The Hobbit: Irony 4 key examples

Gandalf has already told Bilbo and the dwarves that he sent a message ahead to the elves so that they will expect visitors. It is not altogether surprising, then, that they know the names of some of their guests. Still, Bilbo gets the sense that these strangers know "all about him, although he had never seen them before." Tolkien confirms that elves as a whole get their news almost impossibly fast, "as quick as water flows, or quicker." The internet has changed the way news travels; long before and after Tolkien's day, the spread of news was always somewhat halting. Even when a messenger raced with a piece of news to the next recipient, the news stopped spreading for a moment as it was relayed from mouth to ear or as the recipient read it. Newspapers took longer to reach rural areas than urban areas because they had to be carried there by some kind of vehicle with limited speed. One of Tolkien's major influences was Sir Walter Scott, a popular 19th-century novelist whose characters are frequently tripped up by the slow spread of news and information through the country. By comparing the elves' news to flowing water, Tolkien suggests that the elves have a magical way of overcoming all the infrastructural obstacles to getting the news in their remote valley.

The elves' mysterious way of knowing more than they should reverses the dramatic irony that typically comes into play in this kind of situation. Most often, a traveler passing through a rural settlement like Rivendell would bring tidings of the rest of the world. In other words, the traveler would know more than the host. In this case, Bilbo gets the sense that there is almost nothing he can tell the elves that they don't already know. In fact, the elves seem to know even more than they let on, and Bilbo knows neither what they know nor how. They have an air of mystery and magic about them that puts Bilbo in awe of them.

Tolkien has been fairly criticized for creating races with essential, unwavering qualities, such as the elves' all-knowing nature. While this moment certainly reinforces a strong distinction between the elves and the other races of people in the novel, it also sets Bilbo up for character growth. He is amazed by the elves' music and in awe of their cleverness. He wants to know what they think of his adventure. By the end of the novel, he has demonstrated that a hobbit can write his own songs about his adventure. He has also proven that he is a cleverer person than he ever thought he could be. Tolkien's racial distinctions thus exist in part to give characters the chance to challenge them.

The suggestion that Thorin and his party eat gold—a substance that is by no means edible—is clearly meant as verbal irony. What the messenger actually means is that the men of the lake have the upper hand. They are about to lay siege to the mountain, and there is nothing inside for Thorin and the rest to eat except the provisions they have already run through. Before long, Thorin will have to either surrender or let his company starve to death.

By laughing at the idea that the gold inside the mountain will feed Thorin, Bilbo, and the dwarves, the messenger also points out the situational irony of Thorin's stubbornness. Thorin has spent his whole life waiting for the day when he can reclaim the Lonely Mountain on behalf of his people. He has assembled a group of 13 dwarves, one hobbit, and a part-time wizard to make the difficult journey here. After locating the side entrance to the mountain and breaking into it, Thorin has at long last seen the defeat of the dragon who drove his family and people out of the mountain. However, he is about to let his self-centered greed ruin the entire enterprise. What good will a mountain full of gold do Thorin or the dwarves if they don't live to rebuild their city?

Thorin maintains that all of the riches inside the mountain belong to the dwarves because the gold and jewels all come from the ruins of the dwarves' old city. He rejects the idea that the men of the lake deserve any of the treasure just for killing Smaug. It seems unfair to him that just when he has finally won back his people's birthright, these men demand some of it for themselves. They hardly seem better to him than Smaug. What Thorin and the men of the lake all fail to recognize in this moment (and what Bilbo comes to understand) is that there ought to be solidarity between the dwarves and men. Smaug terrorized the men's city of Dale at the same time as he drove out the dwarves. Now that the dwarves have returned and Bard has killed Smaug, there is a chance for all of them to live happily together. Thorin sees fit to reward Bilbo for his fellowship with one-fourteenth of the treasure. By recognizing the same kind of fellowship with the men, Thorin could save his own people and help usher in a new age of abundance for all the inhabitants of this area.

Bilbo survives the Battle of the Five Armies by putting on the ring. Because no one can see him, he is able to survive a battle that far more experienced warriors (including Thorin) do not. This is a tried-and-true trick of Bilbo's by this point. The ring has helped him get past Gollum, goblins, spiders, and more. Meanwhile, it has also helped him convince the dwarves that he is a more skilled burglar than he actually is. Clueless to his secret ring of invisibility, they begin trusting him to carry out more subterfuge. This opportunity allows him to develop his burglary skills in earnest.

However, Bilbo realizes in this passage that the invisibility may have, ironically, backfired on him. He was invisible when he was knocked out on the battlefield, so none of his friends knew he was there. The dramatic irony still empowers him somewhat: he is in a good position to play a prank on the man who finds him by speaking in a disembodied voice. Nonetheless, Bilbo feels that the joke may be on him. Because no one could find him to carry him to safety, he has missed out on a comfortable sleep. The ring may have saved him, but it also made the battle more strenuous on his body than it needed to be. It may in fact have endangered him since even an ally could have killed him by accident while he was lying out in the open.

While Bilbo is amused by this irony, it also marks significant character growth. Where he once relied on the ring to compensate for his lack of survival skills, he now sees that there are times when he may not need the ring at all. He shifts to the understanding that it is one tool in his full arsenal of survival tactics. At long last, he understands that he has power all his own.

Through Bilbo's many adventures, his longing to get back home has been a constant refrain. The thought has kept him going when despair threatens to take hold. By the time he actually arrives at his hobbit hole, he and the reader both expect him to find it unchanged and as comfortable as ever. Instead, he finds that his beloved things have been auctioned off to people like the Sackville-Bagginses, his cousins whose very name is emblematic of their greed and willingness to "sack" someone's house for personal gain. After all of Bilbo's heroism, it is a comical and ironic let-down to see him paying these cousins for the furniture they stole from him. He may be "home," but he can't relax into his bed or favorite chair just yet.

Bilbo's trouble getting his things back parallels Thorin's trouble once he and the rest of the adventurers arrive at the Lonely Mountain. Thorin has spent his whole life hoping to get back inside the mountain to reclaim his people's treasure from Smaug. What he doesn't bargain for is that the people living near the mountain will help defeat Smaug and claim that the treasure is rightfully theirs. He also doesn't expect all of the enemies he has faced on the way to the mountain to come back for another huge battle. Just when he thinks he has returned home and reclaimed his birthright, he finds, like Bilbo, that life has been going on without him while he has been gone.

Thorin, the "King under the Mountain," ultimately leads his people to victory over the goblins and Wargs and helps broker peace among the dwarves, men, and elves. However, his valor also gets him killed. Bilbo, the more humble and unsuspecting "burglar under the hill," lives to tell his own tale. Bilbo and Thorin's similarities suggest that Bilbo is more capable and heroic than he first seems. Meanwhile, their different outcomes suggest that it can be wise not to seek too much glory and grandeur. Bilbo has no ambition to be a king or to amass more wealth than he can ever use. Once the Took part of him is satisfied by his adventures, the Baggins part of him is ready to go back to a simple life where he is safe from dragons, goblins, Wargs, and trolls.