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 11: On the doorstep.
This review contains spoilers.
The dwarves reach Smaug's lair, but must find a safe way inside.
Finding the back entrance to halls under the mountain is relatively simple, and the dwarves locate it after only a little exploration. Everyone's on edge though, because the myth of a long-forgotten dragon feels less and less like myth the closer you get to it. Even the men of Laketown only accompany them part of the way, feeling less enthusiastic about Thorin's legend the farther from familiar territory they travel.
Once Bilbo locates the backdoor, the hobbit and the dwarves are unable to open it. They try everything, including dwarven mining, but the magic sealing the door is too powerful to bypass. It's a puzzle, of sorts, like in any good dungeon crawl. But actually they technically already have the answer, and so does the reader, but they've forgotten it by now (and probably many readers will have, too). It's impossible for me to experience this chapter with fresh eyes because I literally can't remember a time when I didn't know how the door is meant to be opened. I guess there must have been some point in my life that I didn't know the answer, but my dad read The Hobbit to me several times throughout my childhood, and the thrush has always been an iconic bird to me.
For much of this chapter, the dwarves are pretty miserable and helpless. Bilbo is the driving force from start to finish. I believe their respective attitudes are borne of their relationship to the end goal. For the dwarves, this feels like the culmination of a journey that started long before they ever reached Bilbo's home in the Shire. Before they were on the doorstep of the dragon's lair, anything was possible. They could safely imagine success, and invent fantasies of how rich they'd be, and how they'd spend their wealth and restore the honour of their lineage. But now they had actually arrived, and at best it's equally likely that they fail as succeed. It must have been a terrifying feeling. Whether they acknowledged it or not, it must have made them resist any action that would bring them that much closer to learning how their story was actually going to end.
Bilbo, on the other hand, is barely invested in the adventure. He's tagging along on a whim, still dreaming of returning home. We have no indication that it has at all occurred to him that he's going to actually get gold in exchange for his services. He's a barely-willing consultant, brought in to manage a very specific aspect of the job, and then he gets to go home at the end and forget any of it ever happened.
As terrifying as it is to steal into a dragon's lair, I don't think Bilbo is thinking that far ahead yet. In fact, I think he's gained courage both from recent successes and because he's had to displace his own concerns to invent solutions for the dwarves. I work in IT and have done my fair share of consultation, and this is a familiar phenomenon to me. The only thing on the line is your reputation, which is valuable but it depends on your immediate actions. Because you believe you know what's best (or else you wouldn't have taken the consulting role), you advance bravely into the territory everyone is afraid of.
I think Bilbo is emboldened by the same power, so he finds the secret door, he solves the puzzle, and in the next chapter he'll go in and face the evil within.
I'm tracking Bilbo's reputation with the dwarves, and the dwarves' reputation with Bilbo, as the book progresses. In this chapter, Bilbo both found the door and figured out how to open it. Because they're trailing so far behind, I'll be generous to the dwarves and count Bilbo's 2 contributions in this chapter as a single Victory Point:
The language and atmosphere in this chapter must have been some of the key components to the book's success among imaginative wargamers. When the dwarves manage to get the door open, Tolkien describes the darkness itself as something that seeps like smoke from the passageway. There's magic on the door that prevents people from seeing the keyhole, it's impervious to the mining tools of dwarves. The dragon's presence is felt long before it's confirmed (in fact we still don't know for sure that there is a dragon inside). It's subtly one of the most evocative chapters yet, even though the events within it are relatively mundane (insofar as opening a magically sealed door can be).