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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9769983" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's not at all clear to me that that is true.Well, because he has spent more time as child hearing stories of trolls, and as a young man swapping tavern tales at the bar, heard more tales of heroism and of daring, than any player of D&D has spent reading the monster manual.  He lives in a world were trolls are real, and so that world is filled with stories about them, and warnings about them, the way your life was filled with stories to not play with matches or run out in front of traffic and so forth.When Bilbo, a gentle hobbit of leisure from a landed family with no education or profession to speak of, first sees a troll he doesn't need anyone to tell him what a troll is or that trolls turn to stone when exposed to sunlight, even though there hasn't been a troll in the Shire in centuries.  Because he's been told all about them in travelers tales and folk lore, in rhymes and lore poems and song.  He's knows that he's seeing trolls.  Likewise, when he talks to Smaug, there hasn't been a dragon in the Shire in centuries, but he knows what sort of beast that they are, how to flatter them, not to give his name to one, and so forth.  He's not ignorant of the ways of dragons despite coming from the most sheltered background possible in middle earth.Because he lives in a world where those things are real and not merely stories in books.  He lives in a world were knowing how to recognize the signs of those things or defend from those things is essential skills for all culture.  He knows as much about the monsters and dangers of his world as the average young man knows about sports.  If these things exist, the common lore of the day, the songs he sings, the folk stories that he has heard since he was a child, the talk of the old men of the village is filled with all of these things.  Imagine a vampire or a zombie invasion actually happened in the real world, wouldn't you expect most people to immediately recognize these things just from their place in movies and literature?  So how much more so would you expect that those who live where vampires and zombie invasions aren't merely hypothetical would know at least as much as the average person?</blockquote>

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