Exploring J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit by Corey Olsen

Author:Corey Olsen [Olsen, Corey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Lazy Lob and crazy Cob

are weaving webs to wind me.

I am far more sweet than other meat,

but still they cannot find me!

Here am I, naughty little fly;

you are fat and lazy.

You cannot trap me, though you try,

in your cobwebs crazy.

(148)

Again Bilbo insults the spiders, calling them names and accusing them of being not only lazy, but helpless and impotent. He increases the stakes a bit by teasing them with his own sweetness and naughtiness, increasing their desire both to eat him and to punish him for his insulting disrespect. Both of these songs are made up, we are reminded, “on the spur of a very awkward moment,” but although they might not be very beautiful as verse, they are extremely effective in stirring up the desired emotion in his listening audience: blind rage (147).

Like the first song, Bilbo’s second poetic effort also contains wordplay and double meanings that are quite clever. Notice, for instance, the play that Bilbo makes on the word crazy, which he uses in both the first and the last lines of the song. Although the word is used almost exclusively to refer to insanity these days, the primary definition of crazy is, as Tolkien would know well, “full of cracks,” “impaired,” “damaged,” or “frail.”* In line one, Bilbo applies the word to the spiders’ mental status as usual, implying that they are crack-brained. He then plays on this sense of the word in his taunts throughout the middle of the poem, harping on the fact that, for some reason, the spiders can’t even locate the sweet, juicy, annoying little fly who is standing right in front of them, in the very middle of their own webs. Remember that the spiders would have no understanding of Bilbo’s magic invisibility ring; Bilbo seems to be trying to get them to doubt either their own senses or their own sanity. In the last line, Bilbo applies the word crazy to their webs, suggesting that they are frail and flawed, mocking the tools with which the spiders are attempting to catch him. Bilbo punctuates this last insult by drawing his sword, slashing easily through a web that is indeed crazy and shoddily constructed, and going off singing into the distance.

In Bilbo’s songs, we can hear a remarkable amount of nerve, as Bilbo dares not only to sneak up on these terrifying monsters, but to throw insults at them and provoke them into a frenzy. Remember that back in Bag-End, just hearing Thorin mention the possibility that some of them might never return from their journey was enough to make Bilbo burst out in a shriek and collapse into a quivering heap on the floor. Now, he has both the courage and the coolness to deliberately goad dozens or even hundreds of giant spiders into charging at him, so he can lead them on a chase through the dark and trackless forest. He can stand a little bit later in the middle of “hundreds of angry spiders” surrounding him and his

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