Эребор
William H. Green calls the Lonely Mountain the fourth and final stage of Bilbo's education. He identifies multiple parallels and repetitions of structure between the stages, each one involving a journey, privation, and "unlikely escape". The Lonely Mountain stage, too, symbolically echoes the first stage in the Shire: before setting out, Bilbo was peacefully smoking a pipe of tobacco at his own front door; at the mountain, the smoke is the dragon's, and its meaning is anything but peaceful. The Christian writer Joseph Pearce views the journey to the Lonely Mountain as a "pilgrimage of grace", a Christian "bildungsroman", at its deepest level. Pearce states further that Bilbo's quest to the mountain parallel's Frodo's quest to a different mountain, Mount Doom, which he calls "a mirror of Everyman's journey through life".