There's Elves and Elves

A discussion of the chapter "Barrels Out of Bond" from The Hobbit.  A look at how Tolkien's second chapter about elves goes in a more medieval direction than the Victorian elves of Chapter 3, and just exactly what the medieval conceptions of elves were.  A look at the theistic nature of the dwarves escape from the elven king, and a some theories on just who the elven king was and what Professor Tolkien may have been thinking of when he wrote the character.

Transcript

1. Several years ago, my friend Kasra and I went to see a local Atlanta band - Seven Handle Circus - perform at some local venue I had never been to before or since, but you know the type - a warehouse somewhere that clearly wasn’t really being used for what it had been constructed for, and was now a converted stage.  Not a dive - really not a dive - but also kind of a cave.  There are no windows, not that any light could get in when it is dark outside anyways.  And even though there is plenty of room, before the show starts everyone is packed a little closer together near the stage than we really needed to be.  Not mosh-pit close, but still… a little tight.  And everyone has their drink, and everyone is just kind of waiting.  And, like always, the band is waiting just a few minutes after the posted start time to come on stage.

And then a note.  Maybe a chord?  I think it was a dobro?  A slide guitar?   It came from off stage right, anyway…  And the crowd quiets a bit - no one really sure that we just heard what we heard, or if it portends what we think it portends.

And then from stage left, quietly, the double bass starts this soft walking bassline.  Bum bum bum bum bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum, bum-bum-bum…

It fades.  And as it does from behind the stage - behind the curtains at the back of the stage, a banjo echoes… bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum bum buuuum.

And the song begins to pick up speed.  And ever so slowly, pick up volume.  And the band comes out from five corners around the stage building up into Edward Grieg’s In the Hall of the Mountain King.

It was a great show.  Thanks for the tickets, Kas.

But making it even cooler was the venue itself.  We were in a cavernous hall, all huddled a little too close together, somehow separated from the world, and the light, and the outside air, held spellbound there.

Grieg wrote his Suite to accompany Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt.  And in Act II of the play - particularly the scene that In the Hall of the Mountain King is meant to accompany - Peer is banished from his Norwegian home, and finds himself trapped in the underground barrow of the troll king.  And while Bilbo and his troup are trapped, captured in the halls of the woodland king, I love the idea that they would feel the power of this same song.  The tip-toe of the bass line being passed around from section to section of the orchestra, never quite coming from the same place, always just out of sight, just out of place.  The melody always transposing to a perfect fifth, or dropping or jumping an octave as it moves around the edge of your hearing, until it finally resolves.  And the impending sense that the dwarves must have felt in the Halls of the Mountain King as they were trapped in Barrels Out of Bond.

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

1. Concerning Elves (Part Deux)
   1. In the Fellowship of the Ring, when the company is in Lorien, Frodo turns to Sam to ask him, not for the first time, what he thinks of elves.  `What do you think of Elves now, Sam? ' he said. `I asked you the same question once before-it seems a very long while ago; but you have seen more of them since then.'  

'I have indeed! ' said Sam. 'And I reckon there's Elves and Elves. They're all elvish enough, but they're not all the same. Now these folk aren't wanderers or homeless, and seem a bit nearer to the likes of us: they seem to belong here, more even than Hobbits do in the Shire. Whether they've made the land, or the land's made them, it's hard to say, if you take my meaning. It's wonderfully quiet here. Nothing seems to be going on, and nobody seems to want it to. If there's any magic about, it's right down deep, where I can't lay my hands on it, in a manner of speaking.'

There’s elves, and there’s elves.

And that is going to be true for the Hobbit as well.   We’ve met elves once before on this podcast, way back at the last homely house, but these elves are going to be different.  Not dark, but certainly darker.  And if the elves back west came from slightly more of the Victorian traditions of fairies that Tolkien grew up with, these elves are going to be more primordial, more primal.

1. A new kind of Elf
   1. The elves we meet here are new to Tolkien, although not new at all from a mythological sense.  Tolkien, at this point in his career, had written many stories about the Eldar, or maybe, as we mentioned in Episode 4 of this podcast, about the Noldor - stories about Gondolin and Luthien Tinuviel and Feanor - wise and powerful lords of the elves, in shining armour.  Great craftsmen, learned loremasters, etc.  All harkening back to an older time - Rome or Atlantis or whatever.   And Tolkien has already written into this very story elves of a far more 19th century type - the laughing, playful, mostly unseen but not unheard fairies of the Last Homely House back in Chapter 3.  Elves that laugh at dwarves’ silly long beards.  Elves that Bilbo can smell before he can see.  Silly, funny creatures.   But these elves are more in line with the folk-lore traditions of the middle ages.  Spirits of the wood that are dangerous and tricksy.  Beings that will steal people away and replace them with changelings.  Beings that can vanish on the spot (think: the fire glades in Mirkwood).  Tolkien is very clear that these elves are not evil: they aren’t trolls or goblins.  But these elves aren’t nice either.
2. SAY: John Rateliff calls them The Vanishing People
   1. It starts in the previous chapter “Flies and Spiders” with the vanishing fires - a normal enough occurrence in any sort of adventure story where people are discovered and didn’t want to be - you can imagine a scene in a western, perhaps, the lawmen come upon Butch and Sundance in a canyon and as soon as the step too close to the firelight, Sundance kicks dirt into the fire, plunging the scene into darkness and our anti-heroes get away.  As a matter of fact, that is how the smothered fire is described the first time in “Flies and Spiders”: “No sooner had the first [dwarf] stepped into the clearing than all the lights went out as if by magic.  Somebody kicked the fire and it went up in rockets of glittering sparks and vanished.”  But by the time the dwarves get to the third iteration of the woodland feast, the magic is far more prominent. Kili, who is on lookout duty, tells the others that “There’s a regular blaze of light begun not far away - hundreds of torches and many fires must have been lit suddenly and by magic.”  And then when Thorin steps into the glade “Dead silence fell in the middle of a word.  Out went all the light.  The fires leaped up in black smokes.  Ashes and cinders were in the eyes of the dwarves.”  And the spectacle of several or dozens or hundreds of torches and fires kindling in an instant and then being snuffed just as quickly is deep in the magic of elfin lore.  Deep in the lore of the Vanishing People
      1. Francis Thompson wrote a poem about these vanishing people in the late 1800s,  “Sister Songs: An Offering to Two Sisters”
         1. A man is in a glade in the wood when first one and then many elves begin to dance around.  And after watching them for a while, he accidentally moves:

Then, through those translucencies,

   As grew my senses clearer clear,

   Did I see, and did I hear,

   How under an elm’s canopy

   Wheeled a flight of Dryades

   Murmuring measured melody.

   Gyre in gyre their treading was,

   Wheeling with an adverse flight,

   In twi-circle o’er the grass,

These to left, and those to right;

        All the band

   Linkèd by each other’s hand;

   Decked in raiment stainèd as

   The blue-helmèd aconite.

   And they advance with flutter, with grace,

        To the dance

   Moving on with a dainty pace,

   As blossoms mince it on river swells.

   Over their heads their cymbals shine,

   Round each ankle gleams a twine

        Of twinkling bells—

   Tune twirled golden from their cells.

