Country Elves

Exploring chapter 3 of The Hobbit, including the mythic history of elves both within Tolkien's world and without, and how elves were used in Canterbury Tales, and how they came to be associated with Christmas.

We look at the song and poetry of the elves.  And we explore the idea that "things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale."

Transcript

1. Chapter 3 – Country Elves
   1. About 15 years ago, my family rented a farmhouse in rural Maryland for a week in June, just outside of Mount Airy.  And one evening, sitting on the wrap-around porch, we watched as the sun set and the treeline 100 feet away lit up with fireflies.  Thousands of them, maybe more, twinkled on and off under those trees for what felt like forever.  I have never seen such a mystical, otherworldly, fey sight in my life.   There was not a river running through the farm, and it was not a valley at the edge of the mountains.  But every time I think of what Elrond’s house must be like, what the valley of the elves must be like, what decent into Faerie must look like, I’m reminded of that feeling of a warm June night, under the stars, with a warm breeze and the twinkle of a thousand thousand lightning bugs.  I’m reminded of the bioluminescent mangrove bays in Puerto Rico, where in the pitch dark night you can still see the light of every star overhead and the corresponding glow of the bioluminescent bacteria in the waters all around you.  These places are beautiful and mysterious.  Peaceful and calming.  I imagine that that feeling of peace and of otherworldliness must be how Bilbo felt entering Rivendell for the first time: a perfect place for a Short Rest.

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

1. Concerning Elves

There are only three jobs available to an elf. The first is making shoes at night while, you know, while the old cobbler sleeps.

You can bake cookies in a tree. As you can imagine, it's, uh, dangerous having an oven in an oak tree during the dry season. But the third job, some call it, uh, "the show" or "the big dance," it's the profession that every elf aspires to. And that is to build toys in Santa's workshop.

