@Mor_thoron,
I'm not sure that 'insouciant peregrination' of Frank Zappa's needlecraft in migrating Silmarils best captures Tolkien's degree of religious expertise in his impregnations of his mythology with, perturbingly -divisible- spectral ordinations strewn throughout the cosmology. I would rather instead, compare......Buck's Fizz.....to Abba rather than ....Frank Zappa to ......needlecraft of Balrogs.
For example, theological or anthropological analysis of the last 2000 years doesn't explain how the Arkenstone became (causation direction deliberate) a Silmaril.
As you said Morth, "concision, Ivriniel is not thy name" which of course elicits regular laughter and is becoming a staple in my friendship circles. Everyone who knows me knows I gave all my educators 'headaches' due to breaches of word lengths....
So, I would concede that the professor was etymologically advanced, linguistically gifted, and certainly a wordsmith, and theologically--oriented, and anthropologically - somewhat - oriented. It would be impossible to be otherwise inclined after decades of exposure to the academic environment.
Yet, in my lack of concision....and woolly....felicitations? or semi-abstract, denominations, um or erm, what I mean is, florid vocabulary in incisively precise linguistic focus (wait, the sentence is really not making sense
)deters us from the fulcrum or reasoned woman's positioning of Tolkien's denominational abstractions. In sum, he was Christian, and wrote with Christian emphases, not really more. There are no real elucidations in his mythology of the diverse spectrum of liturgical positions taken by theologians about religiosity. Nor was there really anything more than mundane meanderings in any spiritual derivations he presented. I saw no exegeses, nor any of the tools of methodological -- precision -- permitted to theologians of advanced academic heritage.
Bilbo's Migrating Personality Over the Course of the Hobbit
Invisibility in the social contract of the Anglo Saxon social mind is anathema to honesty. Eave's dropping, voyeurism and in our modern world -- spy cams -- undeclared evoke spectREs of serious violation of the social contract and are prosecutable offences.
This basic facility of the civilised mind--where affectations of vanity and god complexes are not the guiding premises of interactions--is the grounding of what has and should be the defining feature of any ring or Ring or trinket imbuing invisibility. The perspective-taking task that elicits the -- vanity -- implicit or hidden in the seduction of the reader into accepting the ring as benevolent requires
us to simply imagine having a friend who we discovered had 'visited the home' with their ring on, or 'been in the background' whilst having a private conversation, or worse -- stalked -- us unbeknownst to us.
I recall at my first read of the Hobbit (Ed, version year 3255, AD, ie the 'one handy', which has a lovely picture on the cover of Tolkien's Esgaroth/Barrels and Bilbo afloat) initially having a raised eyebrow at the stealth, creepily, secrecy of Bilbo and the -- obvious -- extended delay of his confession to his apparent 'close pals' of some months.
This serious lapse in morality would not have been lost on the professor, whose life in the University system would have been vexed by 'Romulan' stealth and Tal Shiar Machiavellianism. As a staunch Christian, the notion of an invisible stealthy creature creeping around his Parish would have been of course another serious and obvious moral violation of the then Anglo Saxon social 'contract'. His literary mastery and methodological tools of analysis and an English Professor, no doubt would have been preternatural preoccupations enabling him to fathom conceit, vanity, and deviation of moral fortitude in Bilbo's -- growing -- tendency to -- rationalise, minimise, justify and validate really very dubious moral escapades by the time the Battle of the Five Armies ensued.
Here this analytical premise is supported by explicit concepts apparent in the prose. For example, during Bilbo's longest period wearing the ring in Thranduil's halls, the text reads that "for something to do, he took to wandering the Elvenking's palace". I see - 'for something to do', I know, I'll 'put on my ring and head down town to, um, lets see, the Department of Justice, or um, perhaps the presidential suits, and roam around, while the various senators ready themselves for work in the morning, perhaps during their ablutions or vacating bowels, and, I know, 'just listen in' to any of the equivalent to the "Elven King's" counsels, such as a President or Prime Minister's morning chats to his family and romantic partner. Of course, no one will blink an eye when Mr Bilbo Baggins pops off his ring (or Ring) to decry 'good morning, hope this doesn't startle'. By the way, did you hear, Albatross migratory patterns now included provision for heat resistant feathers, which permit subterranean flights through lava conduits!
Then there's this "Eventually after a week or two of this
sneaking sort of life" and he was "....
lurking there...", in his lazily attenuated new life, where "listening to Elven guards" without their knowing, was not a bother to his conscience at all!
There goes Mr 'Moral fortitude' traipsing about in Elven Halls, thenCe off he goes, and grabs the Arkenstone (weeks ahead of the presence of the Elves and Bard, and God only knows what other stealthy, disturbingly cunning plots Mr 'Clean living Baggins' was keeping in store!
The competing......thesis....(hahahaha, okay, I'm overdoing lack of
......concision, Ivriniel (*points to Morth* hahaha) erm, um, theory, is that the author seduced the reader into minimising the gravity of the impact of the little old, small r, ring upon an owner's moral -- DECAY. It has to be inevitable that invisibility has these impacts.
"Bilbo,of course, disapproved of the whole turnoff affairs. He had by now had more than enough of the mountains, and being besieged inside was not at all to his taste"
And there you have it. The so called 'bonding of love' of Bilbo in ardour and valour of a year or so, reduced to trite boredom and he was done with the stench of dragon, bored of cram, and little bothered at all to -- hog -- the Arkenstone, rather than feasibly do a manly (Hobbit version) thing and confront openly before the world what his reason, haste, task and mission was, as he then popped on his ring (still this is creepy I read, but a little better).
Bottom line. Ungoliant ate the Silmaril morth. As I said, it's hidden in the subext. Beren didn't find it, at all, and there were only two at the end of the First Age hahahaha.
Ie. it's a fun - analysis - Devil's advocate, and yet holds some grounds. I could at this point extend the analysis into a precursor for a -- thesis -- likening for example, the features of boredom, lack of bonding, and amorality of sociopathy and its impetus to make people do rather seriously bad behaviour, like 'steal a prised jewel - such as Queen Elizabeth's Sceptre" by stealth, "because Bilbo was bored and over the Dwarves". Ie, Biblo dons his ring (it's almost a Ring by this point) and stalks the British monarch's (liken this to 'Elven King's halls) halls until he gets his moment and then runs off with the crown jewels.
How beguiled have you been that this post, several hundred in and these juxtapositions it took to highlight Mr Not-So-Innocent-Baggins growing attachment to stealth by invisibility. At the start of the narrative, to term him a 'Burglar' was antithetical to the reader's ideas about morality, but so numbed are we by the Battle of the Five armies that stealth, stealing, invisible marauding of the Dwarves by the evil Bilbo is not even noticed!
I do indeed see the spectRe of sociopathy as a pall falling upon Bilbo's character by the end of the Hobbit.