Why do Fili and Kili die?

One of Tolkien’s final touches to The Hobbit was also his hardest – to kill off the young dwarves Fili and Kili. Hard for his readers and, I suspect, for Tolkien himself. So why did he do it, when all along he had meant them to live?

In the complete manuscript version of the story, Fili and Kili survived the Battle of Five Armies.

Tolkien’s decision to change this in the final typescript is striking and in some ways puzzling.

The death of Thorin Oakenshild from wounds after the climactic battle is not only heroic but also the wages of folly. In both respects, it’s a death well earned. Thorin survives just long enough to make amends for his anger against Bilbo and to repudiate his own former gold-madness: ‘If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.’

By contrast, Thorin’s nephews are the least blameworthy and the youngest of all the story’s characters. They absolutely do not deserve to die. And they are the dwarves who young readers might identify with most closely.

The reader only learns of their deaths in the retrospective account of the day – like Bilbo, who has been knocked out mid-way through the battle:

Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

As John D. Rateliff puts it in his superb History of The Hobbit, ‘The idea that the two most likeable of all Bilbo’s companions should also die in the battle [is] one of the saddest moments in the whole story, even though it occurs offstage while our narrator is hors de combat.’[1] (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

So why did Tolkien change the story so that they died?

Rateliff proposes two reasons for the change. On a purely pragmatic level, he points out, Tolkien may have introduced their deaths in order to remove any confusion about the dwarven succession after Thorin’s death. The kingship has to go instead to Thorin’s cousin Dain, to justify his actions as a deus ex machina in the Battle of Five Armies). On an artistic level, the deaths of the blameless Kili and Fili adds a touch of realism, writes Rateliff, to ‘ground the eucatastrophe and prevent the book from being “escapist” in a negative sense’.[2] (Si apre in una nuova finestra) He’s probably right on the pragmatic motive. He’s certainly right on the artistic one.

But if we look beyond internal narrative logic and philosophical values, we can find other, more urgent and personal reasons for the deaths of Fili and Kili…