This is what Philippa Boyens says about her in 'Desolation of Smaug' commentary.
Tauriel being curious to see the world beyond Mirkwood is an obvious parallel to this scene in movie one, when Gandalf reminds Bilbo of
Bilbo and Tauriel both leave their homes and go into the world following their respective reckless dark-haired sons of Durin.
They fight for their Dwarves.
They risk their lives to save them...
...and fail.
And then, in movie three
"You will not be the same."
Evangeline Lilly was asked in an interview what happens to Tauriel after the events of the movie. She said:
“It’s going to sound very mundane, but I think she goes back to Greenwood — and she goes back to work. Ultimately, she has a job. She has a responsibility. And maybe she doesn’t go back to being head of guard, maybe she’s been softened and wouldn’t resume her old position, but maybe she would be even more impassioned to protect what she loves, to protect her home, to protect what’s important to her, but maybe she’ll do it now with more compassion and a little bit of softness”.
They both return home and resume their old life, mourning for their Dwarves. Changed forever.
It's almost unbelievable how perfectly their character arcs mirror each other, from the beginning to the very end.
It is beautiful and i will never be over it.
(also, i recommend this excellent piece of meta that summarises all of this very well)
Okay, so I have to ask because I love your OFMD meta and I just finished reading The Hobbit for the first time... I don't get Bilbo/Thorin! I just don't feel a connection like that between them. I'm not opposed to it whatsoever and I really want to see it, so I'm inquiring here to let you talk about it, if you want! Was it more a movie thing?
Hey Anon, I certainly don't blame you for not finding Bilbo/Thorin content in The Hobbit book. Going into an Unexpected Journey, I genuinely expected Bilbo/Balin to be the main pairing (if there even was one, which I doubted) based on their book interactions.
Bilbo/Thorin is almost entirely in the films. It is a result of some major changes to Thorin's character (from an old treasure hunter looking for his last big score to a noble exiled prince in his late prime looking to restore a homeland for his people) and some minor ones to Bilbo's character (that he chooses to go on the adventure, rather than being hustled out the door by Gandalf). It caught pretty much everyone who went to see it by surprise. Even then, I'd say I didn't get the fanfic-y "Oh." of falling in love with the ship until the last couple of scenes of AUJ. Then it all came together for me.
If you're looking to ship Bagginshield and understand why I wrote tons of meta and fic for it, you'll (unfortunately, in the case of some rather subpar film elements mixed with stellar individual performances) have to watch the films :)
I was doing some research the other day instead of doing my math homework and I realized that A. The dwarven calendar is a lunar calendar. and B. They began their year far earlier than everyone else as seen by Thorin’s conversation in Rivendell in Unexpected Journey-
While in Rivendell, Thorin declares: “The first day of the dwarves’ New Year is, as all should know, the first day of the last moon of Autumn on the threshold of Winter. We still call it Durin’s Day when the last moon of Autumn and the sun are in the sky together.”
And so while the concept of writing a yule/winter holiday fanfiction around this time of year is always popular, if you’re writing about Dwarves celebrating yule it would more culturally line up with Durin’s day.
But we don’t even know that they do celebrate what we or even in world peoples would recognize as yule. Hobbits are recorded as having a yuletide that lasts multiple days which was a new years celebration, as are men and elves both having new year days and celebrations in midwinter, lining up with our own expectations for winter holidays.
Obviously writer-tolkien brain would say, the dwarves are partially inspired by the norse and so they would celebrate yule same as everyone else, but especially because they are dwarves. It’s also well known that most cultures in our world have some sort of celebrations mid-winter because it’s just so depressing in the middle of dark cold winter months.
But think about the in world reasoning. Both having a lunar calendar and Durin’s Day as the new year opens up possibilities for many different types of celebrations. Perhaps they may still have a form of a Great Hunt occurring in the winter, as the need for furs and meat would likely eventually lead to a ceremonial holiday as well.
I think that they do celebrate a type of yule around Durin’s day, just calling it Durin’s day instead. I think also some of the traditions may be different as the season is still changing at this time, so maybe more fall type things where they celebrate saving enough crops for the winter and perhaps have something like a craft show but more hardcore.
Along with this, during the times when Erebor and Dale were occupied, I could definitely see the dwarves happily participating with the men in dale in any celebrations, even if their holiday had passed.
My own thoughts- I feel like every single culture celebrating yule is a bit of a stretch when it comes to cultural diversity. While I can see the elves and men and hobbits all having effect on each other in some places, the more separated groups of men and elves, along with the obvious separation of the dwarves, could lead to some different types of holidays that really give us the opportunity to be creative.
