Headscratchers / The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Smaug and Oakenshield

• How does Smaug know that Thorin goes by the name Oakenshield? When talking to Bilbo, Smaug uses the name. But Thorin didn't get that name until after the fall of Erebor, and Smaug had established himself on the hoard by then. Does Smaug subscribe to The Rhovanion Gazette?
  • Since he also knew that "darkness is coming", perhaps Sauron made a little visit and updated Smaug on what's been going on in the world in the past few decades. Alternatively the Company may not be the first adventureres who stumbled into his lair.
  • "We come to reclaim this hall in the name of Thorin Oakenshield, son of Thráin, son of Thrór, son of — ohshitohshit ohshitohshitohshit" *flame*
  • The orcs call Thorin "Oakenshield", too. It's possible that Smaug has a few orc contacts who report to him on how the world's faring every few years or decades.
• Also, what the hell is a dragon supposed to do with all that gold (besides sleeping in it and pushing Thorin's buttons)? Tolkien never explains this; and seriously, when will we ever see Smaug i.e. going out to a marketplace to spend money? And sure, maybe Smaug having magpie-like tendencies (those tendencies being intensified the bigger the piles of glittering, shiny things are) might be a sufficient explanation as to why he chose to take over Erebor, and one that holds more traction than wanting to spite Thorin and his line — but no, all we have is him being characterized as being simply drawn to the great wealth that Durin's folk have amassed. And if all he cares about is the gold, why even bother learning the name of Oakenshield at all when Thorin is basically like a tiny, insignificant little speck that he can burn to a crisp like any other being or creature of Middle Earth who dares to cross his path?
  • Its in the mythology (both Tolkien's and real Norse and Germanic Mythology that Tolkien took inspiration from) Dragons love treasure, especially gold, they horde it, they sleep on it. They keep it for no other purpose than they want to own it, and anyone who takes but a single piece will incur there wrath. Why? Why do people spend thousands of pounds for works of art that they don't plan to sell on, the feeling of owning it. Smaug's got greed around ten times worse than any Dwarf, to him just owning all that treasure is worth anything it takes to get it (not that he doesn't enjoy that to).
  • In the book it's stated that Smaug is well aware of the horde's current market value. Why? Only dragons would know.

Orcs catching up with the Company

• How did the Orcs catch up with the Company so quickly? The Eagles carried them a fair way away from the confrontation cliff, with not many opportunities for what Wargs were left to track their scent, and yet BAM - opening of the second film the dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf are running from the orcs as if the eagle intervention never happened. Admittedly, we don't know how much time passed between the first and second film, but still!
  • The eagles didn't carry them more than a few miles and they spent a long time on the Carrock to treat Thorin, and most likely coming down. And the orcs have steeds while the dwarves don't — steeds that can smell their trail.
  • Plus, the second film takes place around nightfall while the end of the first film takes place around midday, and considering that the dwarves don't have steeds, and the Orc's Wargs are at least as fast as horses (if not faster), I'm surprised that the Orcs hadn't caught up sooner.

Translating spider language

• The Spiders in Mirkwood at first only hiss and roar, then Bilbo puts the ring on and we all can hear what they are saying. That's fine, considering the rings' powers and the Spiders' origins, but then Bilbo removes his ring and at least one of the Spiders could still be heard, so what gives?
  • My guess would be that either this effect of the Ring's lingers for a short while after one removes it, or it basically "downloads" the language into the wielder's brain so that they can always understand it once the Ring has translated.
  • Gollum being able to see Frodo even when the latter was invisible at the end of the quest on Mount Doom seems to back up the idea that the ring's effects linger (and that the longer you have it, the longer it lingers for too).
  • Uh? Gollum did not see the invisible Frodo in Rot K. What he saw was Frodo's steps on the volcanic ash.
  • Once the Ring grants the power to understand the Shadow's servants it apparently doesn't take it away again as long as it is in the bearer's possession, whether worn or not.

