![]() ![]() The Company has been flown to Carrock by the great eagles, and so is freed from pursuit by the goblins and wargs, but is left far from where they had meant to go. However, Tolkien doesn’t just use this method to reveal depth he very skillfully uses the same repetition in the chapter “Queer Lodgings” for humor’s sake. As in science, each time this occurs, the reader learns something about the lands and peoples of Middle Earth, as well as our narrator, Bilbo Baggins. Each subsequent repetition tweaks the formula, leading to a different result, either in terms of events, character reactions or Bilbo’s view of the world. The first event is our control, the base line. In reality, the best metaphor for the technique Tolkien exploits throughout The Hobbit is the Scientific Method. It is a technique that is often used, as in this case, to add to the depth of the tale. This is a major theme which Tolkien explores through repetition portraying basically the same events but in each case only changing the motivations and the peoples involved. The last post delved into the nature of motivation and how preconceived biases color Bilbo’s and the readers’ view of events and the peoples involved. ![]() A reader seeing this for the first time may pass this off as a cheap trick to fill the pages, but Tolkien actually does something quite clever with his parallel plots. Yet many of these happenings are near identical in nature. ![]() Bilbo’s quest, as recorded in The Hobbit is by nature an episodic tale, full of small (and large) adventures along the way. ![]()
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