   Every step was a tinkling sound,

   As they glanced in their dancing-ground,

   Clouds in cluster with such a sailing

   Float o’er the light of the wasting moon,

   As the cloud of their gliding veiling

   Swung in the sway of the dancing-tune.

   There was the clash of their cymbals clanging,

   Ringing of swinging bells clinging their feet;

   And the clang on wing it seemed a-hanging,

Hovering round their dancing so fleet.—

   I stirred, I rustled more than meet;

   Whereat they broke to the left and right,

   With eddying robes like aconite

        Blue of helm;

   And I beheld to the foot o’ the elm.

1. And at his moving, the elves all vanish, left and right.
2. The Wife of Bath’s Tale
   1. And we talked about this phenomenon already when we did our first “Concerning Elves” segment back in chapter 3 of The Hobbit.   In the Wife of Bath’s tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, The knight is riding home after a year of trying to figure out what women want, when he comes across a glade of persons (elves) dancing in a glade

And in his wey it happed hym to ryde,      989

In al this care, under a forest syde,      990

Wher as he saugh upon a daunce go      991

Of ladyes foure and twenty, and yet mo;      992

Toward the whiche daunce he drow ful yerne,      993

In hope that som wysdom sholde he lerne.      994

But certeinly, er he cam fully there,      995

Vanysshed was this daunce, he nyste where.      996

1. And these stories really emphasize the  Vanishing People nature of these medieval elves.  You see them, but when they see you, or rather, when they perceive that you have seen them, they Vanish.  Poof.   And if there is a second trope about disturbing the feasts or festivals or dances of these fey creatures, it is that when they vanish, you, the disturber, lose time.
2. On Fairy Stories.49
   1. If you are present at a Faerian drama…[t]he experience may be very similar to Dreaming… [b]ut in a Faerian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp… You are deluded - whether that is the intention of the elves… is another question.  They at any rate are not themselves deluded.
   2. And this is again, the Rip Van Winkle theme that we have mentioned before, or the Peter Klaus theme, of the man who goes into the hills to find his lost goats and then finds some strange men and disturbs their drinking, so they give him a drink of their wine and then when he wakes up it is 20 years later.
   3. Think - Bombour and Bilbo’s enchanted dreams.  Dreams that are particularly insidious because they are dreaming about gorging themselves at elaborate feasts while they are, in reality, starving to death.  The Faerian drama - the dreams of others that you accidentally enter.
   4. And it is in dreams like this - these Faerian dramas - that the elves can take time away from you, or can even take you away.  Changelings - a person - usually a child - who was stolen by the elves.  According to Katharine Briggs, this is one of the oldest legends about the fey folk.
3. In Sir Orfeo - the 13th century retelling of the Greek Orpheus myth - this is exactly what happened to Sir Orfeo’s wife.  She, through no fault of her own, entered a Faerian drama - the dream of the elf king - and in this dream he kidnaps her, and then tells her that, despite anything she can do to the contrary, the next day he is going to take her physical form as well.  And she wakes up and screams and scratches at her face until she is bleeding.  And when her husband - Sir Orfeo - comes and calms her down, she tells him that the elf king and his retinue of a hundred knights are going to come and take her the next day.  And so the next day Sir Orfeo has her guarded by a THOUSAND of his own knights, but low and behold, his very securely guarded wife vanishes - stolen by the elf king.
4. The Hunt
   1. And the vanishing of Lady Heurodis (the Eurydice (yr·i·duh·see) figure from Sir Orfeo) is a great segue for us into the theme of the Fey Hunt, or sometimes better known as the Wild Hunt.   Because Sir Orfeo searches for years for his wife - whom he KNOWS the elf king stole - and as he searches for her, often he would witness from afar the elf-king’s hunt.
   2. Sir Orfeo - lines 281-288
      1.    He might se him bisides,

Oft in hot undertides,

The king o fairy with his rout

Com to hunt him al about

With dim cri and bloweing,

And houndes also with him berking;

Ac no best thai no nome,   

No never he nist whider they bicome

1. There often by him would he see / when noon was hot on leaf and tree / the king of faerie with his rout / came hunting in the woods about / with blowing far and crying dim / and barking hounds that were with him / yet never a beast they took nor slew / and where they went he never knew.
2. The wild hunt has its origins, perhaps, in Odinic myths of Germanic Europe.
3. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle is a “historical” document (and we should take that term with a large grain of salt) that begins more or less as a list of events that happened in England from as early as 60 BC up through the 1100s.  And, according to the Chronicle, In the year 1127:

Think no man unworthily that we say not the truth; for it was

fully known over all the land: that, as soon as he came thither,

which was on the Sunday when men sing "Exurge quare o D---- etc."

immediately after, several persons saw and heard many huntsmen

hunting.  The hunters were swarthy, and huge, and ugly; and their

hounds were all swarthy, and broad-eyed, and ugly.  And they rode

on swarthy horses, and swarthy bucks.  This was seen in the very

deer-fold in the town of Peterborough, and in all the woods from

that same town to Stamford.  And the monks heard the horn blow

that they blew in the night.  Credible men, who watched them in

the night, said that they thought there might well be about

twenty or thirty horn-blowers.

And this is supposed to be a “historical” account of the Wild Hunt, the Fey Hunt, the Odinic Hunt - it is given a wide variety of names all across the British Isles and Germany, and Scandinavia.

1. From “Lord Nann and the Korrigan”
   1. Another example of the Wild Hunt comes from an ode attributed to a long oral tradition out of Brittany - the northwestern peninsular spur of France that justs out into the Atlantic just south of Cornwall and Wales.  The ode, finally set down and published in the mid 1800s by Vicomte Théodore Claude Henri is translated as Lord Nann and the Korrigan.

Lord Nann and the Korrigan.

The Lord Nann and his bride so fair

In early youth united were,

In early youth divided were.

The lady lay-in yesternight

Of twins, their skin as snow was white,

A boy and girl, that glad his sight.

"What doth thy heart desire, loved one,

For giving me so fair a son?

Say, and at once it shall be done.

A woodcock from the pool of the glyn?

Or roebuck from the forest green?"

"The roebuck's flesh is savoury,

But for it thou to the wood should'st hie."

Lord Nann when he these words did hear,

He forthwith grasped his oaken spear,

And vaulting on his coal-black steed

Unto the green-wood hied with speed.

When he unto the wood drew nigh,

A fair white doe he there did spy,

And after her such chase he made,

The ground it shook beneath their tread.

And after her such chase made he,

From his brows the water copiously

And from his horse's sides ran down.

The evening had now come on,

And he came where a streamlet flowed

Fast by a Korrigan's abode;

And grassy turf spread all around.

To quench his thirst he sprang to ground.

The Korrig at her fount sat there

A-combing of her long fair hair.

She combed it with a comb of gold—

These ladies ne'er are poor, we're told.

"Rash man," cried she, "how dost thou dare

To come disturb my waters fair!

"Thou shalt unto me plight thy fay,

Or seven years thou shalt waste away,

Or thou shalt die ere the third day."