Gold Dwarf Statue

• Where did the huge golden dwarf statue (which promptly gets melted) come from? Was that something that was under construction when Erebor was being evacuated?
  • Yes. The stone plating that got pulled off was the mold, and the point of starting the bellows was to pump all the molten gold into it. Obviously, under normal circumstances, they would have given it longer to cool.
  • What confuses me is what exactly Thorin planned to achieve, other than pimping Smaug up with a fabulous golden plating? It would make sense if they at least had a mean to rapidly cool and solidify the gold, thus trapping Smaug in it, but just bath him in it? What, did they expect him to drown in that shallow pool or to burn him to death with it? He's a dragon, he breathes fire, obviously, fire cannot kill a dragon!
  • You have a significant amount of acid in your stomach. That does not mean you wouldn't be bothered by it if you got it on your face...
  • With the concentrations it's present in it there would do just that - bother me, but definitely not kill me. Which proves my point.
  • Yes, and Smaug was at least bothered by the gold, proving you both right - it knocked him down for several seconds and seemed to cause him pain, even if it didn't affect him significantly. However, did you have any other suggestions as to what the dwarves should do? There was no way in hell they could engage Smaug in direct combat, and although the water screwed him over briefly as well, they probably figured molten gold had more kick. Thorin doesn't exactly have a chemistry manual with him explaining the exact effect of molten gold on dragons - in fact, there probably isn't any precedent in all of Middle-Earth for what they did. They had few options to begin with, and this seemed to be the best one. I also have to say that if you got the amount of hydrochloric acid that's in your stomach on your face, it might not do a lot of damage - but in Smaug's case, it's more like getting entirely covered in hundreds of gallons of your stomach acid. While we as viewers can sit back and say, eh, he's a dragon - heat weapons probably won't bother him, Thorin didn't act out of hand.
  • Molten gold isn't just incredibly hot, it's incredibly heavy. The dwarves were probably hoping that a flood of molten gold could smash the dragon forcefully enough to stun him, then suffocate him before he could recover.
  • In short, this was the best plan (a desperate plan, at that) Thorin could come up with at the time, and it failed spectacularly.
  • Simple. The gold was never meant to burn or boil him, it was meant to drown him, similar to the smash argument above. That would make more sense. Whether Smaug was immune to the heat of the gold or not, it was liquid. Generally, flooding a living thing with liquid will drown it. Unfortunately, they didn't have enough of a gold river to keep Smaug submerged long enough to pull it off. In that case, still a desperate plan but a somewhat better one.
    • Which leads to a common trope with molten metal in films - it's much denser than living things, but said living things seem to have no problem submerging or sinking into liquid metal or molten rock if the plot demands it.
• Apart from its practical use in fighting - or annoying - a dragon, why did they craft such a behemoth in the first place? Is this something dwarves do? The only reasonable explanation seems that the golden king was supposed to stay in that hall forever, maybe for ceremonial reasons. They surely couldn't sell or transport that thing, right
  • It may not have originally been intended to be solid gold, but some other castable metal that could be plated with gold if desired. Thorin and his companions diverted the smelting and casting equipment to process Smaug's hoard instead of the ingots that would've been used originally.

