The History of the Hobbit
John D. Rateliff
Dedication
to
Charles B. Elston
&
Janice K. Coulter
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Frontispiece
Introduction
i. Chronology of Composition
ii. A Note on the Text
iii. The Plan of This Edition
iv. Abbreviations and Acknowledgments
The First Phase
I(a). The Pryftan Fragment
i. The Lost Opening
ii. Nomenclature in the Pryftan Fragment
iii. The Geography of the Tale & The First Map
I(b). The Bladorthin Typescript
i. Baggins of Bag-End
ii. Bladorthin
iii. Dwarven Magic
iv. The Voice of the Narrator
The Second Phase
I(c). The Adventure Continues
i. The Dwarves
ii. Moria
iii. The Necromancer
iv. The Third of March
II. Trolls
i. The Trolls
ii. Bilbo’s Contract
III. Rivendell
i. The Last Decent House
ii. Elves in the Moonlight
iii. Elrond
iv. Durin’s Day
IV. Goblins
i. Goblins
ii. The Giants
iii. Switzerland
iv. Bilbo’s Dreams, and Other Matters
V. Gollum
i. The Gollum
ii. Riddles
iii. The Ring
iv. The Invisible Monster
VI. Wargs and Eagles
i. The Wolves
ii. The Eagles
VII. Medwed
i. Bears
ii. Bothvar Bjarki
iii. Beorn’s Hall
iv. The Carrock
v. The Dolittle Theme
vi. Radagast
Plot Notes A
Tolkien’s Plot Notes
VIII. Mirkwood
i. The Children of Ungoliant
ii. Butterflies
iii. The Theseus Theme
iv. Bilbo the Warrior
‘The Enchanted Stream’
Mirkwood Reconsidered
Plot Notes B
i. The Story Foreseen from the Capture by Wood-elves
ii. Visiting the Mewlips
iii. Lake Town
iv. The Original Time-Scheme
v. Into the Dragon’s Lair
vi. Conversations with Smaug
vii. The Gem of Girion
viii. Bilbo Kills Smaug
ix. The Poem
x. A Battle Gathering in the West
xi. Just a Hobbit Again
IX. In the Halls of the Elvenking
i. The Vanishing People
ii. The Three Kindreds of the Elves
iii. The King of Wood and Stone
iv. The Name ‘Thranduil’
v. The Wine of Dorwinion
X. Lake Town
i. Lake Town
ii. ‘The Mayor & Corporation’
iii. Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror
XI. The Lonely Mountain
i. The Desolation of the Dragon
ii. The Thrush
Plot Notes C
XII. Conversations with Smaug
i. Tolkien’s Dragons
ii. Smaug the Magnificent
iii. ‘The Only Philological Remark’
XIII (later XIV). The Death of Smaug
i. Bard the Dragon-Slayer
ii. The Black Arrow
iii. The Death of Smaug
iv. The Name ‘Esgaroth’
Plot Notes D
XIV (later XIII). While the Dragon’s Away . . .
