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CuriousG
Gondor
Oct 11 2012, 12:21am
Views: 320
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Careful speaking to strangers (and dragons)
[In reply to]
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Mine is, “I come from the end of a bag, but no bag went over me”.
Mine too.
I like your comparison of the titles they give to each other and themselves. They both get carried away. I see this as Tolkien's little lesson in the perils of hubris.
Sigurth concealed his name because it was believed in olden times that the word of a dying man might have great power if he cursed his foe by his name.
The thing about Turin was that Glaurung and Morgoth had already cursed his family, so he had nothing left to lose at that point. Tolkien took Sigurth story in a sort of reverse-fate direction.
A “nasty suspicion” grows in Bilbo’s mind as the dragon’s biting words poison the hobbit against the dwarves and his concern grows for his “fair share” of the loot.
Wouldn't you like to turn Saruman and a dragon loose on each other to see who had the more bewitching voice?
5. Bilbo makes the statement “Never laugh at a live dragon, Bilbo you old fool”, a saying that eventually, we are told, became proverbial. What do you think the closest real-world proverb would be to Bilbo’s saying?
Speaking of hubris, I often wonder if Tolkien the author hoped this would become a saying in real life by trying to say it was already. But I'll let sleeping dragons lie.
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