‘One minute’ Bl. was saying. ‘Here are the key from the troll-lair they might come in useful, Gandalf: And now Goodbye, Goodbye!’
‘Goodbye, goodbye!’ Bladorthin was saying – ‘straight through the forest is your way now. Don’t stray off the track – if you do it is a thousand to one you’ll never find the path again, or ever get out of Mirkwood; and then I don’t suppose I (or anyone else) will hear of you again!’
‘Do we really have to go through?’ said Bilbo
‘Yes you do, if you want to get to the other side. You must either go through, or give up your quest. And I am not going to allow you to back out, Mr Baggins, now – I am sure you can’t be thinking of it.’
‘No, no!’ the hobbit hastened to say (and between you and me I believe he really was speaking the truth: adventures were quite changing him) ‘No, I meant – is there no way round?’
‘There is if you care to go a hundred miles or so out of your way, north or south! But you wouldn’t get a safe path, even then. Remember you’re over the Edge of the Wild now, and in for all sorts of fun, wherever you go. Before you could get round Mirkwood to the North, you would be right among the slopes of the North End of the Misty Mountains – and they are stiff with Goblins, hob-goblins or orcs of the worst description.TN37 Before you could get round the forest to the south, you would come into the land of the Great Necromancer, whose dark hidden tower watches over a wide land – I don’t advise you to go that way, my dears!TN38
‘Stick to the forest track, keep your peckers up,TN39 hope for the best, and with a tremendous slice of luck you will come out one day and see the Long Marshes lying below you – and beyond them faint and far the top of the Lonely Mountain in the East. There is a path too across the Marshes . . .’
‘We know, we know!’ said Gandalf. ‘The marshes are on the borders of the lands we knew of old, and we have not forgotten. Thank you very much; goodbye! If you won’t come, you had better be off; and so had we. Goodbye!’
And so they parted. Bladorthin rode off west, but before he had gone out of hearing, he turned his horse, put his hands to his mouth, and shouted. They heard his voice come faintly: ‘Goodbye – Be good, take care of yourself [>yourselves] – and don’t leave the path.’
‘O Goodbye, and go away’, grumbled the dwarves, who were really very worried at his going off. There was nothing for it, however, and so they shoulder each the heavy packs they had to carry as they were now without ponies. Then they plunged into the Forest.
TEXT NOTES
1 The phrase that completes this sentence in the published book, ‘frightened like a rabbit, even if you look rather like one’ (DAA.[161]), is absent in the manuscript but present in both typescripts (1/1/57 and 1/1/38). For Tolkien’s denial of any connection between hobbits and rabbits, see his 1938 letter to The Observer (Appendix II) and also his 1971 letter to Roger Lancelyn Green (Letters p. 406). For T. A. Shippey’s rebuttal, see The Road to Middle-earth (rev. ed. p. 62), where he lists five places in the published book where Bilbo is compared to a rabbit (these correspond to DAA.76, 156, [161], 181, & 334). Note, however, that not all of these are present in the original draft (cf. pp. 93, 209, 228, 241 & 667), which supports Tolkien’s persistent and consistent denial of any connection in conception.
2 The sentence originally continued with the phrase ‘when the sun is ’ followed by a final illegible word, the first letter of which seems to be l- and the fourth and fifth letters the ligature -gh, but I cannot make out the word itself.
3 For the significance of this passage in Tolkien’s mythology, and hence its appropriateness as ‘a polite thing to say among eagles’, see the last paragraph of the Commentary to Chapter VI above (p. 223).
4 Added in the margin: ‘and his fifteen chieftains [gold >] fine gold chains on their necks’.
5 This statement turned out not to be true, since in the manuscript of Chapter XVIII Bilbo encounters an eagle when he awakes on the battlefield after the Battle of Five Armies. However, there is no evidence that the battle had been foreseen this early on, and we may take this passage as evidence to the contrary. Later, after the manuscript was completed, Tolkien noticed the contradiction and changed the eagle in Chapter XVIII to a man of Lake Town (cf. pp. 678 & 683). He also changed the passage in this chapter to read as follows: ‘Bilbo never saw them again – except high and far off in the battle of Five Armies. But as that comes in at the end of this tale we will say no more about it just now’ (First Typescript, typescript page 61; Marq. 1/1/57:1), dropping the evocative final line of the original: ‘But he didn’t forget them’.
