31 The specific detail of four bows was soon lost, replaced in the typescript by the more general ‘some bows’, the reading which remained thereafter. But the idea of the dwarves having only four bows resurfaced later, a good example of the phenomenon Christopher Tolkien points out (BLT I.9) where details which disappear between versions of one of Tolkien’s stories are not necessarily rejected but sometimes merely omitted through compression; see p. 357 below.
32 Here the paragraph ends in the manuscript (on the bottom of manuscript page 94, the verso of manuscript page 93), but the typescript continues Medwed/Beorn’s speech for one more significant sentence: ‘But I wish you all speed, and my house is open to you, if ever you come back this way again.’ – a bit of foreshadowing of Bilbo’s return visit, perhaps, retrospectively tipped into the earlier scene.
33 In the typescript, this is followed with another sentence, tying their current activities into the quest as a whole: ‘But their spirits sank at his grave words, and they all felt that the adventure was far more dangerous than they had thought, while all the time, even if they passed all perils the dragon was waiting at the end’. The final passage was later revised slightly, in ink, to read ‘even if they passed all the perils of the road, the dragon was waiting at the end’ (1/1/57:12).
34 At this point the text breaks off, and the bottom half of this page is a pencil map showing the relative positions of the mountain-pass (Chapter IV), Goblingate (Chapter V), the wargs’ clearing in the pinewood (Chapter VI), the unnamed great river (later the Anduin) as well as a tributary thereto running down from the mountains, the Carrock and Medwed’s steading, the borders of Mirkwood, and the path running northwest through the great forest. A dotted north/south line between Medwed’s steading and the entrance of the forest path represents Gandalf & Company’s route. This early sketch formed the basis for the more finished map appearing on Plate I [bottom] and hence ultimately the westerly portion of the Wilderland map that appeared as an endpaper in the published book (DAA.[399]).
In order to bring the text into accord with the map, a number of changes were made at the time of the typescript; no drafting of these changes survives. First, a penciled note was added to the end of the preceding paragraph in the manuscript: ‘Beorn tells them of North
. . . By his advice they were no longer making for the main forest-road to the south of his land. Had they followed the pass their path would have led them down a stream from the mountains that joined the great river miles south of the Carrock.† [added: At that point] there was a deep ford which they might have passed, if they had still had their ponies, and beyond [that] a track led to the skirts of the wood and to the entrance of the old forest road. But Beorn had warned them that that way was now often used by the goblins, while the forest-road itself he had heard was overgrown and disused at the eastern end and led to impassable marshes where the paths had long been lost. Its eastern opening had also always been far to the south of the Lonely Mountain and would have left them still with a long and difficult Northward march when they got to the other side. North of the Carrock the edge of Mirkwood drew closer to the borders of the Great River, and though here the Mountains too drew down nearer, Beorn advised them to take this way; for at a place a few days’ ride due north of the Carrock was the gate of a little-known pathway through Mirkwood that led [almost] straight to[wards] the Lonely Mountain.
‘The goblins’ Beorn had said, ‘will not dare to cross the Great River for a hundred miles north of the Carrock nor to come near my house – it is well protected at night! – but I should ride fast; for if they make their raid soon they will cross the river to the south and scour all the edge of the forest so as to cut you off, and Wargs run swifter than ponies. Still you are safer going north, even though you seem to be going back nearer to their strongholds; for that is what they will least expect, and they will have the longer ride to catch you. Be off now as quick as you may!’
That is why they were now riding in silence, galloping wherever the ground was grassy and smooth, with the mountains dark on their left, and in the distance the line of the river with its trees drawing ever closer. The sun had only just turned west when they started and till evening it lay golden on the land about them . . .
—typescript page 73; 1/1/57:13.
† Editor’s note: This stream appears as a southernly tributary to the Great River on the sketch-map.
35 There is a change in the handwriting at this point (the middle of manuscript page 97), indicating a slight pause in composition: the writing on the remainder of this page is smaller, darker, and neater than what precedes it.