1. Jacob Grimm, in Teutonic Mythology, goes to great lengths to gloss the word elf.  He begins with the Middle High German, alp, and then renders it to Anglo Saxon, aelf, and Old Norse, alfr.  The dative feminine of alp he glosses as elbe.
2. The word probably has some early ties with the Greek word alphos or the Latin word Alba.
3. Grimm is also very clear in his introduction to Teutonic Mythology about the byproducts of the spread of Christianity throughout Europe (and it’s necessary displacement or appropriation of native gods and traditions). “Christianity was not popular. It came from abroad, it aimed at supplanting the time-honoured indigenous gods whom the country revered and loved. These gods and their worship were part and parcel of the people's traditions, customs and constitution. Their names had their roots in the people's language, and were hallowed by antiquity ; kings and princes traced their lineage back to individual gods ; forests, mountains, lakes had received a living consecration from their presence.”
4. Now, if you Google the etymology - the origin of the names - of some places around Europe, you find that the Alps are probably named thusly because of their color and the connection to the word albus, or “white”, or perhaps because there was a pre-IndoEuropean word “albs” meaning hill.  You find that the river Elbe is simply the High German name for river or riverbed.  You find that the name Albion - one of the original names of the Isle of Britain - comes from the Gaulish roote albiyo, meaning earth.  But Albion is also a translation of Ælfwine, meaning elf friend; and Elbe, as I mentioned earlier, is just the dative feminine of Alp, like the ALPS, the Middle High German word for elf.  Places, lakes, rivers, forests, mountains had received a living consecration from their association with the mythic, from their association with Gods and with Faerie.  And while I don’t doubt that the Alps are white in the winter and that that contributed to their name, I can’t help but feeling that there are too many names in and around central Europe, around Scandinavia, around Britain, that can be glossed back to Elves for this to be pure coincidence.
5. The Eddas - the Norse mythological texts - occasionally use the words aesir and alfar together, sometimes interchangeably.  Now, the Aesir were Gods, and the Alfar were elves.  But for the Norse, these two were not totally dissevered from one another.  Loki, even though he is technically an adopted child of giants - ioten - and lives with the gods - the aesir - is often addressed as an elf, an alfar.  Added to these two races - aesir and alfar -  a third race, the vanir (who were mostly like the aesir but slightly lesser - second tier gods) and you have the opening lines of the Hrafnagaldr Odins (an Icelanding poem): Alfodr orkar, alfar skilja, vanir vita.  Which translates: The Allfather has the power, the Elves have the skills, and the Vanir have the knowledge.
6. So the elves are next to the gods, in one respect.  But we have already seen, back in episode one, that they are also intricately connected with the dwarves - the dvergar - as well.  In the names listed for the Dvergar in the Voluspa, some of them translate directly as a type of elf.  The Voluspa lists dwarves named Gandalf - which means Magic Elf - and Vindalf - which means Wind Elf - as well as a dwarf simply named “Alfr” - Elf.  So the dwarves are intricately connected with elves as well.  The Eddas, particularly the poem the Alvismal - where the dwarf “Alvis” (all wise) recounts the names of all things - separate the elves and the dwarves as two separate races.  But really it is most likely that the dwarves, the dvergar, are simply another term for the svartalfr - the black elves.  This is contrasted with the proper name for elves - the liosalfar - the light elves.  Certainly the poetic Eddas list both of those.  The Prose Edda lists a third kind of elf - the Dockalfar.  Some scholars have called this just a renaming of the svartalfr.  Indeed, the line from the Prose Edda translates “In alfheim dwells the nation of the liosalfar (light elves), down in the earth dwell the dockalfar (dark elves), the two unlike one another in their look and their powers, liosalfar brighter than the sun, dockalfar blacker than pitch.”  But Grimm disagrees with this theory.  Grimm believes that the ancient Norse would have believed in three types of elves - the light elves (liosalfar), the black elves (svartalfar), and the dark elves (the dockalfar).  As evidence of this he points to the Pomeranian (a region consisting of eastern Germany and western Poland) tradition of dividing the underworld into the white, the brown, and the black.
7. Elves are also one of the few mythological creatures that are referenced multiple times in Shakespeare.  In Henry the IV, part 1, Falstaff calls Prince Henry - “'Sblood, you starveling, you elf-skin, you dried neat's tongue, you bull's pizzle, you stock-fish!”  Elves are also mentioned in the Queen Mab speech Mercutio gives in Romeo and Juliet, and by Oberon as part of he and Titania’s subjects in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
8. That said, assuming that elves and dwarves are two sides of the same coin in mythology, the vast majority of myths and legends deal more with the dwarvish side than the elvish.  Grimm attributes this to the fact that dwarves are supposed to be more of the earth than the elves, and thus more accessible to man.  Man digs in the earth and thus he comes upon dwarves.  But to enter the realm of the light elves of the fey, of the proto-angels, requires something else.
9. Elves are often associated with woods, as dwarves are with stones.  Knot-holes in wood, in particular, are said to be of elf-design.  A Swedish legend tells of a family whose ancestor was an elf-maid who came into the house through a knothole in the wall with the sunbeams.  She was married to the son of the house, bore him four children, and vanished the same way she had come.  Scottish legends also connect elves with knotholes.  Indeed, in old Scotland a knothole in wood was even called an elfbore and looking through or passing through one is a way to enter (or at least perceive) the land of the elves: Faerie.  
10. And while elves are usually benevolent and helpful, they are associated in most European traditions with the stealing of children, or, rather, the replacement of children with one of their own.  This is a changeling - an elfin child that has been replaced for a human baby.  Strikingly, the remedy for getting rid of a changeling is consistent across almost all European cultures: Boiling eggshells.
11. It is traditionally unlucky to use an elf’s proper name - it invites them in to make trouble for you.  Hence Gandalf calling the elves “good people” as a euphemism rather than identifying them by name.
12. Probably the most consistent trait of elves, however, is their affinity for dancing - usually at night, and almost always in fields or woods.  The idea of a fairy ring comes from this.  Chaucer, in the Wife of Bath Tale, claims that this used to be far more common than it is today only because the priests have now driven out the elves: 
    1.        In th'olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,

Of which that Britons speken greet honour,

865 All was this land fulfild of fayerye.

The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,

Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede.