An ink emendation in the First Typescript changes the gold-giver from Gandalf (i.e., the wizard, replacing ‘Bladorthin’ in the manuscript) to ‘the dwarves’, so that ‘the gold that Gandalf sent them in remembrance’ becomes ‘the gold that the dwarves gave them’ – Tolkien having apparently decided it more appropriate for the gift to come from the surviving dwarves than the wizard.
6 This outline only takes up half of this page. The back of the sheet (1/1/23:2) is blank except for the following list of dwarf-names:
Gandalf
Dori Nori Ori
Oin Gloin
Bifur Bofur Bombur
Fili Kili
Dwalin & Balin
7 There might be an echo of this in the following passage from Tolkien’s ‘The Sea-Bell’ (ATB poem #15; originally published in 1934 under the title of ‘Looney’):
I crept to a wood: silent it stood
in its dead leaves; bare were its boughs.
There must I sit, wandering in wit . . .
For a year and a day there must I stay . . .
At last there came light in my long night,
and I saw my hair hanging grey.
‘Bent though I be, I must find the sea!
I have lost myself, and I know not the way,
but let me be gone!’
8 This sentence was changed several times in the course of writing. Originally it read ‘And more by good luck than by good management . . .’, immediately changed to ‘And by good management with good luck in plenty’ before finally reaching wording almost the same as that of the published book (cf. DAA.163): ‘And by good management and good luck, I have done it.’
9 The wizard’s departure had been prefigured for careful readers as far back as the opening chapter; otherwise his partnership with the thirteen dwarves would preclude the need for Bilbo’s addition as the lucky fourteenth member of the company.
10 Shanks’ ponies (later altered by Tolkien to shankses’ ponies), is an old expression meaning travel by foot – or, as the OED puts it, ‘one’s own legs as a means of conveyance’. Variants included Shanks’ mare, Shanks’ nag, etc., but Bladorthin chose the one most appropriate to hobbits and dwarves. Cf. the parallel term ‘ash breeze’ used by old-time sailors to refer to those dead calms when they must row their boats with ashwood oars.
11 This sentence and the one following it were altered to read ‘But there is somebody, that I know of, who lives not far away. That somebody made the steps on this hill’. The word ‘somebody’ was probably inserted in order to tie in with the wizard’s speech a few paragraphs later: ‘The Somebody that I spoke about’ (p. 231, emphasis mine). Similarly, the later line ‘What’s
12 Added in top margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘which he calls Sorneldin > Sinrock > Lamrock > the Carrock.’ For more on the significance of these invented names, see section iv of the Commentary below.
13 Tolkien revised the opening of this sentence to read ‘Refreshed if still hungry they went on’, then revised it again to read ‘When they had dried in the sun now strong & warm they were refreshed if still hungry; and they crossed over the ford . . .’
14 Furrier: a trapper, fur-trader. Coney, Conies: an archaic word for rabbit, still in use in rural dialects in England (cf. Sam Gamgee
, LotR.680–82). Bilbo is thinking of a rustic trapper or poacher; his comment about ‘turn[ing] their skins into arctic fox’ probably contains not so much a view of the innate crookedness of fur-traders as a deliberate echo by Tolkien of Elizabethan slang, where ‘coney-catching’ meant a con game or swindle (the guileless victim being the rabbit or ‘coney’ to the conman’s weasel or fox). The latter meaning is remembered today chiefly because of a series of pamphlets by an early rival of Shakespeare’s, playwright Roger Greene, entitled The Art of Conny-catching [1591–2].
15 Several paragraphs followed this statement in the manuscript, each crossed out in turn (some before reaching the end of a sentence). Taken together, they reflect Tolkien’s considerable uncertainty about just what sort of being Medwed was. I reproduce the entire sequence here as it was originally written.