36 Bladorthin’s intended departure is made explicit on Ms. page 79 (p. 230 of this book, corresponding to DAA.163), but it had been prefigured as far back as the first chapter (see the commentary on the ‘lucky number’ on page 14). Note, however, that while in the published book the wizard stresses his pressing engagements elsewhere (‘some pressing business away south; and I am already late through bothering with you people’ – DAA.187), here he states less emphatically ‘I have got other business on hand now that can wait no longer.’ Bladorthin also rather tartly remarks ‘you won’t catch me going through Mirkwood, unless I am obliged – and I am not’ – hardly words of reassurance to those about to undertake that very journey. Finally, Tolkien heightened the dwarves’ dismay at his departure via the insertion of the following passage into the published book: ‘Then they knew that Gandalf was going to leave them at the very edge of Mirkwood, and they were in despair’ (DAA.187); this passage first appears in the typescript (typescript page 74; 1/1/57:14). As we shall see subsequently, Tolkien at this point had no clear idea what Bladorthin’s ‘other business’ might be, merely that the dramatic necessity of the story required his departure at this point.
37 ‘Goblins, hob-goblins, or orcs of the worst description’ – in this, the only mention of hob-goblins or orcs in the original draft of The Hobbit, Tolkien established a false hierarchy between the three terms which he later explicitly spelled out in the prefatory note added to the revised paperback edition in 1966: ‘Orc is not an English word. It occurs in one or two places but is usually translated goblin (or hobgoblin for the larger kinds)’ (DAA.[27]). As Tolkien himself later discovered when researching possible origins of the word ‘hobbit’ for the OED, ‘Alas! one conclusion is that the statement that hobgoblins were “a larger kind” is the reverse of the original truth’ (JRRT to Roger Lancelyn Green, 8th January 1971; Letters p. 406) – that is, the ‘hob’ in hobgoblin is probably a diminutive rather than the reverse. A hob-goblin, then, would in actual folklore usage be smaller than a regular goblin. So great is Tolkien’s influence over the fantasy genre, however, that the distinction has persisted into other writers’ work (such as that of the creators of the D&D game and the many novels derived thereof), even though based upon a fallacy.
For the distinction between ‘goblin’ and ‘orc’ in Tolkien’s work, see the commentary on Chapter IV (pp. 137–8).
38 The Great Necromancer’s ‘dark hidden tower’ was prefigured as far back as Chapter I. Gandalf & Company would certainly not want to go that way, since doing so spelled doom for his father’s dwarven party a century before. During the writing of The Lord of the Rings, the place gained an elven (Sindarin) name, first Dol Dúgol (‘The Dark Hill’), then Dol Dúghul (a refinement of essentially the same meaning), and finally Dol Guldur (‘Hill of Sorcery’, or perhaps ‘Sorcerer’s Hill’ – a rough parallel to The Necromancer’s Tower). See HME VII.178, 233–4, & 244 for the arising of the elven name, and Christopher Tolkien’s discussion of the first Middle-earth map on pages 296, 298, and 306 of the same volume for its placement (originally the tower was placed further to the east and only shifted when the border of Mirkwood contracted on the evolving map). On the relationship between this tower and Sauron’s tower in ‘The Lay of Leithian’, see the Comment
ary on pp. 20 & 83.
39 ‘Keep your peckers up’ – probably the most startling phrase in the entire manuscript, this is not nearly as salacious as it sounds but was common British slang of a slightly earlier period (in keeping with the yesteryear air of most of the hobbit’s accoutrements, especially in the Bag-End passage – all the OED’s citations are from the 1850s through 1870s, and include a passage from Dickens and one from Gilbert & Sullivan). Like all slang, it’s difficult to translate exactly but meant roughly ‘keep your courage (spirits, resolution) up’. In short, it’s the equivalent of the slightly later but much more familiar ‘keep a stiff upper lip’.
