A Princess of Mars: Part 1: Under the Moons of Mars

My wife tells of how her father used to own a collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs first editions, which he kept in a glass cabinet in their living room. She would covet those books when she was little, longing to look at the books with the marvelous and exciting covers; but her father told her that she was not allowed to touch them until she learned how to read. That was all the incentive she needed. By the time she started kindergarten, she had taught herself how to read well enough for her father to relent and grant her access to the book cabinet and to the incredible worlds of ERB.

Edgar Rice Burroughs was possibly the most successful writer of pulp fiction of the era. He is best known for Tarzan of the Apes and it's many sequels but he also wrote stories of swashbuckling interplanetary adventure. Planetary Romance stories, tales which split the difference between Sword & Sorcery and Space Opera, existed long before Burroughs; but one can argue that Burroughs codified the genre.

His very first professional sale was a serial published in All-Story Magazine in 1912 entitled "Under the Moons of Mars" and using the pseudonym "Normal Bean"; which was finally published as A Princess of Mars.


The story starts with a brief forward in which the author explains the the reader how he came to be in possession of this story; a narrative frame that we don't see that much anymore. Burroughs uses it to one extent or another in many of his books and it seems to pop up frequently in Planetary Romance. I suppose the author feels that the reader will wonder how he can be reading the account of someone's adventures on another world and needs an excuse to justify it.

In this case, Burroughs begins with a description of his uncle, John Carter; a dashing, charismatic cavalry officer from Virginia who, after the Civil War, went out west prospecting for gold and disappeared for several years. He returned, over a decade later, a more thoughtful and pensive man bearing some secret. He gave his favorite nephew a manuscript he had written and instructions on what to do if he should die. This manuscript forms the rest of the novel.

I go into this because I find it interesting what Burroughs has done here. He has not only invented a fictional uncle to be the hero of his tale, he in effect invents a fictional self. Burroughs describes himself as being five years old when Uncle John went off to war, when actually he wasn't born until 1875. He has given himself, as the transmitter of John Carter's narrative, a more respectable background to lend more credibility to his outlandish adventure.

Eventually, Carter is found lying outside his home, facing upward to the heavens with his arms outstretched as if in supplication. He is presumed dead, and per his instructions in buried, unembalmed, in the special ventilated coffin he has prepared and interred in the sealed mausoleum which can only be opened from the inside. And now that the specified space of time has passed, the author is free to release John Carter's own story.

Carter begins his tale with a brief description of himself. He considers himself a gentleman and a Virginian; that almost goes without saying. He also makes the interesting remark that he is not sure exactly how old he really is, and that as far as he can remember he has always been approximately in his mid-30s. This is never really explained. Like many things, Burroughs leaves this as a mystery. He is a warrior by profession. He does not consider himself a particularly courageous man; he simply does not generally think of the cowardly course of action until after he's already taken the brave one. He serves with distinction during the Civil War. Then,

I found myself possessed of several hundred thousand dollars (Confederate) and a captain's commission in the cavalry arm of an army which no longer existed; the servant of a state which had vanished with the hopes of the South.

He and a friend go off to the Arizona Territory looking for gold. While prospecting, they are attacked by Apaches. His friend is fatally wounded before Carter can rescue him and Carter is forced to take refuge in a hidden cave. There he finds himself overcome by mysterious fumes; he falls to the floor of the cave, and dies.

Or does he? This next part is rather enigmatic, because we only see things from his point of view and there's a lot which he never sees until much later and still more which he never learns at all. He remains conscious, but his body becomes paralyzed. With a great effort of will, he manages to break his consciousness free, so now he seems to have two bodies: his physical form which lies inert on the cave floor, and an astral form, standing naked over it; no less real than the other (he pinches himself to be sure). He leaves the cave and looks out upon the desert landscape.

As I stood thus meditating, I turned my gaze from the landscape to the heavens where the myriad stars formed a gorgeous and fitting canopy for the wonders of the earthly scene. My attention was quickly riveted by a large red star close to the distant horizon. As I gazed upon it I felt a spell of overpowering fascination -- it was Mars, the god of war, and for me, the fighting man, it had always held the power of irresistible enchantment. As I gazed at it on that far-gone night it seemed to call across the unthinkable void, to lure me to it, to draw me as the lodestone attracts a particle of iron. 

My longing was beyond the power of opposition; I closed my eyes, stretched out my arms toward the god of my vocation and felt myself drawn with the suddenness of though through the trackless immensity of space. There was an instant of extreme cold and utter darkness.

The next thing he knows, John Carter is on Mars. He doesn't know how he got there, or even why he's so sure it must be Mars; although his first attempt at walking on this new planet, where taking a step under the lesser gravity propels him high into the air is pretty good confirmation.

He comes across a strange structure with a thick glass roof. Looking down through the roof he sees what seems to be an incubator full of large eggs, each about two and a half feet in diameter. A few are hatching, revealing strange green six-limbed creatures: his first glimpse of native Martians.

His next glimpse comes when a party of adults shows up to check up on the eggs and finds him there. These are the Green Martians, a race of beings about fifteen feet in height with four arms, huge bulbous eyes and big honkin' tusks. This is one of Burroughs's specialties; he fills Mars and his other worlds with visually striking and memorable aliens. The Green Martians are a Proud Warrior Race, similar in some ways to how the white men viewed the very Apaches Carter had escaped from earlier. They ride upon eight-legged mounts called Thoats; (multiple limbs being a theme in Martian biology).

