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Copywork
About This Passage
Thorin's eyewitness account of Smaug's coming. Tolkien builds dread through sound before sight, a hurricane's roar and cracking pines, before the dragon settles 'in a spout of flame,' and slips in a wry parenthetical about his own younger self. The passage rewards study of periodic build, sensory escalation, and the dash-bound aside.
There was a most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm called Smaug. One day he flew up into the air and came south. The first we heard of it was a noise like a hurricane coming from the North, and...
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Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter, then identify the single most important sentence or moment, and explain what it reveals about the book's larger argument concerning comfort, courage, and worth.
Discussion Questions
- The chapter sets Bilbo's love of comfort against the dwarves' call to adventure and loss. What does Tolkien suggest about the value and the limits of a safe, settled life in this opening chapter, and do you find that view convincing? Use the chapter's details about Bilbo and the dwarves to defend your reading.
- Tolkien's narrator often speaks of Bilbo with affectionate irony, saying he was 'not quite so prosy as he liked to believe' and calling Gandalf's praise 'poetical exaggeration.' Why does the narrator treat Bilbo with this irony, and how does it shape the way we see him at the chapter's start? Use the narrator's words and asides to defend your reading.
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Vocabulary
Item 1
dull, plain, and commonplace, especially in speech or manner
Item 2
suggesting magic, enchantment, or witchcraft
Item 3
in a fixed way that cannot be shifted or changed
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Critical Thinking
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