“Outlandish” has an archaic meaning which plays a little game with us.  We usually know it as “unusual or bizarre”, and read right past it as such.  But the scene is of Bilbo telling himself not to think of dragons – and he may be telling himself not to be ridiculous… but dragons are real in Middle Earth, they are simply foreign to the Shire, the older, archaic meaning of “outlandish”.  We and Bilbo should not leave a live dragon out of our calculations.

• 02.002 and all that outlandish nonsense at your age!”

“outlandish, adj. and n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, June 2015. Web. 29 July 2015.