At first the Martians are hostile and suspicious of Carter, finding him as they did fooling around on top of their nursery. But they are amused by his incredible leaping abilities. Carter tries to make gestures of peace and friendliness, which the Martians seem to accept. The leader of the party, Tars Tarkas, takes him with them back to their home, the city of Thark.

The city his captors live in is an ancient one, and one apparently built by a different and more sophisticated civilization. Here Burroughs is following the view reflected in War of the Worlds and popularized by the astronomer Percival Lowell that Mars was an older world than Earth; one which once had a lush environment and oceans which have since dried up. The famous Canals of Mars were created to channel the planet's dwindling water supply to it's cities and it's former oceans were now great desert basins.

The dwindling resources and fight for survival have made the Martians, competitive and warlike. The Green Martians in particular have expunged all softer emotions of friendship and love from their society, and their sense of humor is particularly grisly. Early on during his stay with the Tharks, he rashly punches one who had been manhandling him and knocks the Martian cold, (thanks to his superior Earthly strength), possibly killing him (we aren't told). The other Martians find this hilarious.

Tars Tarkas assigns one of his retinue, a female named Sola to look after Carter; and she in turn procures a "watchdog", a huge frog-like creature with several rows of sharp teeth which ultimately becomes his faithful companion, to help guard him. Exploring some in the uninhabited portions of the ancient city, Carter encounters more Martian fauna, a pair of White Apes, huge gorilla-like creatures with four arms. The watch-beast, Woola, comes to Carter's rescue and helps him fight off the White Apes. It is only afterwards that Carter learns that Tars Tarkas and his comrades had watch the whole fight, enjoying the spectacle. His success against the apes had gained him respect in their eyes.

In these chapters we get a lot of National Geographic stuff: descriptions of the Martian culture, biology and society; and this is really one of the hallmarks of the Planetary Romance: the description of exotic alien lands and the strange people and creatures which inhabit them.

The eggs in the Martians's incubator are all hatching now and Carter witnesses the ceremony by which the females of the tribe choose hatchlings to take care of. Sola gets one, and since both Carter and his new "brother" seem to be equally developed in terms of Martian education, she trains both of them simultaneously. The Martian language turns out to be fairly simple and easy to learn; in part because it seems to have a telepathic component. Carter discovers he has a latent telepathic ablilty of his own, and under Sola's training enhances his senses. He also learns that although he can with concentration catch the thoughts of other Martians, they cannot read his own; something which becomes very useful later on.

Next:  John Carter meets a new kind of Martian, and everything changes.

The Hobbit: Part 7: The Battle of Five Armies

The Dragon is dead; the dwarves have recovered their treasure and their ancestral home. We should be moving into "Happily-Ever-After" territory, shouldn't we? That's how it seems to Bilbo; but there are a few loose ends about to turn up that are going to give Bilbo and the dwarves some grief.


A small army of men from Lake-Town, led by Bard, the bowman who slew Smaug; accompanied by a larger group of elves from Mirkwood, led by the Elvenking; arrive at the foot of the Lonely Mountain. They are surprised to find Thorin and Company waiting for them; they had assumed that Smaug ate them all before proceeding to Lake-town. But finding them there, Bard advances to speak with Thorin.

Smaug's hoard consists not only of the old treasure of the dwarves; it also contains wealth which the Dragon looted from the Kingdom of Dale. As a descendant on Girion, king of Dale, Bard has a claim on a part of Smaug's gold. Bard also speaks for the men of Lake-town, whose Master he still serves, and who had assisted Thorin when he and his company had arrived there penniless. The men of Lake-town had supplied food and ponies to the dwarves to aid them on the last stage of their journey to the Lonely Mountain; and they had suffered grievously in the Dragon's attack on their town. Bard presents his case before Thorin with words which are proud and grimly-spoken; but Bilbo thinks the request seems fair.

But ... he did not reckon with the power that gold has upon which a dragon has long brooded, nor with dwarvish hearts. Long hours in the past days Thorin had spent in the treasury  and the lust of it was heavy on him. Though he had hunted chiefly for the Arkenstone, yet he had an eye for many another wonderful thing that was lying there, about which were wound old memories of the labours and the sorrows of his race.

Dwarves are naturally possessive and jealous of their rights under the best of circumstances; and this is exacerbated by the malign influence of the Dragon. In Western lore, dragons are the living embodiment of avarice, and the gold upon which dragons have nested tends to transmit that greed like a contagion.

Thorin rejects Bard's demands.

"I will not parley... with armed men at my gate. Not at all with the people of Elvenking, whom I remember with small kindness. In this debate they have no place. Begone now ere our arrows fly!"

And he actually does shoot an arrow at one of Bard's messengers. Bard announces that he will besiege the mountain until Thorin is willing to speak reasonably. He figures that with winter fast approaching and the dwarves' food dwindling, he won't have long to wait. Bilbo knows better. Thorin would rather starve than back down now; but he is also expecting his cousin Dain from the Iron Mountains to arrive any day now to break the seige. This can't end well. But Bilbo has been working on a plan of his own.

One night he creeps out of the dwarves' redoubt, concealed by his magic ring, and sneaks across no-man's-land to Bard's camp. He gives Bard the Arkenstone, which he found in Smaug's hoard and which he has been guiltily hiding from Thorin. "The heart of the Mountain, and it is also the heart of Thorin. He values it over a river of gold." Bilbo hopes that with the Arkenstone as a bargaining chip, Bard will be able to negotiate an end to the stalemate short of battle.

The elvenking is impressed by Bilbo's action. "You are more worthy to wear the armor of elf princes than many who have looked more comely in it." But he warns Bilbo that Thorin will surely be angered at the theft and suggests that Bilbo might be safer remaining with him and Bard. Bilbo declines the elf-king's offer. "I don't think I ought to leave my friends like this, after all we have gon through together."