1. I have no idea what the translator was thinking when the line was translated “unto me plight thy fay”.  Another translation puts the line at the far more understandable “Either though straight shall wed with me”.  And even other versions of the lay imply that even the wedding isn’t so much what the Korrigan is looking for but more the… wedding night.   And the lay continues to tell how Lord Nann of course refuses to sleep with the Korrigan, and then, of course, her prophecy comes true and Lord Nann sets his affairs in order and then dies.  And everyone tries to keep it from his young wife that he has died, but when she passes his new grave on the way to church, she knows that it is his - or maybe is told that it is his - and she falls down on the grave and she also dies.
2. And Tolkien definitely knew of this poem, because he used it as the inspiration for his own “The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun” which are simply Breton terms for Lord and Lady.  And in his version of the poem, Tolkien writes:

Beneath the woodland's hanging eaves

a white doe startled under leaves;

strangely she glistered in the sun

as she leaped forth and turned to run.

Then reckless after her he spurred;

dim laughter in the woods he heard,

but heeded not, a longing strange

for deer that fair and fearless range

vexed him, for venison of the beast

whereon no mortal hunt shall feast,

for waters crystal-clear and cold

that never in holy fountain rolled.

He hunted her from the forest-eaves

into the twilight under leaves;

the earth was shaken under hoof,

till the boughs were bent into a roof,

and the sun was woven in a snare;

and laughter still was on the air.

The sun was falling. In the dell

deep in the forest silence fell.

No sight nor slot of doe he found

but roots of trees upon the ground,

and trees like shadows waiting stood

for night to come upon the wood.

1. And in between the two versions of this lay, Tolkien’s and Henri’s transcription of the old oral tradition, you have not only more instances of this fey hunt, but you have also a couple of the elements that are going to show up with the wood elves in the Hobbit - in the Lord Nann story you have the danger of the enchanted water.  Notice that Lord Nann is not beholden to the Korrigan - and a Korrigan is just a type of fey creature from Breton legend, more on them in a later episode - He is not beholden to the Korrigan because he hunted the stag like in the Arawn story from Welsh Mythology, no, rather, he is beholden to her because he drank from her stream.  The enchanted stream that belongs to the fey creatures - the Korrigan’s stream in the Lord Nann lay, and the wood elves’ stream that dooms Bombour in the Hobbit.  And then in Tolkien’s version, we have the laughter of the wood spirits, from the wood elves, that again, shows up in the Hobbit.

1. Translation - The Elves Under Ground
   1. And after we go through the Wild Hunt, we come back to where we started with these elves - to the Vanishing People.  And we have to ask ourselves where they vanish to.  Well… back to their halls, I suppose.
   2. Jakob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology, Vol 3, Chapter 32 talks about Translation.
      1. Translation is the Germanic belief that the elves - or whomever - have the ability to move a thing from here to there and back again.  And particularly, to move a thing from here to their underground home and back again.  Not deep underground, but in the hidden caves and caverns and barrows that so obviously MUST be hidden under the hills.
         1. And this manifests itself in all kinds of ways.  Buried treasure lies underground, and when it is found it is the unearthing of a treasure that the elves - or whomever - must have translated there.
         2. Trees that have withered, when they come back to life come back to life from the roots which are underground
         3. The dead heros that our myths tell us must come back to us one day - Arthur - the once and future king who lived and died and will live again when Britain needs him is underground, and one day those who translated him away from us will deliver him back.
         4. Jacob Grimm in Teutonic Mythology writes, “With our [the German] people a favorite mode of representing translation is to shut up the enchanted inside a mountain, the earth, so to speak, letting herself be opened to receive them.  More than one idea may be at work here together: motherly earth hides the dead in her bosom, and the world of souls is an underground world; elves and dwarves are imagined living inside mountains, not so much in the depths of the earth as in hills and rocks that rise above the level of the ground.”
         5. He continues, further in the chapter, “It is preeminently to white women, white-robed maidens that this notion of mountain banishment becomes applicable: devine or semi-divine beings of heathenism, who still at appointed times grow visible to mortal sight; they love best to appear in warm sunlight to poor shepherds and herd boys.  German legend everywhere is full of graceful stories on the subject, which are all substantially alike, and betray great depth of root.”  He then goes on to list a dozen or more iterations of this story of translation and of the white woman who appears from the elf-mound to this shepherd or that.
   3. Elf-mounds or fairy hills are the final piece of the puzzle that we need to ascribe to the pre-Christian European conception of elves that Tolkien is pulling from.
      1. And we have to start with the fact that these mounds are very real and very everywhere.  Peoples literally all over the world have throughout history and pre-history, when someone has died, built a cairn to them and then raised a mound over it.  In the Iliad, Patroclous’s body is burned and then a barrow is built over the remains of the pyre.  In Beowulf, the same thing happens - a pyre for the great lord, and then a mound built over the remains as a monument.  Heck, even the Pyramids fit the requirements here - a large mound erected where no hill has been or should be, set there as a monument to the dead.
      2. And what happens when, in places wetter and less arid than Egypt or Asia Minor, a decade passes… a century… two… and now the grass has grown over this cairn, and nobody remembers who or what was originally in it.  But it seems to be there for SOME reason…  Who lives there now?
      3. In Ireland, it is the Tuatha de Danaan.  In England and across Scandinavia, it is the elves and fairies.
      4. In Halls of the Mountain King from Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, and Grieg’s more famous score thereabout, it’s the… Mountain King.  
      5. The mounds become the homes of the creatures from the Other side.  The logical jump is really pretty easy.
         1. These mounds exist, and were clearly MADE by something
         2. Things MADE were made with a purpose
         3. Elves, Dwarves, Trolls, Fairies, Goblins, Wights, and Gnomes, or WHATEVER you want to call them, exist
         4. We cannot see the elves, dwarves, trolls, fairies, goblins, wights, whatever
         5. Since they exist where we cannot see them, they must exist somewhere we never see
         6. We never see under those mounds…
         7. QED
      6. And this belief, actually, that these creatures lived in Fairy Mounds is one of the things that leads more modern (meaning Renaissance or Victorian) views of elves and trolls and fairies to be of diminutive, half-sized creatures.  If the creatures live in the mounds, but the mounds don’t seem to be very big, why… then… the creatures themselves must be small.
   4. So this is the Early Middle Ages views of Elves - the older antecedents to the more playful folk that we introduced back in Episode 4.  They are the Vanishing People, they embark on the Wild Hunt, They trap us in their Faerian Dramas, and they live in Fairy Mounds.

Let’s see how Tolkien deals with him now that his story has grown up a few chapters - and, presumably, so have his children.

1. Tolkien’s Legendarium
   1. We’ve already talked about how Tolkien uses elves back in Episode 4 of the podcast, so we aren’t going to rehash all of that.  But let’s look at particularly how Tolkien incorporates these themes of the Vanishing People into his elves.  And mostly, that is going to come down to the Barrows.

