In some ways Bard is a figure from the ancient world of heroes. He prides himself on his descent, from Girion Lord of Dale. He re-establishes monarchy in Laketown, which till then seems to have been a kind of commercial republic. The proof of his descent lies in an inherited weapon which he speaks to as if it were sentient, and as if it too wanted vengeance on its old master’s bane: ‘Black arrow!…I had you from my father and he from of old. If ever you came from the forges of the true king under the Mountain, go now and speed well!’ And it is this arrow, of course – shot by Bard, but directed by the thrush, and ultimately by Bilbo – which kills the dragon, in a way not entirely dissimilar to Sigurth or Beowulf.
The death of Smaug is, however, presented for the most part and up to the final shot in a way which seems much more modernistic. It is above all a crowd scene. When the dragon-fire first appears in the sky, what Bard does is not prepare his own armoury, like Beowulf, but start to organize a collective defence, like a twentieth-century infantry officer. He has the whole town filling pots with water, readying arrows and darts, breaking down the bridge – the Middle-earth equivalent of digging trenches, collecting ammunition, organizing damage-control parties. Smaug is met by a fortified position and by volley-fire, with Bard running to and fro ‘cheering on the archers and urging the Master to order them to fight to the last arrow’. The last word shows up the mixed nature of the scene, for the phrase one might expect is ‘fight to the last round’, a phrase from an era of musketry. In the same way ‘there was still a company of archers who held their ground among the burning houses’. ‘Hold one’s ground’ is another modernistic phrase, suggesting maps and front lines – the Old English version of it would be something like ‘hold one’s stead’, i.e. the ground one stands on. The whole scene in fact, though transmuted into an era of bows and arrows, seems more like the First World War which Tolkien himself fought in than any legendary battle from the Dark Ages. Though victory does in the end turn on a single man and an ancestral weapon, the vigour of the description comes from collective action, from forethought and organization: in a word, from discipline.
I have commented elsewhere on the nineteenth-century idealization of this quality as the most prized of British imperial virtues (Road, 1992), and Tolkien was no stranger to it in real life. When, in his Beowulf lecture of 1936, he mentioned men in the present day ‘who have heard of heroes and indeed seen them’, he must have been referring to his own war service – I have no doubt that he knew, as a matter of regimental pride, that his own regiment, the Lancashire Fusiliers, won more Victoria Crosses (seventeen) during the First World War than any other. But when one talks of modern war-heroes, and then of ancient ones, the contrast of styles is very marked, the latter (for instance) having almost no conception of concern for others – no one is ever praised in saga literature, let alone decorated, for rescuing the wounded under fire – the former (by convention) without the personal and self-aggrandizing motives which so often, in epic or saga, come over nowadays as boastfully immodest. And yet, Tolkien must have thought, was there after all no connection, no connection at all? Could the relationship between Dark Age battles and the First World War not perhaps be like the one between Gollum and Bilbo: different on the surface, with a deeper current of similarity? That is what seems to be the case with Bard.
Superficial clash of styles leading to a deeper understanding of unity is in the end the major theme (even the major lesson) of The Hobbit. The superficial clash is exploited comically from the beginning, as when Bilbo’s ‘business manner’ runs into the narrator’s, and into Thorin’s, in chapters 1 and 2. Bilbo speaks from the heart of the bourgeois world when he says obstinately, ‘I should like to know about risks, out-of-pocket expenses, time required, and remuneration, and so forth’, and the narrator immediately mocks him by putting the commercial language into plain speech – ‘by which he meant: “What am I going to get out of it? And am I going to come back alive?”’ Thorin then trumps even this with his letter which says, in a parody of business English, ‘Terms: cash on delivery, up to and not exceeding one fourteenth of total profits (if any); funeral expenses to be defrayed by us or our representatives, if occasion arises and the matter is not otherwise arranged for’. Words and phrases like ‘cash on delivery’, ‘profits’, ‘defrayed’, were not and could not be used in medieval times (the word ‘profit’ is not even recorded in its modern sense by the OED till 1604). But on the other hand few modern contracts qualify profits with the gloomy phrase ‘if any’, or assume the likelihood that there will be no funeral expenses, because the contracting party or parties will have been eaten (though Beowulf says exactly that in lines 445-55 of the epic). Even the signature on the letter, ‘Thorin & Co.’, is ambiguous. Nothing could be more familiar in modern commerce than the ‘& Co.’. But Thorin’s ‘Co.’ is not a limited company but a company in the oldest sense – fellow-travellers, messmates. In this initial clash Bilbo’s deliberately grown-up style loses hands down. It seems pompous, evasive, self-deceiving, readily exposed by the dwarvish concentration on real probabilities.
After that, one might say, the styles see-saw. Thorin’s is still up when they arrive in Laketown and he announces himself with genuine pomp as ‘Thorin son of Thrain son of Thror King under the Mountain’. Fili and Kili get the same treatment, ‘The sons of my father’s daughter…Fili and Kili of the race of Durin’, but Bilbo is left as an anti-climax, ‘and Mr. Baggins who has travelled with us out of the West’. One should note that Laketown is itself a place of clashing styles, in which there are at least three attitudes present: the Master’s wary scepticism, similar to Bilbo’s at the start, but extending in the case of the younger people to refusal to believe in any old tales about dragons at all; a counterbalancing and equally foolish romanticism, based on ‘old songs’ not very well understood, in which the dragon may exist but is no longer to be feared; and the grim and unpopular views of Bard, balanced between the two. Laketown, at the centre of the book, functions as another primarily hostile image of modernity, against which Thorin and the dwarves seem both splendid and realistic.
But then the stylistic see-saw tilts the other way. When Thorin launches into another magniloquent speech at the start of chapter 12, which contains within it the epic ‘now is the time’ formula, the narrator cuts it down with ‘You are familiar with Thorin’s style on important occasions’, and Bilbo cuts it down further with a mix of plain speech and sarcastic exaggeration: ‘If you mean you think it is my job to go into the secret passage first, O Thorin Thrain’s son Oakenshield, may your beard grow ever longer…say so at once and have done!’ Dwarvish rhetoric, and dwarvish splendour, are re-established by the sight of the treasure, which fills even Bilbo ‘with enchantment and with the desire of dwarves’; but this too is kept in check by Bilbo’s reactions. His mithril mail-coat and jewelled helmet ought to transform the hobbit even more than did the naming of Sting, but though he appreciates them, he cannot help putting himself back in a Hobbi-ton context: ‘I feel magnificent…but I expect I look rather absurd. How they would laugh on the Hill at home! Still I wish there was a looking-glass handy!’
The final confrontation of styles comes, however, in chapters 15 and 16. Chapter 15, ‘The gathering of the clouds’, reaches a pitch of archaism higher than anything so far encountered. The raven Roäc son of Care speaks with impressive dignity; Thorin’s challenge repeats his titles, and is backed up by a newly aggressive version of the dwarves’ song from chapter 1; the chapter leads on to the parley between Thorin and Bard, so archaically put, so full of rhetorical questions and grammatical inversions, that it remains quite hard to follow. One thing it does convey impressively is the difficulty of negotiation once issues of honour are involved. Much of the chapter would fit quite easily into situations from the Icelandic ‘Sagas of the Kings’. But in the next chapter Bilbo takes a hand, and he does so with a return to the ‘business manner’ which was so