As Bilbo leaves the camp to return to the dwarves, he unexpectedly runs into Gandalf. The wizard always seems to disappear when he is most wanted, and reappear again when he is most needed. Gandalf praises Bilbo for his generous act of burglary, but warns that a difficult time is coming quickly and there is news brewing of which even the ravens have not heard.

The next morning Bard comes to the dwarves' fortifications again to parley, but this time he has the Arkenstone, which he offers to ransom to Thorin in exchange for a share of the treasure.

"How came you by it?" shouted Thorin in gathering rage. 

"I gave it them!" squeaked Bilbo, who was peeping over the wall, by now in a dreadful fright. 

"You! You!" cried Thorin, turning upon him and grasping him with both hands. "You miserable hobbit! You undersized -- burglar!" he shouted at a loss for words, and he shook poor Bilbo like a rabbit.

Bilbo is frightened, but he reminds Thorin that he was promised a fourteenth share of the treasure. "Perhaps I took it too literally -- I have been told that dwarves are sometimes politer in word than in deed. The time was, all the same, when you seemed to think that I had been of some service.... Take it that I have disposed of my share as I wished and let it go at that!"

Grimly, Thorin agrees to send one fourteenth of the gold and silver -- "the promised share of the traitor" -- to redeem the Arkenstone. He casts Bilbo out from his walls. "Take him, if you wish him to live; and no friendship of mine goes with him."

As for the payment, that will have to wait. "That shall follow after, as can be arranged," Thorin says; but in the back of his mind he is thinking of Dain and his army, due any time now. He might be able to recapture the Arkenstone without paying a nickel.

Dain does arrive the next day, with five hundred seasoned veterans of the dwarf and goblin wars. For the moment, the army of Bard and the elvenking can prevent them from joining up with Thorin, but the moment of crisis has come. How big a crisis, only Gandalf knows.

Just as battle is about to be joined, the sky is darkened by a swarm of bats heralding the arrival of a goblin army riding on wolves. "Dread has come upon you all!" Gandalf cires. "The goblins are upon you! Bolg of the North is coming, O Dain! whose father you slew in Moria." This is a reference to the great war between the goblins and the dwarves which had been alluded to before. Tolkien expands on it a bit in the Appendices of Lord of the Rings. Suffice it to say that the goblins have also heard about the Dragon's hoard; and they are looking for payback.

Dwarves may be generally unpopular, but everybody hates goblins. The rival factions quickly set aside their differences to face this new threat.

Thus begins the Battle of the Five Armies, pitting the elves, men and dwarves on one side against the goblins and the wargs on the other. Bilbo does his very best to stay out of it. His magic ring may be very useful to avoid being seen by an enemy combatant, but it is no help in avoiding being trod upon or hit by a stray arrow.

It was a terrible battle. The most dreadful of all Bilbo's experiences, and the one which at the time he hated most -- which is to say it was the one he was most proud of, and most fond of recalling long afterwards, although he was quite unimportant in it.

Bilbo observes the battle from the hilltop where the elves have taken up a defensive position. The battle is going against his friends; the goblins are overwhelming them with superior numbers. Then, when all looks hopeless...

The clouds were torn by the wind, and a red sunset slashed the West. Seeing the sudden gleam in the gloom Bilbo looked round. He gave a great cry: he had seen a sight that made his heart leap, dark shapes small yet majestic against the distant glow."The Eagles! The Eagles!" he shouted. "The Eagles are coming!"

Tolkien was very fond of this passage, and felt that it was his most successful evoking of something he called eucatastrophe, or "good catastrophe"; a turn of events which upends everything which came before, but which brings about joy rather than sorrow. It's the Cavalry coming over the hill; Jack Worthing discovering that he really is named Earnest; the Millennium Falcon coming out of nowhere to take out the TIE fighters on Luke's tail; it's the look on the villain's face when he realizes that all his diabolical plans have only given the hero the chance to triumph; it is Victory snatched from the jaws of Defeat, the sudden Reversal of Fortune which makes the Happy Ending possible. A devout Catholic, Tolkien regarded the story of the Resurrection as the ultimate eucatastrophe.

 
We've seen smaller eucatastrophes scattered about in The Hobbit previously: the trolls petrified by the rising sun; the previous appearance of the eagles rescuing the dwarves from the goblins in the fir grove. Here is the climactic catastrophe of the book, in which the tide of battle turns leading to ultimate victory. Tolkien liked the scene so much that he invoked it again in Lord of the Rings during the climactic battle at the Black Gates of Mordor. Pippen hears someone shouting "The Eagles are coming" and thinks, "No, that's Bilbo's story."

Bilbo does not witness this victory. A stray stone flung from above hits his helm and knocks him unconscious. He doesn't get to see the goblins routed or the last-minute appearance of Beorn in the form of a gigantic bear smashing through the goblin ranks. By the time he wakes up and has the presence of mind to remove his magic ring, the battle is over. (If he hadn't been invisible, he probably would have been taken to much more comfortable quarters by now.)

He learns that of his companions only ten remain. Fili and Kili were slain, defending Thorin. They were the youngest of Thorin's company and his nephews. Here we have some of Tolkien's own somber experiences of war creeping into the tale. It is always the young who perish in wartime. Thorin has also been fatally wounded and lies near death. He has asked to see Bilbo one last time.

"Farewell, good thief," he said. "I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers, until the world is renewed. Since I leave now all gold and silver, and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship from you, and I would take back my words and deeds at the Gate. ... If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell!"

