Mathias Énard's THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGERS GUILD (Tr Frank Wynne)

I never realized, before plunging into the fray of Mathias Énard's The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, that a work of fiction could have terroir. This is not the kind of sentence I ever imagined myself writing, or taking such pleasure in having written, but it's the best way to describe this novel, at least insofar as I understand the concept I'm evoking here. 

The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers Guild, hereinafter referred to by your lazy blogger as TABotGG, teems with the kind of rural characters that a reader might will be terribly romanticized -- but stubbornly refuse to be, who persist in their Rabelaisian crudity (the works of François Rabelais, and of François Villon, echo throughout this text even before the title scene begins quoting these guys outright) and gossiping ways as our main point of view character struggles to document their way of life for his anthropology dissertation, all while realizing that he doesn't really even understand his own. 

David Mazon, late of the academic world of Paris, has done field work before, but this time he's really got to dig into his subject and get his hands dirty (beyond his futile battle with the weird red worms infesting the bathroom of the hut he's renting from a local farming couple). But of course, like most academic fish-out-of-water types, he's realizing that his course of study and lack of experience outside of studenthood hasn't even prepared him to research well. He spends most of his time playing with the farm cats who adopt him, and playing Tetris, at least at first.

So,  TABotGG could easily fall into cliché and bore us to tears as yet another supposed sophisticate finally learns about real life from colorful locals -- but it never does. We get a certain amount of arrogant bumbling on David's part, and of deserved comeuppance, but Énard is much more interested in pulling us deep into the soil and its produce here, avoiding also the tiredness of bewailing how every particle of dirt in Europe has passed through innumerable human bodies over the centuries, Europe is a bone heap, etc: Énard is here, instead, to celebrate this. And, in the process, to hint rather gently at the responsibilities of stewardship these facts impose on the agricultural communities who have made all of this possible. But only gently. No preachy environmental polemics here!

Instead, as we follow David through his rounds of interviews and tours and trying of his hand at the odd farm chore -- and David turns out himself to have quite a bit of character, as we see early in his story when a winter storm knocks out power to the village and he resorts to stealing candles from a church for the benefit of a near stranger who is stranger than he knows (we'll get to Arnaud -- oh, Arnaud! -- in a moment) -- we are invited to feel the course of waters through the soil and the decomposition of bodies, and the nutrient cycle, but, again, without being lectured about it. 

Meanwhile, we get to know lots and lots of characters, and not just in their current incarnations; we're a bit in Eastern philosophical territory here, as, upon a character's ordinary or dramatic or untimely or actually pretty funny death, we follow his or her soul, unstuck in time but very much confined to this geography, through karmic cycles of lives as people and animals of other eras in the region. For instance, David's wormy nemeses have human stories, too.

This is best explored through the character of Arnaud, whom we first come to know as the poor, neurodivergent young man whom the locals think is fun to get drunk and make him do his one seeming party trick of being able to rattle off a historical precis of everything of significance that ever happened on a particular date. We learn later in the book that there's much more to this seeming fixation and... look, I would read a whole book just about Arnaud. Arnaud is the best. But this is a book about a banquet, according to the title, right? A banquet held by the people who start up the process of converting the meat puppets we walk around in for a few decades, back into soil.

And these guys know how to party.

"...as was his wont, he filled the glass to the ringing brim until the surface of the wine was slightly convex, which he checked, stealthily approaching the glass with the wiles of a Sioux warrior, chin resting on the tablecloth, as though the precious liquid must be caught unawares before it should flee: once again Martial Pouvreau managed to ambush the wine’s meniscus; with pursed lips and an inhuman slurping noise, he drank off a good two centimeters of Chinon in a single draft before lifting his glass by the foot, with airy insouciance."

Oh, the banquet scene, the novel's capstone and center and longest (and most exhausting) chapter by far. I initially complained a bit about it to a few of my book-nerdiest friends, who all agreed that it's a bit much and a major tonal shift that can feel out of place. It is, however, the title scene, in which a hundred or so funerary professionals from all around the greater area of western France (or it might be the nation, excluding those from the cities?) come together for three days to discuss business a little and eat and drink a lot. Traditionally, these three days are a time when no one dies so that the gravediggers and cemetery caretakers and embalmers and hearse drivers and whatnot can let their hair down, and boy do they ever. We are treated to careful and meticulous details about everything they eat and drink, to their shop talk as they guzzle, and to their over-the-top feats of public speaking in which they quote and paraphrase France's earthiest literary figures.

“Of a sudden, darkness fell upon the battlefield below. 

“‘Gendarme, an eclipse! The darkest shadow has surprised our armies!’ 

“‘Not so, Commander, ’tis the giant’s schlong that blots out Phoebus! His tumescent pork sword is big as a billboard!'"

Which brings me to translator Frank Wynne, one of the greatest to ever do it, and who had his work cut out for him in rendering many versions of spoken and written French, prose and poetry, into something like their equivalents in English; as he shares in a terrific translator's note at the end, for instance, he  cleverly resorted to rendering one character's outré and vaguely archaic dialect... as Scots. 

It totally works, by the way. In a scene in which a judge is struggling to understand her testimony in court, even with the help of a local "interpreter."

But so, this isn't, like, Doc Martin  (for all that I could see Martin and many of the other residents of Port Wenn at work and play here) but a French novel by the same guy who sent Michaelangelo on an imaginary sojourn in the Ottoman Empire; trigger warnings galore, here. There are bawdy and sometimes gross jokes. There is a very vivid description of rape and its aftermath. There is cruelty and negligence and lots of talk of creepy crawlies and rotting corpses and inept gunplay and cheerfully lusty sex. But there's also a nice love story or two and many depictions of healthy marriages and friendships and fellowship and good food and well-turned earth. 

