Although there is violence in several sections of The Hobbit, it does not become central to the plot. Both the trolls and the giant spiders talk of eating the dwarves, but no reader expects them to succeed. The emphasis is on the comic aspects of the two rescue scenes.
Tolkien's sense of poetic justice turns the quarrelsome trolls to stone and has the stinging spiders wounded by Bilbo's newly named sword, Sting. In the first attack by the goblins the magic of Gandalf s wand and sword take priority over the killing of goblins. In relating the final conflict with the goblins, the great Battle of Five Armies, the narrator calls it "a terrible battle," the.....
