On the subject of meeting in the Shire… Isn’t it the case that the dwarves arrived separately at Bilbo’s house? As I understand it, there was no expedition until after they’d all gathered in the Shire and left from there. The issue of 13 is only an issue after they all get together.
So that doesn’t rule out Gandalf picking another place for them to start, but the starting point would have to be before the dangerous terrain starts. You can’t just have them all show up outside Smaug’s lair to pick up a local burglar, because they wouldn’t have survived the trolls, orcs, etc. without a large-enough team.
The Silmarillion is also depressing when you consider the bad guys. The Sauron who nearly conquers the world in LOTR was a shadow of his former self. And his former self was just a lackey of Melkor. Or there’s Shelob, who’s just some bastard half-breed of the original giant spider Ungoliant.
So after I read The Silmarillion, I couldn’t help but feel that LOTR is the equivalent of Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield in thirty years: feeble, senile cripples in an old age home, fighting out one last grudge match.
Silmarillion and depressingness thereof – in line, I suppose, with what I’ve read about Tolkien re his (traditionalist) Catholic Christianity: essential view, Earth (including his “serial-numbers-filed-off” Middle-Earth) ultimately lost and doomed and damned – and fuller of wickedness and nastiness, than of their opposites – ever since Satan invaded it. The only hope for the future, God’s intervention – in the Christian era, Christ’s sacrifice, pre-then, “whatever” (I’m no theological expert): salvation in everlasting afterlife, available for those who (in whatever way), choose and qualifiy; everything and everyone else, ultimately and deservedly going down the sewer.
Things on Earth thus expected to be, largely bad – heroic efforts needed to counter this, and even such heroic efforts, expected at best to put a bit of a brake, for a while, on the headlong descent into “outer darkness”. What I gather Tolkien described as “fighting against the long defeat”. I take it that he at least hoped that he had only to serve a sentence on Earth of something under a hundred years (fighting the hopeless battle as best he could, during that time – it seemed he didn’t consider World War I a supremely-vital part of same – but what do I know about assorted religious-wallahs and their priorities?) after which – hopefully – ultimately, eternal union with God. Which rather glum “take” on things, seemingly didn’t stop him taking pleasure in some of Earth’s innocent joys – I’m not naturally a religious type, and find such apparent rather self-contradiction a bit hard to make sense of – but as above: the religious think what they choose to think (even those supposedly subject to powerful and dogmatic churches who largely tell them what they must think)… it’s all beyond me, on standard Earth, let alone Middle-Earth.
Y’know, with all the times I’ve read The Hobbit, I never actually made the connection between the party’s arrival at Bag End, and their arrival at Beorn’s house. How the heck did I miss that?
Gandalf, having been reduced to a material body loses some of his understanding of the themes in creation. Not all of it but some - you can hear it when in the LoTR when he is rehoused in the Gandalf MkII body he says he’s remembered things forgotten.
That said, Eru took the vision of the world away before it ended so the Powers don’t exactly know how it’ll all shake out in the end, though they have faith.
It’s only speculation on my part, to the best of my knowledge. I know I’ve never come across an actual published Tolkienian scholar who’s advanced the idea. And it has a better than even chance of not having been Tolkien’s intention to compare the two scenes…IIRC, Thorin and Co. have been separated (if not individually, then by groups) for at least some minimum time going by the dialogue at Bag End.
It would be more clearly intentional/meaningful if they’d come in the same order to both places. Or even in reverse order. As it is, all you get is Gandalf recycling his strategy of not overwhelming a flighty host with a single massive invasion of dwarves. I don’t recall the manner in which the party introduced themselves to Laketown–did they do that in bits and pieces as well or did they all turn up at the same time?
At Lake-town they just barged in and Thorin grandly announced himself as the returning King under the Mountain. The elves who’d accompanied the barrels downstream had something to say about it, but the Master of Lake-town had his eye on the main chance, and in any case all the townsfolk got themselves excited before he could put the lid on it; after that it was a case of keeping the dwarves fed and hoping they would either expose themselves as fakes or bugger off to the Mountain.
That’s hardly fair. Yes, he didn’t sign up the instant war was declared, instead electing first to finish his degree, but he DID enlist and he DID serve in combat. The fact that he became ill with an actual disease is hardly his fault. After all, it’s not like you “call in sick” in the army. Someone has to judge you unfit for duty.
So if we really wanted to torture the theme we’d have to say they arrived near Laketown in fragments, this time in barrels. So 3 x (trickle in to new host, get fed, embark on next major [del]disaster[/del] stage of the journey).
I’m still not sure exactly what Thorin thought they would do once they got into the mountain. Steal what swag they could carry and run off? Hardly the great revenge Thorin had apparently worked himself up to.