Basically, TABofGG is a hefty French novel about hobbits. It's a book I didn't even know I needed, but find that I most certainly did. From now on, whenever I contemplate the Shire, I shall not imagine them with those rich English countryside accents, but robust and fruity French ones, starring Gerard Depardieu as Bilbo Baggins and Romain Duris as Frodo. Your mileage may vary. But I think you'll have more fun if you do. Give it a try, non?

Puttin' the Blog in Balrog II: The Hobbit - Chapters 6-12

WELL! We are off to a rip-roarin' start with this whole Puttin' the Blog in Balrog madness. Be sure to check out everybody else's posts on this score. EssJay has a good little clearing-house at the bottom of her entry (see the "Related Reading" list at the end). We'll try and keep everyone updated as new posts appear. We're really getting a nice range of input from serious Tolkien grognards, complete Middle Earth tenderfoots (Tender Feet, shouted Odo...) and everything in between. Middle Earth is a great place to spend the summer.

In particular, we've discovered that lots of people grew up singing "That's What Bilbo Baggins Hates" when our moms made us do the dishes. Chip the glasses and crack the plates, everybody!

Now, onwards with The Hobbit!

Chapter 6
Bilbo is really starting to feel his stuff in this chapter, isn't he? But after outwitting Gollum and escaping from a cave full of goblins, who wouldn't feel like a bit of a badass, with or without his or her original complement of beautiful brass buttons?* So I'm sure it surprised no one that he decided to seize the opportunity to make a very dramatic entrance, right in the middle of Gandalf and the Dwarves bickering over whose fault it was he'd been lost and whether or not they needed to go back and get him. "And here's the burglar" indeed!

Reading as a fully-informed Silmarillion-totin' adult, I've found myself sort of hyper-vigilant about how the Ring might be influencing Bilbo's behavior, even at this early stage. We had an interesting conversation over at EssJay's blog about whether it was the Ring or Bilbo's survival instinct that prompted him to pounce on the opportunity afforded him by Gollum's misunderstanding of "What have I got in my pocket?" I like the latter theory; we Tolkiephiles know that Hobbits are made of surprisingly tough stuff and I balk at the notion that the Ring would be messing with Bilbo's head already, just an hour or two after he's found it. I find my argument strengthened by the fact that before Bilbo discovers that everybody else made it out alive, too, he is ready to go back and try to rescue them all on his lonesome. "He had just made up his mind that it was his duty, that he must turn back, and very miserable he felt about it."

When reunited with his party, of course, he lies his head off about how he got away from Gollum and the goblins, but by that time he has actually worn the Ring for a while, so I pin down this fib-fest as the Ring's first foray into Bilbo-bothering.

BUT, none of that is exceptionally germaine to this story, is it? And certainly not this chapter, because this is the chapter of the wolves. And no, I'm not excited about the wolves because I'm one of those wildlife freaks who swoons at the very thought of them and wears that stupid tee shirt on my off days.

This guy would have to be very quick with that stick 

to stop me from kicking him in the crotch.

I'm from Wyoming, okay? Wolves are still a very real fact of life out here. They aren't beautiful and they aren't noble and they aren't misunderstood. They are vicious predators and they hunt in packs like bullies and if cornered they'll rip out your throat as soon as look at you. Plus they kill livestock, poop all over the place and carry fleas and worse. There's a reason they're the villains and the monsters in all the old fairy tales, peeps.

So when the wolves start howling in the eastern foothills of the Misty Mountains, Bilbo and the Dwarves should be pretty much peeing their pants. And hey, they are! "Even magic rings are not much use against wolves, especially against the evil packs that lived under the shadow of the goblin-infested mountains."

"What shall we do, what shall we do... escaping goblins to be caught by wolves!" And Gandalf is all, I know, up in the trees everybody, even though that's pretty much a one-way escape so it isn't an escape so much as a very slow-acting and delayed sort of trap. Unless you're Katniss Everdeen and there's a nest full of trackerjacks up there, but no, except yes because see after the pic of the scary cannibal man below.

Yeah, I didn't sleep for like a week after this part, you guys. When I was a kid, I mean. Now I just rant and rave and foam at the mouth and look for guys in stupid tee shirts to kick in the crotch.

And then it gets worse, because here come the goblins, who have a serious hate-on for our heroes now because the dwarves and Gandalf killed the Head Goblin while they were escaping the cave, and who sing the best song maybe ever. I like this one even more than the I Hate Dishwashing song, but I had far fewer occasions to sing it, at least until I was in high school and on the speech team and was sometimes confronted with an array of types about whom it was entirely appropriate to muse "What shall we do with the funny little things?" Except for the eating them part.

Though on second thought, you funny little things...

Of course before the goblins get there, we are treated to some very detailed descriptions of exactly what "birds" are in what trees, because Tolkien cannot pass up any opportunity to wear us down with scenery porn. So Dwarves 'N Da Hood are up in a larch and Dori, Nori Oin and Gloin are in a pine and Bifur, Bofur. Bombur and Thorin are in another pine and Dawlin and Balin are in a fir and Bilbo is running around like a rabbit in seventeen different types of grass each with its own special growth patterns and seed shapes and medicinal uses and dude, Mr. J.R.R. sir I don't mean to interrupt but there are wolves down there, can we have some focus please?

