This is an unusual chapter in which no enemy appears at all. It is a chapter which points back to the past and ahead to the future.
The story of Gandalf is briefly taken up again to make his reappearance as unlikely as it would otherwise seem. The thread of the accommodating and hypocritical Ḿaster of Laketown also looks to future events. The reaction of the Elves also looks to future events.
That Tolkien refers to the Elves who guide the rafts of barrels as “raftmen” is somewhat confusing as the reader might think they are men. The later Tolkien would have called them “raft-Elves”.
Douglas A. Anderson in his
The Annotated Hobbit quotes Tolkien’s reference from
The Lord of the Rings that Bilbo had arrived at Laketown on his birthday, although it slipped his mind at the time, but that the banquet Bilbo participated in at the time was very splendid, although he had a bad cold at the time and could only say, “thag you very buch.” Anderson then notes in contradiction that
The Hobbit actually says for three days Bilbo was too sick to attend banquets and that even after that is cold was so bad that at banquets his words were limited to, “Thag you very buch.″
Anderson is wrong here:
Even Bilbo was given a seat at the high table, and no explanation of where he came in — no songs had alluded to him even in the obscurest way — was asked for in the general bustle.
Following this banquet Bilbo’s cold apparently got worse:
For three days he sneezed and coughed, and he could not go out, and even after that his speeches at banquets were limited to “Thag you very buch.”
It is not at all unlikely that Bilbo’s speech was already impeded when he attended that first banquet, although it is not particularly mentioned in
The Hobbit, but his cold is mentioned earlier. There is no contradiction.
That Laketown as a town founded on a wooden platform on planks laid down over the water is a delightful idea. It simply makes the story more interesting. Now of course, the supposed lake-villages recently discovered in Switzerland at the time
The Hobbit was written are now known to be villages built on the shores of lakes in marshy areas in which the individual buildings were raised on stilts to prevent damage from spring flooding. Any entire village built over the water is only a fantasy, but a delightful one.