This was the olde opinion, as I rede;

I speke of manye hundred yeres ago.

870 But now kan no man se none elves mo,

For now the grete charitee and prayeres

Of lymytours and othere hooly freres,

That serchen every lond and every streem,

As thikke as motes in the sonne-beem,

875 Blessynge halles, chambres, kichenes, boures,

Citees, burghes, castels, hye toures,

Thropes, bernes, shipnes, dayeryes,

This maketh that ther been no fayeryes.

For ther as wont to walken was an elf,

880 Ther walketh now the lymytour hymself

1. The Wife of Bath goes on to tell of a knight who rapes a girl and his punishment is death, but that sentence is commuted for one year to give him the chance to find out what it is that women really want.  And he looks and he looks and he can’t find any two women who seem to agree on what women really desire.  And so he gets really despondent, because he knows that his year is almost up and he is a dead man.  Then Chaucer picks back up:
2.  it happed hym to ryde,

In al this care under a forest syde,

Wher as he saugh upon a daunce go

Of ladyes foure and twenty, and yet mo;

Toward the whiche daunce he drow ful yerne,

1000 In hope that som wysdom sholde he lerne.

But certeinly, er he came fully there,

Vanysshed was this daunce, he nyste where.

No creature saugh he that bar lyf,

Save on the grene he saugh sittynge a wyf -

1005 A fouler wight ther may no man devyse.

Agayn the knyght this olde wyf gan ryse,

And seyde, "Sire knyght, heer forth ne lith no wey.

Tel me what that ye seken, by your fey!

Paraventure it may the bettre be,

1010 Thise olde folk kan muchel thyng," quod she.

1. [Finish telling the Wife of Bath’s Tale]
2. Sir Orfeo
   1. A Retelling of Orpheus and Eurydice, with the Elven King as a stand-in for Hades. The end of the story is a throwback to Odysseus returning to Ithaca
   2. A translation of the story was done by Tolkien
3. The Mabinogion
   1. Arawn has Fey characteristics and seems to be the Lord of Faerie
   2. Annwn would later be appropriated by Tolkien as Annun or Andune, a euphemism for Valinor, and Arawn would be re-cast as Orome, the huntsman of the Valar who comes to guide the elves to Valinor - to Annwn.
4. It is around Chaucer’s time, however, that language began to change - French became a much more dominant language than any of the Germanic languages - effectively having mixed with Anglo Saxon after the Battle of Hastings a couple of centuries earlier to create Middle English.  And so around this time the French term “fairy” began to be used far more commonly to refer to what had been identified as the Germanic “elf”.  And for the next several hundred years, stories about elves went out of fashion.  Stories about fairies?  Sure.  But not about elves.
5. Der Erlkonig
6. The Elves and the Shoemaker
   1. Originally entitled “die wichtelmanner” or wight-men, but Margaret Hunt, when she translated it into English, chose to make the little men not wight-men or dwarves or fairies, but elves.  And so Elves reentered the popular consciousness
7. Obviously, the other association with elves is with Christmas.  This tradition goes back almost 200 years, and seems to have begun with Clement Moore’s 1823 poem “A Visit from Saint Nicholas” more oftenly called today by it’s first line - Twas the Night Before Christmas.  In the poem, Moore calls Santa Claus “a right jolly old elf,” and the association with Elves and Christmas begins.  Louisa May Alcott, about 30 years later, also wrote a story about the Christmas Elves.  This is the first written record I can find of the idea that elves make toys for Santa Claus.
8. Tolkien
   1. I have no idea where Tolkien’s love of elves came from.  Certainly he, over the course of his lifetime, worked on translations of Sir Orfeo and of the Mabinogion.  But I believe he was writing stories about elves of his own earlier than that.  Certainly by 1916 and the Battle of the Somme, Tolkien was writing the Fall of Gondolin, the story of the great fall of the hidden city of the elves.
   2. Tolkien, it seems, began learning Welch around 1911 when he enrolled in Exeter College, and so he would have come upon The Mabinogion at that point.  Welsh also ended up being the inspiration for Sindarin, which he began working on again when he was at Exeter College.
   3. For Tolkien, elves were the first, the original.  They are the referred to by Illuavatar as The Children.  They were the planned creatures for whom Middle Earth was created - those were welcome in Valinor.  Men were planned as well, but were to be kept from Valinor, from the undying lands.  See, elves can’t die.  Or at least, not of natural causes.  Elves live forever - for thousands and thousands of years.  Humans can die.  So let’s talk about death than, shall we?
   4. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause—there's the respect

