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 8: Flies and Spiders.
This review contains spoilers.
Gandalf has departed, and the dwarves and Bilbo enter Mirkwood forest. They come across a river, which Beorn warned them not to touch. Bilbo spies a boat on the other side, so the dwarves use grappling hooks to snag it and bring it back across. They ferry themselves to the other side in small groups. Bombur falls in and succumbs to a magical sleep spell.
After days of wandering through the forest the best they can, with the slumbering Bombur in tow, their rations start to dwindle. One evening, Bombur awakens. He has no memory of the adventure prior to dining at Bilbo's home, which means little to us readers because we have no knowledge of the adventure prior to that anyway.
Bombur also says he's been dreaming of food, at which point everyone notices twinkling lights not far away. They go toward the lights and discover that some wood elves are having a feast in a clearing. When the dwarves stumble out of the trees to ask for food, the lights go out and the elves (and their food) disappear.
This happens several times until at last, in the confusion of the darkness, all of the dwarves but Thorin are abducted by giant spiders. Bilbo finds them and rescues them, and we learn that Thorin has been captured by the elves.
On the surface, this chapter might seem like just another monster-of-the-week episode in the ongoing series of this book's misadventures. The dwarves are captured, the dwarves are rescued. It's the established pattern.
But this time, there's a noticeable difference. Slowly but surely, Bilbo becomes the hero of the story. This is Bilbo's turning point, in a big way. Armed with his magical ring and his elvish blade, he taunts the spiders to draw them away from the dwarves, and then attacks and slays many of them. We've never seen Bilbo so confident and so capable, and he expertly manages both the battlefield and the escape.
Also in this chapter, Tolkien establishes the fantasy trope of the adventurers wandering through the cursed forest. It's happened in a lot of fantasy since. A character enters a dark forest, gets spooked by some imagined threat and then overcomes a real one just before emerging as a hero.
Appropriately, this chapter is undeniably a major turning point in the book. I think there's a real argument that Gandalf knew, or at least felt, that he needed to get away from the party so that Bilbo could grow into a hero. I doubt Gandalf knew it would happen mere days after he left, or exactly in this way, but this chapter is the fulfillment of Gandalf's promise that Bilbo would surprise the dwarves by the end.
I'm tracking Bilbo's reputation with the dwarves, and the dwarves' reputation with Bilbo, as the book progresses. This one tips the scales severely in Bilbo's favour.
Out of sportsmanship, I'll consider Bilbo spotting the boat and having the idea to pull it across as a single Victory Point. Grabbing the rope after the dwarves lose their grip is another Victory point, though, because without Bilbo's intervention Fili's Victory Point would be void (because the boat would have been lost). Bilbo did a lot of work to rescue the dwarves from the spiders, but I'll count it all as 1 Victory Point just to keep accounting simple.
The new score is:
This chapter should have been a boring chapter. On the surface, there's hardly any change of status, aside from Thorin being captured by some angry wood elves, but that could have been done in a paragraph or two. But once you start reading the chapter and witness Bilbo transforming himself from a timid and homely hobbit into a true hero, Flies and Spiders is actually one of the most significant chapters in the book. It's the counterpoint to the Trolls chapter, and the avoidance of another goblin debacle. This is a resounding victory for the dwarven party, and a personal victory for Bilbo Baggins.