Thorin is buried under the Mountain, with the Arkenstone on his breast. His cousin Dain assumes leadership of the dwarves and honors the agreement to give a fourteenth share of the treasure to Bard, to use in rebuilding the Lake-town and re-establish the kingdom of Dale. Dain also offers to give a share to Bilbo in reward for all he has done; but the little hobbit will accept no more than what a pony can carry. He figures that any more that that would be more bother to carry home than it would be worth.

Accompanied by Gandalf, Bilbo takes a more leisurely trip back home. One by one, he bids farewell to his friends, both old and new: the dwarves, the elvenking, Beorn, Elrond. A year has passed since he ran out the door of Bag-End without his handkerchief  and arrives back home to find one last joke played upon him. Because of his long absence, he's been declared legally dead and he returns in the middle of an auction selling off his belongings.

His remarkable adventure has ruined his reputation as a solid, respectable hobbit. Most of his neighbors now regard him as 'queer'. But he has the honor of elves, wizards and dwarves, which is something. He spends the dragon's gold he received on presents, which perhaps is the best way to break a dragon's curse. He takes to writing poetry and visiting elves, and confounds his proper relations by being remarkably happy to the end of his days.

My Silver Age Of Comics

In a previous article I gave a comic per year of my life of growing up with comics, here I am just going to give the year and the comic, and leave it at that, as the comics are so good, the commentary is unnecessary.

Thanks for the people who encouraged me to do more, also, bite me! to the people who encouraged me to do more, this took forever.

1986

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The Hobbit: Part 6: The Fall of Smaug

Bilbo and the dwarves, led by Thorin Oakenshield, have finally reached Erebor, the Lonely Mountain. Unfortunately Smaug, the terrible dragon who currently occupies the dwarven halls under the Mountain, has become aware of their presence. He has sealed them in the secret tunnel leading to the Dragon's treasure chamber, and is now flying off to Lake-town to punish the men of that community, whom he believes sent the dwarves.


Unable to go back the way they came, Thorin's party ventures down into the Dragon's lair; once again sending Bilbo first. The Dragon is gone for the moment, but as far as the dwarves know he could come back at any time. While exploring around Smaug's hoard, Bilbo comes across a large, glittering gem.

It was the Arkenstone, the Heart of the Mountain. So Bilbo guessed from Thorin's description; but indeed there could not be two such gems, even in so marvelous a hoard, even in all the world. ... The great jewel shone before his feet of its own inner light, and yet, cut and fashioned by the dwarves, who had dug it from the heart of the mountain long ago, it took all light that fell upon it and changed it into ten thousand sparks of white radiance shot with glints of the rainbow.

Impulsively, Bilbo shoves the jewel into his pocket. Why? He'd not sure he knows himself. His sensible Baggins-nature recognizes that he's probably making a mistake.

"Now I am a burglar indeed!" thought he. "But I suppose I must tell the dwarves about it -- some time. They did say I could pick and choose my own share; and I think I would choose this, if they took all the rest!" All the same he had an uncomfortable feeling that the picking and choosing had not really been meant to include this marvelous gem, and that trouble would yet come of it.

The Arkenstone is similar to the silmarils from Tolkien's Silmarillion; jewels of such intense beauty, that people become obsessed with possessing them. All things considered, Bilbo gets off pretty easily for his act of pilferage. If C.S. Lewis had been writing the story, I think that karma would have bitten Bilbo in the butt much harder. But perhaps his crime is mitigated by how he ultimately uses the Arkenstone. That comes later.

Meanwhile, what happened to the Dragon?

The men of Lake-town see flashes of light on the distant mountain and think hopefully that the King under the Mountain is once again forging gold. The grim-faced captain of the town's archers thinks the fires more likely come from Smaug, "the only king under the Mountain we have ever known." His name is Bard, and if he has a reputation among his peers as a Gloomy Gus, he comes by it honestly. His family were refugees from Dale, the kingdom lying in the valley between the Mountain and the Lake, when it was devastated by the Dragon; and he is descended from the Kings of Dale.

Bard rallies the towns defenses, orders evacuations of the townsfolk and organizes bucket brigades to try to control fires. The town's position in the middle of a lake makes it well-defended against conventional ground-based attack, but it is still built chiefly of wood and highly vulnerable to aerial flame attacks; which is just what Smaug begins to do. The arrows of Bard's bowmen do no damage to the dragon's diamond-and-kevlar hide. Then, when all looks lost, a thrush flies up and lights on Bard's shoulder.

Yes, this is the same thrush who was hanging around the dwarves' camp; whose cracking of snail shells reminded Bilbo of the inscription on Thror's Map, and who was listening when Bilbo told the dwarves about his conversation with Smaug. Earlier Thorin mentioned that the Men of Bard could understand the language of thrushes, and now this thrush tells Bard of the Dragon's weak spot which Bilbo observed.

I have to admit, I've always found this bit rather convenient. Yes, we have seen talking eagles and wolves and spiders, but the bit with Bard and the bird just seemed to be stretching coincidence more than I like. But what Tolkien is doing here is giving a shout-out to the old Norse sagas he loved so much. In the Völsungsa saga, the great 13th Century Icelandic epic, the hero Sigurn gains the ability to understand the speech of birds when the tastes the blood of the slain dragon Fafnir. Richard Wagner used this same bit in his Ring of the Nibelung, which was based on the Völsungsa saga.

Tolkien often became annoyed when people compared his Lord of the Rings to Wagner's Ring Cycle. "Both rings were round, and there the resemblance ceases." he'd gripe. I don't know if he would have been less testy if people compared LOTR with the Völsungs instead of with Wagner, but I think that in the case of Bard and the Bird the similarities were deliberate.