That makes calamity of so long life.

1. Shakespeare understood it, and Tolkien did as well.  Death is a consummation devoutly to be wished, it is something to look forward to, to yearn for.  Death is a release.  There is one and only one way out of this world, and that is to die.  Otherwise you are stuck here forever, with all of the crap and hurt, aches and heartaches, with all the tedium that this world brings.  And the only way out is to die.  Tolkien called this the Gift of Men, or sometimes the Gift of Illuvatar to men.  That we can die.  We are allowed to die.  Elves can’t.  Elves are tethered to this world and can never leave it, are never allowed to leave it.  If they have souls, their souls are stuck here.  We aren’t.  We are not slaves to this world.  We are not this crude matter.  Luminous beings are we.  As George Macdonald said, and I’m paraphrasing here, You are not a body that has a soul.  You are a soul that happens to have a body.  You are meant for something greater.  Elves, it seems, are not.  We, humans, look at elves and dwarves and fairies and vampires and jedi and view them as supernatural.  But it turns out that they are merely natural - they are no more than their bodies.  But we, we are supernatural.  We are more than this world, more than this matter, more than our bodies.  Okay, maybe Jedi are too.  Our gift is that we can die.
2. But we don’t see it that way.  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil must give us pause.  Death is our gift but once you unwrap it there is no taking it back and exchanging it.  It is the final ending, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.  We don’t know what we will find there and it terrifies us.  And in our reluctance, we stop seeing this gift of death as a gift but rather as a curse.  And so the men of Middle Earth begin to envy the elves their eternal life when it really should be the other way around.  The entire story of Numenor is the story of Men trying to find a way to cheat death, to make it to Valinor, to stay in this world forever.  But of course, they can’t.
3. But the elves, it seems, are also proud and sometimes envious.  The elves, the Children, the Simarillion tells, awakened somewhere in the forests of Middle Earth and were found by Orome the Hunter, the Orion character, the Arawn character, who lead them (or most of them, at any rate, some of the elves stayed behind) to Valinor where the elves got to live in peace with the Valar, with the Angels.  And they did so for many long years, until Feanor, the greatest craftsman of the Elves, made the Silmarils - three jewels that glowed with their own light.  So beautiful were the Silmarils that even Morgoth - the fallen Angel, the Devil - coveted them and stole them and took them away from Valinor to Middle Earth.  Feanor was so furious that he chased Morgoth back across the ocean - and when the elves who held the ships he needed would not let him cross, Feanor and his followers, who were called the Noldor, by the way, slaughtered all of the ship building elves.  And for that they were cursed, and Mandos, one of the Valar came to them and said:
   1. Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they be for ever.
   2. Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained the land of Aman. For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow. For though Eru appointed to you to die not in Eä, and no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos. There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you. And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as with a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after. The Valar have spoken.
4. And I’m not going to tell you all of the Silmarilion here, because that isnt what you are here for.  And if I did, what would I talk about if and when this podcast ever gets around to the Silmarilion?  I’d be screwed, that’s what I’d be.  Suffice it to say that the Doom of Mandos comes true, and it is only at the end of the 1st Age, when the Valar repent and step in at the behest of Earendel (more on him later) that any of the Noldor are readmitted to Valinor.  And even then there are some elves who refuse to take the ships and cross over back to the uttermost West.  All that is to say, that by the time we get to the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, the elves have been in exile in Middle Earth for millenia.  Either they never made it to Valinor in the first place, like many of the Grey Elves, or they went to Valinor, came back to Middle Earth, were cursed to remain here, were given the chance to end that curse, but were too proud to take the pardon and have stayed here ever since.
5. Tolkien’s elves good - they are the Children of Illuvatar - they are tall and strong, and they are wise.  But they are also proud, and their pride has often (usually?) been their downfall.
6. The Father Christmas Letters
   1. Not every elf that Tolkien created was Glorfindel or Galadrial or Gil-Galad or Feanor, tall fierce proud warriors in the style of medieval romances.  Tolkien also created some elves in more of a Victorian style.
   2. In the Father Christmas Letters, Tolkien would mention the Snow Elves or the Green Elves at the North Pole, and most often the Red Elves, who made their first appearance in the Father Christmas Letters in 1934.  These were diminutive figures that would have felt right at home in any of the fairytales common to 1800s England - silly creatures who tried to turn every activity into a game.  Fun Elves.  And these, we will see, are sometimes closer to some of the elves we find in the Hobbit than anything out of the Silmarillion.

