Storytelling Alchemy

By some definitions, alchemy involves turning ordinary metals into gold – the opening of The Hobbit achieves a similar effect.  Seemingly “ordinary” elements are combined with one another and take on a magical, wondrous quality.  There is food and drink and smoking and singing – but the effect of them all together is greater than the sum of their parts.  There is a strong theme of mingling and mixing, even transmutation.  Sometimes this is harmonious, as with this segment of the dwarf song:

On silver necklaces they strung

The flowering stars, on crowns they hung

The dragon-fire, in twisted wire

They meshed the light of moon and sun.

Even the lines of the song are twisted together.  Sometimes, however, this mingling is less harmonious, as with the famous:

Chip the glasses and crack the plates!

   Blunt the knives and bend the forks!

That’s what Bilbo Baggins hates –

   Smash the bottles and burn the corks!

 

There is a clashing of expectations about Bilbo’s role, of course, and even the dwarves get mixed together: “He pulled open the door with a jerk, and they all fell in, one on top of the other.”  Around Gandalf there is a more elegant mingling of smoke rings: “He had a cloud of them about him already, and in the dim light it made him look strange and sorcerous.”  Likewise, Gandalf is the magical element that combines Bilbo and the dwarves into a single company.

 

The greedy impulse in gold-hunting alchemy is reflected in the motives of the dwarves, whose longing for “pale enchanted gold” affects even the humble hobbit, such that he “felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves.”

 

But for the reader, the whole of the chapter is simply magic… and so the journey begins.