Prompted by the thrush's advice, Bard spots the bare patch in the Dragon's armor and readies his lucky Black Arrow, and heirloom passed down by his family.

"Arrow!" said the bowman. "Black arrow! I have save you to the last. You have never failed me and always I have recovered you. I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!"

The arrow flies straight and true and finds the Dragon's weak spot. Smaug plummets from the sky, crushing a large portion of the town beneath him. In a hiss of steam he sinks to the bottom of the Lake. Bard himself only barely manages to escape the catastrophe of Smaug's death-throes.

The Dragon now is dead, but the town has been devastated. At first people are inclined to blame the Master of the Town, who fled at the first sign of trouble, and want to declare Bard king. The Master insists that if anyone is to blame, it's the stupid dwarves who went and got the dragon all riled up; (and he does have a point). "Why waste words on those unhappy creatures?" Bard says; "Doubtless they perished first in fire, before Smaug came to us."

Bard is not without ambition himself; the idea of re-establishing his forefathers' kingdom in Dale appeals to him, and it occurs to him that the unclaimed treasure of the dwarves would make some excellent starting capital. But he still has duties to the Lake-town and an obligation to help the Lake-folk left homeless by the Dragon's attack.

The Elf-king hears of Smaug's fall and he too thinks of all that gold and treasure lying unguarded under the mountain. But before he sends his own army to Erebor, he first has it escort food and relief down the river to Lake-town. He may be prejudiced against dwarves and have an unseemly fondness for the bling; but despite these personal flaws, Tolkien reminds us again that the elves are "Good Folk." Extending charity to his unfortunate neighbors will take priority over treasure-grabbing for the moment.

And there are others who also hear of the Dragon's death and regard the news with interest.

While all this is happening, the dwarves have been exploring the ancient halls of their ancestors and doing inventory of the treasure and armaments they find. Thorin gives Bilbo a short mail-shirt made of mithril, a lightweight metal as bright as silver and stronger than steel. The mail-shirt, along with Bilbo's elvish blade, Sting, get passed on to Bilbo's nephew Frodo in Lord of the Rings.

"I feel magnificent," he thought; "but I expect I look rather absurd. How they would laugh on the Hill at home! Still, I wish there was a looking-glass handy!"

I wonder if here Tolkien was thinking of a bit from H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, where the protagonist, Alan Quatermain, is given a similar shirt of mail. Like Bilbo, he feel's self-conscious wearing it, but it does prove to be useful.

In his inventory of the the Dragon's hoard, Thorin does not come across the Arkenstone. Now would be the time for Bilbo to mention finding it. He doesn't.

A day or two pass and still the Dragon has not returned. The dwarves begin rebuilding some of the hall's fortifications, expecting trouble. Just as the Men of Dale could speak with thrushes, the dwarves used to have a working relationship with the ravens of the Lonely Mountain. One of them comes now to Thorin: an ancient bird named Roäc, whose father served Thorin's grandfather Thror when he was King Under the Mountain. Roac brings Thorin tidings of Smaug's death, and also of the host of elves on their way from Mirkwood. He also warns that the Lake-men blame the dwarves for their trouble and also want to take reparations from the Dragon's hoard.

"Your own wisdom must decide your course; but thirteen is small remnant of the great folk of Durin that once dwelt here, and now are scattered far. If you will listen to my counsel, you will not trust the Master of the Lake-men, but rather him that shot the dragon with his bow. Bard is he, of the race of Dale, of the line of Girion; he is a grim man but true. We would see peace once more among dwarves and men and elves after the long desolation; but it may cost you dear in gold. I have spoken."

Before Roäc even got to the part about "cost you dear in gold," Thorin has already made up his mind. They can have his gold when they pry it out of his cold, dead fingers; not a moment sooner. He tells Roäc to go to his kinsman, Dain, who dwells in the Iron Hills a couple week's march away, and bid Dain to come with all the dwarves he can muster to defend their homeland.

"I will not say if this counsel be good or bad," Roäc croaks, but he can see that this is not going to go well. Still, he flies off to bear Thorin's message.

Bilbo doesn't like the situation either and wishes the matter could be settled quickly, but the dwarves pay even less attention to him than they do to the raven's advice.

NEXT:  Dwarvish Diplomacy; Bilbo's Desperate Gamble; Thorin's Rage; The Battle of Five Armies and Eucatastrophe!

Cat-Men from Mars!

In addition to occasionally blogging about my favorite science fiction and fantasy novels, I also draw a webcomic which I try to update every week.  The comic's title is HANNIBAL TESLA ADVENTURE MAGAZINE and it is a pulp-era adventure comic featuring a two-fisted Man of Science whose resemblance to a certain Man of Bronze is far from inexplicable.

In the current storyline, Gutsy Girl Reporter Ginger DuPree has traveled into space to investigate instances of sabotage on a planned Mars rocket.  She has discovered that Cat-Men from the planet Mars have landed on the Moon and are preparing for an invasion of Earth.  While escaping from the Cat-Men, she makes an astounding discovery...

The Hobbit: Part 5: The Lonely Mountain

Bilbo Baggins has come a long way since the day last spring when he dashed out the door of his home in Bag End without his hat to accompany Thorin and his dwarves on their quest to recover their ancestral gold. He has lost his handkerchiefs and most of his buttons; but he has gained an elvish sword, (well, a dagger really, but for someone Bilbo's size it's close enough), a magic ring, and a bit of courage he never knew he had.

Twice now he has saved the dwarves: once from the spiders of Mirkwood and once from the dungeons of the Elf-king. Now the dwarves are within sight of the Lonely Mountain and are about to start the last leg of their journey.