1. One last note on Elves:  Some of the High Elves were called Gnomes in the 1937 version of the Hobbit - again, these are the Noldor, which is Quenya for knowledgeable.  But Tolkien eventually gave up on this thread of thought as unlikely to break through popular sentiment.  For Tolkien, the linguist, Gnome came from the Greek word for thought or intelligence or knowledge - a gnostic is one who knows.  An agnostic - a gnostic - is one who is without knowledge. But Tolkien found that for the majority of people, gnomes had become too synonymous with Parcelsus’s pygmies to ever be anything else.  So he returned to just the term “Elf.”

1. The descent into Rivendell is the descent into Faerie
   1. When Gandalf and the Dwarves (and Bilbo!) leave the Trolls, they spend several weary days looking for Rivendell.  This isn’t the trip from the Lord of the Rings where Aragorn seems to know exactly where to go each step of the way.  This is a desperate search.  Gandalf is said to wag his head left and right looking for the few key markers - white stones - that will lead them from the highlands where they are down into the exact right dell.  And when they finally get there, they seem to be descending in to Faerie.
   2. Discuss Faerie
   3. The dissent, like much of chapter 4 will be, is also a recollection of Tolkien’s own youth.  In a letter to his son Michael in 1967, Tolkein wrote:  
      1. I am.... delighted that you have made the acquaintance of Switzerland, and of the very part that I once knew best and which had the deepest effect on me. The hobbit's (Bilbo's) journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911* : the annus mirabilis of sunshine in which there was virtually no rain between April and the end of October, except on the eve and morning of George V's coronation. (Adfuit Omen!)†1
   4. Tolkien never, in either the Hobbit or the Lord of the Rings, gives a really detailed description of Rivendell.  The best image of it we get is actually an illustration Tolkien himself made of Rivendell in 1937.  The drawing is very similar to the geography around Lauterbrunnen in Switzerland, one of the towns Tolkien visited on his walking tour of the country.  Google a picture of Lauterbrunnen and see for yourself: Rivendell.  Lauterbrunnen, by the way, translates to Loud Fountain in English.  
2. When the do descend into the Valley, we get our first look at elves.  Except, we really don’t.  We don’t see the elves.  Bilbo explicitly says that “It smells like elves.”  And I wonder how Bilbo knows what elves smell like.  And then, immediately after, the song of the elves bursts like laughter in the trees.  After the song, Bilbo catches glimpses of the elves as the darkness deepens.  And finally one elf does come out to greet them and set them on the right path to Elrond’s House - the Last Homely House - but then again we get mostly jests, and songs and teasing and laughter from the elves.  Every elf we meet in the Lord of the Rings (almost) is immediately described as tall and ageless and fair to look upon, and serious and sad etc.  But in the Hobbit, in this chapter, the only description we are ever going to get of an elf at all is the one fellow who gives them directions who is described as tall and young.  These elves are not serious, they are silly.  They are mirthful.  They like laughter and jokes.  They are teasing, possibly even a little mean (although not really mean-spirited).  And although Tolkien, as the narrator, tells us that is foolish of the dwarves to think the elves foolish, I’m kind of on the dwarves side in this one.  These are rather foolish elves.
3. The elves sing three songs in their initial meeting with the dwarves, but Tolkien only gives the words to one of them in the published Hobbit:
4. The Song of the Elves

