# King?! WHAT KING?!? [Merged]



## Maeglin (Nov 4, 2002)

*to what "king" are the dwarves referring?*

Page 42, The Hobbit


> These parts are none too well known, and are too near the mountains. Travellers seldom come this way now. The old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded. *They have seldom even heard of the king around here* ,and the less inquisitive you are as you go along, the less trouble you are likely to find.



notice the bold print, what "king" are they talking about? there was no king yet at the time of The Hobbit.


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## Celebthôl (Nov 4, 2002)

i think that would be refuring to Thror, or the kings of his line Thrain or Thorin, i think, hope it helped.

Celeb

also there was a king it was Thorin, he just didn't have his kingdom (coz of Smaug)

Celeb


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## Eriol (Nov 5, 2002)

I think the king being referred to is the king of Men (the kingdom of Arthedain, in this case). Of course, there had been no king for a thousand years, but people still could be divided as those who had heard of the king, and those who had not -- this last group being on the fringes of civilization, and therefore wild and dangerous. That, I think, is the message behind the quote, and a hobbit like Bilbo would be impressed at the knowledge that there were indeed people so wild that they had never heard of the king.

P.S. Smeagol, are you sure that it was Arvedui who gave the Shire to hobbits? The Shire was founded in 1601, and Arvedui was lost centuries later, I think. I remember 1975 as the date of his death, but it's been a long time since I read the Appentices (is that spelled correctly??).

See ya!


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## Wonko The Sane (Dec 12, 2002)

*King?! WHAT BLOODY KING?!?*

Alright, I don't have the book with me today...which means I may never have it but whatever.
Ok..here's a question.

In the scene shortly after Bilbo and the Dwarves leave The Shire they encounter the trolls.
The Dwarves tell Bilbo to go check and see what's going on. There are many reasons why he should.

One of the reasons went more or less like this:

"Others said: We're too close to the mountains, and it's been too long since men have settled here. Even the king doesn't come by these parts anymore."

Or something like that.

My question is...What king?! Certainly not Aragorn...and there WAS no king at the time.
I'm so confused!

I asked Snaga and he didn't know either so I put it to you. My brother (the banned wonko) said something about reading that it was an expression meaning that nobody ever went there anymore.
I don't buy it.
I need INPUT!
Help!


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## Celebthôl (Dec 12, 2002)

well at this time Aragorn wasnt even born or at least he was no older than 20 not really king material,
well the quote is
"they have seldom even heard of the king around here"
so it may be refering to Thorin himself

Thôl


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## Wonko The Sane (Dec 12, 2002)

But Thorin wasn't a king was he? I mean...not really.

*head hurts and she fears she's getting sick* NO! I WILL NOT LET THIS HAPPEN!
*tries to steel her immune system*

Anyway, it just doesn't seem likely to me that they were talking about Thorin, but I suppose that's the best answer I've heard yet.

I think my point was more that The Hobbit really doesn't mesh well with LotR...I mean...he named the trolls William (Bill) Huggins, Bert, and Tom...
That's just soo wrong! Those are NOT proper Troll names!


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## Celebthôl (Dec 12, 2002)

yeah i always thought that, they need names like...i dunno i pants when it comes to make stuff up oh well, well i cant think of another king and there is no elven king of proper renowned (sp)

Thôl


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## Wonko The Sane (Dec 12, 2002)

Hmm...Anyone else have any ideas?!


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## Mablung (Dec 12, 2002)

Maybe they were just confused with the Steward/King thing and thought the Steward was the king.


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## Wonko The Sane (Dec 12, 2002)

But that'd be dumb cos I'll bet the steward wasn't up in those parts EVER!


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## Beorn (Dec 12, 2002)

Well, wasn't the Shire area originally part of Arnor? Perhaps the Trolls were a bit out of touch....who knows how long they live...?


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## Wonko The Sane (Dec 12, 2002)

No..it wasn't the Trolls that said it it was the Dwarves...

And there hadn't been a King for over a thousand years!


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## Mablung (Dec 12, 2002)

Well anyone sent up there from Gondor would still be representing the King even if they didn't have one. I mean theres a reason the Stewards still remained Stewards because they still considered everything there to be the King's and they were just it's care takers.


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## Maeglin (Dec 12, 2002)

hey I had a thread about this about a month ago, I don't remember if I ever got a real answer or not, but here it is


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## Uminya (Dec 13, 2002)

There are some indescrepancies [sp?] in The Hobbit...like the "Wild Wurms" in the Great Desert (can't remember the whole phrase) and other minor things. This was probably one of them, and since there *were* kings in Annuminas (north of the Shire) at one point, it is simple an anachronism.