Thorin and the dwarves have been welcome guests in Esgaroth, the Lake-town; a trading community built on piers in the midst of a great lake which lies at the confluence of two rivers. The people of Lake-town remember legends of prosperity when the dwarves lived under the Lonely Mountain, before the Dragon came; and hopefully retell the prophecies that this Golden Age will return when the the Dwarf King re-establishes his kingdom. They regard Thorin as the Prophecy personified.

The Master of the Town is more cynical and believes Thorin and his crew to be frauds, but is willing to play along with popular sentiment. He is surprised when Thorin announces plans to actually go to the Mountain, (he didn't think they'd actually go through with it), but he is not sorry to see them go and happily provides them with ponies and supplies.

The trek north to Erebor, the Lonely Mountain, is a dismal one. At one time the river valley between the Mountain and the Lake had been a prosperous kingdom called Dale; but the surrounding lands had been devastated by the dragon. The grass was sparse and thin, and the old forest reduced to blackened stumps. Now that they are nearing the Mountain's shadow, things look far less simple than they did when the dwarves were being feasted in Lake-town.

Bilbo has been occupying himself by studying the map which Gandalf had given Thorin; which had been made by Thorin's grandfather, Thror. He is acutely aware that the dwarves have never had anything like a plan for their expedition other than "Go to the Mountain." What they would do when they actually got there and had to actually deal with the dragon was left deliberately vague. Unfortunatly, Bilbo is now a victim of his own heroism. Because of his success in rescuing the dwarves on the previous occasions, they are happy to just assume that Bilbo will think of something when the time comes.

So it is at Bilbo's urging that the dwarves, arriving at the Lonely Mountain, begin searching for the secret entrance to the Mountain, through which Thorin's father and grandfather escaped when the Dragon attacked. They find it, and by fortuitous chance are in time to catch the last full moon of Autumn, the first day of the dwarvish New Year, when the setting sun will reveal the door's keyhole.
"Now is the time for our esteemed Mr. Baggins," Thorin says, "...to earn his Reward."

"I have got you out of two messes already, which were hardly in the original bargain," Bilbo grumbles, "But 'third time pays for all' as my father used to say." Drawing his blade, Sting, and slipping on his Magic Ring, Bilbo ventures down into the inpenetrable darkness of the dwarvish passage. As he proceeds  he sees a reddish glow up ahead and hears the deep, rumbling throb of a huge beast snoring.

It was at this point that Bilbo stopped. Going on from there was the bravest thing he ever did. The tremendous things that happened afterwards were as nothing compared to it. He fought the real battle in the tunnel alone, before he ever saw the vast danger that lay in wait.

Tolkien fought in the trenches during the First World War, and sometimes his thoughts and his experiences of war and heroism and courage come to the surface in his stories. I think this passage is one of them and it has always stuck in my mind.

He emerges out of the tunnel into a huge chamber, originally the deepest cellar of the dwarvish stronghold, now a kind of nesting place. The Dragon has gathered up all the gold and jewels of the dwarves and of the men of Dale and heaped it into an enormous pile; and on that pile lied the Dragon himself, Smaug the Terrible.

To say that Bilbo's breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the all the world was wonderful.

Tolkien later admitted that this was a philological reference, casting in mythological terms the linguistic theories of his friend and colleague Owen Barfield about how language and the use of words change. He didn't expect many readers to catch it, though. (I certainly didn't; I picked it up from The Annotated Hobbit)

Since he is the party's burglar and feels he should do something to justify his job description, Bilbo filches a large, golden cup from Smaug's pile of bling and hurries back to the dwarves. Here Tolkien might have been borrowing from a similar cup-stealing episode in Beowulf, and Tolkien confessed that it might have been in the back of his mind. In a letter he said that "the episode of the theft arose naturally (and almost inevitably) from the circumstances. It is difficult to think of any other way of conducting the story at that point. I fancy the author of Beowulf would say much the same."

The dwarves are delighted with his first piece of recovered treasure, but not for long. Soon the Dragon wakes, being troubled by a disturbing dream "in which a warrior, altogether insignificant in size but provided with a bitter sword and great courage, figured most unpleasantly." A delicious bit of deceptive foreshadowing on Tolkien's part. Immediately, Smaug senses that something is wrong. Having slept on it for over a century, he knows his inventory down to the last farthing and he soon spots that there's a cup missing.

His rage passes description -- the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.

Smaug emerges from the mountain and the dwarves must flee into the secret tunnel for safety. Now they are trapped. They can't leave the way they came because the Dragon devoured or scattered the ponies the dwarves rode from Lake-town -- ponies are particularly unlucky in The Hobbit. The only other way out is down the tunnel and into the Dragon's lair.

The dwarves begin blaming Bilbo for stealing the cup

"What else do you suppose a burglar to do," asked Bilbo angrily. "I was not engaged to kill dragons, that is warrior's work, but to steal treasure. I made the best beginning I could. Did you expect me to trot back with the whole hoard of Thror on my back?"

Bilbo is as clueless as the dwarves about how to deal with Smaug, but although "getting rid of dragons" is not his line, he offers to go down into the dragon's lair again on a reconnaissance mission. "Perhaps something will turn up." He resolves to go down at noon the next day, when he hopes the dragon will be sleeping.

He finds the Dragon waiting for him. Smaug knew all along about the existence of the secret tunnel, but since he was too big to fit in it, he had always ignored it. "Well, thief! I smell you and I feel your air. I hear your breath. Come along! Help yourself again, there is plenty and to spare!" Smaug can't see the hobbit, thanks to the Magic Ring, but he knows that someone is there.