1. Thingol, the Elven King, and Thranduil
2. The fans out there are going to dislike this, but the Elven King from the Hobbit really isn’t Thranduil - not if you are reading the Hobbit first. I mean, yes… once we reach the end of the legend and look backwards - once we reach the end of Tolkien’s life and have all of his published works at our disposal, canonically, the Elven King is Thranduil.  But if we are reading the Hobbit as Tolkien wrote the Hobbit, the Elven King that we meet in this chapter, if he is akin to anyone other than himself, is Thingol.

See, when Tolkien was writing The Hobbit, he hadn’t even conceived of writing The Lord of the Rings yet, obviously.  That tale, as Tolkien proclaims in the foreword to the Lord of the Rings, grew in the telling.  But when he was writing The Hobbit, Tolkien HAD already written much of what was to ultimately become The Silmarillion.  The first versions of The Children of Hurin were probably written in early 1921, and he had worked on The Tale of Tinuviel some years before that, back in 1917.  So the idea of an elven king of a woodland realm, one whose realm was protected by magic and nearly impossible to get into or out of, a king who had a particular gripe with the dwarves involving some ancient feud about a treasure that may or may not have been paid for… These elements of the Elven King’s story from The Hobbit would have been well established in Tolkien’s mind as traits of the Thingol story.

1. Green Elves
   1. The Silmarillion tells of the waking up of the elves.  And when the elves first woke up, Melkor - the fallen Valar, the Devil - still held sway across all of Middle Earth.  But the elves having woken up, the rest of the Valar - the rest of the Gods decided that it was their responsibility to protect these children, these elves from Melkor, who would later come to be named Morgoth.  And so the Valar girt themselves for war and brought battle against Melkor and defeated him, and chained him, and imprisoned him.  But this was the first that the elves had ever seen of the Valar - they in their war-like garb and in their martial action - and the elves were frightened of them and did not wish to see them further or to ever come to Valinor which is Faerie, the uttermost West.

So the Valar sent an emissary, Oromë, to the children, and of the elves he recruited three kings to go and visit the Valar in Valinor, and these were Ingwë, Finwë, and Elwë.  And they went.  And these three, after seeing the glory and majesty of the Valar wanted to spend eternity with them in Valinor, and so came back to their people, the elves, and persuaded them the best they could to all travel to Valinor.

But the journey from wherever it was that the elves woke up - Tolkien named it Cuivenen, but, to my knowledge, he never actually plotted it on any map.  We know that it was to the east of the Misty Mountains - but the journey from there to Valinor was long, and a lot of the elves tarried along the way, or got sidetracked.  And a lot of them never actually made it to Valinor.

Tolkien gave these elves - the ones who never actually made it to Valinor (or at least, if they did, came distantly last).  He called them the Avari - the Unwilling - or the Teleri - those who tarried.

And particularly, Elwë was the chief or king of the Teleri.  And at first, upon coming back to his people after himself seeing Valinor and now trying to lead his people there, Elwë wanted to get back to Valinor, and the Valar, and to Finwë, his friend.  But as he and his people came over the Misty Mountains and down into Beleriand, Elwë was walking through a wood, and heard a song.  The Silmarillion says “There suddenly he heard the song of nightingales.  Then an enchantment fell on him, and he stood still; and afar off beyond the voices of the Lomelindi he heard the voice of Melian, and it filled all his heart with wonder and desire.  He forgot then utterly all his people and all the purposes of his mind, and following the birds under the shadow of trees he passed deep into Nan Elmoth and was lost.  But he came at last to a glade open to the stars, and there Melian stood; and out of the darkness he looked at her, and the light of Aman was in her face.”

And this is maybe Tolkien’s favorite story, and he is going to give it to several of his favorite characters.  Melian was a Maiar - an angel - a being far older and greater and more powerful than the elves, although not as high up as the Valar.  And Elwë, who will at this point change his name to Thingol, ends up falling for a being far above his poor station, a girl with whom he should never have had a chance, and she will dance for him in a wood, and she will, to some degree, give up her greater station to stay with him.

This is Arwen giving up eternity for Aragorn.  This is Luthien forsaking her people for Beren.  This is Thingol and Melian.  Like we’ve talked about so many times - Tolkien’s stories take fractal shapes.  And the more you zoom out, the more you see the same shape of story over and over.  This, by the way, Tolkien was convinced, was he and his own wife Edith.    I suppose it is a healthy thing for anyone in a relationship to view their spouse as having been the one to “marry down”.  Certainly my wife is far more intelligent and good looking than I will ever be.  And Tolkien felt the same way.  After Edith died, Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher about a memory he had of his late wife, Christopher’s mother, telling of “a small woodland glade filled with hemlocks at Roos in Yorkshire (where I was for a brief time in command of an outpost of the Humber Garrison in 1917, and she was able to live with me for a while). In those days her hair was raven, her skin clear, her eyes brighter than you have seen them, and she could sing – and dance.”

And the point of that letter was to justify to Christopher why, after her death, Tolkien wanted to put the name Luthien on Edith’s tombstone, and why he wanted the name Beren on his.  The Aragorn Arwen story, the Beren Luthien story, the Thingol Melian story - Tolkien saw his wife and he in each of them.

So Thingol, now in love with the wonderful Melian, abandons Valinor and never returns there.  And he became the king of the elves called the Sindar, the Gray-elves, and Melian became his Queen, and “their hidden halls were in Menegroth, the Thousand Caves, in Doriath.  Great power Melian lent to Thingol, who was himself great among the Eldar; for he alone of all the Sindar had seen with his own eyes the Trees in the days of their flowering.

Thingol was the king of the Sindar, but he alone among them had ever been to Valinor.”

A king of the elves who are NOT the wise Nolor.  A king of the elves who have always just tarried in the woods - in this mystic and fey wood - this is Thingol in Doriath, and this is the Elven King in Mirkwood in the Hobbit.

And they both live in Barrow Mounds.

1. The Elven King’s Halls as Elf Mounds (Barrow Mounds)
   1. Doriath & Menegroth
      1. And this leads us into the idea of the Elven King’s Halls as Elf Mounds, as Barrow Mounds.
      2. Menegroth, in the greatest forest of Beleriand, Doriath, was the underground home of the Sindar - the elves who had never been to Valinor.
      3. In the Lay of Leithian, Tolkien describes Luthien leading Beren into Menegroth, describing it as:

Downward with gentle hand she led

through corridors of carven dread 

whose turns were lit by lanterns hung 

or flames from torches that were flung 

on dragons hewn in the cold stone

with jewelled eyes and teeth of bone.

 Then sudden, deep beneath the earth

 the silences with silver mirth

 were shaken and the rocks were ringing,

 the birds of Melian were singing; 

and wide the ways of shadow spread 

as into archèd halls she led 

Beren in wonder. There a light

 like day immortal and like night 

of stars unclouded, shone and gleamed. 

A vault of topless trees it seemed, 

whose trunks of carven stone there stood

 like towers of an enchanted wood

 in magic fast for ever bound, 

bearing a roof whose branches wound

 in endless tracery of green

 lit by some leaf-emprisoned sheen 

of moon and sun, and wrought of gems, 

and each leaf hung on golden stems.

