Mythmoot and the Hobbit

It's astonishing to me that it has not quite been a year since I signed up for my first course at Mythgard. It seems like 3 years, when it has only been 3 trimesters. And even Mythcon, which actually took place in August, seems like a year ago. Partly it's because the online academic experience has involved a fairly intense time commitment, and partly it's just the way time goes as an adult (as the saying goes, the days are long, but the years are short).

So this is all by way of explaining why I went to Baltimore to see the first movie of the Hobbit trilogy with a good group of Tolkien geeks on opening weekend.  I watched it Friday night with a few folks I knew from Mythgard (one I'd actually met earlier this year at Mythcon), then watched it again with the full complement of Mythmooters on Saturday morning.

Jackson & Co. were obviously trying to please many different genre audiences, so some scenes were not to my particular taste (although I'm quite certain they'll appeal to other folks). And yet the movie worked, as a movie.

Among the most successful scenes, in my view:

• The dwarves singing the "Misty Mountains" song - quite possibly my favorite part of the movie. The voices are deep, beautiful, haunting. In fact, this one song, more than anything else, made the dwarves utterly convincing for me. Bilbo is not in the room with them, but we see him listening and it is clear that their song has touched him in some way. He is not suddenly seized with a desire to go on adventures, nor does he suddenly "get" the dwarves; it is more subtle than that, but still there is something there in his face, almost unreadable.

• The scene where Bilbo decides to join the quest. This is again done subtly; in fact it was only in discussing the scene at Mythmoot that I came to fully understand what the film makers were doing here. What we see in the book is a child-like Bilbo being manipulated and railroaded into the adventure, without time to think or pack. In the movie, the choice is far more grown-up; in fact, Bilbo declines the adventure, and the others respect his choice. When he awakens, he has exactly what he wants: everything is ship-shape, as if the dwarves had never been there. The nightmare is over, and he has been released to continue his regular life with all its settled ways. He is free. And as he looks around, we see his face. The sense of loss, of emptiness. As if he didn't know how lonely and sterile his life was, until he had a chance to contrast the silent, empty rooms with the boisterousness that had been in them just a few hours earlier. None of this is explained; it is all in his face. Then he sees the contract and he realizes it is not too late. This is a really wonderful scene, and I recommend Sarah's discussion of it in her Riddles in Response blog. 

• The flashback to the dragon's attack. There is a lovely visual joke at the very start of this scene, which also picks up on a small detail in the book which I'd never noticed until this year.

• The very last scene - it's a little bit of movie cliche, but it absolutely works.

• And of course the scene with the dwarves throwing Bilbo's plates around is very funny.

There's more to say, of course. I haven't even touched on the riddles in the dark scene, which (among its many merits) has a wonderful, easy-to-miss homage to my favorite part of the Rankin-Bass film.