Most of all, with Dwarves being so secretive and the Durin’s Day new year, we have a lot of power to create what we want. For example, in a fic that I wrote recently, I created a festival of Mahal, which was essentially a fall harvest festival where there were lots of different types of competitions, between fighting and cooking and metalworking and of course, a night of drinking and eating in the great hall.
Also, this would be great fuel for a fic where Bilbo brings Thorin home for the holidays, and Bilbo gets to teach him about the hobbit’s traditions as Thorin mutters about the new year starting two months ago. A nice reversal of the typical Bilbo learning dwarven culture in erebor trope.
Anyway, I don’t have a main point I just thought this was all very interesting
You ever think about the fact that Thorin probably fell into the dragonsickness as hard and as fast as he did because the Ring was with Bilbo, and that the fact that he probably trusted Bilbo singularly despite him being the group's LITERAL BURGLAR was because he didnt even know the ring existed ergo all of its temptations and promise just probably came off as a neon Trust Me TM vibe
That shit took time for Thrór and it ain't supposed to be sus that Thorin just suddenly dove headfirst?
Like WHAT is gonna speak more to someone susceptible to a family curse called GOLDSICKNESS, who's endured a century of hardship and insecurity, and now has returned to find themselves unprepared to fight the literal calamity of the age for their homeland back than something golden that promises power and engenders murderous rage
Don't come at me with this "it was his destiny to fall to what his forefathers did" bullshit I know it's you Celeborn
sometimes i just can’t believe the “to me he was...” scene is even real. like how is it possible for anyone to watch that scene and not believe bilbo felt more than friendship for thorin (in movie canon)?
“I know that’s how you must honour him, but to me he was never that” the look of adoration on his face here absolutely breaks me. that is the look of someone in love, someone who feels something much stronger and deeper than friendship or awe.
like ok, he’s saying this to balin, who is obviously thorin’s friend, someone very important in thorin’s life and has known him all his life too. but bilbo is saying that thorin was something more than a legend, a king, a friend to him. he struggles to put it into words, and in that moment he also realizes that he was in love with thorin, and what one word can he even use to describe the weight of his feelings for him? i believe that’s why he stops and gets choked up :(
and then balin gives him the most understanding and knowing look!!! because he knows what thorin meant to bilbo!! and he knows that thorin felt the same!! bilbo doesn’t even have to say it! IT BREAKS MY HEART. BLESS MARTIN FREEMAN AND KEN STOTT. anyway.. the whole end of the trilogy focuses on how bilbo cant even put into words what thorin was to him. and obviously when he says “he was my friend” to the hobbits, that doesn’t even begin to encompass what thorin really was to him, because why would he even bother trying to explain that to the hobbits who ransacked his home? i’m not trying to say that friendship isn’t a deep and important bond and feeling, but friendship is not what comes across between them in my opinion (i could go on about that point), and i honestly struggle to see it from any other perspective. thorin truly changed bilbo’s life, and both bilbo and thorin only wanted happiness for each other in the end, despite all the struggles with the dragon sickness and arkenstone debacle. bilbo stayed so true to thorin up until the very end, never giving up on him no matter what anyone said. THAT’S LOVE.
Headcanon: The reason that Thorin was resistant to sharing Smaug’s hoard with the Men of Laketown and the Woodland Elves was not simple greed or possessiveness. Instead, he was concerned about triggering hyper-inflation in the region by the sudden introduction of large amounts of cash into the economy.
That this is a realistic concern can be seen by asking what Bard would do with the treasure once he got it. It is true that his town had been wiped out, and the people of Laketown faced a harsh winter with little food or shelter. However, Laketown is located in a very sparsely populated region. There were no great standing surpluses of food, materials, or labor to be purchased, and bringing them up from the more populous south would be difficult given the lack of convenient waterways. In the face of such inelastic supply, an infusion of gold would simply run up the prices of everything, preventing the establishment of a functional economy among the refugees.
No similar calamity awaited the Shire upon Bilbo’s return for two key reasons. First, of course, we are simply dealing with a much smaller amount of money (one fourteenth, to be exact) being put into a much larger economy, so the inflationary potential is much less. Second, Bilbo was (as Gandalf had carefully ascertained) disinclined to spend lavishly or make sudden large investments. He intended to husband his treasure for the long term, using it simply to support a modest upper-middle-class lifestyle.