1. So, this is probably the first elf mound in any Tolkien story, whether you look within his legendarium or without - within the stories, Thingol would have been the first elf to construct an underground hall.  All of the other ones are either directly inspired by this one - such as Nargathrond - or are more spiritual successors - such as the Elven King’s domain in Mirkwood.  But in terms of authorship, the story of Beren and Luthien predates the Hobbit by several years, like we said.
2. Nargathrond
   1. The next Barrow Mound we are going to run into is going to be Nargathrond, later in the Silmarillian.

The Noldor eventually all come back to Middle Earth after Morgoth steals the Silmarils - it’s a long story, we’ll get to the whole thing later - but when they get back, they realize that Middle Earth has become a more dangerous place than it used to be.  And, by the way, Thingol is not really thrilled that all of these other elves with their wars and their grievances are back.  But Thingol is cool with Finrod - he and Finrod’s grandfather were close, so Finrod is cool.  And Finrod is welcomed into Doriath.  The Silmarillion tells that 

1. “Now on a time Finrod and Galadriel his sister were the guests of Thingol their kinsman in Doriath. Then Finrod was filled with wonder at the strength and majesty of Menegroth, its treasuries and armouries and its many-pillared halls of stone; and it came into his heart that he would build wide halls behind ever- guarded gates in some deep and secret place beneath the hills. Therefore he opened his heart to Thingol, telling him of his dreams; and Thingol spoke to him of the deep gorge of the River Narog, and the caves under the High Faroth in its steep western shore, and when he departed he gave him guides to lead him to that place of which few yet knew. Thus Finrod came to the Caverns of Narog, and began to establish there deep halls and armouries after the fashion of the mansions of Menegroth; and that stronghold was called Nargothrond. In that labour Finrod was aided by the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains; and they were rewarded well, for Finrod had brought more treasures out of Tirion than any other of the princes of the Noldor. And in that time was made for him the Nauglamir, the Necklace of the Dwarves, most renowned of their works in the Elder Days. It was a carcanet of gold, and set therein were gems uncounted from Valinor; but it had a power within it so that it rested lightly on its wearer as a strand of flax, and whatsoever neck it clasped it sat always with grace and loveliness. 

There in Nargothrond Finrod made his home with many of his people, and he was named in the tongue of the Dwarves Felagund, Hewer of Caves; and that name he bore thereafter until his end. But Finrod Felagund was not the first to dwell in the caves beside the River Narog. Galadriel his sister went not with him to Nargothrond, for in Doriath dwelt Celeborn, kinsman of Thingol, and there was great love between them. Therefore she remained in the Hidden Kingdom, and abode with Melian, and of her learned great lore and wisdom concerning Middle-earth.”

1. So now we have three barrow cities of the elves - Menegroth in Doriath, Nargathrond - it’s very literal successor in the Silmarillion, The halls of the Elven King - the spiritual successor to Menegroth in The Hobbit.
2. But there is one more we need to talk about.
3. Fog on the Barrow Downs as an evil version of the Elven Kings Halls
   1. We talked about the different terms for “elf” when we introduced them back in Episode 4 of this podcast: Alf and Aelf and Alp all being different variations of the term.  And possibly connected with the term “Albus” for the color white.  But there is another term for “elves” in old germanic mythology.  Wights.  And this, fittingly enough, is also a homonym, obviously for the color “white.”  And Jakob Grimm also glosses it as being connected with the word “wife” as well.   But in any case, wights - W-I-G-H-T-S - are just traditionally elves throughout Northern European mythology.

Obviously, for Tolkien, though, there is a distinction between them.  And we see here maybe more clearly than any place else other than Tolkien’s translation of Beowulf, Tolkien’s obvious fondness and predisposition for “Elves” on display.  Unlike the medieval treatment of elves, which ranged from dangerous and good to dangerous and bad (but always dangerous), Tolkien always wants to put elves in the morally good category.  So in this case, he severs the word Elf from the word Wight - traditionally the same thing - and makes the wights the evil versions of elves.  But the mythology is the same.  And so the Barrow Downs from the Lord of the Rings are just exactly the same as the Elven King’s Halls from the Hobbit and Menegroth from the Silmarillion: hidden places under the ground where the fey creatures keep their treasures and sometimes steal or transform the living away (and keep them too…)  But while Beren is able to get out of Menegroth, and Bilbo and the Dwarves are able to get out of the kindly (if suspicious) Elven King’s Halls… and in neither place are we truly worried for our heroes… the halls are described in kindly terms… Frodo and Sam and Merry and Pippen are in a truly fearful spot when they are taken by the Barrow Wights in the Fellowship of the Ring.  This is just the dark version of the Elven King, the other side of the mythology.  This is how it feels to be taken by the elves when the elves are demonstrably NOT on your side.

I wonder if this is how Gollum felt when placed in the halls of Tharanduil…

1. And for an extra connection to the druidic mythos in all of this, we have the Doors of Stone.  Frodo and company rest (and take an ill advised nap) in the shadow of standing stones the afternoon they are taken by the Wights.  Equally, the door that Tolkien drew in his own illustrations of the Elven King’s Realm is a Trilithon - literally  just tri- three, and lith- stone.  A door of stone, made from three great slabs of stone set in the shape of the greek letter Pi - an entrance through one of the monoliths of Stonehenge.

1. One final thing:

ABSENT from these Barrow mounds is the theme of Fairy Food - like Persephone, trapped in Hades for six months out of every year because she had the temerity to eat six seeds of a pomegranate when she was there.  Anyone who eats fairy food gets trapped in Faerie forever.

1. At the same time that Finrod was building Nargathrond - modeled after Menegroth - indeed, the very next paragraph in the Silmarillion - Another of the high elves, the Noldor - Turgon - is building a second city of the elves.  Only he doesn’t model his city off of Menegroth, he models his on Tirion - the shining city on the hill from away west on the coast of Valinor.  And this city that Turgon builds is Gondolin, which we have talked about in this podcast before.
2. So we have two types of elven cities in Tolkien’s writing.  The high elves, the models of wisdom and refinement, the upper class elves live in the open air, in Tirion and Gondolin.  In Rivendell.  But Thingol and the Elven King, Tharanduil when he gets rebranded in the Lord of the Rings, the warrior elves, the dark elves, the wood elves, the vanishing people, they, like the Tuatha de Danaan of Ireland, live in barrow mounds.

The Chapter

1. The book is growing up
   1. It is a sign that the book is growing up that the chapter markers are not the hard, fast, episodic markers that they have been so far.  We mentioned way back in our third episode that Chapter 2 of the Hobbit seems to just be a continuation of Chapter 1, and, in fact, the original writing of the book - the hand-written notes of an oral tale - bears that out.  That chapter marking was mostly arbitrary.  But Chapters 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 have been definite.  It is no accident that I have been able to introduce a brand new fairy-tale creature to you every episode.  That’s how Tolkien introduced the story to his children.  He - and he was not being nearly as pedantic as I am being… 1, he was talking to children, and 2, he was far smarter than I am… - But he just structured the story, in his head, as a monster of the week serial.  And when the company escapes any one of the given monsters, the chapter ends.