No one knows [> Most people disagree] > now knows whether he is an a magic bear with > a marvellous bear with magic > powers of magic, or a great man under an enchantment.
‘Which is he?’ said Bilbo who was becoming very interested: after all he had got to meet the ‘person’ before long.
‘Neither’ said the wizard ‘He is a man [> an enchanter > a man.], one of
But he is under nobody’s enchantment save his own. He is an enchanter himself, and can be a bear if he wishes. He often does wish, because in the days long ago he was a friend of the great bears of the mountains. The goblins drove them out of.
16 Initially this passage ran ‘before the giants and goblins came’, then the phrase ‘and goblins’ was deleted. This is significant in light of the rest of the sentence, which establishes a sequence of events: first came the great bears, then the giants, then the men of old, then Smaug and the goblins, the latter ‘out of the North’ (i.e., from Angband/Utumno/Thangorodrim). Either heritage, pre-giant mountain bear or pre-goblin man-of-old, marks Medwed as an aborigine (in the original sense), the last remnant of a displaced and vanished people.
For more on the werebear theme, see the Commentary below, section ii.
17 ‘a high thorn hedge through which you could not see nor scramble’ – note that the thorn tree was traditionally linked with the faerie folk in English and Irish folklore. In a traditional fairy tale or ballad, such a detail would signal the eldritch nature of the setting and its denizens; by including it in his description of Medwed’s house, Tolkien may be reinforcing the otherworldly, slightly eerie, uncanny nature of its inhabitant.
18 Since Medwed had ‘never heard’ of Bladorthin, how was the wizard familiar with the layout of Medwed’s yard and gate? Unless we assume Bladorthin frequently travelled incognito and in various guises – something we know is true of Gandalf the Grey as Tolkien later conceived him – then the simplest explanation is that he had not himself earlier visited the place but had had it described to him by his ‘cousin’, Radagast (the later Radagast the Brown).
19 In revisions, the word ‘even’ was deleted from the phrase ‘towering tall above even Bladorthin’, in keeping with the image of the wizard as merely a ‘little old man’ to the casual eye (cf. Bilbo’s first impression back in Chapter I, p. 30). Tolkien may, of course, have been deliberately writing from Bilbo’s perspective; after travelling so long with the dwarves and wizard, anyone taller than them all would stand out in the hobbit’s mind. Anders Stenström has done extensive calculations based on this paragraph to determine just how tall Beorn must have been (‘The Figure of Beorn’, Arda 1987, volume VII [1992]), but this seems too elaborate a framework on too slender a basis, given the ‘faerie magic’ aspect of much of the tale’s details.
20 ‘many missing buttons’ – lost when he escaped through the goblins’ ‘back door’ at the end of Chapter V (p. 163).
21 Medwed’s reply was expanded to read ‘Yes yes: not a bad fellow I know him well. Now I know who you are or who you say you are. What do you want?’
22 Bladorthin’s use here of ‘the Lands over West’ (a phrase which persisted into the published book; DAA.168) seems to be juxtaposed with ‘these countries’ – that is, the lands beyond ‘the Edge of the Wild’ (p. 244); the settled country contrasted with Wilderland (or, to use the later LotR terminology, Eriador as opposed to Rhovanion). If this is indeed the case, Tolkien did not pick up on and reuse the name elsewhere, leaving this its sole appearance. Perhaps more significantly, ‘Lands over West’ seems to be The Hobbit’s equivalent of the later Western Lands, a phrase used in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME IV.159 & 161) and the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Valinor’ (HME IV.264) to refer to Beleriand. By contrast, the earlier name ‘the Great Lands’ had applied to all lands East of the Sundering Sea although, like ‘Middle-earth’ itself, it seems to have sometimes been applied more to the westernmost of those lands. These parallels offer yet another hint that Bilbo’s world is more than just closely tied to that of the heroes of the older legendarium; it is the same world at a slightly later date.
23 Note that the original geography is still in place, where Medwed’s hall lay to the south of their intended route rather than to the north of it as in the published text.
