"You People" and Murderous Hobbit Rage

Just got through with all that plotzing, and the next hunk of the story is a head-scratcher.

First of all, Gandalf leads his trusted peers to the woods and proclaims that he's not going in there with "you people".  He YP'd them!  His own crew! 

"It is no use arguing.  I have, as I told you, some pressing business away south; and I am already late through bothering with you people.  We may meet again before all is over, and then again of course we may not."

Who called this mission to order?  Gandalf.  And he's ditching the crew.  Sup with that?  What about wolves?  What about trolls or goblins?  He took the wicked swords AND the horse from bear-man and made everyone else return their ponies, and now he wants them all to march into a deep dark forest and maybe he'll see them on the other side.   Can they walk around?  Yeah, but its hundreds of miles, Gandalf says. Hmmm, how does that phrase go, again?  "F*** you. No smiley." I think that's it. 

Okay, okay, okay.  So the fearless 14 here are walking through the forest, and when trying to cross a creek, one of them falls in the water.  They help him out, he's all wet, he's shook up about the whole thing, and it turns out that the guy goes into a coma because the water was cursed!  Terrible.  His friends carry him and continue into the woods, and, then the guy wakes up, and what happens next?  Fellow dwarf Thorin snaps at a man who just woke up from a coma.

"In fact, if you can't talk about something else, you had better be silent.  We are quite annoyed with you as it is.  If you hadn't waked up, we should have just left you to your idiotic dreams in the forest; you are no joke to carry even after weeks of short commons."

Unfriend. 

Oh, and by the way, what's with the way they address Bilbo?  When I write about him, I use his name, because that's how our society addresses beings that speak -- by name.  When the dwarves are frustrated with him, though, they call him "hobbit".  Thorin is the only dwarf that consistently calls him "Mr. Baggins".  Combined with the earlier YP of this scene, I think it's time we talk about Tolkein's racist undertones.  I know, I know. Tolkein?  Racist??   Well, do you consider James Cameron and his treatment of blue people to be along the same lines?  I haven't Gotten Blued, so to speak, but feel free to spoil movie that for me.

So, they walk on, they get hungry and super cranky and they stray from the path Gandalf said not to, and there are mysterious little bonfires that appear and magically disappear when they get close, and all of a sudden...SPIDERS!  Big ones!  Big ones who want to eat dwarves!  SNAP!  One tries to enclose Bilbo in a web, but, being the resourceful and hopeful Babe the Pig character, Bilbo uses his pocket knife to cut through the webs and, get this, duel with an effing spider!  Then he lunches forward and stabs the thing right between the eyes.  

Pretty impressive.  A turning point, one might say.  But what he goes on to do next is just kind of sick. 

"Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the hep of the wizard or the dwarves or anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins.  He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath.  'I will give you a name,' he said to it, 'and I shall call you Sting.'"

So at this point, Bilbo is high off of his latest kill, and he's looking for another taste of blood.  He runs into a few spiders, and, get this, they're talking (spiders talk!) amonst themselves about eating some dwarves.  So what does Bilbo do?  He puts on his magic ring, unsheaths his murderous sword, starts singing creepy chants to confuse the spideys, kicks his gruesome killing spree into the next gear, and, last but not least, frees all of the dwarves stuck in webs. 

Yeah, right, you're saying the spiders were going to eat everyone!  And they looked super scary!  But the common theme of The Hobbit so far is "When In Doubt, Slash The Hell Out Of It", especially after that whole goblin/cave massacre, so this continues that theme.  I mean, the spiders spoke English! Bilbo could have at least talked to them, held them hostage, or not killed every single last one of them.  I had no idea he had so much pent up murderous rage; can children grasp this glorification of war and violence, or can they relate because they find spiders megacreepy and therefore not fit to live?
 
So....now that everything is dead....the dwarves know that the ring turns Bilbo invisible, and they're all looking to get back on their forest path. Kind of awkward.   I kind of wish they stayed on that path, because as an innocent bystander to all of that, I now know we have a killer on our hands.

Comments

[rayners]

There is no bargaining with spiders!

[Anil Dash]

You're either with us, or you're with the spiders. But I wouldn't expect You People to understand that.

[Xris Ernest Hall]

Never thought about it before, but it's interesting that Bilbo's behavior changes once he gets the ring, and that while he's wearing it he kills all of the spiders.

[apgwoz]

Isn't that one of the major recurring themes in LOTR? That people change with power--become evil? It's why, if I remember from the movies, they were getting rid of the ring to begin with!

[rayners]

Being invisible, Bilbo doesn't have to look at himself and confront the fact that he is now a cold blooded killer.

[Adam Rice]

"Who called this mission to order? Gandalf."

Now, Gandalf is really doing the dwarves a favor, isn't he? This is Thorin's mission.

(I don't remember the cursed water either!)

[rayners]

Thorin is the embodiment of greed in the dwarven hive mind, and greed is the driving force in the story overall. Gandalf is more of a roadie.

[David Jacobs]

@Adam Rice, yes, it's Thorin's mission. Just a reminder, Natalie is no longer really reading the hobbit. She's skimming it, and blogging about whatever she wants to. I think it makes for better blogging, but it does send Tolkien fans into fits! So, it doesn't matter that it's Thorin's mission.

