A Spot of Hobbiting

I first read this book (the exact volume pictured) when I was fourteen, and we took a very slow overnight train from Johannesburg to Durban.

Yesterday my daughters and I spent the afternoon watching The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. The funniest part is when the lead dwarf Thorin says rather loudly that perhaps their plan isn’t going to work. This is while they are all inside the Lonely Mountain with Smaug the dragon prowling around breathing out bursts of fire that seem to travel only slightly slower than the dwarves can run.

If you have read the book you will know that Bilbo the hobbit and a few dwarves set off across Middle Earth to reclaim the treasure under the mountain from Smaug who has taken up residence in the dwarves previous home. Their plan goes something like this: get to mountain, kill dragon, live happily ever after with piles and piles of gold.

A couple of times along the way, head dwarf asserts his birthright as King-under-the-Mountain (something Smaug finds only mildly amusing), and the beautiful thin blonde elves kill a lot of evil (and very ugly) orcs, while the orcs manage to kill relatively few elves or dwarves, despite their relatively much greater number. Meanwhile the two pretty girls in Laketown have not been trained to kill multiple orcs at once, so instead they scream, very bravely throw a plate in one orc’s face, and then hide under the table while their brother heads off in a boat with the only black arrow left in the world able to kill Smaug.

Hmm. My daughters and I are currently working our way through The Lord of the Rings at bedtime (the book, not the film). So far the hobbits do not seem too perturbed by the fact that they are being pursued by faceless Black Riders. They have managed to ingratiate themselves with three different hosts, have had a bath, and have eaten quite a lot of good food. Their plan is about as good as the dwarves’ previous plan: get to the Cracks of Doom, throw in the ring, and get home in time for supper.

Has anyone else noticed that The Lord of The Rings is hysterically funny? Bilbo and the dwarves only had one bath in The Desolation of Smaug (on arrival in Laketown, just before the orc attack): if one is going to be barbecued by a dragon it helps to smell nice for the occasion. If (in the book) they have another bath before they get to the Cracks of Doom I think I am going to die.

Critical Cultural Studies is a branch of the Social Sciences that takes a critical look at cultural products, particularly in relation to how they reproduce or re-inscribe dominant narratives about things like power, gender, ethnicity, body image and (yes you guessed it!) diet.

In The Hobbit Gollum is portrayed as a hideously depraved creature because he eats raw fish, is partial to the occasional goblin, and would quite like to eat Bilbo if he could. Bilbo on the other hand is a civilised sort of creature (aka ‘good’), and therefore he prefers bacon sandwiches.

We never get to find out why the orcs hate the dwarves so much. Mainly it seems to be because the orcs are ‘evil’, as demonstrated clearly by their manifest ugliness. As my daughter quite rightly pointed out, it all really just depends on whose side you are on. A film telling the story from the orcs’ point of view might be informative.

Tolkien would never be allowed to publish The Lord of The Rings in the form that he did today. It would be cut in half at least (much less eating and bathing, and fewer descriptive passages about mist), but back in 1954 perhaps it all seemed quite splendid. Clearly, bearing this latter point in mind, Sauron is Hitler, the orcs represent the Germans and the elves, dwarves and men are the Allied Forces.

We have worked out that if we read six pages of The Lord of the Rings a night we will have it finished by Christmas, and I have worked out that at the rate I am going I have about 400 hours more editing to do on my book, which is going to be about the same size as The Lord of the Rings and therefore is not going to be finished before Christmas. However, since nobody will publish it in its entirety, which is how I want to publish it, I have decided to publish it myself. I’m glad we have The Lord of the Rings in the world even if only for its historical value and as fodder for nerds like me who are interested in Critical Cultural Studies. Please buy my book and use it as a doorstop. One day someone might find something of interest in it.

In the meantime, please also remember that nobody owns a piece of the earth just because they were born there, their father was born there, or their father killed a lot of orcs in order to stake his claim to the ground. Cooking your dead flesh and eating it sandwiched between two slices of bread does not make you inherently less evil than someone who eats theirs raw with their bare hands, and the points of view of both the pigs and the orcs matter if there is ever to be peace on Middle Earth.

Oh, and if you haven’t got a plan, you need to get a plan. In real life nobody defeats Smaug with a knitting needle he just happened to whip out of his back pocket...