Sorry, got carried away a bit. It might only have been sixteen kinds of grasses, except that one kind actually has two different cultivars and they're well on their way to speciation in fact I wonder if we have time for a little plant breeding experiment here and

WOLVES!

Oh yeah. Which Gandalf deals with rather cleverly but irresponsibly by starting a forest fire (see, this is the Katniss Everdeen bit, amirite?). Dammit, Gandalf, I like you and all but I grew up in the middle of a major National Forest (well, with forest on three sides, anyway) and if there's one thing I can't stand it's a firebug.

But at least that catches the attention of the eagles, Tolkien's favorite flying dei ex machinae, and now my shoulder sockets are aching in sympathy for Bilbo. I always thought hang gliding would be fun, and I bet I'd enjoy it more than Bilbo did, but still ow, ow, ow.

Oh, and just as a last by the bye for this chapter -- did anyone else expect that there would maybe be fewer than 13 dwarves in the party by now? Any other author, and some of these guys would be absolute red shirts, troll food, goblin slaves, eagle poop, but no. Dwarves are badasses who can survive anything as long as they have a wizard and a hobbit around, apparently. But that is cool, yes?

Chapter 7

Ah, Beorn. BEORN. If you do not share my love for Beorn, you might as well skip on to the next bit, because Beorn, Beorn, Beorn.

A curious thing I noticed for the first time this reading is that in the lead-up to meeting Beorn, Gandalf, who at this point is still just referring to Beorn as The Somebody, comes up with a very careful and cautious approach to bringing his party (whom he has just announced he is going to leave very soon so he can gang up with the rest of the Wise to kick Sauron out of Mirkwood and, though he doesn't know it yet, take his first crack keeping Saruman from becoming a complete bastard) to Beorn's house:

This Somebody I spoke of, a very great person. You must all be very polite when I introduce you. I shall introduce you slowly, two by two, I think, and you must be careful not to annoy him, or heaven knows what will happen.

Does this not remind you a little bit of how the dwarves first gathered at Bilbo's house? Did they not also approach that beautiful green door two by two, or at least in very small groups? I like the sort of rhetorical equivalency this gives to Beorn and Bilbo, though Beorn's greatness lies mostly in past deeds while Bilbo's is (mostly) yet in his future at this point.

Like fairies (some hobbits believe that a Took ancestor had a fairy wife) and giants (like those hurling rocks around in the storm in the mountains), skin-changers like Beorn seem to exist only in this children's tour of Middle Earth, which is something else I always found curious. As Beorn is the only one we encounter even in this book, we have no way of knowing whether there are a lot of these or just a few or maybe just Beorn and his descendants. Anyway, they're pretty cool:

Some say that he is a bear descended from the great and ancient bears of the mountains that lived there before the giants came. Others say that he is a man descended from the first men who lived before Smaug or the other dragons came into this part of the world, and before the goblins came into the hills out of the North.

And here I will pause to let all you George R.R. Martin fans have your mental snigger about Jorah Mormont and "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" and all that nonsense.

And no, really, I don't like bears anymore than I like wolves. I respect both, but my form of respect consists of staying as far away from them as possible, keeping the lid firmly on my trash, and hoping I never, ever encounter one outside of a zoo. And the people who cause traffic jams in Yellowstone Park and other such places so they can feed bears send me into crotch-kicking rages also, thag you bery much.

But Beorn, Beorn is a badass. He can turn into a bear at will but lives mostly on cream and honey because he's a Good Guy. He keeps livestock -- for conversation partners, not for food (well, except for the cream of course. But I'm sure he has a nice chat with the cow as he milks her. Shut up).

Also, Beorn keeps lots and lots of bees, in pastures set aside just for them, bees "bigger than hornets... and the bands of yellow on their deep black bodies shone like fiery gold." I'm pretty sure this is the sole entomological reference in all of Tolkien (the giant spiders don't count because those are arachnids, not insects) and I treasure it as such. Happy sigh.

Oh, and his house is pretty awesome, too, as you would expect of the manliest, beariest hippy ever to inhabit a semi-magical kingdom.

I am, however, a little disappointed that he didn't bitch out Gandalf for starting a forest fire (yes, yes, with goblin help, but still). But we know, we know, he's not a tame bear, and he did go back and give the goblins who fanned Gandalf's flames a proper thrashing. And then, because now that he knows the synopsis Gandalf gave while the dwarves arrived at his house is true, he lets the crew borrow his pony friends for a while to give them a leg up on their journey. But only as far as Mirkwood.

Oh boy. MIRKWOOD. Stay on the path, Beorn says. And don't drink any of the water you find there, especially not in that nasty enchanted stream. No foreshadowing there, of course.

Bye bye, Beorn! You're the bestest! I wish you'd at least gotten a cameo in LOTR! But at least you're being played by an appropriately badass dude in the film!

Mikael "Hamilton"  Persbrandt will be an interesting  Beorn. 

Though it looks like Beorn is a grizzly instead of a black bear.

Chapter 8

So. Mirkwood. And I was wrong: there's some more entomology, first when Bilbo and the boys try having a fire at night and it brings "thousands of dark grey and black moths, some nearly as big as your hand, flapping and whirring round their ears" and later when the party starts losing hope of ever getting out of the densest, darkest forest that ever was, and send Bilbo up a tree to see if he can see the Forest's edge (I feel like this common noun, "forest" needs capitalization when we're talking about Mirkwood) and he sees lots of black butterflies flitting about the tree tops.