24 The bottom of the next page (manuscript page 88; Marq. 1/1/7:12) is marked with a number of squiggles in ink, some of which are either overwritten by the last few lines of text or else scribbled over them (it really is impossible to tell). It seems as if Tolkien’s pen was giving him trouble, since he also traced over several words near the middle of the page with wider strokes in a darker ink.
These ink trills probably indicate a pause in composition, and I think it significant that similar doodling appears on the final page of Plot Notes A (Marq. 1/1/23:10). Since the rest of this chapter is based upon and derives directly from the very rough drafting of Plot Notes A, those Plot Notes were almost certainly written when the narrative had reached this exact spot.
25 This poem appears in the manuscript almost exactly as in the final text, with only a few minor changes. The replacement of ‘till’ with ‘The’ in the seventh line and the rephrasing of ‘neath [clouds]’ with ‘where racing clouds’ in line sixteen are made in ink in the manuscript, probably at the time of original composition. Such fluency in Tolkien’s poetry generally means that the poem was probably drafted on loose sheets that have not survived. The alternate option, that the poem predates the current work and was incorporated into The Hobbit but not written especially for it, is rendered unlikely by the explicit mention within the poem of both ‘the lonely Mountain’ and ‘the Dragons lair’, the latter corrected to ‘dragon’s lair’ in the typescript.
For the most part the earliest draft and published poem are word-for-word identical, aside from the addition of punctuation and adjustments of capitalization (and the replacement of ‘plumes’ with ‘tassels’ in line thirteen and ‘neath’ with ‘under’ in line fifteen). Curiously enough, though, the final line of the draft is later rejected and replaced by an additional five lines (that is, a new line to conclude the fifth stanza and a complete new sixth stanza to follow). The old line (‘No light but of the moon was there’) was replaced by the following in the typescript (typescript page 69; 1/1/67:9):
and flying smoke was in the air.
It left the world and took its flight
over the wide seas of the night.
The moon set sail upon the gale,
and stars were fanned to leaping lights.
This, of course, agrees exactly with the published text (DAA.178). As with the poem itself, no drafting of this additional stanza has been found among the Hobbit papers.
26 The words ‘and saw’ were cancelled, probably at the time of writing; their absence concentrates the effectiveness of the scene as Bilbo lies awake and listening in the dark.
Note that Bilbo here imagines himself as being in exactly the position of Beowulf’s companions when they bed down in the great empty hall of Heorot waiting for Grendel to come:
. . . many
&nbs
p; valiant sea-fighters sank to hall-rest.
None of them thought he would ever return
from that long hall-floor to his native land,
the people and home-fort where he’d been raised,
for each one knew dark murder had taken
too many men of the Danes already,
killed in the wine-hall.
—Beowulf, tr. Howell Chickering, lines 689–696a.
27 The neologism ‘asleepy’ was almost at once changed to simply ‘sleepy’.
28 This missing word has been supplied editorially on the basis of the typescript version of this passage (1/1/57:11); that Tolkien wrote ‘little’ at the end of one line and began the next with ‘about Medwed’ is an indication of the speed at which he was setting down the draft of the story.
29 Once again the missing [bracketed] word has been supplied editorially, as required by the sense of the passage. This agrees with the sense of the typescript text of this passage, which combines the two sentences with a semicolon and begins the second clause with ‘nor did they have to wonder long . . .’ (the exact reading that remained into the published book; cf. DAA.181).
30 This passage, detailing their provisions for the journey through Mirkwood, was changed to read as follows in the typescript:
nuts, flour, twice-baked cakes of flour and honey, sealed jars of dried fruits, and red earthenware pots of honey, and various other foods which would last and the keep of which he had the secret (1/1/57:12).
This was then later revised in black ink on the typescripts to a reading very close to the final, published text:
nuts, flour, sealed jars of dried fruits, and red earthenware pots of honey, and twice-baked cakes that would keep good a long time, and on a little of which they could march far. The making of these was one of his secrets; but honey was in them, as in most of his foods, and they were good to eat, though they made one thirsty. Water, he said, they would not want . . . (ibid.).
The History of the Hobbit Page 33