Part II – in which the King Under the Mountain gets offended faster than a tumblr tween.
You Do Not Hear
He does not, Master Burglar, sing on command.
Thorin Oakenshield is neither bard nor minstrel nor a creaky wizard's skald, so he does not understand why you seem to confuse a mountain king for a performer. Your hobbit eyes must be very bad in this highland light, indeed. Has the chill of pine ranges that is so pleasing to Dwarves made you ill again? Perhaps it is a fever, then, that is responsible for your demanding such a thing (and in such offhand, cavalier fashion); he cannot imagine it is in character, halfling, having already seen what Shirelings call courage. And he notes here how pitiably you are crouching near the flame.
Indeed, some sickness. It must have grabbed the tongue right out of your slack, dimpled face. For only a fool or a very sick man would kick up his heels at a Dwarf campfire, puffing that damnable toy pipe like you do, and make insolent suggestions with such a smug, churlish smile.
Yes, you have heard him correctly. Sick, insolent, smug. And that is to say nothing of your imprudence, or your arrogance – for how daring must you think yourself to request of a Durin?
You say: "Give us a song, Thorin."
Who do you think you are?
He can answer for you: you do not know.
You mean no harm by it, you say. You were only having fun – thought it would be nice, hobbit, did you? – only a song. Perhaps you are not so unwell, then, as to be completely oblivious, because that impetuous mouth snaps shut when it realizes its mistake. You are not so sight-impaired to miss the offense spark in a Durin's eye, a pang like a bad hammer blow at a smoky forge. Your grotesquely pointed ears hear well enough to detect the warning, the icewind, when coolly asked "Fond of Dwarfsong, are you, halfling?" And, though he stands far from you across their pit – for princes do not sit near to grocers – you are not amiss to the insult Thorin Oakenshield takes to your "fun."
Whatever you babbled to quit the field was useless, as your fumblings all have been. You say nothing-words like "well" and "suppose" as you try to mete out the most toothless version of what you meant. Well, suppose all you like. What halflings mean is of no consequence to Erebor's king.
So he digs on: are their hymns, chants, and lore relaxing to a townsman? Do they amuse you? Does the voice of a Durin lull you to sleep, drowsy on threnodies of grievous battle and unfathomable loss? You would not dare say so now, not dare belittle a Dwarrow Lord – but you pull your feet off the log they were on, so you must have feared to answer wrongly. And you look (as you do with increasing, irritating frequency as of late) for aid from your companions, as though they are indeed yours and not his. You find none. You, burglar, should expect no help from others, for Dwarves do not coddle the frail. Even you must learn to stand to walk, fight, speak on your own.
That, or you will die, unknown and unvindicated and suffering in gray steppe mud, as so many who sang these songs that soothe you have.
This is the diversion you ask for, hobbit.
He does not know and does not care what music means to halfling pumpkin-farmers, sheep-keepers, cotton-growers – if it is but an entertainment, a distraction, something pleasing and unimportant and base. He does not concern himself with smaller peoples. But you will know that song is a serious act of Dwarves.
And you may find, as you go, that it is all the more serious to King Thorin of Thráin of Thrór.
Go on, then, hobbit. Tell him what it is you'd most fancy hearing – what you feel best fits the napping mood of a slight, flimsy creature soft at his middle and scrawny-armed. Perhaps they should put on a grand show for the sake of your good night's rest, let you sample their myths and their lamentations and see what sounds prettiest to you at the moment. Would that suffice, Master Burglar, from these strange travelers in your company? Dwarves are a bizarre, outlandish and exotic folk, your precious books say – given easily to merriment, comradeship, drunken ballads over mead and tall tales. They have a madcap, humorous want for jewels. They will sell their mothers for a gold piece. They are backwards and barbaric and caught in the haze of old blackstone ways.
Hobbit, if you look for fables and fair-weather friends, you have found the wrong Dwarves.
