Esgaroth

In the narrative of The Hobbit the town is almost always called Lake-town. This is a plain descriptive name in the Common Speech, of the same kind as the Hill, the Water or the Mountain. It says nothing about the town beyond what a traveller sees on arrival: a settlement standing out on the water rather than on the shore. The people who live there are called, just as simply, the Lake-men. The lake itself also has a descriptive name, the Long Lake. The Lake-town name therefore places the town within its landscape rather than giving it an identity of its own. The hyphenated form is the one used in the text. The unhyphenated spelling Laketown is a later convenience and has no separate standing.1

The town's proper name, Esgaroth, is used in the appendices to The Lord of the Rings. There it serves chiefly as a mark of origin: Bard is identified as Bard of Esgaroth, the way a man is named after his home town. The appendices treat the two names as interchangeable. Esgaroth is the more formal designation, suited to chronicle and annal, and Lake-town is the name of everyday speech. The pairing follows a pattern found throughout the legendarium, where a place often carries both a descriptive name in the Common Speech and an older name of a different linguistic character.2

The published works do not explain the name Esgaroth. Its sound and shape resemble names of Elvish origin more than the names borne by the Men of the region, such as Bard. Tolkien, however, gives no translation. He does not say in which language the name was formed or who first bestowed it on the town. Glosses offered by readers therefore remain conjecture and are not adopted here. What the texts do support is modest: Esgaroth is the town's own name, and Lake-town is the name that describes it.3

Lake-town stood in the wide country east of Mirkwood, on the Long Lake south of the Lonely Mountain. Dale lay between them, in the valley below the Mountain's southern face. The lake was fed from two directions. From the north came the River Running, which rose within the Mountain and flowed past Dale. From the west came the Forest River, which issued from the woodland realm of the Elvenking. At its southern end the lake emptied again over falls, and its waters passed on towards lands the story does not follow. The town thus sat where the river routes of the region met. Travellers from the Elvenking's halls reached it by water and could see the Mountain on the northern skyline.1

The town was not built on the shore but out on the lake itself, on the shallow water of a small bay sheltered by a projecting spur of rock. Its houses, halls and quays were all of wood and rested on great piles driven into the lake-bed. Only a single wooden bridge joined the town to the mainland. The open water was its chief defence, which the Lake-men valued as protection against attack from the land and above all against the dragon. At the heart of the town was a broad pool of still water ringed by the larger buildings. Steps and landing-stages led down from these buildings to the water.2

Lake-town lived by trade. Goods travelled up the river from the south, and wine and other wares passed along the Forest River to and from the Wood-elves. Empty barrels were floated downstream to the town, which is how Bilbo and the dwarves reached it. The town of Bilbo's day was the reduced remnant of an older and larger settlement. The Hobbit adds that in dry seasons, when the lake sank, the rotted stumps of an older and larger town showed above the water along the shore. These were traces of the time before the dragon, when Dale flourished and the lake traffic was heavier.3

No founding date for the town is recorded, and the texts do not say who first built it. It appears in the story as an old settlement whose best days already lay behind it. During the centuries when Durin's Folk held the Lonely Mountain, the Men of the Lake took part in the prosperity of the region. The Tale of Years sets the return of Thrór to Erebor in 2590 of the Third Age, and the Dwarf-kingdom grew rich in the years that followed. Its wealth passed into Dale and down to the Lake through trade and craft. The Lake-men of Bilbo's day kept a memory of that time in their songs. These songs foretold that a King under the Mountain would one day come back and that gold would then run again in the rivers.1

That prosperity ended in 2770, when Smaug came down on Erebor, drove out the Dwarves and laid Dale waste. The town on the Lake survived, but it lost the wealth and traffic that had sustained it. For almost two centuries it lived within sight of the dragon's mountain. It kept up a reduced trade with the Wood-elves and the lands to the south under the rule of an elected Master. By the time of the quest the prophecies of a returning king were treated more as festival matter than as expectation. The Master in particular was a man of commerce and cautious calculation rather than of old loyalties.2

In the autumn of 2941 Thorin Oakenshield and his companions arrived at the town, having escaped from the Elvenking's halls, and Thorin openly declared himself heir of Thrór. The townsfolk received him with enthusiasm, seeing in him the fulfilment of their songs. The Master had doubts, but he found it prudent to go along with the popular mood. The Dwarves were lodged and feasted for some time and then provided with boats and supplies for the last stage of their journey. It is unlikely the Master was sorry to see them go. The town's welcome later proved costly. When the dragon was roused in the Mountain, he blamed the Lake-men for helping the intruders and turned his anger against them.3

The watchmen saw the dragon approaching, and the bridge to the shore was broken in time. Water alone, however, could not protect a town built of wood against fire from the air. Smaug set the roofs ablaze, and many of the inhabitants took to the boats while a remnant of armed men held on under Bard. Bard, a descendant of Girion of Dale, shot the dragon with his last arrow, guided by what the thrush had told him. The dying beast fell upon the burning town and wrecked it in its fall, and its remains sank into the shallows. The Master had already fled. The homeless survivors gathered on the western shore, and there the Elvenking's people, who had been marching towards the Mountain, brought them help.4

After the Battle of the Five Armies the settlement of the Mountain's treasure paid for the restoration of the region. Bard gave a large sum to the Master for the rebuilding of the town. According to the account Bilbo later received, the Master fell under the dragon-sickness that clings to hoarded gold. He fled with much of it and died alone in the Waste. His successor was wiser, and the rebuilt Lake-town prospered again as trade on the rivers returned. Bard himself rebuilt Dale and, as the Tale of Years records, became its king in 2944. From then on the town's fortunes were once more bound up with those of the kingdoms of Dale and the Mountain.5