O! What are you doing,

And where are you going?

Your ponies need shoeing!

The river is flowing!

   O! tra-la-la-lally

        here down in the valley!

O! What are you seeking,

And where are you making?

The faggots are reeking,

The bannocks are baking!

    O! tril-lil-lil-lolly

        the valley is jolly,

             ha! ha!

O! Where are you going

With beards all a-wagging?

No knowing, no knowing

What brings Mister Baggins,

   And Balin and Dwalin

       down into the valley

            in June

            ha! ha!

O! Will you be staying,

Or will you be flying?

Your ponies are straying!

The daylight is dying!

To fly would be folly,

To stay would be jolly

     And listen and hark

     Till the end of the dark

        to our tune

        ha! ha!

1. The opening lines of the poem mirror a W.H. Auden poem entitled “O Where are you Going” and are likely taken from an English Folksong - the Cutty Wren.  Indeed, Tolkein’s poem follows the exact meter as the Cutty Wren, and may have been the tune he was intending for the song.
2. From the Fellowship of the Ring, when Frodo wakes up in Rivendell.  Pippin is talking to Frodo and says “it seems impossible, somehow, to feel gloomy or depressed in this place. I feel I could sing, if I knew the right song for the occasion.'
3. `I feel like singing myself,' laughed Frodo.”
4. And then from the Return of the King, when Sam wakes up in the Field of Cormallen:
5. ‘A great Shadow has departed,’ said Gandalf, and then he laughed and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as a sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tears ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.

‘How do I feel?’ he cried. ‘Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel’ - he waved his arms in the air - ‘I feel like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!’

1. 
   
2. A Second (Unpublished) Song of the Elves

Come home, come home, ye merry folk!

The sun is sinking, and the oak

In gloom has wrapped his feet.

Come home! The shades of evening loom

Beneath the hills, and palely bloom

Night-flowers white and sweet.

Come home! The birds have fled the dark,

And in the sky with silver spark

The early stars now spring.

Come home! The bats begin to flit,

And by the hearth 'tis time to sit.

Come home, come home, and sing!

Sing merrily, sing merrily, sing all together!

Let the song go! Let the sound ring!

The moon with his light, the bird with his feather:

Let the moon sail, let the bird wing!

The flower with her honey, the tree with his weather:

Let the flower blow, let the tree swing!

Sing merrily, sing merrily, sing all together!

1. “Now it is a strange thing, but things that are good to have and days that are good to spend are soon told about, and not much to listen to; while things that are uncomfortable, palpitating, and even gruesome, may make a good tale, and take a deal of telling anyway.”
   1. Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, and to a lesser extent, probably, Sam and Merry and Pippin are divided creatures, as we have said before.  They want the calm life, the quiet life, the peaceful life.  They want comfort and predictability and six meals a day when they can get them.  But they each also have a Tookish side to them that, unlike other Hobbits - or, unlike other Hobbits until the last couple of chapters of the Lord of the Rings - wants to go on adventures.  To carry a sword instead of a walking stick.  To hear poetry instead of prose.  To be unpredictable.  Hobbiton and Bywater are entirely domesticated.  Moria and Mirkwood are entirely adventurous.  But the one place in all of Middle Earth that seems to be both - that seems to fulfill both Bagginsish desire for purely animal comfort and Tookish want for high adventure and poetry is Rivendell.  A perfect place whether you liked food, or sleep, or work, or story-telling, or singing, or just sitting and thinking best, or a pleasant mixture of them all.