Of course Dain did ultimately release most of the treasure following the Battle of Five Armies. However, the battle itself somewhat changed the circumstances. The destruction of the Goblins -- always hostile to trade with other races -- and the purging of the Necromancer’s influence from Mirkwood opened up trade routes to the west (to the Woodmen and Beornings, and beyond down the Anduin), expanding the market area into which the gold would be infused. Moreover, these new lands created new opportunities for productive investment that could absorb the influx of cash. Balin’s expedition to Moria, though wrapped in the language of reclaiming an ancestral patrimony, was thus primarily commercial in intent. There was at the same time an attempt by a group of hobbits to establish an outpost in the former northern Goblin settlement (the one visited by Bilbo) as part of an emerging trade war between Eriador and Rhovanion over the resources of the Misty Mountains.
(This also explains why most of the Dwarves in Thorin’s company seem like such bumblers -- they weren’t selected for their potential as heroic adventurers, they were selected for their business degrees and quantitative modeling expertise. What we now know as Say’s Law was first demonstrated by Bofur using data from the shift from agriculture to sheep-herding in Forlindon, and Oin would be recognized today as a proto-Marxist.)
Another perspective can be had by examining the effects of Smaug’s arrival. Prior to Smaug, Dale and Erebor operated as feudal tributary regimes, with most exchange taking place in the form of taxation and redistribution by the central lord. The money supply was regulated by the twin pressures of accumulating large hoards as a source of prestige for the monarch, versus distributing largesse to secure alliances. Moreover, much of the value of the treasure had to do with the symbolism of the objects into which it was wrought (see e.g. the mithril coat made for an Elf prince that Bilbo acquires). There was little in the way of a market operating on gold as a universal medium of exchange.
Smaug destroyed this feudal system. With the lords of Dale and Erebor gone, the region turned to a more commercial organization of the economy. Even the surviving monarchy of Thranduil’s Elves became drawn in, as we see with their participation in the wine trade. Indeed, northeastern Rhovanion is one of the few places in Middle-earth where Tolkien posits the existence of a market-based economy. (The other, of course, is the Shire. And here we can incorporate my headcanon that the idea of the Shire as a quiet pre-modern backwater is Bagginsish romanticism -- in fact the Shire was the hub of a proto-capitalist trading sphere stretching across Eriador and beyond.) At the risk of sounding like I’m justifying the mass murder he used as a means, Smaug’s attack in effect enabled the modernization of Rhovanion’s economy.
Once this capitalist system was in place, the release of Smaug’s hoard back into the system would have a very different effect. Gandalf was presumably concerned not only about the possibility of Sauron using Smaug as a military threat during the coming war, but also that if the dragon were defeated in the end, the lack of a steady hand on the tiller would cause economic chaos far worse than any war.
“The Arkenstone, it’s this mystic rock that the Dwarves uncovered. It doesn’t essentially have power, it’s not something that’s gonna be able to melt tanks and blow things up. But it’s become so symbolic that it’s the only thing that will unite the seven Dwarf families who are scattered around Middle-earth”.
“Rather than just being a shiny stone or jewel we wanted the Arkenstone to be something quite special. Its uniqueness wasn't in its form, but in its properties. I think it might have been something Philippa [Boyens] said that sent us down the cosmic route with the design – thinking of it as a kind of seed of creation, a mirror of the beginning. Captured within it is some kind of hologram of what the universe looked like at the moment of its creation”.
“We would look at photographs from the Hubble space telescope. That would give us the kind of reference that we were using for that sense of deep space that we see when we peer into the stone. And then Peter wanted that to sort of expand, sort of trail out into the air from the Arkenstone itself”
– Peter Jackson and his design team (from ‘The Hobbit: Art & Design’ and the BOTFA ‘Behind the Scenes’)
*
Personally, I never quite liked it when in post-botfa AU fanfics the authors made Thorin destroy the Arkenstone. Like, to smash it with his hammer or cast it to the abyss – ‘cause having now freed himself from the dragon spell he’s tormented by remorse and cannot bear to look at it. This is unfair. The Arkenstone isn’t the One Ring, it does not contain evil in itself. It wasn’t the cause of Thorin’s dragon sickness, just a symbol that in his deluded mind he’s given too much significance to. This jewel is a marvelous object, a wonder of creation – almost a living thing, in the same sense that Feanor’s Silmarils were. It deserves to exist.
Apropos to nothing and definitely not the bagginshield fic I'm working on right now, the fact that Peter Jackson made elves into vegetarians still pisses me right the fuck off, not saying some of them aren't, but it's pretty goddamn canonical that elves like to go hunting, they are famous archers with a goddamn god of the hunt as a major deity, dammit, they definitely eat what they hunt and that's why I read the banquet scene in Rivendell as a deliberate, targeted insult or "joke" by Elrond at the dwarves' expense and one that Thorin, as a person born into nobility noticed for what it was and that's why he was so salty the whole time...
... anyway this will definitely make an appearance in the weird gender fuckery bagginshield fic I'm working on but I needed a second to vent about it here too idek