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## Eriol (Dec 13, 2002)

Yes, I gave some thoughts in that thread too... but I have a nagging suspicion that there is something about this strange habit of referring to 'the king' in the LotR prologue. Am I crazy?


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## Wolfshead (Dec 21, 2002)

The original quote from the book was as follows


> They have seldom even heard of the king round here


I think that they were referring to the king of Gondor. Even though there hadn't been one there for quite some time. The point of the saying was that they had lost all knowledge of their past. Thus meaning they were not all that civilised and friendly.


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## FoolOfATook (Dec 24, 2002)

Douglas Anderson's "Annotated Hobbit" addresses this very question:

Chapter 2, Note 14, Page 69

"The mention here of the king is probably not meant to refer to an actual personage but instead to invoke the idea of the king as the theoretical source of justice, law, and order"

Tolkien, as an Englishman writing for what he probably imagined to be a largely British audience, would naturally use the idea of a monarch to refer to those civic values, and the remark should probably be treated with the same amount of literal interpretation as the reference to policemen in an early edition of "The Hobbit".


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## Calimehtar (Dec 29, 2002)

I think "the king" is The King Under The Mountain. And kind of saying the whole mountain itself. Saying that the people in that area have never even heard of the Lonely Mountain, its troubles, and its legends.... and king.

By legends I mean, the whole thing of the river getting rich on jewels when the king returns and stuff.


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## Calimehtar (Dec 29, 2002)

*Tolkien, as an Englishman writing for what he probably imagined to be a largely British audience, would naturally use the idea of a monarch to refer to those civic values, and the remark should probably be treated with the same amount of literal interpretation as the reference to policemen in an early edition of "The Hobbit".* 

I'm not too sre of that /\....



*As for any innermeaning or 'message', it has in the intention of the author none. It is neither allegorical nor topical*

/\/\That came from either the forword or the prologue of The Lord of the Rings. I forgot to look to see which it was. Anyways, if you are meaning that Tolkien is writing secretly about Britain... I dont think that is right. Other people have thought he was writing about WWII. And that the ring was like a nuclear bomb. But I dont believe any of that.


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## Aragorns_girl00 (Dec 29, 2002)

well, i'm confused. i guess to understand this thread you would have to read the book.... lol


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## Wolfshead (Dec 29, 2002)

> _Originally posted by Aragorns_girl00 _
> *well, i'm confused. i guess to understand this thread you would have to read the book.... lol *


 And the simple to solution to that, Aragorns_girl00, is to go and read the book!


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## Great Khan (Jan 1, 2003)

why couldnt it be Elrond, he was the sort of King guy of Rivendell at that wasn't very far away from were the trolls were


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## Beorn (Jan 1, 2003)

The king referred to is probably a King of Men. And, most, if not all, of the hobbits had never heard of Elrond, so it wouldn't be him if they had heard of a king.


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## Tháliõndágnir (Jan 1, 2003)

"I think my point was more that The Hobbit really doesn't mesh well with LotR...I mean...he named the trolls William (Bill) Huggins, Bert, and Tom..."

What do you suggest are good troll names anyway? What constitutes as a troll name? Maybe their mothers were rather refined ladies and didn't want to go with the overused _Krag_ and _Bog_.

Wasn't some place in The Shire named "Michael Delving"? Does that make sense?


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## FoolOfATook (Jan 2, 2003)

It couldn't be Elrond because 1) I doubt the trolls even know that Rivendell exists- there are references to Rivendell being hidden and difficult to find and 2) because Elrond is not a king, no one ever refers to Elrond as a king, and there is no way in hell that three trolls would refer to an Elf as "king". I maintain that the reference is just one of those things in The Hobbit that you have to chalk up as "Tolkien writing the book without contemplating how every line would fit in with a mythology and set of languages that he'd been experimenting with and developing since the first World War and hadn't yet truly connected with the children's story he was writing at the present time" Or something like that.


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## Eriol (Jan 3, 2003)

> [The hobbits] attributed to the king of old all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were ‘The Rules’ (as they said), both ancient and just.



This is a quote from the prologue. If we remember that Bilbo is supposedly the writer of the book, it seems clear that the King being referred to later in the book is the same King, the monarch that gave the land to the hobbits in T.A. 1601: the King of Arthedain.


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## Goldberry (Jan 5, 2003)

> _Originally posted by Tháliõndágnir _
> *
> Wasn't some place in The Shire named "Michael Delving"? Does that make sense? *



It was Michel Delving.


