The Hobbit - Chapter 09 - Barrels Out of Bond

[Formendacil]

Just when you think you're about to catch up, the CbC threads roar out of sight. Ah well, here's another attempt to catch back up...

For me, in The Hobbit, there are two categories of chapter: the memorable and the fleeting. The memorable include "An Unexpected Party", "Riddles in the Dark", "Flies and Spiders", and other chapters that are the iconic, deeply etched in my mind, parts of the book.

The rest, although fun to read, important to the book, and often full of fun/interesting episodes, are not quite crucial to my mental image of The Hobbit. "Barrels out of Bond" is one of them. The whole episode the Elvenking's palace is given in sparse detail until it's very end: the day when Bilbo and the Dwarves escape. I'd really like a deeper look at Bilbo's survival, although rational thought leads me to suppose that it was every bit as boring as its absence suggests.

The poor Dwarves, being stuffed into the barrels always have my sympathy- and I'm not even claustrophobic! Imagine if one of them was... Poor, poor, poor Nori, Bofur, or whatever poor Dwarf it was.

This chapter contains another piece of The Hobbit's legendary "un-Legendariumish" puzzle: The Drunk Elven butler. Although quite natural seeming from within the context of The Hobbit, serious canonists seem to have some mental difficulty reconciling these silly Woodelves being drunk with the sombre Elflords of the Silmarillion.

Well, I'm having a little time reconciling Fordhim Hedgethistle and the drunk high school kids in my town as being both Canadian, so if those canonists ever figure it out, I'd love to hear how it works.