Spoiler Alert: do NOT read unless you have already read The Hobbit
After reading “Out of the Frying Pan and Into the Fire” I had a mixed of emotions consisting primarily of confusion, excitement, and shock. There were so many twists and turns in the chapter that you would think it would end after a climax but Tolkien just put another climax in. It just goes on and on, and I could talk about it all day. What better place to start off than the very beginning when “…Bilbo [stepped] down into the middle of [the company], and [slipped] off the ring”. Everyone was so intrigued on how this not-so-promising hobbit just magically appeared. Everyone was fooled; everyone except for Gandalf who had a thought of it but kept it to himself.
The next part which I loved was when they got captured by the evil wolves just when they thought their worst enemy was hunger. The wolves sent guards to surround the trees that the dwarves and Bilbo were on, “…while all the rest (hundreds and hundreds it seemed) went and sat in a great circle in the glade.” In the circle they discussed how they would wait for the goblins who at the time were their partner in crime would come down at dawn to cut or burn down the trees as goblins were immune to the fire.
Just as it seemed all hope was lost when the goblins came and were burning down the trees waiting for them to either jump down or perish even their leader Gandalf seemed to lose hope. He jumped down his tree but, “Just at that moment the Lord of the Eagles swept down from above, seized him in his talons, and was gone.” Soon the other eagles and they swooped in on the trees getting dwarf after dwarf until all who were left were Dori and Bilbo leaving Bilbo clinging onto Dori for his life while flying through the night sky.
Now this final scare may seem to be kind of silly as it was so short and harmless, but at the time for me it seemed that they had lost it all. It was when one eagle commanded the others to bring their prisoners to the Great Shelf.” At the time I had believed that the eagles were taking them as prisoners of their own and to explain how they had set fire on the wolves. It just turned out that Gandalf had helped them sometime ago when their Chief Eagle was injured so they were just repaying the favor and only called them prisoners because they were the prisoners of the goblins. Overall, I truly enjoyed this chapter with all the twists and turns and mostly the cliff hangers which always kept me on edge.
