Darkness flowed out like a Vapour

Sometimes while reading you come across an image that sticks in your minds for days, weeks even. I want to talk about one of those today. It’s been lingering in my mind for over two weeks since I read this passage from The Hobbit with my students. Here it is in context:

‘The key!’ shouted Bilbo. ‘The key that went with the map! Try it now while there is still time!’
Then Thorin stepped up and drew the key on its chain from round his neck. He put it to the hole.It fitted and it turned! Snap! The gleam went out, the sun sank, the moon was gone, and evening sprang into the sky.
Now they all pushed together, and slowly a part of the rock-wall gave way. Long straight cracks appeared and widened. A door five feet high and three broad was outlined, and slowly without a sound it swung inwards. It seemed as if darkness flowed out like a vapour from the hole in the mountain-side, and deep darkness in which nothing could be seen lay before their eyes, a yawning mouth leading in and down.
(The Hobbit, ch. 11)

The image which has held me for the past two weeks is that of the darkness flowing out like a vapour. It is a creepy, ominous image that comes at one of the most hopeful moments in the whole novel.

The dwarves had been growing impatient. They had been on the doorstep for days with no sight of the hidden door. Their problem, you may remember, is that Thorin’s map said the keyhole would be revealed in the last light of Durin’s day. Thorin himself admitted that the dwarves no longer had the means to predict exactly when that day would be (as it is a day that is calculated by an intersection of a lunar event with the solar calendar, it is not as simple as saying “be there on October 31st!” – which is roughly when Durin’s Day falls).

Bilbo had heard several dwarves grumbling that their burglar was doing nothing to get them inside the mountain. As Bilbo himself pointed out, he was doing exactly what they brought him to do: sit and think on the doorstep. If it had not been for Bilbo’s patience, they would have missed their chance at finding the keyhole.

So in the moments before the keyhole is revealed, nerves were frayed, tempers beginning to flare, boredom had set in, and hopeless was beginning to spread.

And then the keyhole appeared. Bilbo is the only one who thinks to act and calls for the key. The moment, described in the quote above, wherein Thorin sets the key in the hidden keyhole unfolds with a mixture of ceremony and almost matter-of-factness.

It is a moment that both captures something long-hoped-for and the very simple and everyday act of unlocking a door. Indeed, the door’s opening is described with a great deal more detail than the magical moment of the keyhole appearing in the bare rock face.

And it is out of this moment when their long journey finally comes to its end and hope must have been near its peak that Tolkien chose to insert what I think is the most ominous image in the whole novel. It is not the sight of Smaug and the description of him lying on his stolen hoard that has stuck in my mind. It is this description of the dark pooling out of the tunnel like a vapour.

It is a simple but very evocative image. It is suggestive of something nightmarish, even hellish.

In the classic outline of the Hero’s Journey, this is the moment right before the plunge into the Belly of the Whale. It is the doorway to the underworld, the land of death. It is not just a normal tunnel. This is a tunnel into a place so deadly that the darkness of it spills out into the world beyond.

It suggests the darkness is embodied, an actual thing in the world not, as we normally conceive it, simply the absence of light.

That Tolkien then ends the chapter by describing the tunnel opening as a “yawning mouth” only heightens the hellish imagery. Classical Christian iconography usually depicts hell as a gaping maw swallowing those who come near it.

And what waits at the bottom this tunnel but a dragon, itself a creature Biblically connected to the devil.

Bilbo has journeyed twice already through the land of death: once in the Misty Mountains and once in Mirkwood. Perhaps I should write about these passages through death that Bilbo undergoes. But right now, as Bilbo will later say to the dwarves, Third time pays for all!

Bilbo’s rebirth as a hero, begun in the Misty Mountains and continued in Mirkwood, is completed here. If it is fair to say that he is not the same Hobbit who left the Shire, it is even truer to say that he is not the same Hobbit who emerges from his encounters with Smaug as the one who sat waiting patiently on the doorstep.