But insects aren't really their biggest concern, in Mirkwood, because the deer really have it in for them. First one comes at them, makes them waste a lot of arrows, and knocks Bombur into the enchanted stream that Beorn warned them against (don't drink or bathe in it, he told them, or you'll fall asleep and forget everything), and then later a white doe (called a hind in the British fashion here, natch) and her fawns happen along and make the boys waste the rest of their arrows. "Now the bows Beorn had given them were useless," the narrator observes, though I don't see where they were all that useful before, what as they only thing anyone managed to shoot was a black squirrel that tasted so horrible they never shot another one.

Of course, bows and arrows are pretty damned important much later in the story, but not in these guys' hands, amirite?

Nor are the troubles with wildlife over, especially not if you belong to the school of "the appearing and disappearing torchlight is a trap by the spiders." I'm not sure I do, but I don't have a better theory, either. At any rate, Bombur's stream-stoned dreams of a fancy woodland feast get everyone else all worked up and they start thinking they see rings of torchlight and partying way off the path. You know, the path that Beorn told them not to stray from. But as soon as our gang tries to crash the will o'the party, yoink, total blackness and no way of finding the path again. Are the Elves just messing with them, or what?

Not that this matters for much longer because SPIDERS! Who fortunately make the mistake of taking on Bilbo last so that when one of the SPIDERS! starts binding up his legs while he's dozing, Bilbo busts out his little knife-sword-thing and kills that SPIDER! which, when he finally gets around to realizing that he's done so, makes him feel like a badass and since badasses always name their knife-sword-things, names his knife-sword-thing Sting. I had, by the way, totally forgotten how Sting got its name! See why it's good to re-read once in a while?

Then it's just a matter of putting on the Ring (d'oh!) and sneaking up on the rest of the SPIDERS! who have all of his friends trussed up and ready to envenom and dissolve and slurp up like Dwarf-smoothies "after they've hung a bit" because oh yeah, these SPIDERS! can talk. In English. I was finding this odd, on this re-read, as hey, neither Ungoliant (Silmarillion) nor Shelob (LOTR) ever talk, but then again, this is a children's book and talking animals are a common narrative convenience in those, right?

Not that you want your kids reading too many children's books with giant malevolent SPIDERS! in them, I'll reckon.

Anyway, it turns out to be pretty fortunate that these SPIDERS! can talk, so when Bilbo starts chucking rocks at them and insulting them in doggerel they give chase and clever Bilbo can then sneak back and free everybody else. Attercop, indeed. What?**

Did anyone else ever wonder what all these SPIDERS! eat when they can't get wandering Dwarf? Especially when they can't get wandering Dwarf, even when they can? I mean, sustaining bodies that big (and no, no, I'm not going to go there. I'm NOT. I'm not going to be tempted into mystandard rant about how invertebrate land animals that size defy the laws of physics, nope, nope, nope. Because I know you'll all just tell me to let it go, nerd, it's fantasy) takes quite a lot of food...? Anyone?

Anyway, it is a very thrilling escape they have. Of course, "escaping goblins to be caught by wolves" (heh), because ELVES! Uh, cave-dwelling Wood-Elves, who still think Dwarves are guilty of stealing their treasure. Poor Dwarves.

Chapter 9

You've got to feel for the dwarves. They're all still staggering around the dark forest, high on spider venom, slowly starving to death, depending on a little guy with a little sword to protect them... I think I'd be glad to get captured, too. Especially since the little guy is smart enough to go invisible at the first sign of trouble!

I love how they claim their beef with the Dwarves is that they kept trying to crash the Elves' woodland feasts, and that Balin, gonnabe Lord of Moria, manages to climb the high horse about it. "Is it a crime to be lost in the forest, to be hungry and thirsty, to be trapped by spiders?"

Apparently, yes, yes it is. Or at least it's a crime to be DWARVES lost in the forest...

Man, this time around reading these, I'm all about spotting the parallels. Like now, I can't stop thinking about how Tolkien describes Thranduil, the king of the Mirkwood Elves (and also Legolas' daddy), as living in what amounts to a great big cave, and being hopped up on treasure most of the time, and wanting more, and hating dwarves because they also like treasure and so have to be there to steal his, and gosh, doesn't he sound like someone else we have a date with later in this book?

Of course, he's a bit nicer. A bit. I mean, at least he has his soldiers untie them. They're not, he judges, an escape risk because "There is no escape from my magic doors."

ANYWAY, Bilbo winds up spending a crazy long time wearing the Ring, which is kind of horrible to contemplate for those of us who know about that Ring. Good thing certain parties are distracting certain other parties in another part of the forest. Funny to think, though, that this is as close as You-Know-Who (couldn't help myself, there, heh) will be to the Ring before Bilbo's nephew destroys it years later. Hmm!

"I am like a burglar that can't get away, but most go on miserably burgling the same house day after day" he says to himself at one point. But since this is his first time actually, you know, burgling, it's good that he's getting lots of practice, I say.

But of course, none of that matters, because this is the chapter that's all about BARRELS and how Bilbo goes from burglar to smuggler in just a few easy steps. This was one of my favorite parts when I was a kid, because I love rafting and all I ever really thought about was Bilbo's experience but this time, with my newfound overwhelming sympathy for the Dwarves, all I could think about was how much it would suck to be nailed helpless into a barrel and sent down the river to who-knows-where. Hello, claustrophobia!

Chapter 10
Well, the secret is out now, isn't it? Thorin doesn't even hesitate to tell the Master of Lake Town that he is, in fact, that Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror and the rightful King Under the Mountain, and since Lake Town doesn't get a lot of celebrity visits, everyone pretty much turns into 24 hour party people, as if his merely showing up is going to undo all the bad stuff that has happened since Smaug came to stay.