1. Finally ties to Middle Earth
   1. Gondolin
   2. Elrond
      1. Pre-dates the Hobbit by 4+ years.  Originally seen in Sketch of the Mythology
         1. “When later the elves return to the west, bound by his mortal half he elects to stay on earth.  Through him the blood of Hurin (his great-uncle) and of the elves is yet among Men, and is seen yet in valour and in beauty and in poetry.”  --Sketch of the Mythology
      2. Elrond is, according to the mythology, one of two children of Earendel the Mariner.  Earendel is, according to many sources, the genesis of all of Middle Earth.  According to the Tolkien Society:
         1. One of the poems he discovered in the course of his Old English studies was the Crist of Cynewulf—he was amazed especially by the cryptic couplet:

Eálá Earendel engla beorhtast

Ofer middangeard monnum sended

Which translates as:

Hail Earendel brightest of angels,

over Middle Earth sent to men.

1. And, in typical Tolkien fashion, he decided that he needed to create a backstory and find out who Earendel was and why he was flying over Middle Earth, and figure out exactly what Middle Earth is.  So he did.
2. According to Tolkien’s mythology, Earendil was half-elven, born to parents who were also half-elven, in Gondolin.  After Gondolin fell, Earendil and his wife Elwing lived by the sea.  When the Sons of Feanor heard that Earendil and Elwing had the Silmaril captured by Beren and Luthien, they attacked and Elwing had to cast herself and the Silmaril into the sea.  Earendil then sailed to Valinor to beg on behalf of the Elves and Men of Middle Earth for aid in the war against Morgoth.  The Valinor agreed, and Earendil’s ship was somehow turned into a flying ship.  No idea how that one happened.  And he, with the Silmaril attached to his brow, fought the flying Dragon Ancalagon the Black and defeated it.  But because he had been to Valinor, he was not allowed to return to Middle Earth, but was set to fly the heavens for all eternity.  After Morgoth was overthrown, the Valar decided that it was not a good idea to have so many half-elves, and so they gave Earendil’s children a choice of which kindred they would like to belong to.  Elrond chose to be elven and immortal.  His brother Elros chose to be human, and was the first king of Numenor.  Aragorn is his sixty-something-th great grandson.
3. The Last Homely House is a recreation of the Cottage of Lost Play from The Book of Lost Tales.
4. Again, we see fate-levels of luck
   1. Moon Runes - Had they started their journey a week earlier or a week later, they would not have seen these moon runes and known nothing about how to open the hidden door.
   2. Durin’s Day - Had the journey gone as planned at all, they would have arrived at the Lonely Mountain a month too soon and would have missed out on opening the door.
   3. Tolkien, later in life, would probably have pointed to these insane coincidences as Divine Intervention, as part of Illuvatar or God’s plan for everything.  In the same way that Gandalf will tell Frodo in the Lord of the Rings that there was a power out there guiding the finding of the Ring, and that Bilbo was MEANT to have the ring, and that therefore Frodo was MEANT to have it, Tolkien probably would have said later in life that the finding of Orcrist and Glamdring in the Troll’s lair, that the arriving at Rivendell just in time to read the Moon Runes that can only be read every few years, that the arrival of the dwarves at the Lonely Mountain on Durin’s Day which, by Thorin’s own admission, they have no earthly idea how to predict, that these are all evidence of the hand of God.  But I never get the sense that 1930 Tolkien thought that.  At least, he never indicates so in his writing.  In the Lord of the Rings Tolkien will, occasionally, point out the hand of God.  But in the Hobbit, these are played off as simple coincidences - just one of those things that make the story more magical and more interesting.
5. It is at this point that Tolkien abandoned his 1960 revision of the Hobbit.  He apparently lent the first three chapters of re-writes to a friend who read it and responded with something like - “It’s wonderful, but it isn’t the Hobbit.” Which Tolkien, respecting her opinion, acknowledged and abandoned the project.