"What is the meaning of this?" cried the other. "Why are you pelting me?"

"I am not pelting you," answered the first, growling.

They disputed about it for a time, but as they were weary they let the matter rest, and their eyes closed once more. The little tailor began his game again, picked out the biggest stone, and threw it with all his might on the breast of the first giant.

"That is too bad!" cried he, and sprang up like a madman, and pushed his companion against the tree until it shook. The other paid him back in the same coin, and they got into such a rage that they tore up trees and belabored each other so long, that at last they both fell down dead on the ground at the same time. Then the little tailor leapt down.

Trolls Turning to Stone
1. Alvissmal
2. The Night Troll

Translated by George E.J. Powell and EirÍkur Magnússon from Jón Árnason’s, Islenzkar Pjódsögur Og Æfintyri, Volume 1

At a certain farm it befell that whoever had to keep watch over the house of Yule night, while the rest of the household was at Midnight Mass, was found either dead or mad next morning. Folk were troubled about this, and few were willing to sit at home of Yule night. One year a girl volunteered to look after the house, whereat the others were glad, and went to church. The girl sat down on the bench in the living-room, talking and crooning to a child she had on her knee. During the night there came a Thing to the window, and said:

“Fair in my sight is that hand of thing –

My brisk one, my brave one, sing dillido!”

Then she sang:

“Filth has it never swept from the floor

Foul fiend Kari, sing korriro!”

Then the Thing at the window:

“Fair in my sight is that eye of thing –

My brisk one, my brave one, sing dillido!”

Then sang she:

“Evil it has never looked upon,

Foul fiend Kari, sing korriro!”

Then the Thing at the window:

“Fair in my sight is that foot of thing –

My brisk one, my brave one, sing dillido!”

Then sang she:

“Nought unclean has it trodden upon,

Foul fiend Kari, sing korriro!”

Then said the Thing at the window:

“Day now dawns in the eastern sky,

My brisk one, my brave one, sing dillido!”

Then she sang:

“Dawn now hath caught thee, a stone shalt thou be,

And no man henceforth shall be harmed by thee,

Foul fiend Kari, sing korriro!”

Then the spectre vanished from the window; and when the people of the house came in the morning, they saw a great stone standing between the ridges of the roof; and there it has stood ever since. The girl told them what she had heard; but of what the troll was like she could say nothing, for she had never looked towards the window.

Tolkien
1. Trolls are NOT in the Silmarillion or in any writing that would become the Silmarillion. They do predate The Hobbit, but are first found in the Book of Lost Tales, particularly in the History of Eriol or AElfwine of England. When Tolkien gets the most specific of about including England in his mythology, he tells of how the ‘Men come to Tol Eressëa” and when they do, the Orcs and Dwarves and Trolls come with them. We spoke in our last episode about the historical origins of Hobbits, and how one of the prefigures of Hobbits - particularly of the three clans of Hobbits: Stoors, Harfoots, and Fallohides - might be the three tribes St. Bede listed as first moving from Germany to England - the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. Well, in the story of Eriol, Tolkien connects the titular character specifically to the fathers of the Jutes.
2. Within Tolkien’s world of Middle Earth, within the Legendarium, Trolls are described by Treebeard. He says, “Maybe you have heard of Trolls? They are mighty strong. But Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves. We are stronger than Trolls. We are made of the bones of the earth.” The darkness, according to Treebeard, cannot create. Creation reserved for God alone - Illuvatar within the mythology. God can create; none of the rest of us can. We can subcreate, we can mix and match, we can mashup, but we cannot truly create. And neither can the angels, and neither can the darkness. Evil can only ruin what has been created by good, but can make nothing new by itself. The original evil is only deviation from the will of God. And Tolkien holds with this theology in his Legendarium. Evil, in Tolkien’s world, entered creation when Melkor (the devil) broke with the harmonies of Illuvatar. And ever the evil one seeks to twist and misshape that which was originally good. Elves are good, the children of Illuvatar, and so the darkness twists them into orks. Ents are good, the shepherds of trees, the bones of the world, and so the darkness twists them into trolls - a mockery of the ents, a facsimile. Linguistically, this plays out. We have heard above how Jacob Grimm glosses the origin of the word “troll” to coming from a similar root to the word “giant” - joten. Well, the word Ent itself is a further derivation of the word “giant”. GiENT.
3. Trolls show up three times across the Hobbit and the Lord of the RIngs, and in a 1954 letter to Peter Hastings, Tolkien tried to define them as three different types of troll.
4. There are the trolls we see here in Roast Mutton - large, disgruntled, hungry, dangerous and murderous but not warlike, and as likely to fight amongst themselves as anything else. These, Tolkien named “stone trolls.”
5. There are the cave-trolls that we meet in Moria. Now, Tolkien does not describe the battle in Moria quiet the way Peter Jackson plays it out in his Fellowship of the Ring. The cave troll is seen through the door by Gandalf, and then Frodo stabs its foot. But it is not the troll that stabs Frodo back, that, in the book, is an orc chieftain. Cave trolls also show up at the end of the Moria sequence, carrying large stone slabs so that the orcs can get over the firepits and chase the Fellowship.
6. Finally, Trolls show up in the battle before the Black Gates in the Return of the King. But these trolls are armoured, not in working clothes the way the trolls in The Hobbit are described, and they are out and fighting in daylight, which seems like a dangerous career move for the Trolls we meet in this episode. But Tolkien named these “Olog-hai,” similar to the Uruk-hai breed of orcs, and said that they had been bred by the enemy specifically to stand up to sunlight.
But there we are. As much as Hobbits are consistent - apart from a few clannish differences - and elves and dwarves are the same - apart from a few shifts over the Legenderium’s millenia, Perhaps Trolls for Tolkien were the same as Trolls for the Old Norse - an adjective not a noun, a general term that vaguely means monster, a thing that goes bump in the night.