And thus are some very bad seeds planted, because of course some of Thranduil's people are in town and of course they're very interested to learn that this is what the Dwarves have been up to all this time and of course they rush home to tell their treasure-happy king all about it.

Everyone's been happy to let the dragon use all that gold as his giant posturepedic, but now that one snotty dwarf has shown up, each is even happier to start dreaming about what he'll do with his share of the loot, because of course, as the Master tells Thorin, he's sure the New Kingz Under Da Mountain will show proper gratitude later on, if you know what he means. But for now, by all means, help yourself to the food, the clothes and the barber shops (and *cough* some other services that we'd hear all about if George R. R. Martin were writing this instead of J.R.R. Tolkien and let's just all give thanks for that right now).

This should be a bit of a wake up call for everybody. Just because so far no one has held out a hand and said "ahem" after helping the party along doesn't mean everybody's as nice as Elrond or Beorn. But only Bilbo worries about what this big welcome means.

Silly Dwarves.

Chapter 11
Good bye, Lake-Town, hello desert. Smaug totally trashed the place when he moved in, and keeps everything nice and blackened and crispy. Our boys ride through the Desolation without much worry, except for Bilbo, who first got a look at Erebor (the Lonely Mountain) from astride a bucking barrel and never got over the shock of it.

I'm not going to spend a lot on this chapter. It's mostly about everybody getting nice and frustrated trying to find a way into the Mountain, because they've apparently decided that Elrond didn't know what he was talking about when he showed them the moon-runes and what they said. Had I been writing this book, someone would have come out to clobber them for making the racket they do, banging away on the rock with every tool they've got, but I guess Smaug is a sound sleeper. He would have to be, since he's scorched the landscape for miles around and ruined any chances of easy pickings when he gets peckish. He must drop into serious energy conservation mode between faraway raids on Men's livestock, is my guess.

Anyway, of course good old Bilbo finds The Stone which is covered in Snails and waits around for many days until one evening a Thrush shows up and starts knocking the Snails against the Stone like Otters with Shellfish. Which means it's finally Durin's Day! Because everyone... knows that Thrushes only try Escargot... on Durin's Day... Yeah, that still bothers me. It bothered me when I was seven apparently I still haven't gotten over it. Worst plot device ever.***

And then, and then, we have to prolong the suspense anyway and the sun sets behind a cloud and for a moment we're supposed to think "oh no, this is the one Durin's Day when the last ray of the setting sun won't shine on the keyhole!" but of course one very determined red ray shoots through the clouds and hits that keyhole anyway.

Open sesame. Belloc.

Chapter 12
So now it's time for Bilbo to enter the Mountain all by himself, after a nice pompous speech by Thorin and a tart observation on the part of the author about the character of Thorin's race: "Dwarves are not heroes, but calculating folk with a great idea of the value of money." SaraJean and I have been exchanging a lot of back-channel observations about how the Dwarves are the Jews of Middle Earth, but I think I'm going to save that for another post (or let her do it), since this one is getting long, and it's not what this chapter is really about.

It's time for Bilbo to Do His Job, after all.

Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterward were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.

Bizarrely, we have a sort of Princess and the Pea situation after Bilbo hobbits up. He pinches a cup and takes it back to show it off to the Dwarves and Smaug notices the cup's absence almost immediately, even though it is small and Smaug is enormous. Dragons are serious about hoards.

As for the actual meeting between Smaug and Bilbo that follows, I think the Rankin-Bass cartoon did a wonderful job on the primary scene of this chapter. Who are you, and where do you come from?



Though the searchlight eye thing seems a little weird to me as an adult. Perhaps this was the inspiration for the stupid searchlight Sauron in the LOTR films?

Anyway, Bilbo's handling of the dragon, again via misdirection and riddling talk, is a nice parallel to his meeting with Gollum back under those other mountains a while back, isn't it? And Sneaky Bagginses would have been an hors d'oeuvre had he not "won" the Ring away from Gollum.

Of course, this time around, the consequences of Bilbo's tricksy victory are much, much greater. The dragon is amuck, and is angry and very shrewd and pretty sure the Thief came from Lake Town. Watch out!

*Man, when I was little, I felt the loss of those buttons as keenly as anyone ever felt the loss of anything. It was emotionally a very complex moment for me. I was very, very, very sad that Bilbo's buttons all popped off when he was squeezing through the gate because all I could think of at the time was how many hours of overtime his daddy must have had to work to afford those buttons, but I also giggled quite a lot at the image of them whizzing off InvisiBilbo's gut and winging goblins in the head. Pop! Ping! OW! Hee hee.

**From Michael Quinion's World Wide Words: The word is Old English, from attor, poison + cop, the head. (Cop, or coppa, was also used by itself to mean a spider, so cobweb ought really to be spelled copweb.) The name was given to spiders in the mistaken belief that they were all poisonous to humans. By the sixteenth century it had begun to be applied to a cross-grained, ill-natured, figuratively venomous person. There, see, you learned something didn't you?

***And yes, I know it is a very special Thrush, from a long-lived line of Magic Thrushes that ran messages for the original Dwarf kingdom and whatnot. None of that adds up to "only knocks snail shells against a rock on Durin's Day." Grr.

Puttin' the Blog in Balrog I: The Hobbit, Chapters 1-5

Like, I suspect, many of my generation who were kids in the 1970s, my first foray into J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth wasn't a reading experience at all. It was via the animated efforts of Rankin Bass:




You can watch the whole film right there! Isn't modern technology spectacular?