The later chronicles give Esgaroth little attention of its own. During the War of the Ring the North was drawn into the conflict. The Tale of Years records battle in Dale in the spring of 3019, the deaths of King Brand and King Dáin, and a siege of the Mountain, which was lifted after the fall of Sauron. The fate of the Lake-town during these events is not described separately. Where the appendices mention it, it appears chiefly as the home of Bard. They do not recount any second destruction or any end of the town. The published texts leave Esgaroth still standing on the Lake at the close of the Third Age.6

The inhabitants of the town were Men, called collectively the Lake-men. The Hobbit shows them as a community of traders, boatmen and craftsmen, closely tied to the water that surrounded them. Unlike Dale, Lake-town had no hereditary lord. It was governed by a Master, a magistrate chosen by the townsfolk from among the older and wiser citizens, and he ruled with the advice of councillors. Armed guards kept watch at the landward bridge on his behalf. The office rested on public consent rather than on descent. This made the Master attentive to popular feeling, and the story shows him bending to it when it ran against his own judgement.1

The limits of this elective rule became visible on the night of the dragon's attack. Among the townsfolk lived men who traced their descent from the lords of Dale. Bard was one of them, sprung from the house of Girion. Once the dragon was dead, the survivors turned against the Master and called for Bard to be their king. The Master replied that his authority came from election. He also pointed out that Bard's ancestral claim belonged to Dale, not to the Lake. Bard did not seize the town. Instead he took practical command of the relief and the defence, while the Master kept his title. The episode shows two ideas of authority side by side: the chosen civic head of the Lake, and the royal blood of Dale.2

In this way Lake-town gives the story its measure of consequences: the reckoning falls on people who never set out on the adventure.

The town's closest outward bond was with the Wood-elves. Trade flowed between them along the Forest River, and the Master was careful not to offend the Elvenking. After Dale was restored, the Lake became part of a wider realm of Men centred on Bard's kingdom, and settlers came to Dale from the Lake as well as from other lands. By the time of the War of the Ring, Bard's grandson Brand ruled a kingdom that stretched well to the south and east of Esgaroth. The dwarf Glóin also spoke of friendship between that realm and the restored Kingdom under the Mountain. The texts do not say how the Master's office related to the kings of Dale. They show only that the Lake-men's fortunes were now bound up with both neighbours.3

In the structure of The Hobbit, Lake-town is where the journey leaves the wild and returns to the world of ordinary Men. After the goblin tunnels, the forest and the halls of the Elvenking, the company comes to a place of markets, officials, feasts and public opinion, and the tone of the story shifts with it. The narrator treats the town with mild irony. The Master is drawn as a man who weighs every event by its likely profit, a comic figure beside the heroic mood of the Dwarves. Lake-town is also where the quest stops being a secret. Until now the expedition had travelled by stealth, but here Thorin announces himself openly, and the business of the Mountain becomes a matter of public hope and private calculation.1

The town's second appearance is told in a notable break with the book's usual method. For most of the tale the reader sees events alongside Bilbo, but when the dragon descends on the Lake the hobbit is far away inside the Mountain, and the chapter follows the townsfolk instead. Bard enters the story only at this point of crisis, as a grim and little-regarded figure among the defenders. The death of Smaug therefore happens outside the protagonist's sight and is not his deed. The story keeps the burglar's part and the dragon-slayer's part apart, and Bilbo learns of the event only afterwards.2

The destruction of the town then shapes the ending of the book. Because the Lake-men have lost their homes through the Dwarves' venture, Bard can put forward a claim to part of the treasure. What might have closed as a tale of a slain dragon becomes a dispute over the hoard and over what is owed to those who bore its cost. Bilbo's own last decisive act answers that dispute. In this way Lake-town gives the story its measure of consequences: the reckoning falls on people who never set out on the adventure.3

Among the screen versions, only Peter Jackson's Hobbit trilogy gives the town substantial treatment. Lake-town appears in the second and third films, released in 2013 and 2014. Luke Evans plays Bard and Stephen Fry plays the Master. The films add a character with no counterpart in the book: Alfrid, played by Ryan Gage, the Master's scheming deputy. His presence sharpens the portrait of the town's government. The Master of the book is a cautious and self-interested elected magistrate. The films turn him into an openly corrupt ruler who keeps a poor population under his hand through his officials. Bard's role is enlarged in the same way. He appears from the company's arrival onwards rather than only at the moment of crisis, and he is given a household of three children, Bain, Sigrid and Tilda, of whom Tolkien says nothing.1

The trilogy also changes how the Dwarves come to the town and what happens to it afterwards. In the book the company arrives openly and is welcomed by the townsfolk. In the films they are smuggled in secretly by Bard. Several of them are left behind when the rest set out for the Mountain, among them the wounded Kíli. Elves of the woodland realm, Legolas and the invented Tauriel, follow them there, so the town becomes a scene of combat before the dragon ever arrives. The killing of Smaug is tied to an heirloom black arrow of Girion's line rather than to the thrush's message. The Master's end is changed as well: he dies during the dragon's fall while trying to escape with the town's gold, instead of perishing later in the Waste. The post-war rebuilding of the town and the Master's successor have no place in the films.2