Bard

Bard belonged to the Men of the North who dwelt about the Long Lake, in the wooden town of Esgaroth that stood on piles above the water east of Mirkwood. He held no lordship there in his youth: he served as a captain among the archers of the town's guard, a man of the working population rather than of the Master's circle of merchants and councillors. Tolkien draws him as grim of face and grim of voice, given to blunt speech and to unwelcome warnings, so that his neighbours reckoned him a croaker of ill news and were glad enough to leave him at the margins of the town's affairs. The Master in particular had little liking for him, and the antipathy was mutual, since Bard judged the town's leadership by its readiness rather than its trade.

His name is one of the plainest in the legendarium. Tolkien supplies no gloss for it, no Elvish root and no explanation from the tongues of the North; it stands in the narrative as an ordinary name of an ordinary man, and is not treated as significant in itself. What accumulates around it are descriptive by-names earned in the world of the story rather than inherited: he is styled the Bowman from his skill and his office among the archers, and after the events at the lake he is spoken of as a slayer of dragons. Later he is named among the lords, and at length king, of the city his ancestors had held, so that the bare personal name gathers titles by stages without ever acquiring an etymology.

Behind the obscure archer stood a broken inheritance. Bard was descended in long line from Girion, lord of Dale in the days before Smaug came down upon that city; Girion's wife and child had escaped the ruin by the Running River, and their posterity had lived on among the lake-folk, unremarked. That descent carried more than a claim. The old people of Dale had understood the speech of certain birds, and Bard retained enough of the faculty to make out what a thrush said to him, an inherited trait that marks him as genuinely of the elder city's stock and not merely a claimant to its memory.

Bard enters the record of events in the autumn of the year 2941 of the Third Age, some days after Thorin Oakenshield's company had passed through Esgaroth on their way to the Mountain. When a great glow rose in the north and lit the sky above the Lonely Mountain, most of the lake-folk read it hopefully, as the fire of forges reopened and gold being worked again by a returned king. Bard read it otherwise. He argued that the only king the Mountain had known in living memory was the dragon, and that a light of that size meant Smaug was roused; when the river-noise and the shadow above the water confirmed him, he pressed the Master to give the order and took charge of the town's defence. At his word the bridge that linked Esgaroth to the shore was hewn down, every vessel in the town was filled with water, and arrows and weapons were given out along the quays.

The defence failed as a defence. Smaug came low over the roofs, kindling the timber and the piles, and the arrows of the archers broke or glanced from the plates of his hide and from the crust of gems welded into his underside by long lying on his hoard. The Master took to his gilded boat, and most of the townsfolk fled downstream, but Bard held a company of archers together among the burning houses, shooting until his shafts were spent save one: a black arrow of dwarf-make, an heirloom of his fathers which he had always recovered after loosing it. As he set it to the string a thrush came to him with word first gathered by Bilbo Baggins inside the Mountain, that the dragon's armour was incomplete and a patch of his left breast lay bare. Bard shot into that gap. Smaug fell out of the air in his death-throe, crushed the ruin of Esgaroth beneath him, and settled in the shallows of the Long Lake, where his bones remained.

The town was destroyed, but the greater part of its people survived, and on the shore the shape of Bard's authority changed at once. He had come out of the water last of all, and the survivors began to call for him as king; the Master turned the cry aside by observing that Bard's inheritance lay in Dale rather than in Esgaroth, and Bard for the moment let the old man keep his office while there was shelter and food to be found. Relief came from the Wood-elves: their king — The Hobbit calls him only the Elvenking, and his name Thranduil is given in The Lord of the Rings — was marching for the Mountain on rumour of the dragon's fall, and turned his host aside with supplies to the camps at the lake's head. Within a short time Bard was leading a force of lake-men north with the elven-king, to press a claim upon the treasure under Erebor for the ruin of his town and for the wealth of Dale that Smaug had carried off in Girion's day.

Thorin refused to negotiate under arms and shut the gate, and the siege of the Mountain followed, with Bard trying repeatedly to distinguish a settled claim from mere plunder and being answered with defiance. The deadlock broke when Bilbo left the Mountain by night and put the Arkenstone into Bard's hands, knowing what Thorin would pay for it; on the following day Bard used the stone as a counter and obtained Thorin's word for a fourteenth share of the hoard. The arrival of Dain of the Iron Hills with a mailed company brought men, elves and dwarves within a step of fighting one another, until Gandalf halted them with news that Bolg's goblins and Wargs were coming. In the Battle of Five Armies that followed, Bard commanded the archery of the lake-men on the spurs of the Mountain, and the alliance held long enough for Beorn and the Eagles to turn the day, at the cost of Thorin's life and of Fili's and Kili's.

Dain honoured the bargain, and Bard's use of the gold defined the rest of his life. He sent a large portion to the Master for the rebuilding of Esgaroth, paid and rewarded those who had followed him, and gave the emeralds that had once belonged to Girion to Thranduil, the jewels the elven-king had most desired; Bilbo he offered a reward that the hobbit reduced to two small chests. The Master carried his own share off into the waste and died there of hunger, deserted by his companions, and a wiser man was chosen in his place. Bard meanwhile refounded Dale, drawing settlers from the lake-country and from lands to the south and west, and ruled the restored city as its king, in standing friendship with Erebor under Dain and with the realm of the Wood.

