Who is the King in The Hobbit?

[The Saucepan Man]

In the second chapter of The Hobbit, Roast Mutton, when Bilbo and the Dwarves are debating whether to make for the light they can see, the following is said:

The old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded. They have seldom even heard of the king round here, and the less inquisitive you are as you go along, the less trouble you are likely to find.

Now, this suggests that there was a kingdom in the vicinity (the Trollshaws, just west of Rivendell). But, since the last King of Arnor had died some 1000 years earlier, and there were no other kingdoms in the vicinity, what "king" is being referred to here?

[Iarwain]

Bravo, Sacepan, I believe you've found an unplanned error in Tolkien's writing. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img] There are other explainations though, if one really wants to make Tolkien perfect. We could say, for instance, that they were talking about the king under the mountain, though that wouldn't make very good sense.

Congratulations!,
Iarwain

[Meoshi]

Remember that the Hobbit was written before Tolkien had composed much of Middle-Earth's history. He probably hadn't even composed the history of Gondor, much less Arnor, at that time.

Perhaps 'The King' not having influence there could mean that the Rangers, being the remainder of the King's army, rarely visited those parts of Eriador.

[Alatáriël Lossëhelin]

They have seldom even heard of the king round here

I always assumed that they were referring to the wild, uncivilized nature of the land and it's inhabitants, in that these people had never heard of the Kings of Númenor. Even though the Kingdom of Arnor had died out long ago, the Hobbits' legends say that they had sent archers to the aid of the King at Fornost in the last battle with the Witch-King of Angmar, and respectable Dwarves such as Thorin & company were also familiar with the legends of the Kings. Since Hobbits & Dwarves consider themselves imminently respectable & civilized, perhaps they were considering the people of that region to be uncivilized & barbaric since they had never heard the tales of the Kings...

[lindil]

I noticed it too last itme I was reading t H. to my girls.

It is true that the creation [or discovery if you will] of rnor lay some 10 years or so in the future. One can make up exscuses for it, but I basically think it is an oversight. The best possible 'in-world' explanation though is that the King was still remembered as an institution [and a mark pf a 'civilized' culture in Hobbit minds even though the Dunedain had gone underground hundreds of years before.

[Belin]

It isn't an oversight; it's all explained in the introduction to LotR. This is an old expression from half-remembered stories:

There remained, of course, the ancient tradition concerning the king at Fornost, or Norbury as the called it, away north of the Shire. But there had been no king for nearly a thosand years, and even the ruins of Kings' Norbury were covered with grass. Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For the attributed to the king of old all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will

This wasn't the only expression they had about the king; Appendix A mentions that

for a long time many still looked for the return of the King. But at last that hope was forgotten, and remained only in the saying When the King comes back, used of some good that could not be achieved, or of some sore evil that could not be amended.

The hobbits still remember the old kings a little bit, whether there's currently one or not, and that's what Bilbo meant.

--Belin Ibaimendi

[ March 08, 2003: Message edited by: Belin ]

[Lalaith]

I also seem to remember reading in something Tolkien had written that "never having heard of the King" was a hobbit saying to describe uncivilized folk.
But you know what, I think Saucepan Man is still onto something. I suspect Tolkien, meticulous scholar that he was, was aware of having said this in the Hobbit, which consequently did not make sense in the context of LotR, and so was trying to "patch" over it....

[littlemanpoet]

Wi' cup o' mead in hand
(best in the land)
I tells ye it mus' be as Belin
is tellin' ye.
Ye see,
The Hobbit yer readin'
was a revision
by Tollers
after he wrote
LotR, so it follers
(without quote)
that he reworked his text
being vexed
by his nigglin' ways
to build back from earlier days
the legend o' the king
to fit in wi' the Ring.
He knowed wut he wuz doin'
and west of Anduin
civil folk knowed
to whom they owed
what little law they owned
came from he who was crowned
and ruled in Fornost
before most
of the hobbits came
and made their hame.

Um - I hope that made sense.

Translation: Tolkien was enough of a niggler that in his revision of The Hobbit after having written LotR, it's very doubtful that he would have missed this king reference, and sure as sure, he worked it seamlessly into the whole. At least that's what I think. And no, I don't think ol' Tollers was perfect, just a perfectionist to a fault. What a great fault!
[img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[lindil]

yep, he covered his tracks nicely.

but methinks it was still as are so many things in the Hobbit, a holdover from a time when non-beleriandic M-E was still as soft putty in the 'translators' mind.