Barrels

• In The Desolation Of Smaug, Bombur (in a barrel) is thrown out from the river, bounces on a bunch of orcs, then stops and Bombur himself pokes his arms and legs out and attacks the orcs. After that, he jumps back into an empty barrel floating down the river. Where did the empty barrel come from?
  • The elves apparently toss empty barrels in the river all the time. It's conceivable that one from a previous batch got snagged on a branch or stuck in the mud along the way, and the dwarves' barrels knocked it loose. They'd have put Bilbo in it if they hadn't been too busy battling for their lives.
  • Before Bilbo pulled the lever releasing the barrels, you can see some extra empty barrels that were dropped as well, so Bombur most likely jumped into one of those.
  • Where did he get all those weapons? I don't remember dwarves arming themselves during the escape and where would they?
  • They likely managed to nab a few of the weapons left behind from the dead orcs.
• How the hell did those barrels not got filled with water and sink? In the book, it was logical - Bilbo put the lids on all the barrels, and the elves dumped them into the river as usual. Here there's just no excuse.
  • ...Good question. Blind luck, I guess?
  • It's water. If it goes over the edge, it pours inside, simple as that. They'd need a forcefield, not luck, to keep it away.
  • The barrels couldn't be filled with water because the dwarves' weight was holding them upright, and them filling up most of the barrels made it so water couldn't get in to make them sink when they first got into the water. Also, they're made of wood. Wood floats unless it's weighed down by a lot.
  • Movie physics. The barrels are *far* too low in the water and stable for just the weight of the dwarves to be at work. I think they're probably ballasted with a few hundred-weight of uranium apiece.
  • They're Elf barrels. Maybe they're made with some kind of...Elf magic that lets them drain water out even when dumped in a river.
  • Definitely that they're Elf barrels—things of Elven make are always full of minor but very handy little magics like that, like the camo effect of the Lothlorien cloaks. That's why Boromir's funeral boat stayed floating and upright after going over the Anduin falls.
  • Except they are not elven-made. Might be a bit clearer in the book than in the movie, but they are from Laketown - the elves trade with the humans, receive things in barrels, then send the empty barrels back down the river. Stop trying to rationalize this; on all accounts, the barrels should have been closed, but then we couldn't have had the big fight scene, so Rule of Cool I guess.
• How did that huge platform designed to hold numerous barrels tilt under the weight of one measly hobbit?
  • Rule of Funny?
  • He was standing at the end, unbalancing it.
  • More precisely, if my memory doesn't fail me, he was standing on the long end of a lever, where a smaller force can indeed counterbalance the larger force of the barrels' weight. This is actually probably how it's supposed to be opened in the first place — though maybe not by standing there, but by a pulley mechanism triggered somewhere else.

Smaug's sense of smell

• Smaug is established to have a very good sense of hearing and smell, that he could smell the dwarves while talking to Bilbo, even though they're not inside the mines. How is it that, when escaping the dragon, they were running in a path right underneath the dragon, and Smaug just passed over them? Shouldn't he be able to smell the dwarves there?
  • He probably did; Smaug just let them think he didn't know to give them hope, that he'd crush later.
  • Or Erebor's ventilation ducts might've been sending a breeze through the chasm that went in the wrong direction for Smaug to detect their scent.
  • Smells aren't instantly updated, or deleted when you move away. There'll be wafts of dwarf-smell all over the place: where they've run in the past, where the breeze has moved it to, where Smaug has stirred up the air currents. Trying to work out where they are now will be horrendously complex. (For a test, get a friend to blindfold you, spin you around on the lawn, then try to find a scented plant that isn't even moving about.)
  • Smaug's chamber is where he's been living for 70 years. It probably smells like him now, with new scents attracting his attention, but the rest of the mountain probably still smells like dwarf.
  • Then shouldn't he still have been attracted to the unfamiliar scent of Hobbit?
  • Personally, I just thought Smaug smelled dwarves, live ones, on Bilbo. Bilbo had been traveling with dwarves for quite some time by then. The general stench of dwarf, however stale, probably in turn helped to hide Bilbo and the dwarves from Smaug.
  • Smaug is able to distinguish Bilbo's scent without any trouble - he specifically comments that he doesn't remember smelling Bilbo before. He's also able to smell the One Ring in Bilbo's pocket, so I think it's safe to say that the smell of himself and/or dwarf would have no effect at all. I'm going to go with the 'ventilation breeze' explanation, makes good enough sense to me.
  • Goodness knows that mountain has enough ventilation holes to provide Dramatic Wind at any hour of the day.
  • Or maybe Smaug was taking his time because he was trying to distinguish individual dwarf-scents, to figure out exactly how many intruders there were. He wouldn't want to overlook any of the little pests in the confusion, after all.

