I saw the film pictured above ( The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey ) yesterday and it left me more worried about the power of metaphor in literature than the worth of contract between warring fictional species. This is interesting as it can be missed how funny the joke of a dragon owning property is, especially when the dragon is considerable as a metaphor for all the jealously guarded gold in the world, all in a room doing nothing. Yet that it is the cause of such misery, retrospectively, and such antagonism, contemporarily, not to mention all that moves for good and evil to restore any balance, the mood of any legal discussion seems condemned, if not to be condemning. Its stance is forced to seem aloof and oblvious to the implications, at one and the same time, of its lack of stance in a real world, a world where gold still has the same useless meaning as it does in the fiction, whether its value is real or not. If it seems ridiculous that a dragon can ha...