I am happy to post this interview what is binary option with author Benita J. Prins, fellow lover of all things Tolkien and a great writer in her own right too! I read her fantasy, Sea of Crystal, Sea of Glass recently and recommend … Continue reading
In a single chapter, Tolkien dismantles the scaffolding of heroic warfare and rebuilds it in the image of loss rather than glory. The Battle of Five Armies, that messy collision under the Lonely Mountain, refuses the tidy moral accounting of the Iliad or the Aeneid, and in doing so it offers a model of the epic that feels more honest than anything handed down from classical antiquity.
Australian readers have a particular appetite for stories that grapple with mateship under fire. Walk into Readings in Carlton on a Saturday arvo and you will find Tolkien shelved between the front-line memoirs of Gallipoli and the bush ballads of Banjo Paterson, a placement that says something about how this country reads war. The Hobbit has been taught in schools from Perth to Parramatta for decades, and the question of whether Tolkien's climax belongs in the epic tradition has long been a local conversation.
For most of literary history, the war narrative has been a story of escalation, a duel of champions, and a clear verdict. Homer gives us Achilles dragging Hector, Virgil gives us Aeneas walking away from Troy with a household god under his arm, and the audience leaves the poem knowing who the poem is for. The hero returns, the enemy is buried or forgotten, and the future is mapped onto a single lineage. Tolkien, who spent his working life inside these texts as a scholar, knew the machinery intimately, and he also knew where it squeaked.
The Hobbit does not begin in that lineage, and the final movement of the book is a quiet refusal to follow it. The narrator steps back, the perspective widens to a handful of combatants, and the climax is delivered as a brute fact rather than a triumph. Even Thorin, the figure most likely to wear the armour of an Achilles, is shown as a hollowed-out ruler whose heroism in the battle cannot repair the damage his obsession with gold has already done. The epic drumbeat is kept going just long enough to show how thin it sounds when stripped of its moral scaffolding.
What Tolkien offers instead is an anti-epic with epic scale. The armies are real, the casualties are real, and the resolution comes not from a single decisive blow but from a sequence of small interventions, an eagle's late swoop, Beorn's sudden arrival, the stones falling with calculated weight. The reader is left with the feeling that survival is contingent and victory is provisional, a feeling that older epics worked hard to suppress.
One of the most striking choices in the chapter is the absence of a single heroic centre. Bard the Bowman takes down Smaug, but he does not become the unquestioned leader of the valley. Thranduil commands the woodland host, Dain Ironfoot holds the line of the dwarves, and the men of the Lake-town arrive as a third force with their own grievances. Each of these parties has a coherent claim to a piece of the aftermath, and none of them is willing to fold it into another.
Tolkien refuses the standard resolutions: marriage, slaughter, or a divine voice from the mountain. The battle ends in exhaustion rather than revelation, and the negotiations that follow take place across bodies that have not yet cooled. Thorin dies in the arms of Bilbo, an intimate gesture that openly mocks the public funeral games of antiquity. The treasure is distributed, but the distribution is described as a process, a series of gifts and exchanges, and the moral weight of those choices falls on people who were never combatants at all.
For readers in Australia, where the Anzac legend has been quietly rewritten in public memory over the last thirty years, this structure feels familiar. The Gallipoli peninsula, by the time the campaign ran its course, was not a story of a single triumph but a story of factions, weather, and supply lines. The new histories from Australian and New Zealand presses since the nineties owe a quiet debt to the kind of narrative honesty Tolkien was already practising in 1937.
The treasure hoard in The Hobbit is not a reward waiting for the hero. It is a political substance, a thing that bends everyone who comes near it, including the dwarves who have travelled the length of Middle-earth to reclaim it. Dragon-sickness is not a metaphor the author needs to defend. It is the central engine of the final third of the book, and it works by exposing the limits of every character who pretends to be above material want.
Thorin, Fili, and Kili die for gold that none of them can carry home. The Master of Lake-town, who spends the battle safely indoors, walks away with a portion of the hoard and, in doing so, ensures that the next chapter of the town's history will be written in the same key as the last. Even Bilbo, who hands over the Arkenstone and refuses his share of the treasure, is a counter-example rather than a moral blueprint. He is allowed to leave because he is a hobbit, because his people have no use for gold, and because the other actors find him, in the end, inexplicable.
This is a long way from the rings of power in the later tradition or the cursed objects of folk tale. Tolkien's economy here is closer to a pre-modern understanding of wealth as something that moves through a community rather than something that belongs to an individual. Australian readers, raised on a literature that grew up alongside the goldfields of Ballarat and Bendigo, will recognise the pattern even if they have not thought to name it.