Waterproof map

• One of the things that Thorin has been taking with him the whole journey was that invaluable map. But how did he manage to go through the whole "barrels in the river" without wetting it? And, on a related question, how did Bilbo managed to keep the ring with him? Zippers do not seem to have been invented yet, and having it in his pocket seems very little protection in such circumstances.
  • Both objects are magic. Minor waterproofing and other protection spells are common in fantasy, and the One Ring is the One Ring. It wants to return to Sauron, and it knew Gollum wouldn't help with that, so it left with Bilbo (note the extremely implausible scene where it pretty much leaped onto his finger to save him that first time). Besides, they don't have zippers, but they have buttons for their pockets, which would help.
  • There is no indication that the map is magic; the moon runes may be magical, but the map itself is just a map. There is every indication, however, that the map is made of waxed parchment. It takes way more than a little soak to destroy a document like that.
  • A leather pouch would also have kept the map reasonably dry.
  • Oilcloth and waxed silk are both low tech options, and traditional packaging for dispatches and the like (especially naval orders and post-bags!).

Laketown Fighting

• How come despite Laketown seeming fairly densely populated, nobody responses to the sound of a massive brawl at Bard's home between the orcs and the dwarves, Bard's family and the elves. Sure there are bystanders shown to be shoved aside by the orcs, but otherwise it seems like there's no one in Laketown.
  • Maybe Laketown is the kind of place where you don't go out at night to investigate the sounds of a fight.
  • This seems right, it's a poverty-stricken town where supplies are tight. Fights are likely common, and might be brutal. To interfere with them could be dangerous, particularly at night. Especially if people look out and see it's Bard's house. They know what the town's master thinks of him, risking interfering could be dangerous, if it was the master's guards attacking the house.

Arrest Bard!

• Bard leaves his house and is almost immediately spotted and chased by the Laketown guards, who apparently had orders to arrest him. So why didn't they go to his house to arrest him? Do they not know where he lives? Did he happen to come out just as they were coming to arrest him?
  • Maybe they were on their way to his house at the time. Or maybe they expected him to have his own spy network that would warn him if they got close and give him time to escape, so they decided to lie in wait for him elsewhere.
  • Chances are he wouldn't willingly open his door for Master's agents. Taking this door down and taking him by force would probably attract way too much commotion; Bard was after all perceived as a leader of many people, or at least a notable person. Openly attacking his house might have started a rebellion, and certainly would empower the opposition. Arresting him on the street is a much less outrageous solution than storming his family's home, despite there being more witnesses.
  • Or the guards were just lazy cowards who'd rather wait for the guy to come out so they can ambush him than take the risk of busting in on him at home, where he's more likely to fight like hell because his kids are there. Given the attitude of their boss about penny-pinching, they're probably not paid enough to break down a door if they don't have to.

The White Spider

• What was that white spider that Bilbo hacks to death? An old giant spider? A baby giant spider (do spiders have larvae)?
  • Judging by the way it looked, I would say it wasn't a spider at all. It appeared more like a crab than a spider, with its flat head and crustacean-like covering. I think it was just some other type of bizarre creature that lived in Mirkwood that was disturbed by the huge battle going on outside its hang out and decided to check out what was going on. Why it wasn't just another spider that Bilbo went Kill Bill on I'm not sure, but I'm guessing that might have been a choice on the part of the filmmakers to both shock the audience but also keep them from losing sympathy for Bilbo. The white creature doesn't actually attack anybody, and what Bilbo does to it is pretty brutal - but it also doesn't speak or show any particular intelligence like the spiders. Not that the spiders are sympathetic, but since they at least talk we get the sense that they're sentient - however, as the aggressors against the heroes, it's okay for them to die from an audience perspective. THIS creature doesn't attack at all, which is what makes Bilbo's impassioned killing of it so shocking, which we wouldn't have gotten had it just been another spider. But since it doesn't display sentience, what Bilbo does is also not quite as horrifying. It's the equivalent of having him ruthlessly slaughter a puppy vs. a toddler. The puppy is shocking and awful, but since it wasn't sentient, we're less likely to turn on the protagonist, even if he was under the influence of something, whereas had it been a sentient toddler, we might stop liking Bilbo. This way, he brutally murders a creature without provocation, but since it didn't act sentient it's not much different from him losing it and murdering a dog, so we're shocked by what he did, but we can still sympathize with him and won't reject him for his actions. That's just a theory.
    • Actually, it rushes at Bilbo with clear intent to attack him. In any case, it's made plain that Bilbo is under the Ring's influence and trying to retrieve it, so we're meant to be shocked at him brutally hacking the thing (a centipede, by the way) to death.
• The hordes of spiders are spawning from Dol Guldur and travelling into Mirkwood. The white spider is a particular spider that inhabits Mirkwood. Besides, Bilbo could understand the other spiders even after losing the Ring, but he couldn't understand the white one. This suggests that it doesn't have more magical origins like the others.
• It was a baby Giant Spider that hadn't gained the ability to speak just yet. Yes, Giant Spiders procreate.
• When I saw it in the film I thought it was a giant mite, but later realized it must be a baby spider.
• It could be a spider that'd molted very recently, so its exoskeleton wasn't as hard or dark as the others'. It looked flattened because its outer skin wasn't sturdy enough to hold its shape yet, and it didn't speak because its sound-producing structures were too soft.
• It's a centipede living in a burrow like a trapdoor spider might. It's difficult to see, but it has a very long body and many more legs than a spider would.
  • Its legs and mouthparts are also completely different from the spiders'. It also sounds different, and has a back covered in flattish armor plates.