To this very day, I hear John Huston's voice narrating the novel and speaking Gandalf's lines,Orson Bean as Bilbo Baggins, Hans "5000 Fingers of Doctor T" Conried as Thorin, and Glen Yarbrough singing the poetry. I'm sure I'm not alone, there.

It's been several years since I last read The Hobbit, though I read the "more grown-up" Lord of the Rings trilogy pretty much every autumn. I'm pretty happy to return to it for the summer Middle Earth read-a-thon, though. It's truly a book that not only stands up to repeated readings but is deeply enriched by the reader's having tackled Tolkien's serious efforts at world-building in The Silmarillion* a staggering work of myth-making the philologist spent years on, creating a fully realized world and history in which his lovely invented languages would be spoken if he'd been the boss of anything.

Haven't read The Silmarillion? Well, don't worry; it's not everyone's flagon of miruvor. But my good friend EssJay read it so you don't have to (although if you don't mind some grognardy goodness, you probably should anyway). Just start from the bottom of the page, where Part I is, and enjoy her amusing take on it. She was pretty excited to get this party started.

And so am I!

The Hobbit: Chapters 1-5

Chapter 1:
When I was a kid I wanted to live in Bilbo's hobbit hole; it wasn't until I got to college that I realized that pretty much everyone did. A pre-cursor to the modern fad for earth homes, it sounds like the coziest and most convenient dwelling imaginable, but can still host quite a party at need! Good thing, too, because here come ALL THE DWARVES.

The highlight of this chapter when I was a kid was the song the dwarves sing (not in Glen Yarbrough's voice) about what not to do in Bilbo's kitchen. I used to sing it under my breath when my mom made me do the dishes, but like the dwarves, I never followed through on the implied threat. Well, not on purpose (though had the old "break something precious the first time so you never get asked to do it again" gambit worked as well for kids as for husbands...).

This time, though, it's probably the song they sing by way of introducing the theme of what kind of hare-brained mad adventure they're shanghai-ing Bilbo into on Gandalf's recommendation. With EssJay's Silma-summary, if not The Silmarillion itself, fresh in my brain, their story of pale enchanted gold and the underground kingdoms in which they made it into cool stuff was thrillingly resonant of the dwarves' very beginnings, created by a lesser demiurge, Aule, who got impatient waiting around for the hotshot Illuvitar to get on with populating the place already. When Illuvitar found out he was technically late to the character creation party, he had a fit, and so Aule stashed the Seven Fathers of the Dwarves "in various places" in Middle Earth to wait until Illuvitar got around to actually creating the elves.

Our man Thorin, wearer of the sky blue hood with a silver tassel (this description thus assuring for all time that I would always, always, always imagine Tolkien's Dwarves wearing fezzes) who wants to take back his family's treasure hoard from the dragon Smaug, is a direct lineal descendant of the first of the dwarves to awaken, and has a huge chip on his shoulder that makes a lot more sense when the reader realizes that the dwarves shoulda come first, gosh darn it. They deserve a little help when a dragon comes along, roasts most of their families alive and turns all of their gold into a big shiny mattress (which, diamond-hard scales or not, that still has to be maybe the least comfortable bed ever, surely?), but do they get any from any of the Men or Elves living nearby? Like hell they do.

But really, when you're depending on the goodwill of your customers to survive a disaster, you're probably doing it wrong. Especially if those customers just took it in the pants, too. But hey.

Point is, these are wronged dwarves, and Gandalf has somehow convinced them that this Baggins character, who looks more like a grocer than a burglar, is their best bet at righting this terrible wrong. But has he convinced Baggins himself? Let's read on!*

Chapter 2:
Holy faits accompli, Gandalf! I mean, I know you're basically a demigod and all, but you're really quite the con man, aren't you? When in doubt, convince your mark that he's already agreed and it would be indecent to pull out now, then hustle him out the door without any pocket handkerchiefs. Ha ha.

So we're off now, twelve dwarves and Bilbo on ponies, heading for adventure. Gandalf catches them up "splendid on a white horse" and for some reason this is the first time I've said "Shadowfax?" at this point. Like I said, it's been a long time since I read The Hobbit -- and it's the fact that you can read a book 20-some times and still discover new things that marks it as an exceptionally good one.

"He had brought a lot of pocket handkerchiefs and Bilbo's pipe and tobacco." Not pipeweed, tobacco. Was Bilbo just too much of a fuddy duddy to smoke Longbottom Leaf**, are pipeweed and tobacco synonymous, or other? This is all, of course, deeply irrelevant to everyone except for those people who love to think of Gandalf and the Hobbits as getting high together. I'm really not one of those. Your mileage may vary.

And so begins the most crummyawsome vacation ever. Clark Griswold has nothing on these guys, who barely clear the borders of the Shire (one presumes: the Shire is not named in this book, just references to wild but respectable countryside settled by hobbits and farmers and dwarves on errands) before a pony bolts, two of the guys nearly drown trying to get him out of a river swollen with lots of spring runoff, and 1/14th of the baggage is gone. I hope Dinky wasn't tied onto that one.

