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What is Bard's reward for killing the dragon in The Hobbit?

What an interesting question! Bard's immediate reward for killing Smaug, the dragon, is the freedom of Dale, his city. However, forthcoming events transpire which allow Bard the ability to restore both Dale and Laketown to their former glories.

To recap, immediately after Smaug's death, the men of Laketown clamor to make Bard king of Esgaroth (or Laketown). However, the Master of Laketown isn't too keen on this development. He argues that Laketown has always "elected masters from among the old and wise, and have not endured the rule of mere fighting men." Bard moves on, but he eventually meets with Thorin to bargain for part of the treasure Smaug had hoarded when he was alive.

Bard reasons that since Smaug had stolen much of the wealth from Dale, the people of Dale deserve some part of the treasure that the dwarves now claim for themselves. At this point, Bard also speaks up for the people of Laketown, whose city was destroyed by the dragon. Bard's position is that both the people of Dale and Laketown could use some of the treasure to rebuild their cities and their lives. More importantly, since he was the one who killed Smaug, Bard wants a twelfth of the treasure; for his part, Thorin Oakenshield, the leader of the dwarves, isn't too eager to share his hoard of gold and silver.

Things change, however, when Bilbo hands over to Bard the Arkenstone of Thrain, an heirloom of Thorin's house. With the Arkenstone in his possession, Bard is able to force a bargain from Thorin. In exchange for the Arkenstone, Thorin will give Bard a fourteenth share of the hoard in silver and gold.

It is this fourteenth share of the treasure that Bard uses to rebuild both Laketown and Dale. So, you can say that, after he kills the dragon, Bard is richly rewarded. First, his city is freed from assaults by Smaug. Second, his own act of courage gives him the leverage to bargain for part of the treasure the dwarves have laid claim to. With his fourteenth share of the treasure, Bard is not only able to help Laketown rebuild, he is also able to return Dale to its former splendor. Additionally, his reputation grows so well that men from the Lake and other areas look to him as their new leader.

Is Luke O'Neill in The Thorn Birds more like Amir in The Kite Runner or Rasheed in A Thousand Splendid Suns?

Luke O'Neill in The Thorn Birds is more like Rasheed in A Thousand Splendid Suns. Luke is a heartless man who romances Meggie and gets her to marry him. Once married to Meggie, he is heartless and cold. He leaves her to harvest sugarcane and hires her out to be a housemaid to another family. Luke thinks mainly of money, and refuses to have a child until he is well established with a station...

Rasheed in A Thousand Splendid Suns marries Mariam out of expedience rather than love, similar to the reasons Luke marries Meggie in The Thorn Birds. Like Luke, Rasheed is loveless and impatient towards Mariam. Also like Luke, Rasheed sees women as sexual objects but not as objects deserving of love, and is impatient and abusive towards Mariam after they marry. Unlike Luke, Rasheed wants to have a child and is displeased when his wife has several miscarriages. After his second wife, Laila, gives birth to a daughter, Rasheed abuses the daughter and eventually gives her to an orphanage. He shows the same disregard for his daughter that Luke O'Neill shows toward his daughter. At first, Amir in The Kite Runner is an unethical boy who betrays his friend, Hassan. Unlike Rasheed and Luke, who are unredeemed, Amir eventually rescues Sohrab, Hassan's son. In the end, Amir is loving toward a child and redeems himself, unlike Rasheed and Luke.

What is the theme of "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierce?

I think there is a main theme about time and how the perception of its passage is fluid. I'm quite certain most people have experienced how time seems to "fly" at certain times and "crawl" at others. The same occurs in this story. In the moments between the officer stepping aside and Farquhar's death, time slows dramatically. Farquhar experiences hours and hours of time in the fractions of seconds that exist before his neck snaps.

I think another theme is the theme of imagination/ dreams/ illusion vs. reality. When readers first meet Farquhar, we are told that he longs to fight for the Southern cause. He has dreamed up a romanticized version of what war is.

Circumstances of an imperious nature, which it is unnecessary to relate here, had prevented him from taking service with that gallant army which had fought the disastrous campaigns ending with the fall of Corinth, and he chafed under the inglorious restraint, longing for the release of his energies, the larger life of the soldier, the opportunity for distinction.

Unfortunately for Farquhar, the reality of war isn't as glorious as he imagines it is. The reality of the situation is that war is dangerous and brutal. Farquhar longs for distinction, but the reality is that no southerner will know what he tried to do. There will be no glory in his success (because he failed), and no one will celebrate his failed attempt because no one knows he went to try and sabotage the bridge.

The reality vs. non-reality theme continues in other parts of the story, too. The Union scout (reality) presented himself as a southern soldier (illusion). Farquhar imagines the information obtained is genuine only to discover that in reality it was all a trap. Farquhar also imagines a miraculous escape only to wind up dead in real life from hanging.