Bilbo may not know a lot about dragons, but he knows better than to get too close; and here he begins to play another riddle contest. When Smaug asks who he is, Bilbo replies cryptically:

"I come from under the hill, and under the hills and over the hills my paths led. And through the air. I am he that walks unseen... I am the clue-finder, the web-cutter, the stinging fly. I was chosen for the lucky number... I am he that buries his friends alive and drowns them and draws them alive again from the water. I came from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me. ... I am the friend of bears and the guest of eagles. I am Ringwinner and Luckwearer; and I am Barrel-rider."

He doesn't want to reveal his true name; neither does he want to risk angering the Dragon further with a flat refusal. Dragons love riddling talk, Tolkien assures us, and enjoy trying to figure it out. Smaug is shrewd; although there is much in Bilbo's riddles he does not understand, his remark about barrel-riding clearly points to the men of Lake-town.

But now it's Smaug's turn to play mind-games with Bilbo; games of a nastier sort. He knows that Bilbo accompanied a group of dwarves and now works to sow mistrust of the dwarves in Bilbo's mind. "I suppose you got a fair price for that cup last night? ... Come now, did you? Nothing at all! Well, that's just like them. And I suppose they are skulking outside, and your job is to do all the dangerous work..."

Smaug's insinuations do rattle Bilbo, but out of loyalty and maybe a little hobbit stubbronness he sticks to his mission. He flatters Smaug into letting him get a good look at the dragon's belly. Smaug may be armored with impenetrable scales, but Bilbo has always heard that dragons tend to have soft, vulnerable underbellies. "Your information is antiquated," Smaug grumps. Sleeping on a pile of jewels for a century has has caused loose gems from the dwarves' hoard to become embedded in the Dragon's flesh; he has virtually a waistcoat of diamonds. But Bilbo sees one bare spot in Smaug's armor, in the hollow of his left breast. He had earlier quoted a maxim of his father's: "Every worm has his weak spot," and his conservative stay-at-home father's trite advice has turned out to be true.

Pleased with his discovery, Bilbo withdraws; but makes one parting jab, which angers the Dragon. Smaug sends a jet of flame up the tunnel after Bilbo and the poor hobbit barely escapes being roasted.

Bilbo tells the dwarves about his conversation with the Dragon. They commend him for his discovery of Smaug's weakness, although they don't know how they can exploit it at the moment. Bilbo also tells them of Smaug's accusations. Here is where Smaug's mind-games fail; had Bilbo kept the Dragon's words to himself, his suspicions might have festered within him, leading to more misunderstanding. But Bilbo is too honest for that; he tells the dwarves frankly about his worries. Thorin reassures him that he intends to honor their contract and reiterates his promise that one-fourteenth of the treasure they recover will be his, and that Bilbo can choose his own fourteenth share. This will be important later.

As Bilbo talks with the dwarves, a thrush is perched nearby and seems to be listening to them. The bird kind of creeps Bilbo out, but Thorin assures him that the thrushes of the region are friendly. In fact, he says, the Men of Dale used to be able to understand the speech of the thrushes and used them as messengers.

From there the conversation turns to the treasure itself. There is one item in particular which Thorin is eager to recover; a beautiful gem called the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone.

But when evening comes, the Dragon emerges again from his lair. He flies around to the side of the Mountain and tears off huge pieces of rock, sealing the entrance to the secret tunnel. Now the dwarves are truly trapped.

"Barrel-rider!" he snorted. "Your feet came from the waterside and up the water you came without a doubt. I don't know your smell, but if you are not one of those men of the Lake, you had their help. They shall see me and remember who is the real King under the Mountain!"

NEXT:  The Arkenstone; Lake-town attacked; Smaug vanquished, but is that the end?

The Hobbit: Part 4: Guests of the Elvenking

Bilbo is starting to feel like a real live hero now. With the aid of his Elvish Letter-Opener, and a rush of unexpected courage, he was able to rout a bunch of gigantic spiders and rescue his friends from the spiders' webs. The dwarves no longer regard him as a piece of useless baggage; they are greatly impressed. The fact that, as Bilbo sheepishly admits, he also had the help of a Magic Ring of Invisibility does not lower him in their estimation. After all, it takes luck to find a Magic Ring and it takes wit and bravery to use it well.

But the dwarves are still hungry and lost in the Forest of Mirkwood; and their leader, Thorin, has gone missing.


Thorin has been captured by the Wood-elves who dwell in the forests of Mirkwood, and brought before their king. This king is named Thranduil in Lord of the Rings, but here is unnamed.

Tolkien here gives a brief explanation elvish sub-cultures and migrations. Ages ago, the Valar, the divine powers which served the creator Ilúvatar, (Tolkien was too much of a good Catholic to call the Valar gods, but that is the role they serve in elvish cosmology), summoned the elves across the see to Valinor, the timeless paradise which Tolkien here calls "Faerie". Some of the elves heeded the command and made the long journey across the Sea, but others elected to remain in Middle-Earth, being too much in love with the forests and the green earth. Of the ones who completed the journey, the High Elves, a group called the Noldor returned to Middle-Earth as part of the tragic and convoluted story of Fëanor, which makes up the greater part of The Silmarillion but has nothing to do with The Hobbit. The relevant point is that the Wood-elves of Mirkwood are of the Silvan elves who stayed behind, and are culturally a little less civilized than the House of Elrond, whose ancestors were among the Noldor.

The Elf-king does not trust Thorin, because of the traditional enmity between the two races.