(i)
Bears
An important fact people often overlook in discussing The Hobbit is that it was originally written for a very specific audience, Tolkien’s three sons. While this is widely known as a biographical detail, few take into account the degree to which their likes and dislikes played a part in shaping the story. As Tolkien himself said, an author writes primarily to please himself and uses his own interests as a guide – something we see time and again in The Hobbit, with its incorporation of favorite themes and frequent borrowings from Tolkien’s professional subjects. Yet a writer is also naturally inclined to include things that he knows from first-hand experience will interest his audience, just as he may be tempted to exclude or down-play themes he knows bore them.1 From the evidence of Tolkien’s various children’s stories, all of which originated as tales told to (or written down and then read to) John, Michael, and Christopher, we can emphatically conclude that one element they liked very much was Bears.2
Bears appear prominently in a number of Tolkien’s stories for his children, most notably in the figure of the North Polar Bear (Karhu), Father Christmas’s sidekick who provides most of the comic relief throughout the twenty-three-year series that makes up the Father Christmas Letters. Karhu’s antics provide most of the plot elements in this episodic epistolary story, either to cause some disaster that endangered the arrival of some particular requested present or to save the day in the nick of time (most notably in the battles against the goblins). In time North Polar Bear (or NPB, as he is also sometimes called) is joined by two rapscallion nephews, Paksu and Valkotukka, who become continuing minor characters very much in their uncle’s disaster-causing mode. Yet another bear, Cave-Bear, enters the story in the 1932 letter, and his progeny, the ‘Cave-cubs’, make an appearance a few years later in the letter for 1934.
Bears also play a prominent role in Mr. Bliss, whose unintended entourage runs afoul of the three bears: Archie, Teddy, and Bruno – based, according to Joan Tolkien, on the three teddy bears owned by Tolkien’s three sons at the time.3 In general the bear highwaymen are comic villains, mischievous rogues rather like the North Polar Bear in character, but openly larcenous in behavior. They are also, on the surface, considerably more threatening than the benign NPB, threatening at one point to eat our hero if he doesn’t do what they want. Tolkien assures the reader that they wouldn’t actually do it (Mr. Bliss, page 14), but even the possibility puts Mr. Bliss’s bears somewhere between Karhu and Medwed on the danger meter. Interestingly enough, there is even one scene in Mr. Bliss reminiscent of The Hobbit, where the bears have Mr. Bliss’s companions to supper at their house in the woods: ‘quite a large house, long and low, with no upstairs’ (Mr. Bliss, page 32). Even the illustration of the bears’ dinner party, while completely different in detail (due to the inclusion of modern-day amenities such as chairs, tablecloth, cutlery, overhanging lamp, and curtains), bears a striking resemblance to the illustration of ‘Beorn’s Hall’ in The Hobbit. In particular, both pictures use precisely the same point of view, looking down the length of the house or hall (compare DAA.170 [or H-S#116] with Mr. Bliss, page 31).
Medwed/Beorn does correspond to the bears in The Father Christmas Letters in two significant ways. Like Cave-Bear, Medwed is a survivor of an older, vanished world. Father Christmas describes Cave-Bear as ‘the eldest of the few remaining Cave-bears’ and casually remarks ‘I had not seen him for centuries’. Furthermore, the walls of Cave-Bear’s home are decorated with Neolithic cave-paintings strikingly similar to those found in the real world at Lascaux and Altamira. We are told that these have been in his family for over ninety generations, since before the time of Cave-men (‘when the North Pole was somewhere else’). However, unlike Medwed, Cave-Bear has not been expelled from his ancestral home by the goblins but simply ignores their presence as nothing more than an annoyance. Presumably, therefore, he shares Polar Bear’s immunity to goblin attacks – Father Christmas says in passing that ‘of course Goblins can’t hurt him [NPB], but their caves are very dangerous’, and while North Polar Bear is lost in the darkness he ‘boxed one or two [goblins] flat that came and poked him in the dark, and had said some very nasty things to them all’ (FCL, 1932 letter). Even more reminiscent of The Hobbit (and the Battle of Five Armies in particular) is the description in the next year’s letter of Polar Bear fighting a swarm of goblins that had invaded Father Christmas’s home, Cliff House: ‘Polar Bear was squeezing, squashing, trampling, boxing, and kicking Goblins sky-high, and roaring like a zoo, and the Goblins were yelling like engine whistles. He was splendid’ (to which NPB modestly adds ‘SAY NO MORE: I ENJOYED IT IMMENSELY!’ – FCL, 1933 letter). The illustration of this letter shows the bear crushing a goblin in each hand while trampling another, knocking down a fourth, and kicking two more across the room. Interestingly enough, the North Polar Bear seems to have swelled to twice his normal size in this depiction of the battle-scene – cf. Tolkien’s remark that Medwed/Beorn ