An Unexpected Party: From a "Good Morning" to Deep Dwarven Lore
Reflections on the opening chapter of The Hobbit and the illustration it inspired as we begin a long walk There and Back Again.
Welcome to the first post of my Hobbit illustrated series, exploring chapter 1 of The Hobbit, An Unexpected Party.
Every long journey has a beginning, and for me, the road into The Hobbit began when I was about eight years old, listening as my dad read it aloud to me. I loved it at once, the humour, the mystery, the sense that the world was larger and stranger than it first appeared. And recently, I had the joy of reading the same story to my own children and it was wonderful to experience that “first time” again, albeit vicariously.
Tolkien’s world has been a companion to me ever since. The Hobbit, and later The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion, and other books shaped my imagination and guided my artistic path.
A few years ago I began toying with the idea of illustrating all the chapters of The Hobbit — partly because I have a soft spot for the book, and partly because it felt like a more manageable undertaking than tackling the entirety of The Lord of the Rings.
The idea is to make drawings as illustrations for each of the nineteen chapters of The Hobbit. Not necessarily one particular scene, but an illustration that characterises the entire chapter or my impression of it, either showing multiple scenes in different panels, or one scene with other elements in the borders, simply something that would capture the general story and mood of the chapter.
So far, I have finished seven of them and I am working on the following ones.
This series of posts grows directly out of that long‑term illustration project.
Ever since I started my Substack a few months ago, I’ve wanted to create a thematic sequence of posts to guide what I write, and I’ve been inspired by the thoughtful read‑throughs of Tolkien by friends and fellow creators on Substack: Breanne | Celebreabird of Many Meetings, Kelly | themiddlepage, Patrick Lawrence of Ringfolk, and others.
The theme of this year’s Tolkien Reading Day, “Unlikely Heroes,” gave me the final nudge to begin.
So here we set out together: chapter by chapter through The Hobbit. In each post I’ll reflect on Tolkien’s text — its story, themes, connections, and what caught my attention — and then turn to my illustration for that chapter to discuss my choices, influences, and small discoveries that shaped it.
My hope is that this becomes a journey we can take together, returning to a story that has delighted generations and still has more to reveal. And I am looking forward to discover more new things about it both from my research and from your comments.
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Reading the Chapter: Scenes & Themes
Chapter 1 of The Hobbit is a gentle beginning, but it already contains the whole shape of the story in miniature. The homely and the mythic meet on Bilbo’s doorstep; the familiar rhythms of the Shire are shaken and the first hints of Bilbo’s transformation appear long before he realises anything is happening.
Tolkien builds this opening with humour, linguistic play, and a deep sense of character and it’s worth lingering over the scenes that set everything in motion.
The “Good Morning” Scene
The story begins, of course, with one of the most famous first lines in modern literature: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” What I find interesting about it, though, is how Tolkien creates an opening that unfolds in deliberate stages.
The first line is a perfect hook: simple, intriguing, and immediately inviting questions like “What is a hobbit?” or “Why do they live in holes”?
Consequently, the reader will gratefully accept a longer description and explanation before the story even begins. Tolkien first paints the hobbit‑hole as a place of comfort, and then, just as Bilbo is to be introduced, he breaks off to explain what hobbits even are. Only after this digression does the narrative return to Bilbo himself, now with genealogical detail: the solid, respectable Baggins side and the more adventurous Took side.
And once this description is complete and the reader has a better sense of the setting in which the story takes place, the narrative shifts from a general description to a specific moment, almost like a new opening sentence, in a style reminiscent of the “Once upon a time” of classic fairy tales:
“By some curious chance one morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green, and the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast smoking an enormous long wooden pipe that reached nearly down to his woolly toes (neatly brushed) - Gandalf came by.”
I have written about this scene in more detail in my earlier Substack post What Do You Mean, “Good Morning”?.
The arrival of Gandalf gives us one of Tolkien’s most delightful exchanges. Bilbo begins the day as a perfectly respectable hobbit, secure in his routines and expectations. “Good morning” is, for him, a polite formula. A way of keeping the world predictable. Gandalf, however, refuses to let the phrase remain a mere pleasantry. He turns it over, questions it, teases it apart. With each playful challenge, he unsettles Bilbo’s sense of how things ought to go.