They are not those chortling, laughing bankers of the gently south your mother's bedside yarns told you, who snap at rubies and spring grown from dirt piles. They are Mountain-Made – Durin's pride. Their strides are great and hair dark and bodies more granite than skin. Theirs are a people mortared from the coldest cloud-mist, fiercest fighting, purest tragedy, most bitter earth. Thorin has no mirth to offer in harp and shanty. He is not a jovial fairytale king.
You wonder why such a king would doubt you, burglar? No, perhaps you do not.
Should he sing you the legends of his people? You know nothing of Erebor and less of the Line of Durin, nothing of the language son-of. You say his names flat and unmusically – Thore-inn Dure-inn when it has always been Thauʹrin Duʹrin – and it takes you the longest time to get it right, so frankly he does not see the value in talking to you. He does not see a reason to hear someone who cannot pronounce who he is. He is the Prince of the Silver Fountains, a son of Durin the Deathless, King-in-Waiting. And who, then, he asks again, are you?
He cannot tell you who you are, Shireling. He can only tell you what it is you do. You flounder. You shudder and go pale in this hawkish cliff weather, a climate that foraged a lofty race. You sneeze at the scent of white fir. You could not possibly appreciate Dwarfsong – not with your ears tweaked for songbirds, your flower-hands, and your halfling eyes made for seeing lands of green.
Well, hobbit: there is no bounty green to be had amongst the mountain rock.
Shall he sing you the song of Náin the First, Endurer of Hell, whose crown was doused in the filth of a balrog from which he would not flee? Shall he sing to you of the terrible black hunger of Dwarves – how gold hums to them as a sweet silver bell – their fate to love the power riches trap in shape, in form? Of lost homes and lost wives and unborn children who should be, but never are? Of how he has seen the madness of gemshine make brother kill brother with bloody fists and bloodier bites? This does not seem to interest you from the way you cringe.
Shall he sing you the Dwarfish lullabies Fíli and Kíli have outgrown, of bleak winters and warm hearths and the trickery of fauns? The treachery of elves? Will you chicken-scratch these stories across your messy journal papers to tote some fragment back to a soft hobbit home? You will fail. Shall he sing to you of the curse upon Dwarf children – the elegies of fathers who wish for daughters and get dead sons, the goodbyes of mothers whose wombs cannot hold their young long enough to pass them living into their hands? Shall he sing to you the marches his own mother taught him as she threaded onyx and goldstone in his braids, of perseverance and fearlessness and how to die? They are the same ones he taught to his sister-sons, the ones that – even without the crystal beads for memory, even without the Halls of History around them – they can recite by heart. Baruk Khazâd! Does that seem the type of thing you would like?
If these are too warlike for your preferences, hobbit, might he better sing gently of the Valar-Who-Created Our Fathers' Fathers? What purpose would that serve, he wonders. Our Fathers are not yours, brash child of the West, and none of this great sorrow or violence could you ever understand.
Or shall he sing to you the most wicked poetry of them all – the Desolation of Smaug – of Erebor washed red with drake-fire, child-blood, death heat? Of how mad was Thráin's cry at the sight of Thrór's severed head in the Delving sunlight, long beard chopped, hair in the fist of a malignant white demon, dangled over another birthright ripped from them? Of how many died and died and died again to retake what has been so sorely lost? Of irony, of disaster beyond any of which a people has ever known but his – of how all their gilt glory Under the Mountain poured to thick, yellow flame that melted and ate them as they ran?'
No, hobbit. There is no lyric for that.
You are sorry. You are ignorant. But it is not a king's responsibility to educate you. He does not have the patience or the time to suffer fools. And Dwarrow do not think of music as little Shirelings do.
(You are told later – by Fíli; a Durin, no less – that this is rubbish; that Dwarves, too, knit their happy carols, and it is but Thorin of Thráin whose voice is only for greatness and sorrow. The choice of which prince ought be believed is yours. He does not know what his sister-sons say, and he does not care to debate with them. They feel Erebor in their stitchings, but they are surface children, orphan-kin; they know not the full weight of what was once, is now gone.)