But now the book is growing up and getting more complex.  It is no accident that I ended the last episode of our podcast a good 4 pages before the published end of the chapter “Flies and Spiders”, nor is it an accident that I spent a good portion at the top of this podcast going backwards and talking about the Fey Hunt that occurred dead in the middle of the last chapter.  The ideas are getting more complex.  There is starting to be overlap.  Tolkien is playing with an idea that won’t be totally grown up until a third of the way through The Lord of the Rings - overlapping narratives.    And so, we have to take a step back - a few pages back, really - and remember what happened to Thorin.

1. Thorin
   1. At the end of Flies and Spiders, Thorin is missing.  Just as Bilbo fell into a deep, sound sleep when he was pushed into the fire circle of the woodelves (and woke up having been in the Faerian Drama of the banquet), So too when Thorin stepped into the third of the fire circles, he fell like a stone.  And while the woodelves were content to let the sleeping Bilbo lie, the enchanted Thorin they took back with them to their caves.  And there was so much chaos at the time, that it took hours and hours for the dwarves and Bilbo to even realize that Thorin was gone.  Tolkien actually hints at it a couple of times to see how closely we were paying attention - he mentions the twelve dwarves when, really, it should have been thirteen.

And it isn’t until after the episode with the Spiders is over and done with that anybody - it ends up being Dwalin - realizes that Thorin isn’t even there.

Thorin had been taken by the elves, and it is actually here and not in the chapter of Barrels Out of Bond that we are given the description of the elven king and his realm - his cavern of living stone, and his crown of berries or flowers or whatever seasonal thing is out there.

1. It is at this point in the writing of the Hobbit that I really think that Tolkien decided to finally throw caution to the wind and commit to the bit.  We have talked many times over the course of this Podcast and shown many proofs - both Tolkien’s own words and evidence from the text - that Tolkien did not set out for The Hobbit to be at least set in the same world as his Matter of the Older Days.   Oh sure, he has thrown a few names around before this.  He has mentioned the city of Gondolin a couple of times.  And he has thrown in Elrond as a character.  But according to the Professor himself, those were thrown in because he found it hard to come up with really good names.  Certainly, at least, they bear no meaningful connection to the stories of the Eldar Days, the stories of the book that would one day be published as the Silmarillion.

But at this point, Tolkien begins to tie the story of The Hobbit - or, maybe it is more correct to say the backstory of the Hobbit - to the events that he had already written down as his Lay of Leithian or Fall of Gondolin - the matter of the Eldar Days.

And I DON’T want to imply at this point that Tolkien was necessarily conceiving of creating some Middle-Earth version of the MCU - a wide web of stories that all interwove with each other and became a cohesive and universal mythology.  He would think more in those terms by the end of his life, wherein he began to conceive of all of this as a “what-if” mythology for England.  But I don’t think he is there yet.

But he IS tying this material more thematically to his other stories, and he does so with the background on the interactions of the Elven King and the Dwarves.

When Thorin is first dragged in front of the Elven King, Tolkien tells us “So to the cave they dragged Thorin - not too gently, for they did not love dwarves, and thought he was an enemy.  In ancient days they had had wars with some of the dwarves, whom they accused of stealing their treasure.  It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account, and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had bargained with them to shape his raw gold and silver, and had afterwards refused to give them their pay.  If the elf-king had a weakness it was for treasure, especially for silver and white gems; and though his hoard was rich, he was ever eager for more, since he had not yet as great a treasure as other elf-lords of old.”

1. The Nauglamir
   1. This “stealing their treasure” seems to me to be a direct reference to the Nauglamir.

In the Silmarillion, the dwarves made the Nauglamir for king Finrod.  It was a magnificent piece of jewelry, described as “the Necklace of the Dwarves, most renowned of their works in the Elder Days.  It was a carcenet of gold, and set therein were gems uncounted from Valinor; but it had a power within it so that it rested lightly on its wearer as a strand of flax, and whatsoever neck it clasped it sat always with grace and loveliness.”  And the Silmarillion seems to make it clear, at the time, that the dwarves of the Blue Mountains made the Nauglamir for King Finrod at the same time that they were helping him build his city of Nargothrond.

And eventually, Nargathrond fell and Finrod was killed, and the Nauglamir lay in the ruin of Nargathrond until a man, Hurin, went and got it and delivered it to Thingol in Doriath.  And Thingol, beginning to be corrupted by the Silmaril that he was hiding in his treasury - a theme that we will definitely be coming back to in a couple of episodes - asked the dwarves to remake the Nauglamir but to include the Silmaril in it.  And the dwarves, on seeing this most beautiful work of their ancestors, coveted it.  “Then the dwarves looked upon the work of their fathers, and they beheld with wonder the shining jewel of Feanor; and they were filled with a great lust to possess them, and carry them off to their far homes in the mountains.”  And then, a couple of paragraphs later after the dwarves have finished their labor, Thingol asks for the now remade Nauglamir but the dwarves refuse to give it to him, saying “By what right does the Elvenking lay claim to the Nauglamir, that was made by our fathers for Finrod Felagund who is dead?  It has come to him but by the hand of Hurin the Man of Dor-lomin, who took it as a thief out of the darkness of Nargothrond.”

And in the Silmarillion, which is written - stylized - to be a history of the elves, the dwarves are obviously wrong and just greedy and Thingol, we are told, sees right through them.  But here in the Hobbit, when we are presented with a Cliffs Notes version of the same story, Tolkien is careful to be far more even-handed.  The necklace had been commissioned by the elves, and had been paid for by one elf, but after that elf died, the dwarves saw no reason why the necklace should just naturally pass to any other elf.

And I think that Tolkien, here is trying very hard to paint the Elven King as the distant descendant - either biologically or spiritually - of Thingol, and for the first time in the book, the events of the Elder Days are not just used as a place from which to mine good names, but as ancient history.

1. Now, finally getting into the chapter itself - FINALLY - Bilbo and the dwarves back in the forest wake up and are more or less instantly captured by the elves.  Or, at least, narratively speaking, they are instantly captured.  Actually, Tolkien says it happens after a day of desperately searching for the path.   But they are captured - all except Bilbo, who puts on his magic ring and escapes - but Bilbo is, I suppose, effectively captured too, since the only thing he can do is chase after the party and then, as un-sure as he is about it, plunge into the Elven King’s halls behind the dwarves.  So while the dwarves are the prisoners of the elves, Bilbo, it would seem, is a prisoner of his conscience (at not being willing to leave the dwarves) or perhaps of circumstance (at not being able to get on or get home without them).  Interestingly, this is the second time that Bilbo has been faced with the moral dilemma of whether or not to save the dwarves.  After they escaped the Misty Mountains, Bilbo was all alone, and he was about to make up his mind to go BACK into the Goblin caves to save the dwarves, when he heard them nearby and thankfully didn’t have to go back.  This time, Bilbo doesn’t want to save them either - Tolkien tells us that when they came to the gate “Bilbo hesitated in the rear.  He did not at all like the look of the cavern-mouth, and he only made up his mind not to desert his friends just in time to scuttle over at the heels of the last elves, before the great gates of the king closed behind.”
2. And just as the Elven King had questioned Thorin at the end of the last chapter, he again questions Balin here.  Balin is the next oldest dwarf, as we learn at this point in the story..  As a matter of fact, as it was canonized many years after the writing of The Hobbit, Thorin would have been 195 at this time, Balin 178, and Dwalin, who would have come in 3rd, 169.   But Balin, if possible, is less helpful and more confrontational that Thorin was.  While Thorin, in his answers to the elven king, was merely evasive, Balin is downright confrontational.  And all of the dwarves are sentenced to be locked up, each in a separate cell, until someone gives up the ghost.