“We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think what anybody sees in them,”
This is the first moment where the tension between Bilbo’s Baggins side and his Took side becomes visible. The Baggins in him wants everything to stay orderly and comfortable; the Took, still buried deep, stirs at the unexpected and waxes poetic about Gandalf’s fireworks and his history of sending young hobbits off on mad adventures. Tolkien signals this inner conflict, showing that Bilbo’s journey begins before he even leaves home.
The Arrival of the Dwarves
If the good morning scene cracks Bilbo’s composure, the arrival of the dwarves shatters it entirely. A flustered hobbit, an ever‑growing pile of coats, and a steady stream of unexpected guests.
But beneath the humour, the structure of this scene has always intrigued me. Why do the dwarves come in such groups and not all together?
In the book, it is presented as a simple coincidence: they probably each received the notice about the meeting and set out separately, naturally arriving at Bag End separately as well. But I’ve long suspected that something more deliberate is going on, that the gradual arrival was staged by Gandalf, who knows exactly how to unsettle a respectable hobbit just enough to prepare him for what comes next. After all, he uses a similar technique later with Beorn in Chapter 7.
And it is more or less confirmed in “The Quest of Erebor”, Tolkien’s later account of the backstory behind the meeting at Bag End, that you can read in the Unfinished Tales.
In that text, the gathering at Bag End is revealed to be far from accidental. Gandalf is shown as the quiet architect of the entire affair, nudging events into place, guiding Thorin’s company toward a purpose greater than any of them yet understand.
There is much more to say about this background: about Gandalf’s history with Thorin, about the political situation in the North, and about why a hobbit was the unlikely but perfect choice.
I’m considering writing a bonus post exploring some of this wider context as Tolkien presents it in “The Quest of Erebor” and elsewhere. But I’d love to know what you would find most interesting. Should I explore the history between Gandalf and Thorin, their meeting, their motivations, and how the quest was shaped, or on Gandalf’s earlier history with the hobbits and why he chose Bilbo in particular. Let me know by voting below – I’m curious to know which topic sounds more interesting to you.
The Party
Once all thirteen dwarves are gathered, around the table with food, fire, pipes, and song, we can see the company forming and the shared purpose begins to emerge.
It’s also the moment of Bilbo’s first transformation. At the beginning of the evening, he is determined to resist anything resembling adventure (“beginning to wonder whether a most wretched adventure had not come right into his house”). By the end, he surprises even himself by volunteering (or nearly volunteering) to join the quest. The table in Bilbo’s dining room becomes a kind of threshold: the last supper of his old life. After this night, nothing will be the same (and he will miss his hobbit hole many times during his adventure).
I’ve written more about this transformation in my Tolkien Reading Day post about Bilbo as an unexpected hero:
Interestingly, what makes this shift possible is something deeply hobbity: his commitment to hospitality. Mr. Baggins insists on being a good host, even under duress, and that very insistence draws him into the company’s circle. Once he is among them, listening to their songs, hearing their longing for home, the Tookish side awakens.
One of the most striking elements of this scene is the importance of music (which is another theme I would like to explore in a separate post). Tolkien gives each dwarf a distinct instrument, creating a sense of individuality within the group and hinting at the deep cultural richness of the Dwarves. From the text we learn that:
Fíli and Kíli play fiddles
Dori, Nori, and Ori produce flutes
Bombur plays a drum
Bifur and Bofur have clarinets
Dwalin and Balin bring viols
Thorin plays a golden harp
Only Óin and Glóin are not explicitly assigned instruments in the text.
This musical gathering is not merely decorative. The dwarves’ song, that deep, haunting piece about mountains, gold, and dragons, is the moment when Bilbo’s imagination is awakened. The Tookish side, long dormant, rises to the surface as he listens. The song stirs something ancient and adventurous in him, something he did not know he possessed.
Tolkien uses music here as a kind of enchantment that opens Bilbo’s heart. It is a great example of Tolkien’s idea of Recovery that he discusses in his essay “On Fairy-stories”, the ability to see the world with fresh eyes again. And the dwarves’ song helps Bilbo experience this Recovery:
“The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caverns. Suddenly in the wood beyond The Water a flame leapt up—probably somebody lighting a wood-fire—and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames”
After the music comes the lore exposition of dwarven history that sets the quest in motion. Thrór’s map and key are brought out, and with them the story of the dwarves’ lost home. Tolkien gives us only the essentials in The Hobbit, but from other writings we can learn more about the tragic fate of Thrór and his son Thráin.