[Kalimac]

I'm with Lindil - it was a nice save by Tolkien but I doubt that he planned things that way; just looked back, realized that oops, he's referred to a King when there shouldn't be one, and made a nice linguistic explanation to cover it. Interesting how that turn of phrase never pops up in LOTR proper (though perhaps with Aragorn around, people felt weird about saying it [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]).

[GaladrieloftheOlden]

I'm not educated enough to really know [img]smilies/rolleyes.gif[/img] , so I won't comment, but- interesting poem! [img]smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[Man-of-the-Wold]

I tend to go with Belin, in that the language in The Hobbit is saved by reference to royal memories noted in LR, in regard to the former Kingdom of Arnor. Remember the Thain is very much equivalent to the Steward of Gondor -- a placeholder until the Return of the King. But as one approaches "The Wild," then this legacy becomes weaker. Even in the old days, that area would have been on the Edge.

The statement, though, is not by the narrator or Bilbo, but by the dwarven companions of Thorin, which may mean only that folks in general in that area would not know Thorin, King of the Longbeards, from a hole in the wall.

But these Dwarves from their modest Blue Mountain realm beyond the Lune probably would have shared the Shire's same perspective on the kinder, more orderly influence in Western Eriador, as derived from the (albeit long-lost) Kings of the Men of Westernesse.

So, I think this is Tolkien's out in editing the The Hobbit, for which he wanted to avoid any major rewriting, except for where the Ring was concerned. To wit, that prequel cries out for either a shortened timeline or some explanation of Thorin & Co.'s impossibly slow progress.

The whole Third Age history had not yet unraveled when The Hobbit was written, as revealed in The History of the Lord of the Rings (HoME VII-IX). The Red Book is very hard to decipher, ya know.

So, at the time, JRRT may have had various specific ideas in mind, apart from some generic living King of Men in Western Eriador.
(1) It may refer to Gil-Galad or some equivalently last Elven-King, whose demise at the "Last Alliance" had not yet developed; (Note: the term Eriador arose from Gil-Galad's nominal dominion over it through much of the Second Age, as Third-Age Arnor never covered all of Eriador)
(2) Decendents of the exiles from the Atlanttee, in the name of Elendil, Valandil, etc., who ruled in what was then Beleriand.
(3) Maybe a former king, but only a few generations apart, as "Trotter"/Aragorn was only a grandson or so of Isilidur at one time,
... and so forth.

[Man-of-the-Wold]

Also, on a comparable note, The Hobbit in the end presents Bilbo overhearing about "White Wizards" plural, as opposed to the The White Council in confronting the Necromancer.

This, I think, makes sense if one considers that Bilbo in writing "There and Back Again" wanted to stay true to his relative lack of knowledge at that time, and to how he interpreted things, being only half asleep, as not getting too specific about background details. Bilbo might like the Movie's better than Frodo woould have.

[Kuruharan]

Actually, even though this is not what they were talking about, Thorin himself was a king. Just of a different people. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

[The Saucepan Man]

I noticed it too last time I was reading t H. to my girls.

Funny how you notice these things when your reading to your children. That's when I spotted it too, lindil. [img]smilies/wink.gif[/img]

Thanks, Belin, for the reference to the Prologue in LotR. The part that you have quoted is clearly directed at covering over this potential loophole (particularly given the pointed reference to trolls). Trust JRRT to have spotted this and come up with an explanation. [img]smilies/smile.gif[/img]

[Morsul the Dark]

I think he ment "Kng under the mountain, afterall Lonely Mountain used to be the center of a larger Kingdom everyone wanted their sons trained by the dwarven smiths and payed tribute to them, and also the King Thorin returns I thinkk wwhen they say that they mean His title would gain little to no reespect in certain places because after however many years it was, they'd forgotten or just ignored the king's autority because he was absent.

[Pitchwife]

Without meaning to belittle the status of Thorin's family, I'd think Eriador was safely outside the jurisdiction of the King under the Mountain. A habitual allusion to the days of the Kings of Arnor seems much more likely.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

I see no reason to counter-claim what's been said by some above in this thread a long time ago: it seems clear to me that what we are facing is the Hobbits' saying, as introduced in the Prologue to LotR. It seems obvious to me mainly because the words used are actually almost the same:

Originally Posted by The Hobbit

Others said: "These parts are none too well known, and are too near the mountains. Travellers seldom come this way now. The old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded. They have seldom even heard of the king round here, and the less inquisitive you are as you go along, the less trouble you are likely to find."