What Fitzgerald's quote about writing a novel that was "simple and intricately patterned"?

Fitzgerald told his editor, Maxwell Perkins, in 1923, "I want to write something new--something extraordinary and beautiful and simple and intricately patterned." This was the seed of his plan to write The Great Gatsby, which he finally began in April of 1924. Tumult with his wife, Zelda, followed, along with a move to the Riviera. He started writing in earnest in August of 1924 and finished the first draft of the book by the end of October. Fitzgerald knew that he had achieved what he had set out to do and that Gatsby was a great book. After the book was published on April 10, 1925, writers like Willa Cather praised it. However, the general public found it not much better than a piece of nostalgia. After Fitzgerald's death in 1940, the book was reappraised and found to be the extraordinary, beautiful, and intricate book he had set out to write. The intricate patterning of the book lies in its taut but complicated plot and portrait of the complex character of Gatsby.

How could the following lines be paraphrased? taut throat, hell’s captive caught in the armsOf him who of all the men on earthWas the...

This quote begins at line 788, in the midst of Beowulf's fight with Grendel. One of the difficulties in summarizing lines, rather than sentences or sections, of Beowulf or poetry of its lineage is the fact that many lines repeat or reflect upon information in the previous ones, so that they appear as sentence fragments or redundancies when viewed out of context (such as "taut throat").

"Hell's captive" refers to Grendel, in the sense that...

"Hell's captive" refers to Grendel, in the sense that he is a damned creature and, considering the poem's strong Christian moralism, implying that he is disfavored and cursed.

The following lines simply describe and reiterate Beowulf's strength and role as a protector. Finally, they detail his intentions; to literally wrestle Grendel to death, or, more likely, to crush the life out of him.

So, these lines might be paraphrased as follows:

"Grendel, that hellish creature, was caught in Beowulf's grasp. Because of his great strength and protective instinct, Beowulf had no intention of letting Grendel go until he had crushed the monster to death."

How old is the speaker in "Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now" by A. E. Housman?

The speaker of this poem is twenty years old.

He reveals his age in the second stanza:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

Recall that a "score" of anything is twenty of them. Remember Abraham Lincoln's mention of "four score and seven years ago" in his Gettysburg Address? He meant "eighty-seven years ago." However many scores...

The speaker of this poem is twenty years old.

He reveals his age in the second stanza:

Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

Getting back to the poem, what this second stanza means is, "Of the total seventy years that I'll probably get to be alive, I'll never again be twenty like I am now. So if you subtract twenty from seventy, I've only got fifty more years to enjoy life!" (Saying "threescore years and ten" is saying "seventy years:" [3 x 20] + 10 = 70.)

It's really important to read that whole stanza when you're trying to figure out how old the speaker of the poem is. If you stopped after reading the first two lines of the stanza, you might think that the speaker is seventy instead of twenty--you might misinterpret the first two lines as "Now since I'm seventy, I'll never again be twenty." But after you read all four of those lines, you understand that the first two lines are actually saying, "Now, since I probably only get seventy years of life, my current age of twenty is never going to happen again."

You might have guessed that, instead of someone who's barely out of his teens, it's more likely that an older gentleman of seventy would be out walking, looking at beautiful trees and thinking about how life is so short and valuable. But the speaker of this poem is actually a twenty-year-old doing just that!

Churchill's "Iron Curtain" speech acknowledges "Russia's need to be secure on her western borders," but at the same time it raises concerns about...

In my view, Churchill is not being inconsistent in his “Iron Curtain” speech. There are two reasons for this. First, there is the fact that the Soviet Union was dominating many countries other than Germany whereas Churchill only argued that it should be secure from German aggression. Second, I would argue that Churchill does present some arguments that can be seen as “concrete justifications” for his concerns about Soviet aggression.

In his speech, Churchill does...

In his speech, Churchill does not say that the Soviets have an absolute right to secure their borders against any possible threat. Instead, he says that he understands

the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression.

Even if the Soviets have the right to be secure from German aggression, this does not mean that they have the right to dominate all the other countries of the region. The parts of Germany that the West controlled were separated from the Soviet Union by the Soviet Zone of Germany as well as by other countries like Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. The Soviets did not need all of Eastern Europe as a protection against a dismembered Germany.

Secondly, Churchill does provide concrete justifications for being suspicious of the Soviets. He points out that the countries of Eastern Europe are not being allowed to determine their own destinies. He says that the communist parties of these countries are being

raised to pre-eminence and power far beyond their numbers and are seeking everywhere to obtain totalitarian control.

There is a difference between wanting to be insulated from your enemies, on the one hand, and forcing totalitarian governments on all sorts of countries on the other hand. If the Soviets were imposing communist totalitarianism on Eastern European countries (and putting pressure on countries like Turkey and Iran as well), this would be a concrete justification for worrying about Soviet expansion.