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 3: A Short Rest.
This review contains spoilers.
A short rest, a short chapter. The adventuring party goes to visit Elrond Halfelven in the Last Homely House in Rivendell. Elrond reads the names of the two legendary swords they found in the troll cave, and they learn about moon letters.
Then they continue their journey.
Elrond identifies Thorin's sword as Orcrist, which means "goblin cleaver" in the ancient tongue of Gondolin. We know that Thorin's father, and indeed most of Erebor, has been overrun by goblins, and indeed Thorin's father was slain by the terrible Azog the Goblin.
In The Hobbit, one of the big threats are goblins. In The Lord of the Rings, however, there's more talk about orcs than goblins. And in this chapter, we learn that a sword is literally named "orcrist" and translated as "goblin cleaver", which makes me think that the word "orc" is intended by Tolkien, at least in The Hobbit, to be synonymous with "goblin". I can't tell whether that's what he envisioned for The Hobbit and then changed his mind in The Lord of the Rings or whether he'd developed his mythology further by the time LOTR was written and decided that both goblins and orcs (and uruks) existed.
Tolkien isn't always great at introducing the unique concepts of his world. I don't know, maybe he expected people at that time to have a common understanding of what he wrote about. Maybe talking about goblins and trolls and giant eagles and elves, and so on, just seemed obvious to him. Why tell the reader directly that trolls keep lairs with locks on them, when you can pretend like the reader already knows? It's a trick that works really well for him, and for lots of other authors. It does trick you into believing the fictional world is real, because you're reading a book that doesn't bother explaining stuff to you that, as an imaginary inhabitant of the fictional world you're spending time in, you would already know it.
But there's just as much of a tradition of explaining things to readers. It's a little clumsy by comparison, but it's a valid way to build a world. Don't just shrug and point at an imaginary painting. Paint the picture, and spend pages describing every last detail to the reader. Yes, it breaks the fourth wall by admitting to the reader that because they're not from around here, you have to explain something really basic, like the difference between goblins and orcs (or that there is no difference), but that makes the concept clear in the reader's mind, and can add substance to the fictional world.
The only time Tolkien stopped the narrative to explain a unique concept is in the first chapter, when he concedes to explain what a hobbit is. After that, he pretty much just tells his story. It works, but I still don't know whether goblins and orcs are the same species or two different species. Either way, in The Hobbit only goblins are mentioned.
I feel like most people picture Tolkien's elves as somber and sad, detached from the rest of the world out of disdain. But the elves we meet just outside of Rivendell are cheerful and a little mischievous. They secretly follow the party for a while, until they can no longer resist singing. Then they poke fun at the party, saying things like "Mind Bilbo doesn't eat all the cakes! He is too fat to get through key-holes yet!" and "Don't dip your beard in the foam, Thorin! It is long enough without watering it."
Gandalf has to step in to chide them, saying "Hush, hush! Valleys have ears, and some elves have over merry tongues. Good night!"
Elrond himself comes across a little more serious, but the impression I was left with was that the elves of Middle Earth are oblivious and sort of foreign. They're lighthearted at inappropriate times, confident, cheerful, optimistic. This carries over into The Lord of the Rings with early chapters featuring Legolas, although LOTR is generally more serious in tone than The Hobbit so it doesn't last throughout the entire series. But this meeting with elves has nevertheless made me feel like there's as much fairy as fair in Tolkien's elven folk.
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 introduces an entirely new species to the reader. That's pretty exciting from a worldbuilding perspective.
Chapter 4 is next!