The battle is named for five armies, and the plural is the point. Tolkien takes pains to give each of those forces its own voice, its own dialect, its own reason for being on the field, and he refuses to let any of them be the silent backdrop that a Homeric army often becomes. The goblins arrive in ranks with warg cavalry, the elves of the woodland realm move in ordered companies, the dwarves hold the gate, the men of the Lake-town are a press of armed townsfolk, and the eagles descend from above in a single intervention that does not pretend to be a turning point until it is one.
What the chapter actually delivers is a model of cooperation that does not require a shared ideology. The elves do not love the dwarves, the dwarves do not trust the elves, the men of the Lake-town owe very little to either, and the eagles have no contract with anyone. They fight together because the alternative is annihilation, and Tolkien is honest enough to say that this is the only kind of alliance that lasts longer than a single generation.
There is a useful local parallel in the way Australian volunteer brigades and rural fire services have been written about in the last few years. The fire seasons in New South Wales and Victoria have produced memoirs that read like a footnote to the Battle of Five Armies, accounts of strangers working a flank for twelve hours and then driving home in silence. Tolkien's chapter is a literary version of that same gesture, a recognition that survival is collaborative, and that collaboration is, more often than not, ugly and brief.
Among the many figures who die in the chapter, few are named, and that anonymity is the point. The epic tradition reserves its adjectives for kings and champions, and the rank-and-file appear, if at all, as a coloured mass on the horizon. Tolkien inverts this hierarchy. Theoden's army at the Pelennor Fields will later get the same treatment, but The Hobbit does it first, in a single chapter, on a smaller canvas.
We hear of dwarves cut down at the gate, of elven bowmen who fall on the slopes, of Beorn's solitary charges into the press. None of these deaths are given the slow, ceremonial description that Homer gives to Patroclus or Virgil gives to Pallas. They are counted, the page moves on, and the war continues. The effect is not cold. The effect is a kind of compressed grief, an acknowledgment that the form of the epic is too grand to hold the people who actually do the dying.
It is a tonal choice that Australian readers of war history will recognise. The books that have shaped the local conversation, from Les Carlyon's Gallipoli to the more recent catalogues of conscript experience, refuse the consolation of a single hero. The death of any one soldier in those accounts is permitted to mean only as much as it means to the next soldier beside them, and Tolkien is operating in the same key when he lists the fallen of the Lonely Mountain without ranking them.
The prose of the chapter is another of its quiet arguments. Where classical epic tends to rise into a heightened register, into the long simile and the compound epithet, Tolkien keeps the texture conversational, almost domestic. Sentences stay short. The narrator keeps stepping in to remind the reader that he is reporting rather than celebrating. The result is a war scene that refuses the intoxications of martial language, the very intoxications that make older epics so easy to read and so hard to take seriously.
This is a significant inheritance for fantasy literature in Australia. The local tradition of speculative writing, from the small presses in Brisbane to the genre magazines that have been quietly surviving in Melbourne for decades, has tended to favour plain prose over ceremonial prose. Writers who grew up reading The Hobbit in school libraries from Fremantle to Hobart absorbed this preference, and it shows in the books they write. Tolkien's anti-lyric war chapter is, in a sense, a permission slip for every fantasy author who has wanted to describe a fight without sounding like a Victorian translation of a Greek original.
Rereading the chapter in the middle of the twenty-first century, it is hard not to notice how completely its assumptions have soaked into the fantasy that followed. The sympathetic enemy, the uncertain peace, the treasure that poisons the victors, the alliance of convenience that dissolves within a generation, all of these are now stock elements of the genre. They were not stock in 1937. They were the deliberate choices of an author who had read the entire epic tradition in its original languages and had decided that the tradition, as it stood, was not adequate to the world that had just gone through the Somme.
Australian readers, who tend to be suspicious of grand narratives and a little impatient with heroes on plinths, will find this chapter a useful one to keep returning to. It does not flatter the reader. It does not pretend that a war is a story with a moral attached. It simply describes what happens when several different kinds of people, none of them saints, are forced into a single field together and asked to survive. That description, more than any number of golden shields and singing spears, is what makes the Battle of Five Armies an epic that belongs to the present rather than the past.
An essay I wrote about the desire of Tolkien and the TCBS to be a light to their darkening world. A century later, he still provides light. Thank you, Professor and God trade binary option bless! Art by Justin Gerard … Continue reading