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 7: Queer Lodgings.
This review contains spoilers.
The adventuring party has escaped goblins, Gollum, wolves, and wargs, and their rations have been all but lost. It occurs to Gandalf that they're travelling through the land of a man called Beorn, and he proposes that they go to him for assistance.
Not wanting to appear to be overly imposing, Gandalf and Bilbo approaches Beorn's homestead first. They're invited to tea, and then a pair of dwarves arrive every 5 minutes, almost as if by coincidence. Of all the comedic moments in Tolkien's works (and there aren't many), this is hands-down the most hilarious. My father couldn't even get through the chapter without laughing to the point of tears, and while I can't claim I find it that funny, I do love the way Gandalf stumbles into revealing an ever-increasing number of dwarf companions as he tells his story to Beorn. Beorn's interjections are priceless, too, and then of course no sooner do they gain clarity about just how many dwarves Gandalf is travelling with, another two dwarves show up at the door. It's a brilliant scene, and probably a masterclass in both the slow reveal and social engineering. Beorn doesn't even realise he's invited 14 house guests to stay with him until after he's done it.
They stay with Beorn for two days, and during that time they observe that Beorn hosts animals in his home more often than he hosts people. The animals don't appear to talk like the giant eagles do, but they sit at tables and seem pretty civilised and socialable. Well, except for the bears.
At the end of the chapter, the party is sent toward Mirkwood Forest with some ponies on loan and renewed supplies. Gandalf, however, has pressing business elsewhere and leaves the party to their own devices.
Clarifying exactly what happened during the goblin escape, this chapter says explicitly that Gandalf killed goblins with a flash. So the bright flash that he used didn't just disorientate the goblins, it actually directly slew some of them.
This is, um, pretty powerful.
Once again, I'm forced to confess that I always thought that Gandalf was basically a party magician. I wasn't even sure how much of his quote-unquote magic was mystical, and how much of it was technology that just hadn't become commonplace yet (like a fueled lighter instead of a match, or spectacular fireworks displays using blackpowder, and so on). The past 3 chapters, however, has removed all doubt. I don't know what it costs him or how he does it, but Gandalf can produce a flash of blinding light that also kills an unspecified number of enemies.
He doesn't do it often, so we have to assume that it's either really hard to do, or not always effective, or really expensive, or really dangerous. Then again, we don't really know how often he doesn't do it. There's a lot of room to read between the lines in Tolkien's works, and just because he doesn't write the words "And then Gandalf killed a bunch of orcs with a flash of light" it doesn't mean that during some of the battle scenes of Lord of the Rings there weren't flashes of magical light happening in a corner of the battlefield.
Beorn befriends the adventuring party because they're at odds with goblins and wargs. He hates goblins because they invade his land, and he's basically a druid.
I don't know anything about the lore surrounding druids. As a player of Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant, however, I see a lot of the Druid class in Beorn:
That's easily the description of a D&D druid, and when you consider it along with the archetype of Bilbo as a thief, Aragorn as a ranger, and Gandalf as a wizard, you've accounted for most of the early D&D classes. Tolkien's works were obviously a big influence on D&D, so this isn't news. It's just interesting to see some familiar tropes.
I'm tracking Bilbo's reputation with the dwarves, and the dwarves' reputation with Bilbo, as the book progresses. No change during this chapter. The score remains:
This was a fun chapter, and gives the heroes a little time to recover. Tolkien's an expert storyteller, though, and so just when things are looking up, Gandalf reminds the dwarves that he must leave them for business elsewhere. I remember this being a point of confusion for a lot of readers. Much in the same way that Lord of the Rings readers often ask "why don't the eagles just fly Frodo to Mordor?", I've heard The Hobbit readers ask "Why doesn't Gandalf just stay with the dwarves?" It's always seemed like such a bizarre question to me because of its inherent assumption that the main character of a book is also the main character of the entire universe. The question can only be posed if you assume that everyone else is just supporting cast for the "main character". That's the thing about fiction that bugs me most. Because the book is about a specific person or group, the reader is lulled into the expectation that nothing and nobody else in the book matters. It's like we, as readers, become sympathetic narcissists. What do you mean you can't drop everything you're doing and help the main character? DO YOU KNOW WHO HE IS?
As with the real world, the fictional world doesn't stop so the character we happen to be following can do the thing they need to do. That's even when their actions could save the entire world from sure destruction. The world goes on, because other people have stuff they need to do, too. It may or may not save the world but, in the words of uncle Owen, "he'd better have those units in the South Ridge repaired by midday, or there'll be hell to pay."