i. Dragon-sickness (‘The Hoard’)
ii. The Arkenstone as Silmaril
iii. A Note on Cram
XVa. The Kindness of Ravens
i. The Ravens of the Mountain
The Siege of the Mountain
Plot Notes E: ‘Little Bird’
Plot Notes F
The Third Phase
‘A Thief Indeed’
XVb. King Bard
XVI. Divided Loyalties
XVII. The Battle of Five Armies
XVIII. ‘And Back Again’
XIX. The End of the Journey
i. Dain son of Nain
ii. Bolg of the North
iii. The Battle of Five Armies
iv. ‘The Halls of Waiting’
v. Bilbo’s First Poem
The Fourth Phase
The 1947 Hobbit
i. ‘Proposed correction of Hobbit to simplify Sequel’
ii. Errors in ‘The Hobbit’
iii. Other corrections
iv. Prefatory Note
v. Thrym Thistlebeard
The Fortunate Misunderstanding
The Fifth Phase
The 1960 Hobbit
New Chapter I. A Well-Planned Party
New Chapter II. The Broken Bridge
New Chapter III. Arrival in Rivendell
Queries and Reminders
The End of the Fifth Phase
Timelines and Itinerary
i. Distances and Itinerary
ii. Timetable from Rivendell to Lake Town
ii. The Timeline Revisited
iv. Waxing and Waning
v. Phases of the Moon
vi. The Wandering Moon
Appendices
I. The Denham Tracts (The Name ‘Hobbit’)
II. Tolkien’s letter to The Observer (The Hobyahs)
III. The Dvergatal (The Dwarf Names)
IV. Tolkien’s Correspondence with Arthur Ransome
V. Author’s Copies List
Addendum: The Seventh Phase
i. Timeline of Events
ii. Notes on a Parley
iii. Responses to Queries
iv. Personae
v. Runic Charts
vi. Fëanorian Letters
Index
Endnotes
Picture Section
Copyright
About the Publisher
Frontispiece
Introduction
This book offers for the first time a complete edition of the manuscript of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, now in the Special Collections and University Archives of Marquette University. Unlike most previous editions of Tolkien’s manuscripts, which incorporate all changes in order to present a text that represents Tolkien’s final thought on all points whenever possible, this edition tries rather to capture the first form in which the story flowed from his pen, with all the hesitations over wording and constant recasting of sentences that entailed. Even though the original draft strongly resembles the published story in its general outlines and indeed much of its expression, nevertheless the differences between the two are significant, and I have made it my task to record them as accurately as possible.
Since the published story is so familiar, it has taken on an air of inevitability, and it may come as something of a shock to see how differently Tolkien first conceived of some elements, and how differently they were sometimes expressed. Thus, to mention a few of the more striking examples, in this original version of the story Gollum does not try to kill Bilbo but instead faithfully shows him the way out of the goblin-tunnels after losing the riddle-contest.1 The entire scene in which Bilbo and the dwarves encounter the Enchanted Stream in Mirkwood did not exist in the original draft and was interpolated into the story later, at the typescript stage, while their encounter with the Spiders was rewritten to eliminate all mention
of a great ball of spider-thread by means of which Bilbo navigated his way, Theseus-like, through the labyrinth of Mirkwood to find his missing companions. No such character as Dain existed until a very late stage in the drafting, while Bard is introduced abruptly only to be killed off almost at once. In his various outlines for the story, Tolkien went even further afield, sketching out how Bilbo would kill the dragon himself, with the Gem of Girion (better known by its later name, as ‘the Arkenstone’) to be his promised reward from the dwarves for the deed. The great battle that forms the story’s climax was to take place on Bilbo’s return journey, not at the Lonely Mountain; nor were any of the dwarves to take part in it, nor would Thorin and his admirable (great-) nephews die.
Tolkien was of course superbly skilled at nomenclature, and it can be disconcerting to discover that the names of some of the major characters were different when those characters were created. For much of the original story the wizard who rousts the hobbit from his comfortable hobbit-hole is Bladorthin, not ‘Gandalf’, with the name Gandalf belonging instead to the dwarven leader known in the published story as ‘Thorin Oakenshield’; the great werebear Gandalf & Company encounter east of the Misty Mountains is Medwed, not ‘Beorn’. Other names were more ephemeral, such as Pryftan for the dragon better known as Smaug, Fimbulfambi for the last King under the Mountain, and Fingolfin for the goblin-king so dramatically beheaded by Bullroarer Took. On a verbal level, the chilling cry of Thief, thief, thief! We hates it, we hates it, we hates it for ever! was not drafted until more than a decade after the Gollum chapter had originally been written, and did not make its way into print until seven years after that; the wizard’s advice to Bilbo and the dwarves on the eaves of Mirkwood was ‘keep your peckers up’ (rather than the more familiar ‘keep your spirits up’ that replaced it), and even the final line in the book is slightly different.