What you hear is not in any case what you judge it to be. The Misty Mountains is a longing for a Dwarven home. You think of this ode, and you long, too, for your own humble home – good parchment, fine spices, and clean bedclothes. But halfling, know this: that song was not meant for you. You are a little sneaking half-man. What use have those like you of Dwarven tales, of Dwarven song, of heroes whose roars knocked the hearts from dragons and shambled the spines of giants? What use have you for verse of a Dwarven home?
If you look for a ballad, look elsewhere. Nothing they have will lighten your heart. Nothing of Dwarves is cast of a metal your small, weak soul could comprehend.
You may not know who you are, burglar, but of Thorin's blood-call, there has never been any doubt, and for this difference he cannot respect you. What is your make? You are not a proper gentle-halfling, though you protest to be. You are not a warrior. Not a picklock, not a sneakthief. You are not and will never be Mountain-Made – you are merely the little map-maker from the last grassy knoll that ran off on a whim and a daydream to ride in the shadow of Dwarves. That is your story: one of a chasing child. That is all they shall say of you – if, indeed, there is cause for them to say anything at all.
Whether you can or will change the sad footnote you are is not his place to say. Thorin's place is to rule and take back. He does not tolerate those fickle wonderers who have picked no purpose for themselves. That is a shortcoming kings and princes cannot abide, will not tolerate. That is impertinence. That is what weakness is. He has nothing to say – and, to be sure, Master Hobbit – no songs to share with the type of wonderer you are.
And even so, here in the dark, there is a possibility, a suggestion, that perhaps it is not a hobbit's lack of hearing, but that Thorin of Durin forgets. He, who remembers above all himself, forgets the order of what is not his. He has forgotten in this moment that it from wondering comes story, and it is from story comes sadness, remembering, and song.
And it comes, one day soon, that you will be very brave.
You do not hear of Dwarfsong what Dwarves do. But you hear other things. Your halfling eyes, made for seeing green, see fire on fangs of a pale monster. Your too-small hands steal blood from a monster with an axe. Your ears – pointed and large as they are – do not want to listen to the head and body of a mountain king divided, ripped asunder like Thrór before him, skull held aloft by his lion's mane of thick black hair.
They would have cut out his tongue, put out the bluestones of his eye. They would have pulled each scale from his armor and made it into trophies for a Defiler's wall. They would have chopped off his fingers for every royal ring and stripped the bear fur from his coat and pried the four Dwarven canines from his face. The rest of him would have filled the belly of a large white warg. This Thorin knows bitterly well. He can still feel the gouge of its teeth in his ribs. He can still feel the red-water doom of his unsung death. This Thorin does not forget.
And he does not deny the chill this knowing flares down his spine – for the Lord of Durin's Folk has been hard against you, hobbit, and mocking, and cruel – but from hereon, he will remember this: there are nights in which even kings are afraid.
One day soon, it will not matter that you are not a warrior. It will not matter that you are not Mountain-Made. You are small and foolish, in body and skill, but you are the first of his brothers to stand. That is how they will remember you. That is how the Folk in dawns not yet come will sing of Bilbo Baggins, Master Burglar, King's-Guard. And should they forget you – for the memory of Dwarves is long, but mortal – know that Thorin Oakenshield chooses to remember brave blade and willing heart, and he does not so much recall the other, meaningless things.
You are very brave, but you are still a little hobbit. And, as hobbits and the lesser, smaller, happier races do, it comes not long after that night that you will fall ill yet again on the cloud-cold Carrock towards Erebor.
And then it comes that Thorin, son of Thráin, son of Thrór, will sit nearby you at the fireside – and should it help you sleep, hobbit – he will sing for you whatever you wish.
Regularly with Thorin & Company:
Bilbo: Hey Thorin, did you want one of these sandw—
Thorin: WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE
Bilbo: —iches.
Thorin: asfjghj WEAK jgfht hsghgr motherfucking HONOR and DWARF mjjjghthsf meddling pfshasdthfguh son of a DURIN jghsfshsad ELVES graahhgasdhshfj MOUNTAIN
Bilbo: What just happened.