All that is, of course, neither here nor there, for the point of this chapter is TROLLS! Trolls who sound a lot like I imagine my dad did when he was a kid "Mutton yesterday, mutton today and blimey, if it don't look like mutton again tomorrer." My dad grew up eating mutton and hated it, and now won't even touch a nice rack of lamb because as far as he's concerned, it's mutton. He also had two brothers, and they liked to go camping, so my mental picture of these trolls has always been very, very distorted, conflated with that of three rough-and-tumble little boys camping in the sagebrush as it is.***

Wait, did I just call my dad and uncles trolls? But of course, I speak of when they were little boys, and from the stories I've heard growing up, Dennis the Menace had nothing on them, so the comparison may be as apt as it is unflattering. I definitely come from the school of thought that holds that children are born savage little beasts and have to learn to be civilized beings, rather than the silly old Rousseauist "saintly innocent child" school. And hey, how do we know these are adult trolls, sitting here on the edge of the wilds of Middle Earth? They could well be three little troll brothers on their first foray on their own. Poor things, with nasty Mr. Bagginses the Burrahobbit (how I laughed at that as a kid! This again reminds me of my father, who is never one to pass up a chance to pounce on the absurd in something a kid has said to him) looking on and dreaming of robbing or murdering them while they gobble their supper.

And there I've talked myself into feeling sorry for the trolls.

But Bilbo soon redeems himself in my eyes, for he is more kin to me and my sense of humor than the trolls are, really. "I am a good cook myself, and I cook better than I cook, if you see what I mean." One wonders what Tolkien might have made of the astonishing versatility of a certain other monosyllabic term (the one beginning with "F") had he been of a mind to. At any rate, if there were any lingering doubt that a philologist wrote this book, this would fry it up in a pan, no?

At any rate, Gandalf's extended ruse to rescue everybody still stands up as a masterful bit of pranking, though with my newfound sympathy for the trolls, it feels kind of mean-spirited. Still, The Hobbit would be a much shorter book if the dwarves all wound up being minced and boiled, or roasted, or squashed to jelly, to add a little variety to Bert's and Tom's and Bill's diets, right?

Because without the dwarves, Bilbo would probably have turned around and gone back to his hobbit hole with the beautiful green door. Right?

We'll meet these trolls once again early on in Fellowship of the Ring, and of course this chapter is also noticeable as the origin of Gandalf's possession of the famous Gondolin-made sword Glamdring, known as "Foe-Hammer" to the orcs, and of Thorin's getting Orcrist, aka "Goblin Cleaver", which Bill and Bert and Tom had in their secret hoard.

Chapter 3
As our party slouches on towards Rivendell, the question that really won't let me go this time around is this: how does Bilbo know what Elves smell like? He's led, we've been told, quite a lot, a very quiet, even sheltered life, not one to "go out of the blue for mad adventures" so his chances of ever having encountered an Elve (tee hee), let alone Elves, seem pretty slim. But here he is, as they follow the trail of white rocks, remarking that "it smells like Elves!" So what's the explanation, here? Is it some genetically bestowed superpower from the Took side of his ancestry? Are the pocket handkerchiefs Gandalf brought along imbued with a special "detect Elf smell" charm? Inquiring minds want to know. Or at least this one does.

Anyway, Rivendell. Everybody's favorite set design from The Fellowship of the Ring's film adaptation (well, almost everyone's; I'm sure there are some stump humpers out there who like Lothlorien better), home of Agent Smith/V/Tick/Hugo Weaving, the Last Homely House, where a rather campy bunch of know-it-alls sing a very silly song of welcome**** and observe that the sight of Bilbo the hobbit on a pony is "delicious" and later Elrond reveals the proud lineage of Gandolf's shiny new sword (and of Thorin's too, but the King of Gondolin, Turgon himself, wore Glamdring to war, so it's somewhat cooler) and finds the hidden moon runes on Thorin's treasure map. I was always tantalized by his observation, after he has read his bit from the map and been asked if there's anything else, that there is "none to be seen by this moon." Am I the only one who would immediately be clamoring to look at the map during every other moon phase just in case? Maybe to see if there's a note saying that Smaug is ticklish under his left wing or that if you play Dwarves in da Hood's latest hit single at just the right volume he'll forget who he is and you can trick him into impregnating his sister?

Anyone?

OK, just me, then.

Also: not a lot of geo/ecological change going on in Middle Earth at this point, that everyone can be absolutely sure that the grey stone is going to stay put and that the thrush is going to keep on "knocking" in exactly the same place every year on Durin's Day and never, ever take a year off. If it were me trying to break into the Lonely Mountain, I could guarandamntee that the year I got there would also be the year some bastard with a bow took my flying keyhole clue home to the missus to be made into pie. But then, as we'll shortly see in spades, Bilbo is a much luckier person than I am, which is probably why the KATE STATION has never seen a Dwarvish invasion, unless you count some nights when I am grumpy, sneezy and sleepy all at once.

Chapter 4
This is the most action-packed chapter yet, and also contains some of Tolkien's very finest weather pr0n as he describes a big mountain thunderstorm in loving detail. I remember one year, I must have been about nine or ten years old, when I took my copy of The Hobbit (from the Ballantine boxed set, which I still have, much worn, so worn that this time I'm reading on my Kindle to spare yet more wear. I still think those are the coolest covers) camping and we got caught in a thunderstorm just like this one. I kept quoting from these passages and babbling about stone giants until my parents told me, very kindly, to shut up. Then the next morning, a herd of sheep invaded our camp site on their way somewhere and our tiny peek-a-poo miraculously survived trying to herd them. What I'm saying here is that I KNOW!

I also learned from this chapter that it's better to get soaked to the bone than take shelter in a strange cave. No strange caves up in Wyoming's Snowy Range, which is good, because if we'd ever gotten caught in a storm and had to shelter in one I would have had screaming hysterical fits.