Laketown weather

• When the Company arrives at Laketown, there's ice floating in the lake and intermittent snow flurries in the air. But this is Durin's Day: late autumn. Much too early for weather that cold. Esgaroth isn't that far north, at least in comparison to Rivendell or the Shire. What's going on there?
  • The western side of continents tends to be milder at that sort of latitude, especially if there's a nice warm current. If we assume the Shire is at roughly the same latitudes as Britain, then Lake Town (which is actually a fair way north of the North Farthing) could easily be somewhere in the Northern Baltic, where fresh water can start to freeze in November. Remember that Shetland is in 60N, and even most of Southern England is north of Toronto.
  • The chunks of ice probably floated downstream from the frozen lake where Thorin and Azog duke it out in Five Armies. Also, having it be freezing cold helps to emphasize how badly the survivors of Lake-town are in need of supplies from the elves and of the wealth they'd been promised.

Only one chance to enter Erebor?

• Thorin is utterly broken when he thinks they've missed their chance to open the hidden door. But wait, Durin's Day recurs every year. There was nothing to indicate that it had to be that particular year. Sure, it's not ideal to kick around Esgaroth for a year until Durin's Day rolls around again, but it's not like one more year is going to make that much of a difference after some 60-odd years of waiting.
  • It makes a difference when there are orcs and wargs trying to eat your ass right now. They're not honestly sure they'll make it through the week if they can't get into Erebor, let alone a year.
  • In the book it's clearer: it isn't Durin's Day every year. It only counts if the moon is in the sky during the day, on New Year's Day. The dwarves in exile aren't good enough astronomers to be able to predict when it'll happen again. (I can't calculate to see how often it would happen, but the way they talk about it suggests it's relatively unusual).
  • Going on a harrowing quest where you almost die repeatedly, then right when you're there at your goal you think you've missed the chance would leave anyone utterly broken.
  • Not to mention that there's a large price on Thorin's head, which could well get him killed by bounty hunters in the time they'd have to wait for another chance. Or that, as Gandalf repeatedly points out, others may notice that omens of the dragon's defeat are taking place and come to loot Erebor - either clearing out Thror's treasure vault if Smaug has simply died or departed, or alerting the dragon to the threat if he's still in residence - before they can try again.

Walnut Pillow

• Why is Kili resting his head on a bowl of walnuts? Just... why?
  • They were out of pecans?
  • Óin is a healer for Thorin's Company and stayed behind with Kili. So maybe it some form of Dwarvish Medicine for pain relief?
  • Walnuts were believed to have healing powers, for all we know in Middle Earth they DO.
  • He's using the bowl as a make-shift head-rest whilst Tauriel heals him. It was onlt the table already and the nearest thing to hand — simple as that.

