I'm reading The Hobbit again, as I live-action roleplay as a Tolkien scholar in an attempt to understand Middle Earth, its lore, and its effect on modern gaming. I'm reviewing each chapter of the book as I read, and this is my review of Chapter 4: Over Hill and Under Hill.
This review contains spoilers.
The adventuring party stumbles through the Misty Mountains. It starts to rain, so they take shelter in a cave, where they relax and eat and smoke, and Gandalf manipulates the smoke rings as a form of entertainment.
Late that night, they're abducted by goblins. Gandalf manages to rescue them, though, and most everyone escapes. Bilbo, of course, falls down a crevice, and in the next chapter he'll entcounter Gollum but this chapter closes with Bilbo simply being lost from the party.
Gandalf initially gets away from the goblins through the use of a flash of light that leaves behind the smell of gunpowder. This is later described by goblins themselves as lightning that struck and killed several goblins. This is one of those instances where I think Tolkien undersells magic in Middle Earth. After all, Tolkien himself describes the feat as a flash of light leaving behind a smell like gunpowder. It's like he's broadcasting to the reader that it's not magic, it's just a clever old man who's studied a lot and knows how to use the chemicals in nature that most people in a faux medieval setting do. The fact that goblins talk about it much differently later in the chapter can be interpreted in two ways. The narrator is either unreliable, or the goblins are inflating the danger they faced to impress the Great Goblin.
It's because of scenes like this that, for longer than I care to admit, I saw Gandalf mostly as a wise old man who happened to know some useful party tricks. Middle Earth, as far as I was concerned, was a low magic setting. I feel a little vindicated by tricksy passages like this.
And it's passages like these that reaffirm my belief that part of the "game" that Tolkien has left to posterity is to figure out what was really going in his Middle Earth. To read Tolkien is to roleplay as an antiquarian in Middle Earth. You're studying passages written by a sometimes unreliable narrator, and there are parts of the story missing because they never got published during his lifetime, and it's up to you to piece it all together.
One of the factors that drives the adventuring party into the caves are stone giants playing Cricket with boulders. This is kind of a big deal, and in typical Tolkien fashion it's basically a footnote. It's such a footnote, in fact, that I still hear people today say that it was Peter Jackson who "added" stone giants into The Hobbit. And even when they acquiesce that Tolkien wrote stone giants into the books, they claim it was meant metaphorically.
The stone giants are absolutely in The Hobbit, and it's not metaphorical. The effects of the stone giants throwing boulders is described, and the dwarves discuss the giants as an actual, real danger.
Interestingly though, the stone giants are not outwardly aggressive. I think the movie is a little confusing on this point. It's hard to tell whether the dwarves are nearly smashed deliberately by rocks because the giants spot them and target them, or whether they have merely encountered the collateral hazards they only feared in the book. Somebody mentions giants again in one of the LOTR books, I think as engines of war, and even then it's hard to tell whether the giants are impractical because they're evil or because they're just stubborn or maybe juvenile.
Either way, I don't think you can argue that there are no giants in Middle Earth. They're definitely there.
What's not there is any sense of rivalry between dwarves and giants, which a modern RPG player might be used to from Forgotten Realms or Golarion lore. From this brief encounter (such as it is) with giants in Middle Earth, there's no indication that they have a special hatred of dwarves or that dwarves fear giants any more than anyone else might. Giants throw rocks for fun, which is dangerous for small folk. It seems to be as simple as that.
There's a bunch of goblins in this chapter, and you get pretty up close and personal with them. They seem like a greedy, suspicious, miserly lot who despise dwarves and anybody else who isn't a goblin.
You get the sense, from this chapter and from the history Thorin has with goblins, that goblins and dwarves essentially are, more than anything, competing the same resources. Goblins seem to live under mountains, they hoard treasure, they seem to have a hierarchy culminating with a Great Goblin. Tolkien's dwarves live under mountains, they hoard treasure, and have a hierarchy culminating with a king. The main difference is that dwarves have refined stonecrafting ability, while goblins are crude, aggressive, and invasive.
I'm not interested in intellectualizing it too much. I appreciate the hard line between Good and Evil in a fantasy setting. I don't read about fights against goblins so I can ponder what the goblins might have required to prosper and become the best versions of themselves. A goblin is a fictional monster whose main goal in life is to be a monster, and I'm happy with that. It's interesting, though, to observe that maybe there is some backstory to goblin and dwarf politics that we're not getting, especially compared to orcs. Orcs are evil because they're the spawn of Morgoth or a science experiment of Saruman's, or whatever. They're not competing for resources, they're just invading Middle Earth because Middle Earth is a thing of beauty and their lord wants to destroy it. Goblins might have more nuance, as it turns out.
Or, goblins are actually orcs because, as I pointed out in Chapter 3, the term "Orcrist" is transalted by Elrond as "goblin cleaver". That suggests that "orc" is the Elf word for "goblin".
I'm tracking Bilbo's reputation with the dwarves, and the dwarves' reputation with Bilbo, as the book progresses. There's no change to the score in this chapter, so Bilbo still has 1 Victory Point for pickpocketing a key from the trolls, and the dwarves are still at 0.
This was a good chapter that mentions a new species, and introduces in full That's pretty exciting from a worldbuilding perspective.
Chapter 5 is next, and it's easily the most famous chapter out of maybe all of Tolkien's writings.