We see consciousness/unconsciousness, light/dark, invisibility/surveillance. Bilbo's waking nightmares are actual herald's of doom and Biblo hits his head on a rock at the chapter's cliffhanger end. This narrative structure is so precise and Chapter 5 (entitled "Riddles in the Dark") should be read with close attention to consciousness/unconsciousness, invisibility/surveillance, and riddles/knowledge. Another motif is a parallel to consciousness/unconsciousness, which is light/dark. It is more than the archetypal good/evil dichotomy in this chapter and it is an integral part of the plot-action. Light and dark are active in terms of knowledge, the hidden unknown, invisibility and surveillance (we might consider them as good and evil forces or perhaps, characters even). The darkness of the caves makes both capture and escape possible. Invisibility will become permanently important in The Hobbit and in the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Light, a symbol of goof, becomes festive "sparks" that are deadly, and a flash of light is a blade that illuminates and kills the Great Goblin‹all the while, Gandalf, the killer, remains hidden. Light and dark can be used for good and evil purposes, and in constructive and destructive means. The interrelationships of light and dark are not so simple, then. The swords are historical and usable, treasured artifacts and hated weapons, illuminating and murderous, forged yet magical‹multi-named , as it were. So we should not be surprised to see the sword as a symbol of unity (it is the heart of the juxtaposition between light and dark: murderous sparks). Keep in mind that the motif of ancestral and legacy gifts often includes swords, jewels and rings. We will find plenty of this in The Hobbit, further binding it to the genre of old Norse and Anglo-Saxon epic mythology (consider King Arthur and his sword "Excalibur" as a most common example). Finally, we shift our focus from swords to caves. Looking ahead to Chapters 5, what we have foreshadowed should lead us to think about these places as actual spaces: with or without a Biter or a Beater, the dark and circuitous (winding and twisting) attributes of the enclosing space are all-important.