But the elves are not goblins.  They are not wicked.  And the elven king gives them plenty of food and water - maybe not the best stuff, but he brings them back from the brink of starvation.   And he also doesn’t require that they be shackled.  As a matter of fact, when the dwarves are brought in front of him, he “told his men to unbind them, for they were ragged and weary, “Besides they need no ropes in here,” said he.  “There is no escape from my magic doors for those who are once brought inside.”

I think there is an equal mix of pity and arrogance in the elven king here.  He has them unbound and has his guards stand down because they are ragged and weary.  They have gone through enough, we don’t have to bind their hands and legs.  But equally, because the doors are magic, so who cares about rope anyway.  And his use of the word “magic doors” here is again, worth pointing out, if only because it shows yet again that this story grows up in stutter steps, but not all the way and not all at once.  Magic doors.  Magic?!  That is such a hobbitish idea, at least if we are to believe Galadriel.  When, in the Fellowship of the Ring, Frodo and Sam are discussion elves in Lothlorien, immediately after that quote I read at the top of this episode, Sam says that the only thing he wants to see but hasn’t yet is some real elvish magic.

Frodo says that You can see and feel the magic everywhere to which Sam responds “Well, you can’t see nobody working it.  No fireworks like poor Gandalf used to show.  I wonder we don’t see nothing of the Lord and Lady in all these days.  I fancy now that she could do some wonderful things if she had a mind.  I’d dearly love to see some Elf-magic, Mr. Frodo.”

And then, of course Galadriel appears, apparently having been eavesdropping this whole time (serves Sam right…) and she brings them to the Mirror of Galadriel and says to Sam, “This is what your folk would call magic, I believe; though I do not understand clearly what they mean; and they seem also to use the same word of the deceits of the Enemy.”

Magic is a Hobbit word.  And maybe, if we want to look at the legends as complete, maybe that makes sense, because the Hobbit is supposed to have been a book written by a hobbit, so maybe that’s just Bilbo remembering the word… but it is interesting.

1. This   is the weariest point of the adventure for Bilbo.  He, like we said, is a prisoner of circumstance or of his conscience.  But it is also here that he first really becomes what he was always told he would be “a burglar”.  Yes, it is true that back in Chapter 2 he stole the troll’s purse before literally instantly getting caught.  And yes, I suppose it is true that he “stole” Gollum’s ring in Chapter 5, but isn’t that more “finding” than “stealing”?  But here, Bilbo has to spend - well, we don’t really know how long - burgling for a living.  And he does.

I say that we don’t know how long they were in the caves, because Tolkien never tells us.

If you look it up on the internet - and I have… a lot… - most websites on this sort of thing will tell you that the dwarves definitely escape from the Elven King’s Halls (spoiler alert, they escape) on September 21, and that they PROBABLY were captured on or around August 24.   Now, that first date - escaping on September 21 - is gathered from a detail in the Fellowship of the Ring.  Bilbo, at his birthday party in chapter 1 of The Fellowship of the Ring will say that his birthday - which we are told is September 22 - is also the anniversary of his arrival at Lake Town, which happens the day after they escape from the Elves.  So they must escape on September 21, right?  The capture date, August 24, as best as I can tell, comes from Karen Wynn Fonstad’s 1981 Atlas of Middle Earth wherein she uses the few concrete dates provided in the Hobbit alongside Tolkien’s maps, travel distances, and likely travel speeds to estimate some of these things.  And she puts the capture date at August 24.  And the internet believes her.  We are told early in the chapter that the Elven King is decked out for Autumn.  The elven king’s crown, in the spring and summer, is of woodland flowers.  But when we meet him in this chapter he has “on his head a crown of berries and red leaves, for the autumn was come again.”  Are there berries and red leaves in late August?  I’ll leave that up to you.  According to Fondstad, there are.

And I’m not suggesting that I don’t believe her.  Her book is meticulously researched.  But, like all things Tolkien, we have to look at it both as he was writing and as a fait accompli - a finished work.   As a finished work, after all is written and published, at the End of Tolkien’s life, Bilbo’s birthday has been canonized as September 22.  But as he was writing the Hobbit, there is no indication that this is what that was.  And indeed, as you read the Fellowship of the Ring for the first time, it almost seems like this is a drop-in line by Tolkien in Bilbo’s Party speech to try to remind readers of the previous story.

I think that it is important that we DON’T know how long Bilbo was in the caves.  The important thing is that it felt like forever.  He was in there long enough to sneak out at least a couple of times with various hunting parties of elves, only to sneak back in.  He was in there long enough to get to know every nook and cranny of the halls of the elven king - find every dwarf (even Thorin), find his ways to the darkest cellars.  Fonstad’s timeline has them down there for just under a month.  And that is probably reasonable.  But for Bilbo…  man it was just a long and weary time.

1. And whether this was intentional on Tolkien’s part or not - I rather think it wasn’t - we get an early parallel here between Bilbo and Gollum.
   1. One of the central questions raised in The Lord of the Rings is the “There but for the grace of God go I” connection between Gollum and the hobbits.  Specifically between Gollum and Frodo.  In the movies, Frodo says to Sam of Gollum “I have to believe he can come back.”  In Gollum, we are shown a version of what Frodo might become - of what the ring has done to Gollum and therefore may be doing to Frodo.  And the book is never quite this explicit about it - books tend to be more subtle than movies - the theme is there all the same.  And we can see the same unspoken question here.

Gollum is a creature living in the caves of others, deep underground, destined to spend the rest of eternity using his magic ring to burgle the same cave over and over and over again - survive by stealing from the same miserable house.  And that is what Bilbo risks here as well.  As they are escaping, Bilbo, not having a barrel to be packed in, finds that “It looked as if he would certainly lose his friends this time (nearly all of them had already disappeared through the dark trapdoor), and get utterly left behind and have to stay lurking as permanent burglar in the elf-caves for ever.”

There but for the Grace of God…

1. And as he is trapped there Bilbo is worried about being seen because of his shadow.  So it is important to remind ourselves again that this ring that he has is not the all-powerful, all-evil ring of the Lord of the Rings. This is not Frodo’s ring of temptation and omnipotence.  This is a simple ring of invisibility, and one that can be foiled by showing the shadow of the wearer in the sunlight.  If we, again, accept Fonstad’s theory that they were in the elven caves from August 24 to September 21, and if we assume, as we should, that Bilbo is wearing his ring nearly constantly, then that means that Bilbo was wearing the ring for nearly 700 consecutive hours.  Frodo, across the entire Lord of the Rings, puts the ring on only 5 times: once at Tom Bombadil’s house for a few seconds, once in Bree for a few seconds, once on Weathertop for perhaps half a minute, once on Amon Hen - and this is the long one - for maybe an hour, and once in Orodruin for maybe a few minutes.  All told, significantly less than 2 hours.  And it’s a big deal each time.
2. And in all of this time that Bilbo is walking around burgling the same house over and over, wearing the ring day after day, he keeps wishing for home and wishing for Gandalf.  But, of course, Gandalf isn’t there.