Yet, for all these departures, much of the story will still be familiar to those who have read the published version – for example, all the riddles in the contest with Gollum are present from the earliest draft of that chapter, all the other dwarves’ names remain the same (even if their roles are sometimes somewhat different), and Bilbo still undergoes the same slow transformation from stay-at-home-hobbit to resourceful adventuring burglar. In synopsis, the draft and the published book would appear virtually identical, but then Tolkien explicitly warned us against judging stories from summaries (‘On Fairy-Stories’, page 21). With as careful and meticulous an author as Tolkien, details matter, and it is here that the two versions of the story diverge. Think of this original draft as like the unaired pilot episode of a classic television series, the previously unissued demo recordings for a famous album, or the draft score of a beloved symphony. Or, to use a more literary analogy, the relationship between this draft and the published book is rather like that between Caxton’s incunabulum Le Morte D’Arthur and the manuscript of the same work, discovered in 1934, known as the Winchester Malory. In both cases, it is the professionally published, more structured form of the book which established itself as a classic, while the eventual publication of something closer to what the author first wrote reveals a great deal about how the book was originally put together, what its author’s intentions were, and more about its affinities with its sources, particularly when (in the case of The Hobbit) those sources are Tolkien’s own earlier unpublished works. That Tolkien himself in this case was responsible for establishing the polished final text does not obscure the fact that here we have two different versions of the same story, and rediscovering the earlier form casts new light on the familiar one. In the words of Tolkien’s classic essay ‘On Fairy-Stories’,
Recovery . . . is a re-gaining . . . of a clear view . . . We need . . . to clean our windows; so that the things seen clearly may be freed from the drab blur of . . . familiarity . . . Of all faces those of our familiares [intimates, familiars] are the ones . . . most difficult really to see with fresh attention, perceiving their likeness and unlikeness . . . [T]he things that are . . . (in a bad sense) familiar are the things that we have appropriated . . . We say we know them. They have become like the things which once attracted us . . . and we laid hands on them, and then locked them in our hoard, acquired them, and acquiring ceased to look at them.
—OFS.53–4.
This need for ‘Recovery’ is particularly apt in the case of The Hobbit, which in recent years has come to be seen more and more as a mere ‘prelude’ to The Lord of the Rings, a lesser first act that sets up the story and prepares the reader to encounter the masterpiece that follows. Such a view does not do justice to either book, and ignores the fact that the story of Bilbo’s adventure was meant to be read as a stand-alone work, and indeed existed as an independent work for a full seventeen years before being joined by its even more impressive sequel. I hope that this edition may serve as a means by which readers can see the familiar book anew and appreciate its power, its own unique charm, and its considerable artistry afresh.
(i)
Chronology of Composition
‘In a Hole in the Ground’
The story is now well known of how, one day while grading student exams, Tolkien came across a blank page in one exam book and on the spur of the moment wrote on it ‘in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’. This scrap of paper is now lost and what survives of the earliest draft is undated, but Tolkien recounted the momentous event several times in interviews and letters; by assembling all the clues from these recollections into a composite account, we can establish the chronology of composition with relative certainty.
Auden
All I remember about the start of The Hobbit is sitting correcting School Certificate papers in the everlasting weariness of that annual task forced on impecunious academics with children. On a blank leaf I scrawled: ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.’ I did not and do not know why. I did nothing about it, for a long time, and for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map. But it became The Hobbit in the early 1930s . . .
—letter of 7th June 1955 to W. H. Auden;
Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, p. 215.
Harshaw
Two . . . English boys . . . asked Mr Tolkien how he happened to write The Hobbit. He replied that he was in the midst of correcting 286 examination papers one day when he suddenly turned over one of the papers and wrote: ‘At the edge of his hole stood the Hobbit.’ As he later tried to think just who and what this Hobbit was, his amazing story developed.
—circa September 1956; Ruth Harshaw,
‘When Carnival of Books Went to Europe’,
ALA Bulletin, February 1957, p. 120.
BBC TV
The actual beginning – though it’s not really the beginning, but the actual flashpoint I remember very clearly. I can still see the corner of my house in 20 Northmoor Road where it happened. I had an enormous pile of exam papers there. Marking school examinations in the summertime is very laborious and unfortunately also boring. And I remember picking up a paper and actually finding – I nearly gave an extra mark for it; an extra five marks, actually – there was one page of this particular paper that was left blank. Glorious! Nothing to read. So I scribbled on it, I can’t think why, In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
—Tolkien in Oxford, BBC Television, 1968.
Plimmers
It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’.
I knew no more about the creatures
hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.
The History of the Hobbit Page 1