Chapter 4 Over Hill and Under Hill
So couple of points:
1. Best neologism in years, "it was not a thunderstorm, it was a thunderwar.". Goddamn that worked so well.
2. He drops a dread bomb just in the Front Porch ~`and that was the last they would have of their belongs'. This contrasts well with my 4th point.
3. Bilbo gets his first moment of actually helping in alerting gandalf, and I appreciate it's not a moment of glory, but a small assist.
4. The ponies.
In The Fellowship of the Ring, in chapter 10, the Hobbits lose their ponies. Tolkien actually stops the story, and tells the reader directly that the ponies got away, were fine, And lived happy lives.
I have to think that was a reaction to the expected response to this chapter. We go from fun adventure to kidnapping, enslavement, eating the poor things, and then several dead goblins, the first thing to truly die that we've seen. (Trolls turning to stone doesn't count to children). And then even more death of goblins as they make their escape. We jumped from a barely PG to an upper end PG-13 in only a few paragraphs. He really, really doesn't like goblins, and wants you not to like them either. And while you could read them as industrialists, what I read them as is the misuser of tools, the corruptors of the airplane to the warplane.

 

I like your takes Shoulda, hadn't thought of the contrast of the horses' treatment between books.

One thing I found particularly interesting in this chapter was that Goblin-Cleaver (Thorin's sword) was recognizable on sight not just by the Great Goblin, but by goblins at large. It must have a hell of a history to remain that infamous after being lost for so long. On a similar note, there's an almost "alive-ness" ascribed to the swords, Gandalf's starts burning even brighter after killing the Great Goblin.

Overall, this is very much as Shoulda says, where the story goes from PG to PG-13. The danger really kicks up a notch in a way that the trolls didn't manage to for me. There was something almost a little comical about how that was going vs this.