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## Wonko The Sane (Jan 6, 2003)

*Ponders*

Thanks for the ideas guys! I'll consider them and decide which one of you is wrong in a second.


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## jallan (Jan 19, 2003)

When Tolkien wrote _The Hobbit_ he didn't make clear what kind of society Bilbo lived in or what government he lived under or anything of the kind.

But he did present Bilbo as living in a part of the world that was, to some degree "civilized" and if you went east from it you eventually came to "The Wild" which was comparitively uncivilized.

In the first edition of _The Hobbit_, when the Dwarves saw the troll's fire, some said:


> Policemen seldom come this way now. The old maps are no use: things have changed for the worse and the road is unguarded. They have seldom even heard of the king around here, and the less inquisitive you are as you go along, the less trouble you are likely to find.


The Dwarves are indicating that they are in a wild region where control by the nominal government is weak or non-existant.

What kind of government Tolkien imagined at that time we don't know. Probably he didn't have a particularly clear idea himself, but a large civilized country would likely be ruled by a king and so the expression slipped in.

In the second edition Tolkien replaced "policemen" with "travellers".

Perhaps he should have replaced "policemen" with "Rangers"?

_The Hobbit_ indeed includes a number of fairly modern technical innovations and customs, such as smoking tobacco, obviously not possible anywhere in Europe before the discovery of the "New World".

In the Prologue to _The Lord ot the Rings_, Tolkien in part wishes to justify some of the apparent anachronisms and other oddities of _The Hobbit_.

As Eriol has already pointed out, in section 3, _Of the Ordering of the Shire_, he writes:


> But there had been no king for nearly a thousand years, and even the ruins of Kings' Norbury were covered with grass. Yet the Hobbits still said of wild folk and wicked things (such as trolls) that they had not heard of the king. For they attributed to the king of old all their essential laws; and usually they kept the laws of free will, because they were The Rules (as they said), both ancient and just.


It is actually the Dwarves who speak of the king in _The Hobbit_, but these are Dwarves talking about an area within the old kingdom of Arnor, perhaps repeating what they have heard about it from Men, and might be expected to use the same expression.

So might Bree folk or any other Men that dwelt in similar small ordered settlements in what was once the kingdom of Arnor.

As to _Michel Delving_, _delving_ is just an old word meaning 'digging' and _michel_ is an old and obsolete word meaning 'great' or 'big', related to _much_.

The troll names provide no real difficulty. Tolkien indicates in Appendix E of _The Lord of the Rings_ that in his retellings from the Red Book he has replaced many of the Common Speech names and related names into English-style names or Germanic/Frankish names or other names of equivalent kind.

For example, Meriadoc was really named _Kalimac_. Similarly we should imagine that the trolls had other names in the true Red Book account.


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## Wonko The Sane (Jan 21, 2003)

I'll buy the stuff about the references to the king...

But the excuse you give for the troll's stupid names are too much of a stretch.

If he really was trying to translate their real names into something more easily understood I don't think that Bert and Tom would be names he'd pick.
I mean...Kalimak to Meriadoc...Meriadoc isn't a real name either really.
He'd have done something like that!

So yeah.
I think the answer to the troll naming bit is this: The Hobbit simply is not cohesive nor is it fully consistent with The Lord of the Rings.
And it should not be treated as such.
His vision wasn't as fully developed then as it was for LotR.
I don't think we should give credit where it's not due.

Really.
I mean...this universe doesn't exist. And I guess my point is that the facts don't all have to match up.

In real life the facts don't always match up...In a fictional one you can't expect them to be any better.


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## jallan (Jan 21, 2003)

Wonko the Sane posted


> But the excuse you give for the troll's stupid names are too much of a stretch.


Not really. We have hobbits named "Will", "Tom", "Andy", "Matt", "Bob", "Ted", and especially "Sam". 

Tolkien indicates these are, at least mostly, not supposed to be the same names used in true Westron, but are substitutions in the English of today because they are similar to the supposed originals in form or meaning or in the same style.


> Meriadoc isn't a real name either really.


_Meriadoc_, found in various variant spellings, is a reasonably well-known medieval Breton name, which is partly why Tolkien used it since he wanted the Brandybuck names to have a Celtic flavor.

See Tales from Middle-earth, King Conan Meriadoc, The Story of Meriadoc, King of Cambria, ....

Tolkien was probably not thinking about such translation theories when he originally coined those troll names or some of the Hobbit names.

But this theory of translation and substitution by style allowed him to credibly explain and retain such familiar-sounding names within the logic of the stories and their rendering into modern English.


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## Wonko The Sane (Jan 29, 2003)

This is all true...
I know an orc named Andy....


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