"Riddles in the Dark"

  Since I only have, at most, five readers, and since all of those readers have read The Lord of the Rings, I am going to feel free to post about my current attempt to re-read my absolute favorite book. Stranger, you are welcome here, but if you are a Tolkien neophyte, you have been warned.

  I have just finished "Riddles in the Dark," which has much to do with Bilbo, Gollum and The Ring. Although it comes early in the book, it is the chapter that has most to do with the larger story of The Lord of the Rings. What I did not realize was how at home the "Riddles in the Dark" chapter fits with LoTR. I had always thought Tolkien had added nuances of meaning to this chapter when he refered to it in LoTR that were not really present in The Hobbit. In other words, he was describing things that weren't really there. 

  For example, let us take the famous line from Gandalf to Frodo: "Pity? It was pity that stayed his hand." I had always imagined Tolkien was using Gandalf to add a shade of color that Tolkien hadn't foreseen when he wrote the original draft of The Hobbit, but that didn't conflict with what was on the page overmuch.

  I now see that I was wrong. Bilbo indeed had a chance to kill Gollum, but was stayed by exactly what Gandalf said: a surge of pity for Gollum's condition, and a reluctance to kill without need. Tolkien clearly writes:

"A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo's heart: a glimpse of endless, unmarked days without light or hope of betterment, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering."

  In this single sentence, Tolkien reveals Bilbo to have a depth of empathy that is surprising in one so dedicated to his own creature comforts — surprising to all but Gandalf, perhaps. In a lesser authors hands, or in the hands of one of our more violent modern-day scribes, Bilbo would have plunged Sting into Gollum's vitals — out of fear or revenge, perhaps — then skipped nimbly over the cooling corpse on his way to freedom. In this day and age, I daresay few would notice.

  It's certainly what James Bond would do.

  Instead, we see a "silly hobbit," who, in a flash of insight, sees beyond his opponent's attempts to thwart him, and is instead able to see his opponent's suffering. It is a moment of pure compassion, in the best traditions of the world's great religions. It is also a rarity in fiction, and in real life.