Trolls played for laughs
1. Not the cave trolls of the Fellowship nor the war trolls of the Return of the King
2. In 1931 Tolkien gave a paper entitled “Chaucer as a Philologist: The Reeve’s Tale.” The paper argued that Chaucer’s use of the Northern dialect in the Reeve’s Tale was the first recorded (or maybe “surviving”) use of dialect as humor. In the paper he wrote, “Chaucer deliberately relies on the easy laughter that is roused by “dialect” in the ignorant or the unphilological. But hie gives not mere popular ideas of dialect: he gives the genuine thing, even if he is careful to give his audience certain obvious features that they were accustomed to regard as funny. He certainly was inspired here to use this easy joke for the purpose of dramatic realism -- and he saved The Reeve’s Tale by the touch.” Now, I have read the Reeve’s Tale - I have taught the Reeve’s Tale - and I can tell you that I cannot tell the differences in dialect when written in Middle English at all. At all. But I am not a philologist, nor am I an expert on Middle English. Tolkien, of course, was; and he seems to steal a page from Chaucer’s playbook here. In Chaucer’s day (and for Chaucer’s audience, he living in London) the Northern dialect of English would have sounded bumpkin-ish, unrefined. A little too close to Scotish, perhaps. But in Tolkien’s day, the perceived “unpolished” class of England would have been just the opposite - the working class of London. Cockney. (Tolkien, by the way, would recite The Reeve’s Tale, in costume, for the Summer Diversions festival in 1938.)

There is another reason to make the trolls Cockney. As much as Professor Tolkien could differentiate one regional dialect from another, that doesn’t mean that his audience - his children - had nearly such a refined ear. But one dialect that jumps off the page and is instantly recognizable is Cockney.

Really First Class Thief
1. Dunsany’s “The Bird of the Difficult Eye”, “The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller”, “The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men”, “How Nuth would have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles”
2. The Talking Purse
  1. Turin’s Sword (Gurthang), the fox from LotR, Caradhras, and (not to look too far ahead, Eagles)
  2. The problem with sentience - Toto in the Wizard of Oz
Again, this story hasn’t grown up yet.
1. The violence isn’t really violent.
  1. The trolls have eaten a village and a half between them. But neither the trolls nor the dwarves nor Bilbo nor we seem to be all that bothered by it.
  2. The trolls are going to sit on or roast or debone the dwarves, but once they are out of it, no one gives the near evisceration a second thought. There is no trauma and no fall-out.
  3. The trolls themselves are actually the only ones that the Tolkien children ever really felt sorry for in this chapter. Poor old trolls, it’s a shame they had to get turned to stone.
  4. There is Violence here. Extreme violence. But it is chuffed off as an aside and played for laughs. It is cartoony. Tolkien seems more concerned that the trolls speak poorly and wipe their mouths on their sleeves than about their genocide.
  5. The story hasn’t grown up yet.
2. Gandalf is clever, not magical
  1. He does not use any magic at all to get rid of the trolls, just some nifty ventriloquism and a good accent coach.
  2. He cannot read the elvish writing on the swords. But in the Fellowship, he claims `I once knew every spell in all the tongues of Elves or Men or Orcs that was ever used for such a purpose. I can still remember ten score of them without searching in my mind. But only a few trials, I think, will be needed; and I shall not have to call on Gimli for words of the secret dwarf-tongue that they teach to none. The opening words were Elvish, like the writing on the arch: that seems certain.'
  3. Now, maybe Gandalf specialized in door opening spells and neglected other areas of study - much in the same way I am extremely nerdy about Tolkien’s writings but know next to nothing about Bronte sisters - but Gandalf seems to be an expert on Elvish - reading, speaking, remembering… so where is that wisdom here? Maybe after his failings with the swords he went and took a class?
  4. In the 1960 version, again, Tolkien will try to fix this character lapse by changing the story from “Gandalf can’t read the runes” to “the runes are so covered in dried blood that the swords will need to be cleaned before he can read them.”
Finding Elvish swords in a troll hole
1. Bilbo is the lucky number. And holy hell is he lucky. He picks up a key off the ground and finds the sword of the king of Gondolin. Imagine you were to go for a walk outside, find a key, open a nearby cave, and find Excalibur. And this is, if we look at the mythology as complete, this is even farther removed than you are from Excalibur. King Arthur, if he existed, is supposed to have existed around 500 AD, he is associated with the historical Battle of Badon Hill which took place around then. That means that if you found King Arthur’s sword, you have just found a sword that is 1500 years old. But Bilbo found the sword of the king of Gondolin fully 6459 years after Gondolin fell. That, compared to now, is older than the Bronze Age. Older than ancient Assyria and ancient Egypt. You didn’t find the sword of King Arthur or Alexander the Great or Ramses II, you found the sword of someone who was ancient history even to them.
  Heck of a lucky number.

West of Valinor

Working Class Trolls

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