Tolkien very very explicitly did this on purpose, and let me take a minute to talk to all of you helicopter parents out there.  People only grow up when they have to.  Let me say that again.  People - heroes, hobbits, children - ONLY ever grow up when they have to.  As long as you have someone else taking care of you, you will never grow up.  This is a major theme in Orson Scott Card’s book Ender’s Game.  The military, in that story, needed someone completely self-sufficient, and so they trained this child - Ender - to believe that no one would ever take care of him.  Talking about him, one general says to another, “I told you.  His isolation can’t be broken.  He can never come to believe that anybody will help him out.  ever.  If he once thinks there’s an easy way out, he’s wrecked…”  and then a few chapters later, “[he] must believe that no matter what happens, no adult will ever, ever step in to help him in any way.  He must believe, to the core of his soul, that he can only do what he and the other children work out for themselves.  If he does not believe that, then he will never reach the peak of his abilities.”  Children only grow up when their parents stop solving their problems for them.  And, it turns out, so do hobbits.  Bilbo grows up because he has to.  And that was Tolkien’s plan in removing Gandalf from the story to begin with.

From Tolkien’s letter to Christopher Bretherton in 1964, discussing the process of turning The Hobbit into The Lord of the Rings, he says, “I then linked it [the ring] with the (originally) quite casual reference to the Necromancer, whose function was hardly more than to provide a reason for Gandalf going away and leaving Bilbo and the Dwarves to fend for themselves, which was necessary for the tale.”

When Tolkien was originally telling this story, it was to his children.  And Tolkien knew that these kids of his were growing up.  And no one ever grows up until they have to.  Bilbo was never going to grow up as long as Gandalf was there.  He was always going to wait and see, always going to let the wizard make the first move, always going to stay the innocent Baggins… until he couldn’t.  The IDEA of Sauron definitely predates The Hobbit, but it’s hard to tell whether the name does.  In later, published versions of the Beren and Luthien story, the antagonist is Sauron.  But in earlier versions of the story, he is definitely referred to as Thu, or Gorthu, or Tevildo the Prince of Cats - a throwback to Romeo and Juliet which is itself a throwback to the story of Reynard the Fox.  And we aren’t here to get into a discussion of Sauron… not yet.  But suffice it to say that if Tolkien had wanted to call the Necromancer in the Hobbit Sauron, or Thu, or Gorthu, or Tevildo… he could have.  But he didn’t, because the Necromancer doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Gandalf is gone.  And Bilbo can’t rely on him anymore.  And so now that he must… Bilbo grows up.

1. Bilbo eventually does rescue the dwarves by putting them in Barrels and dropping those barrels into the underground river that flows out of the mountain.  He does this on a feast day - which, if you are going to mess with the elves in Tolkien’s universe, do it on a feast day, it happens here and it happens 3 separate times in the Silmarillion - and his opportunity comes because the Chief of the Guard and the Butler sample some particularly highly fortified wine and pass out, so Bilbo is able to steal their keys.  Another piece of fun trivia, the Butler, Galion, is the only elf in The Hobbit who has a name.  Elrond, at least in this book, is described as half-elven, and the elven king, as we have already discussed, is not yet named Thranduil.

1. And as the dwarves are escaping - unbeknown to Galion and the other elves - the elves break into a work song.  This is the second time we are told that they have been singing this chapter: they also sang when they were marching the dwarves in as prisoners, so I suppose this is a nice bookend - singing as they came in, singing as they go out.  But we aren’t given the words to their marching song.   Here, though, we get the barrel song of the wood elves:
   1. Roll—roll—roll—roll,

roll—roll—rolling down the hole!

Heave ho! Splash plump!

Down they go, down they bump!

Down the swift dark stream you go

Back to lands you once did know!

Leave the halls and caverns deep,

Leave the northern mountains steep,

Where the forest wide and dim

Stoops in shadow grey and grim!

Float beyond the world of trees

Out into the whispering breeze,

Past the rushes, past the reeds,

Past the marsh's waving weeds,

Through the mist that riseth white

Up from mere and pool at night!

Follow, follow stars that leap

Up the heavens cold and steep;

Turn when dawn comes over the land,

Over rapid, over sand,

South away! and South away!

Seek the sunlight and the day,

Back to pasture, back to mead,

Where the kine and oxen feed!

Back to gardens on the hills

Where the berry swells and fills

Under sunlight, under day!

South away! and South away!

Down the swift dark stream you go

Back to lands you once did know!

1. This poem, to me, echos the last song we got out of the dwarves.  When the dwarves were hanging out in Beorn’s house, they sang about the wind that came sweeping down from the withered heath and over the marshes and over the forest and then up into the stars.  And in the dwarves version of the poem, everything the wind touches gets worse.  The wind - and the wind may just be a metaphor for the dragon, or maybe for the dwarves themselves… but probably the dragon - the wind crosses marsh and river and forest and mountain and makes everything worse.  The elves sing a similarly organized song - the barrels to which they are singing are being plopped down into the stream, and the elves sing about all of the wonderful places that the barrels are about to go.  The whispering breeze, the sunlight and the day.  The berries and the oxen.  Whereas the dwarves sing of the darkness that IS, the elves sing of the brightness that may be.  Theirs is a blessing, a la Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young”.  There is something very theistic about it.  The elves don’t actually invoke God, but there is this overtone of Numbers chapter 6 - “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace.”
2. And indeed, the religious symbolism continues through the end of the chapter.  Actually, Bilbo himself will describe what is happening to the dwarves best when he is talking to Smaug a few chapters from now.  Bilbo will brag to Smaug that he is one who “buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water.”

What Bilbo is performing here is equal parts baptism and resurrection - the cleansing of everything that has come before with the immersion into the river - the Forest River, the Jordan, whatever.  And the symbolic death and rebirth of these characters.

1. Interesting subnote: This is even more true with Thorin than all of the other dwarves.  Thorin undergoes a name change along with his resurrection.  In the original handwritten Hobbit, the leader of the dwarves was the dwarf Gandalf - who was not the wizard.  There was no Thorin.  The Oakenshield character was named Gandalf.  Tolkien decided to change the names as he was writing this chapter.  So Gandalf the dwarf goes into the barrel, and Thorin comes out on the other side, making it twice in Tolkien’s writings, I suppose, that a character named Gandalf dies and is resurrected in new form.  But that, too, smacks of Baptism to me.  You go into the water as Simon but come out as Peter.  The dwarf goes into the river as Gandalf but comes out Thorin.  And when he comes out of the river, the first thing he will do is march into Lake Town and declare his kingship, and the heavens will open up and the spirit of God will descend on him like a dove.  Not really, of course, but Tolkien does tell us that some of the Lake Men will go outside expecting the mountain to magically turn golden at the emergence of Thorin.

Baptism and Resurrection.