Originally Posted by LotR, Concerning Hobbits

There remained, of course, the ancient tradition concerning the high king at Fornost, or Norbury as they called it, away north of the Shire. But there had been no king for nearly a thousand years, and even the ruins of Kings' Norbury were covered with grass. Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king.

Especially with the trolls explicitely mentioned, I am inclined to think that this might have been even Mr. Professor's smooth explanation of his own unsmooth use of the phrase in the Hobbit several years ago, while later when writing LotR it became clear that there was no king in these parts of Middle-Earth at all.

As for the in-book perspective, it is interesting to note that by this logic (now you will see why I quoted the whole passages and not just the particular sentences), Bilbo must belong to the group of the "others" (which makes sense) - it was him, logically, who spoke these words (the question was the row between the travellers whether to go and check out the fire they saw in the wilderness or not). I considered it interesting from the perspective of the character analysis, as here we are obviously offered Bilbo's perspective on the matter put together into the group of "others" (some of the Dwarves), which by the way shows that he took an active part in the decision-making (resp. in the arguing) - which is nice, as I always pictured him as the fourteenth traveler who actually seems a bit misplaced and does not express much of his own feelings - at least not in public. This, on the other hand, sounds much more like the older, more self-confident Bilbo we know from LotR.

[Rumil]

Should one forget one's monarchy after a mere 1000 years, one would be no better than a foreigner,

toodle pip!

[Pitchwife]

Originally Posted by Rumil

Should one forget one's monarchy after a mere 1000 years, one would be no better than a foreigner,
toodle pip!

Is that the Welshman speaking, remembering the Owains and Llywelyns?

[Rumil]

Nah,

the Tudors

[Strange Raven]

Or it more simply says that Trolls are not very bright, and really don't know or care if there is a difference between a king and a steward.

Then again, Denethor was a megalomaniac and whose to say Ecthelion was not the same and may well have styled themselves as kings. It runs in the family.

Or, they could be referring to an otherwise unreferenced Troll King.

Any of those things could explain away a minor discrepancy that comes of writing the books separately.

[Pitchwife]

Welcome to the Downs, Strange Raven; hope you enjoy your afterlife! It's good to see another new member who's not a spambot but genuinely interested in discussing Tolkien. Maybe you'd like to introduce yourself briefly in our Novices & Newcomers thread over there.

Originally Posted by Strange Raven

Or it more simply says that Trolls are not very bright, and really don't know or care if there is a difference between a king and a steward.

It was the hobbits (specifically Bilbo as the narrator of The Hobbit) who kept mentioning the king and saying that Trolls hadn't heard of him. Anyway, we're talking about the Trollshaws, west of Rivendell, formerly part of the kingdom of Arnor, and hundreds of miles away from Gondor and its Stewards.

Then again, Denethor was a megalomaniac and whose to say Ecthelion was not the same and may well have styled themselves as kings. It runs in the family.

While Boromir may have had some hidden dreams of royalty, his father took his office very seriously and would never have called himself a king openly, as evidenced by this passage (LotR Book IV, The Window on the West):

'And this I remember of Boromir as a boy, when we together learned the tale of our sires and the history of our city, that it always displeased him that his father was not king. "How many hundreds of years needs it to make a steward a king, if the king returns not?" he asked. "Few years, maybe, in other places of less royalty," my father answered. "In Gondor ten thousand years would not suffice."'

Or, they could be referring to an otherwise unreferenced Troll King.

To make this fit the context, said Troll King would have to be something like an enlightened monarch who had set himself the arduous task to civilize his people and teach them better manners; no wonder he was so unpopular with his own subjects that most of them hadn't even heard of him!

[Alfirin]

Originally Posted by Pitchwife

To make this fit the context, said Troll King would have to be something like an enlightened monarch who had set himself the arduous task to civilize his people and teach them better manners; no wonder he was so unpopular with his own subjects that most of them hadn't even heard of him!

Yeah. Sorry, Strange Raven, but Mr. Shine is not going to be found in ME.