Thrór, the King under the Mountain, was driven from Erebor by Smaug. Later he tried to return to Moria, the ancient halls of his ancestors, and was slain there by the Orc-chieftain Azog, an event that ignited the War of the Dwarves and Orcs. Before leaving, Thrór gave his son Thráin II his Ring of Power (the last of the Seven Dwarf-rings), along with the map and key to the Lonely Mountain.
Thráin II, his son, set up his dwelling in the Blue Mountains but grew increasingly consumed with the desire for the lost riches of the Lonely Mountain. This may have been partly caused by the ring he wore. He set out on an ill-fated expedition to Erebor with a small group that included Balin and Dwalin (and unlike Thrór, he didn’t give his treasures to his son Thorin), but he eventually disappeared under the eaves of Mirkwood. Sauron imprisoned him in Dol Guldur and took his ring, but didn’t take map and key, which now proves to be very fortuitous.
Knowing this wider history adds weight to the moment when Gandalf lays the map on Bilbo’s table and is a great promise of the things to come.
With the chapter’s scenes and themes in mind, let me turn now to the illustration I created for it.
My Illustration of Chapter 1
After spending time with the text of the chapter, I’d like to turn to the illustration I created for it, the first piece in my series of The Hobbit chapter illustrations.
I had so much fun working on this one from line art to full colour, although it took me a lot of time to finish it.
As you can see, the illustration is built around the round green door of Bag End, which serves as both a literal and symbolic centre. It is the threshold between Bilbo’s comfortable life and the wider world he is about to enter.
You can also interpret this composition as unfolding from the centre toward the edges: The central scene captures the very beginning of Bilbo Baggins’ adventure, the “Good Morning” scene we discussed earlier. I wanted to show this iconic moment, while also using a composition that feels decorative and story-rich. Then there is the circle of the portraits of the dwarves that arrive the next day, and finally in the lower corners there are the two artefacts that play an important role when the dwarves’ history and plans are discussed.
Signed art prints of this illustration and others are available in my Etsy shop:
The Central Scene
As I mentioned the composition centres around Bilbo and Gandalf’s first meeting. Although the title of the chapter refers to the party on the following day, I think this is the most iconic moment in the chapter, if not in the whole book.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll have noticed that this is exactly the same depiction of the scene that I’ve already captured in my “Good Morning“ illustration from 2023.
But the interesting thing is that this picture of the first chapter of The Hobbit was actually the first of them. Or to put it more accurately, in 2023 I had just started thinking about a series of illustrations of chapters from The Hobbit, and I had the idea of creating a circular composition for the first chapter, arranged around the round hobbit door. But I liked the sketch of the scene in the centre of the picture so much that I decided to paint it as a separate illustration in greater detail first, and then reuse it as part of this larger composition.
This was the first sketch for this picture in my sketchbook:
As for the details in this central scene, I tried to stay as faithful to Tolkien’s vision as possible.
My depiction of Gandalf follows Tolkien’s vivid description from the book:
“An old man with a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, a silver scarf… and immense black boots.”
Also something I decided to take as my personal mission, to popularise a little-known element of Tolkien’s idea of Gandalf:
“he has a white beard but no hair on his upper lip.”
— a feature adopted from the painting Der Berggeist by Josef Madlener that was an inspiration for Tolkien. More on this in my post on the Good Morning illlustration.
Bilbo’s outfit is based on Tolkien’s own guidance for illustrators, given in one of his letters:
“Green velvet breeches, red or yellow waistcoat (with brass/gold buttons), brown or green jacket, dark green hood and cloak.”
I went with a red waistcoat and green jacket for Bilbo here: rich, warm colours to match the snug atmosphere of Hobbiton. His pipe, of course, reaches nearly down to his woolly toes.
The Dwarves
Around the central scene in the circle echoing the round door are portraits of all thirteen dwarves of Thorin’s company, as it gathered around the table.
The are divided in five sibling or kinship groups in which they are usually presented, each one with his name inscribed in runes.