But it's the swords that were really the problem here, right? Because otherwise the goblins would surely have just eaten the ponies, rifled through the baggage, and let the dwarves and hobbits go, because Thorin apologized, right? Pompously, but you know, everyone knows Thorin's kind of a pompous jerk and that news has surely made it deep into the roots of the Misty Mountains and the tunnels of what is probably Moria or at least the exurban tunnel network outside Moria, where all the Big Box joints drove all the mom 'n' pop pickaxe-and-shovel shops out of business, forcing all the goblins to make the trek to the 'burbs to get their whips, right? Because it was only when the goblins found that Thorin had Orcrist, aka Goblin Cleaver but known as Biter to the goblins, that they got mad, right? Otherwise it would have all been goblin tea and finger sandwiches. Um. Ew.

Of course, in terms of the bigger picture (much bigger), it's a very good thing that Thorin had Biter, or else there would have been no dramatic escape through the tunnels that led to Bilbo getting knocked out and dropped and all of the events of Chapter 5 and, his burglar-y exploits later in the book and, you know, the whole Lord of the Rings trilogy. A goblin would have found the One Ring, lorded it over his friends for a while until the Nazgul came along and said, dude, that's our Master's and then Middle Earth would have turned into one giant Chinese Special Economic Zone.

Most important trolls EVER.

Chapter 5
It's such a tiny little moment, isn't it, when Bilbo finds the Ring? He might just have easily have left it where he, uh, felt it. He's much more concerned that he doesn't have any matches to light his pipe. Ho ho, if he had only known, I'm sure he could have made fire happen with the almighty power of the trinket in his pocket!

Of course, he could have also probably made Smaug get out of bed and dance the hula later on, too. But all this might-have-been speculation is probably only amusing to me.

I'm a little concerned that he wore Sting, the little dagger-sword he found in Bert and Tom and Bill's stash, inside his breeches. How did he not do permanent, uh, damage to himself thereby in all the commotion and jostling in the tunnels? On the other hand, he never did have children...

All this is neither here nor there (and back again), however, because this chapter is all about Gollum, "as dark as darkness" (but acceptable in the movie version as a pale and stunted cave animal type creature, though then perhaps he should have been blind as well, no?) whom we obsessive re-readers now know used to be a being "very like" a hobbit*****, and has a hobbity, Tolkien-y love of riddles and word-play and also a razory attention on the task at hand, which is why it never even occurs to him that "what have I got in my pocket?" is neither a riddle nor a query directed at him and basically talks himself into forfeiting to Bilbo. Of course, we re-readers see a sort of parallel here with how the Ring came to be Gollum's back when he was Smeagol and logicked his way into believing that it was his birthday present from Deagol. Not that he knows he's lost that yet, though it is, in fact, the answer to Bilbo's non-riddle. Oh, clever, cleaver J.R.R!

I always, by the way, liked the idea that the goblins avoided the underground pool where Gollum lived because "they had a feeling something unpleasant was lurking down there." I always imagined Gollum sort of exulting in the fact that he was the scary thing in the water that the goblins were afraid of. They fearsss us, my preciousss!

Also, I remember as a tyke being completely gobsmacked by these riddles, because the only riddles I'd heard up until that time had been barely more complicated than knock-knock jokes, and these were so elegant, elusive and allusive I could have cried from sheer happiness! Except I remember being a little annoyed that Bilbo only accidentally guessed the Time riddle, because I'd gotten that one right away and was very impatient with him, but as the book says, I was sitting comfortably in my bedroom, beneath my Shaun Cassidy poster (shut up!) and not in danger of being eaten by anything except for some mosquitoes.

And then, of course, there is the all-important Pity of Bilbo, which I didn't remember as being so dramatic as it actually is, here. Gollum is completely at his mercy; Bilbo is invisible and has a sword and Gollum doesn't even realize his danger, and Bilbo has "a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering."

And you wonder why I almost always wind up feeling sorry for the bad guy?

And that's it for Chapters 1-5. Watch this space for more as our Summer of Middle Earth rolls on!

*He has also, thank goodness, convinced them that maybe trying to take on the Necromancer just now might not be the greatest of ideas. Of course, we all know who the Necromancer is, don't we?

Tell me this doesn't look like an Ullver album cover.

**And yes, now I'm thinking of Neville. Shut up.

***For more on how inaccurate a lot of my mental imagery of Middle Earth's landscapes have been, check out this post from my old blog back in 2001. Skip towards the bottom if you're impatient.

****And Tolkien intimates that the big beef between Dwarves and Elves lies chiefly in how much the Elves like to make fun of Dwarves' beards, which is, of course, balderdash, but it's amusing balderdash, so hey.

*****And yet in this book, our narrator claims "I don't know where he came from, nor who he was." Of course, The Hobbit is meant to be an adaptation or excerpt from Bilbo's travelogue and we don't ever, in any of the books, narrative, mytho-historical or behind-the-scenes-constructed-by-Christopher-from-Daddy's-notes, learn if Bilbo was ever told Gollum's origin story. I'm sure he must have heard it at some point, say on a particularly dull day at the Grey Havens, but we don't know for certain that he ever knew. So if this is just meant to be Bilbo telling this story, that's one thing, but if it's Tolkien, this is just coy and silly, isn't it? If he didn't want to tell the back-story here, he didn't have to, but he didn't have to call attention to there being a supposedly unknown back-story here, either! But then, but then, just pages later, we're told that asking riddles "and sometimes guessing them, had been the only game he had ever played with other funny cratures sitting in their holes in the long, long ago" so, um, argh! Yes, these are really the thoughts I have, at age 42, reading a book I first read at age 7.