I think it's a shame that we're probably not going to get LOTRded on this blog, unless Nat-Po has a change of heart, because the race issues in the movie (definitely hinted at in the episode Natalie describes above) are really fun to argue over.

[Adam Rice]

Greed. Huh, I never looked at it in those terms. Maybe because I read it first as a child, and in my view all the "good guys" were just good. I saw the dwarves as seeking justice. Mounds and mounds of gold plated, jewel-encrusted justice.

[Kevin Spencer]

Spiders are evil incarnate. Children "just know" this.

[nataliepo]

I don't think that all of them are in it for greed. Bilbo likes his cozy hobbit hole, and he likes his own cooking, and for god sakes, he gets excited about maps. I can't envision dollar signs in his eyes. But the rest of them, yeah, I smell greed.

I don't trust these dwarves. In this segment of the story, they're all traveling in the woods for weeks and are super hungry, and I get the impression that they want Bilbo dead. First, they sent him to climb a super high tree to see if they were close to the edge of the woods, and then they sent him multiple times to investigate the mysterious disappearing bonfires. Do you think the dwarves were thinking of eating him? Bilbo is the only member of the group who is not of the same species (maybe?) so they'd be avoiding cannibalism if he was the one to go.

[Mena Trott]

You had my favorite star at "F** you, no smiley."

[David Jacobs]

Fine, I take it back, you're really reading the book.

[rayners]

I don't think the dwarves were thinking of eating him. I think it's more of a "you're not a dwarf so you're expendable" thing. That and any individual dwarf would be incapable of acting on his own should he be separated from the group.

[Victor Ganata]

It is interesting how incredibly racist modern fantasy is. Elves, dwarves, trolls, orcs are always hating on each other for no good reason. It's all Tolkien's fault! The whole "Magic Ring makes you evil" thing fits pretty well with LOTR, but unfortunately, it's a total retcon.

[nataliepo]

Yeah, where does the animosity come from? Why can't trolls, goblins, orcs, gnomes, and narwhals coexist peacefully? Hatred is learned, and Tolkein is intent on passing on how it's taught to children.

Going back to the killing spree, another famous spider scene in recent times was in Harry Potter in The Prisoner of Azkaban. I have to rewatch the scene to compare them exactly (which I will, indeed, do), but Harry did not kill everything, especially because Hagrid kept one of them, named Aragog, as a pet. It seems Ms. Rowling approached this Spider Massacre scene quite differently.

[Adam Rice]

And the casual racism isn't limited to fantastical creatures -- I began reading the Belgariad to my son recently, and was sort of appalled at how breezily the various human nations were sorted into a racial hierarchy by intelligence, work ethic, degree of culture, and morality, by just a few expository lines in the opening chapters.

"I kept wondering 'Aren't there any good Murgos? Like, one who recycles, or helps old lady Murgos across the street?'"
http://www.librarything.com/review/39812759

Sigh -- I was excited about the possible ring foreshadowing, but on reflection that's clearly not the case. I guess "giant spiders attempting to devour you makes you kill giant spiders" will have to suffice.

[Xris Ernest Hall]

" I was excited about the possible ring foreshadowing, but on reflection that's clearly not the case."

I admit, I was basically retconning there.

[David Jacobs]

I disagree totally with the retcomments. The ring and it's powers are responsible for Gollum's sorry state as well as Bilbo's change in behavior. It's an evil ring that turns it's wearer to do evil things, and I would be shocked if Tolkien hadn't planned that from the beginning.

[Xris Ernest Hall]

" I would be shocked if Tolkien hadn't planned that from the beginning"

I think that's quite possible. We simply don't know how much of what became the Lord of the Rings was in the back of Tolkien's mind when he wrote The Hobbit. He was a busy guy (family and full-time professor) and for all we know, he had much of the Lord of the Rings written in his mind before he actually put it down on paper. The idea of a cursed ring, though, was present in northern European mythology so that was definitely an idea Tolkien would be familiar with.

[Victor Ganata]

When the Hobbit was published, Tolkien had no idea he was going to write LotR. He actually had to completely rewrite the riddle game between Bilbo and Gollum to make the influence of the ring consistent.

[David Jacobs]

Victor - citation?

[David Jacobs]

From Wikipedia: "In the first edition of The Hobbit, Gollum willingly bets his magic ring on the outcome of the riddle-game, and he and Bilbo part amicably.[21] In the second edition edits, in order to reflect the new concept of the ring and its corrupting abilities, Tolkien made Gollum more aggressive towards Bilbo and distraught at losing the ring. The encounter ends with Gollum's curse, "Thief! Thief, Baggins! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it forever!" This sets the stage for Gollum's portrayal in The Lord of the Rings."

[Jay Allen]

"Yeah, where does the animosity come from? Why can't trolls, goblins, orcs, gnomes, and narwhals coexist peacefully? Hatred is learned, and Tolkein is intent on passing on how it's taught to children."

Ahhhh, never discount the powerful influences of xenophobia and jealousy.

[Ezra]

I never thought the ring was evil, I always thought it was simply temptation. Using the ring is the easy way out, and so it makes Bilbo lazy and distorts his sense of right and wrong—not through a magical power, but just through ordinary human fallibility.

Disclaimer: I only read The Hobbit, not the boring trilogy that follows, so I may be an outlier.

Also, in my memory, Gollum does bet the ring in some kind of riddle game. It's not possible I read the first edition, is it? What happens in the current edition?