I used the runes from the Hobbit, which are basically Anglo-Saxon runes, as opposed to the Tolkien-invented Angerthas runes used in the Lord of the Rings.1
Here is a transcription of the names, in case you can’t read them in runes (clockwise)2:
ᚠᛁᛚᛁ (Fili), ᚦᚩᚱᛁᚾ ᚩᚪᚳᛖᚾᛋᚻᛁᛖᛚᛞ (Thorin Oakenshield), ᚳᛁᛚᛁ (Kili)
ᚩᛁᚾ (Óin), ᚷᛚᚩᛁᚾ (Glóin)
ᚩᚱᛁ (Ori), ᚾᚩᚱᛁ (Nori), ᛞᚩᚱᛁ (Dori)
ᛒᚩᛗᛒᚢᚱ (Bombur), ᛒᚩᚠᚢᚱ (Bofur), ᛒᛁᚠᚢᚱ (Bifur)
ᛒᚪᛚᛁᚾ (Balin), ᛞᚹᚪᛚᛁᚾ (Dwalin)
I am not much of a portrait artist, drawing characters was never easy for me, so this was a little bit of a challenge, but I loved finding little ways to make each dwarf feel individual, even though many of their hoods — which I was excited to colour according to Tolkien’s descriptions — ended up hidden behind their glorious beards!
By the way, I also made another picture featuring all of Thorin’s company in all their proper colours, albeit in a very different composition and much simpler, “Expedition to Erebor“:
A big inspiration for the portrayal of the dwarves was David Wenzel’s The Hobbit graphic novel. His expressive and recognisable dwarves helped me when trying to define each member of the company.
The map and the key
At the bottom of the image are two important artefacts:
Thrór’s Map, showing the Lonely Mountain and secret entrance. Here I drew only a small section of the actual map from The Hobbit.
The Key to that very door, which Gandalf entrusts to Thorin. I played with some key designs, using the signature angular dwarven aesthetic.
Borders & Style Choices
The outer border features a round hobbit-style design: warm, floral and circle-based. I was doing some research on what kind of design style would be most fitting for Hobbit designs and I think some aspects of the Arts and Crafts movement fit very nicely for hobbits.
I didn’t make that much use of it here, but I might make more hobbit-themed designs someday. The inner decorative ring, surrounding the dwarves, by contrast, is more angular and geometric, with a hint of Art Deco — a subtle nod to the dwarves’ aesthetic, shaped by stone and metal.
Now It’s Over to You
One of the joys of reading Tolkien in community is discovering how differently the same scenes strike each of us and also how readers respond to one another, build on each other’s insights, and sometimes notice things no single reader could have caught alone.
So please feel free not only to comment, but to reply to one another as well, to make a little unexpected party here.
This opening chapter is full of small but significant turns: the layered introduction, the unsettling “Good morning,” the dwarves arriving in their curious order, the music that stirs something deep in Bilbo, the table that becomes a threshold. I’ve shared what stands out to me, but I’m very curious what stands out to you.
If you feel like sharing, here are a few places you might begin:
How did the multi‑layered opening strike you this time?
The famous first line, the ethnographic aside, the genealogies, the fairy‑tale shift. Did any part of that sequence stand out to you?What do you make of the dwarves’ gradual arrival?
Does it feel accidental, theatrical, humorous, intentional, or something else?How do you imagine the music in this chapter?
The instruments, the atmosphere, the effect of the song on Bilbo does that scene evoke the enchantment and recovery for you?And from the illustration side:
Is there an element of the composition or symbolism you’d like to hear more about in future posts?
And because this is the first entry in a long series, I’d also love your thoughts on the post itself:
Does this structure work for you?
Do you like the balance between text commentary and illustration notes?Is the length comfortable, or would you prefer something shorter (or longer)?
I considered breaking it up into one post focused on reading the text and another on the illustration and I am inclined to do it for the following ones. What do you think?Are there other ways you’d like me to explore the story as we go?
More close reading? More exploration of various illustrations? More connections to Tolkien’s wider legendarium?
Feel free to answer any of these, or simply share whatever caught your imagination.
Next time, we’ll step out of Bag End and into Chapter 2, “Roast Mutton.”
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Take a look:
I am here sticking with Tolkien’s usage. I use Angerthas runes in the Lord of the Rings illustrations such as my picture Song of Durin, but for illustrations related to The Hobbit I use these runes from the book, as I have done in the picture of Roac son of Carc.
It is so fun to write the actual runes in plain text, thanks to Unicode capabilities. Too bad it’s not possible for the Angerthas runes or the Tengwar Elvish script. However, there is a proposal to include them.
I think the balance between text commentary and illustration notes is right on. I enjoyed this glimpse into your illustrative process, and especially the comparisons with other artists' takes. Your ability to distill the essence of each chapter in high fidelity is awesome!
There was something so special about reading this chapter. I was very new to fantasy and didn't know I would like it so much, but the story swept me away just like the music swept Bilbo. Lovely art and writing!