Bard's function in the narrative of The Hobbit is narrow and decisive. The story arrives at a problem its protagonists cannot solve — a dragon that Bilbo can rob but not fight, and that the dwarves have no means of confronting — and Bard is the instrument by which that problem is removed. Tolkien introduces him only a few pages before the deed and gives him no part in the quest itself; he is not a companion of the company, does not enter the Mountain, and has no dealings with Thorin until the dragon is already dead. What he supplies instead is competence of an unglamorous kind: a captain's judgement about defence, the nerve to keep a firing line together among burning houses, and the marksmanship to place a single shaft in a gap he could not see until he was told of it. The narrative treats this as craft rather than destiny, and the surrounding chapters make plain that his warning about the northern glow had been correct while the town's confident reading of it had not.

His abilities are ordinary abilities exercised well, with one exception. He has no magic, no weapon of virtue beyond an inherited arrow of dwarf-work of which only two things are said: that it had never failed him, and that he had always recovered it after use, and no strength beyond a strong man's. The single faculty that lies outside the common range is the remnant of Dale's old understanding of the speech of thrushes, and even this is presented as a partial and fading inheritance rather than a power: it lets him receive at one moment everything the bird had heard within the Mountain, and it does nothing else in the story. The limits are equally plain. Arrows loosed by Bard and his archers rebounded from Smaug's armour exactly as everyone else's did; nothing in his skill could have found the bare patch without Bilbo's observation carried to him by the bird. He could not save Esgaroth, only its people, and he could not prevent the Master from taking the town's wealth or, later, from squandering the share sent for its rebuilding.

In the wider legendarium his standing is that of a founder rather than a hero of the older kind. The later chronicles do not dwell on the archery at all; they record him as the man who restored a ruined kingdom of Men in the north and set a line upon its throne, and they place the Dale of his making in the strategic account of the north-east as a realm allied to Erebor and standing in the path of assault from the East. His authority was won by acclamation and confirmed by descent, not conferred by any older sovereignty, and it depended on the goodwill of neighbours as much as on his own strength — the Wood-elves fed the survivors, the dwarves of the Iron Hills paid the agreed share, and the alliance he entered under Gandalf's urging was what preserved all three peoples at the Mountain. The reach of what he founded was likewise limited: Dale was a small realm between larger powers, and its independence lasted three reigns before it was overrun in the last war of the Age.

His antagonists are drawn as two different failures of leadership, and his handling of each is characteristically restrained. With the Master of Esgaroth the quarrel is one of temperament rather than policy: a man who counts prosperity against a man who counts preparedness. Bard never moves against him, lets him keep his office while the survivors needed feeding, and afterwards sends him a great share of the treasure — a trust the Master betrays. With Thorin the opposition is sharper but shorter, an argument about whether a claim can be pressed by an armed camp; Bard answers refusal with patience, uses the Arkenstone as leverage rather than plunder, and when the dwarf is dead lays that stone upon his breast in the tomb. Both relationships show him unwilling to convert advantage into humiliation.

The bonds he chooses prove the durable ones. Thranduil, Dain and Bilbo each deal with him as an equal in a bargain, and in each case Bard settles the account generously and then keeps the connection. What began as a fragile battlefield alliance hardened into the standing friendship of Dale, Erebor and the woodland realm, which is how the later chronicles describe the north-east rather than through any act of his own; the peoples he fought beside for one day became neighbours for three reigns. It is the clearest measure of the man that his lasting relationships are political and voluntary, made with strangers of other kindreds, while his private ones go almost unmentioned.

In the Rankin/Bass animated television film of 1977, Bard is a minor figure voiced by John Stephenson, appearing only in the sequence at the lake and in the brief treatment of the battle that follows. The compression of the novel into roughly ninety minutes removes nearly all of the material that gives him weight in the book: his warnings about the light in the north, the organised defence of the town, and the long negotiation with Thorin under the Mountain are cut or reduced to a few lines of narration, and the Master of Esgaroth is dropped from the story altogether, so that the political quarrel over the treasure and the Master's later theft have no place in the film. What survives is the essential action — the thrush's word about the bare patch, the black arrow, the dragon's fall — together with Bard's part in the alliance at the Mountain, and he is left as an archer who kills Smaug rather than as a claimant and founder.

Peter Jackson's trilogy gives him a far larger role, played by Luke Evans across the second and third films. The screenplays rewrite his position in Esgaroth: instead of a captain among the town's archers he is a bargeman and smuggler who carries the dwarves into the town hidden in empty barrels, and he is given a family the novel does not mention — a son named Bain and two daughters, Sigrid and Tilda, with his wife dead before the story opens. His descent from Girion is made explicit and dramatised, Girion being shown to have failed at the same shot generations earlier, which supplies the knowledge of the dragon's weak point in place of the thrush that brings Bilbo's observation to him in the book. He is imprisoned by the Master before the attack rather than commanding the defence, and the Master dies in the burning of the town instead of surviving to squander the rebuilding money. Bard's kill is likewise reworked as an improvised shot from a bell tower rather than the last arrow of a firing line.