Goal! By Thorin Oakenshield

With the FIFA World Cup about to kick off I thought this might be an excellent idea for a bit of Middle Earth trivia about football.
 
For those of you outraged at the very idea that I dare mention football and Middle Earth in the same sentence… this bit of trivia might just give you a shocker.
 
Did you know that football was around in Middle Earth?
 
Poppycock I hear you say. No, I couldn’t be more serious, it was… furthermore, it was known to the dwarves… and I quote from the Hobbit, Chapter 4 Over Hill and Under Hill:
 
“This won’t do at all!” said Thorin. “If we don’t get blown off or drowned, or struck by lightning, we shall be picked up by some giant and kicked sky-high for a football.”
One of the Stone Giants in the first Hobbit movie.
 
And from down the same book (Chapter 8 Flies and Spiders): “There was a noise like the kicking of a flabby football, and the enraged spider fell off the branch, only catching itself with its own thread just in time.”
 
Not only did the dwarves know about a football, the fact that they know it is supposed to be kicked seems to indicate they played it themselves, or at least saw it being played. Thorin Oakenshield is the only Tolkien character that personally mentions the attribute of the sport. Who knows, perhaps Thorin was the striker in the local Thorin’s Hall “Ai-Mênu FC” football squad. Nah, surely he was the manager with Bombur in the goal and maybe one of them quick hobbits up front.
 
Seriously though, why does Tolkien mention “football” at all in his works? Well, most likely J.R.R. Tolkien (who wrote The Hobbit for his young boys initially) wanted to put a few familiar objects into the text.
 
So, go out there and enjoy the World Cup and just imagine Thorin shouting by the sideline and Bombur getting the golden glove award. 
 
By the way… one rule if you wish to post reply to this post, YOU MUST tell us who your favorite team is for the upcoming world cup.  
Mine is….. BELGIUM (what did you expect folks?)

About The Dwarrow Scholar

The Dwarrow Scholar first experienced the brilliance of Tolkien when he received a copy of The Hobbit from his uncle as a kid, reading it feverishly again and again. Some years on, when he got his very own walk-man (aye forget about tiny phones, this thing was a brick and played cassette tapes) he made his own little audiotape of The Hobbit, so he could listen to it on his bike on his way to school. Between reenacting the Battle of Five armies with 4 of his school friends (still feel sorry for the kid that had to be the Orc) and before the days of the internet, you would find Roy frequently in libraries trying to find all he could about Tolkien and his beloved dwarves. When Roy isn’t delving into Neo-Khuzdul or searching for lost dwarvish treasures on the net he’s enjoying time with his wife and son, re-reading his tormented Tolkien paperbacks, watching a good movie, learning new languages or playing a game of LoTRO or other dwarf related games.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink.

2 Responses to Goal! By Thorin Oakenshield

  1. Yswllyra says:

    Fantastic! I’m so glad to read this – and I am particularly pleased that it is the dwarves who mention it! Thanks for the fun post

    Like

    • Yswllyra says:

      And whoops I forgot to mention my football team. I was going for Australia. Alas we were swiftly kicked from the competition (pardon the pun)

      Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s