In ancient days they [the elves] had had wars with some of the dwarves, whom they accused of stealing their treasure. It is only fair to say that the dwarves gave a different account, and said that they only took what was their due, for the elf-king had bargained with them to shape his raw gold and silver, and had afterwards refused to give them their pay.

This is a highly-abbreviated version of the story of the Nauglahin told in The Simarillion. It was a piece of elf-bling commissioned by Thingol, king of the woodland elves' domain in the First Age, as a setting for one of the Simarils. Because of the Curse of Fëanor, pretty much everybody having anything to do with the Simarils met with tragedy. The corrosive effects of greed and covetousness are a recurring theme in Tolkien's works, and will come up again in The Hobbit.

It also should be mentioned that the elves and the dwarves had a long history together, and not all of it bad. In the original creation account of the elves, there were only two sentient races, elves and men. The dwarves in The Silmarillion come off as kind of an afterthought. The early elves thought that dwarves were ugly and called them "the stunted ones". But the dwarves were no friends of Morgoth's and in their own way fought against him. Their oldest home was Khazad-dum in the Misty Mountains and they developed close ties to the elves who lived in neighboring Eriador. These elves were Noldor, who had returned from Valinor, and were craftsmen; so they and the dwarves had much in common. Unfortunately, the dwarves inadvertently woke a great evil sleeping under the mountains which destroyed their home. The elvish communities also dwindled until they only existed in small pockets such as Elrond's home in Rivendale.

It is because of this long history of mutual mistrust that the Elf-king suspects Thorin of being a spy, and that Thorin refuses to tell the elves any more than he has to. The king orders Thorin sent to his deepest dungeon.

The following day the elves find and capture the rest of Thorin's crew, except for Bilbo who slips on his Magic Ring and follows invisibly. The other dwarves are no more co-operative than Thorin was.

"What have we done, O king?" said Balin, who was the eldest left. "Is it a crime to be lost in the forest , to be hungry and thirsty, to be trapped by spiders? Are the spiders your tame beasts or your pets, if killing them makes you so angry?"

This pisses the Elf-king off even more. The spiders are not his pets, thank you; reading between the lines of both Hobbit and LOTR we can gather that the spiders only started becoming a problem in Mirkwood when the Necromancer moved into the neighborhood. Tolkien emphasizes here as well as the chapter in Rivendell that elves are "the Good People" and are not wicked. But they can be subject to greed like everybody else and this Elf-king, like Thingol before him, has a weakness for jewels.

The Elf-king has the dwarves sent to separate dungeon cells, on the theory that eventually one of them might crack and tell them why they were really in the forest; which might have worked with any creatures but dwarves. Actually, Thorin is very close to giving up and telling the Elf-king the truth when Bilbo shows up.

Bilbo has managed to sneak into the elf-citadel and has been wandering around it invisibly. Unfortunately, there is little he can do except hide and explore. His invisibility can only do so much; he still has to stay out of people's way, and if he falls asleep in the wrong place he risks having an elf stumble over him. Also, he still casts a faint shadow in strong light, so he has to be doubly careful when sneaking out into the open. "I am like a burglar that can't get away, but must go on miserably burgling the same house day after day," he complains to himself. But in his explorations he discovers the cells where the dwarves are being kept, including Thorin, and is able to pass messages between them.

Finally, after several weeks skulking about the underground halls of the Elven-king, Bilbo discovers a way out. The main entrance to the city are a set of large gates opened and shut by magic, possible for an invisible hobbit to sneak through, but not a baker's dozen of highly-visible dwarves. Bilbo discovers a second way out, though: a water-gate opening up through a trap door to an underground river which leads out of the city and eventually out of the forest. The elves of Mirkwood use this river to transport trade goods to and from a settlement of men who live on a large lake downstream. The goods are transported in barrels and this is where Bilbo gets his idea.

One night, when the Elf-king is holding a feast and most of the staff are occupied, Bilbo steals the keys from the guardsman, who had been doing some celebrating of his own and sleeping off some very potent elvish wine. Bilbo frees the dwarves and hides them in a bunch of empty barrels waiting to be sent back down the river. The dwarves aren't extremely happy with this plan, but Bilbo has no better one and to be truthful, the dwarves have begun to rely on his resourcefulness. ("Just what Gandalf had said would happen," the narration tells us).

It is a cold and uncomfortable trip, as much for the dwarves, who are battered and buffeted in the dark casks; as for Bilbo, who nearly drowns trying to hang onto one of the rolling barrels. But the plan works, and they all arrive safely, if wet and bedraggled in the Lake-Town.

Lake-town is an artificial island, built wooden piers, like the crannogs of the ancient Irish. When Thorin enters the town, he proudly announces himself as the King Under the Mountain, returned to claim his kingdom. And something remarkable happens. For once, people are happy to see him. Lake-town is built on trade, and although none of the Lake-men are old enough to remember a time before the Dragon, they tell stories about how the era in which the Dwarves ruled the nearby Lonely Mountain was a time of prosperity. Many are eager to believe that the Return of the King means a return of that age when the River ran with Gold.

The Master of Lake-town is a shrewd businessman and believes that the dwarves are frauds and vagabonds; but he knows enough to court popular opinion, so if the populace thinks they are figures out of prophecy, he's willing to go along with the gag. Bilbo finds himself overwhelmed and overlooked by the dwarves' sudden popularity and Thorin and Co. are feasted and hailed; but he's fine with that. He caught a bad cold riding the barrels down the river, and when he is asked to speak at a banquet, the best he can muster is "Thag you very buch."

NEXT:  The Last Stage; the Lonely Mountain at Last; and Facing Smaug the Terrible!!!