The Fight With Smaug

• How was the fight not a complete Curbstomp Battle? Smaug is a giant dragon, there were several times he could have flash fried them with his fire, but instead chose to chase after them and they just give him the run around. It makes Smaug look less like a terrifying badass and instead like a total joke. Hell, at one point Thorin was casually balancing on his mouth. Why didn't Smaug just open up his mouth and eat him? Problem solved.
  • Because of Plot Armor, Character Shields, etc. Maybe Smaug is used to roasting large groups at once and just isn't up to snuff on his small-unit tactics. That whole scene really did make Smaug seem very much not as threatening as he was proclaimed to be by the characters (but then again, the characters aren't infallible), although the CGI and Cumberbatch's voice still made him pretty intimidating.
  • Possibly because Smaug himself expected it to be a complete Curbstomp Battle. He enjoyed matching wits with Bilbo and watching him squirm - he probably got a kick out of chasing the dwarves like a cat after a bunch of mice. The idea of Thorin restarting the forges probably didn't even remotely occur to him, which meant the dwarves had absolutely no way to damage him at all, so he could afford to not crush them right away. (And of course, even after covering him with gold, they still didn't.) He probably figured he had plenty of time to mess with them before he ate them one by one, and when the dwarves split into groups, he also may have been having trouble deciding who he wanted to eat first - there were thirteen targets, after all, and they were all moving through a changing landscape. Then Thorin started insulting him, which pissed him off enough to cloud his judgement a bit. And when Thorin was on his mouth for those few seconds, he was likely just thinking "What the HELL I have a dwarf on my nose...?" and then Thorin jumped off pretty fast, indicating that he was fully aware that in another second, Smaug would have snapped out of it and opened right up. I also remember them kind of slowing time down for that segment, to make it a bit more theatrical, so Thorin was probably only on Smaug's mouth for a grand total of about two seconds, and it wasn't exactly 'casual.' What makes Smaug a 'terrifying badass' is that even when the dwarves manage some slight wiggle room (running like hell and trying their molten gold idea) they still accomplish nothing but infuriating Smaug and instead of just eating them right there he takes off to burn Laketown so they can watch.

Last Light of Durin's Day

• The last light of Durin's Day is not the sunlight but the moonlight, which doesn't make much sense. How can they have a moon that bright appearing on the West in the evening, a few minutes after sunset? The moon showing up on the West after sunset must be a very narrow crescent moon, and that doesn't provide too much light. I know that this is covered by Weird Moon, but since Tolkien did a lot of research to get the moon phases right, Peter Jackson's decision is a bit jarring.
  • Tilion Did It.
  • What is more jarring is that when Elrond reads the runes on the map in the first movie, he actually says "the setting Sun with the last light of Durin's Day". The second movie shortens it to just "last light of Durin's Day", but then why did Elrond explicitly say "setting Sun"? Did Peter Jackson change his mind between the two movies in how he wants to play the scene out?

Extended-Edition Possible Plot Hole?

• So, in the Extended Edition, Gandalf finds Thrain alive, albeit traumatized and insane, during his exploration of Dol Guldur. In the book this happens before the main action of the story, and that's when Thrain gives Gandalf the map and the key. But then, at what point did Gandalf get the map and key from Thrain in the movie? It implies that they met at some point previously, which further implies that Gandalf must have known Thrain was alive after the Battle of Azanulbizar, which makes his reaction to Thorin's insistence that his father is alive somewhere a bit strange. What's going on there?
  • In the film Thrain gave the key and the map to Gandalf for safekeeping before going to take Moria with Thror. It's no more complicated than that.

Two clear bad guys, meh it's nothing

• In the prologue/flashback, who were those two guys in the pub?
  • They're background scenery to establish the place is not necessarily safe and that Thorin ought to keep what Gandalf is telling and giving him secret.
  • It's also a hint that people - not necessarily just orcs - may be looking for him, to collect the bounty Azog put on Thorin's head.

Sleeping Dragons

• In the first movie, Smaug is awakened by a bird breaking nuts on the rock. But not when half a dozen stout dwarves are whaling away on that wall with axes?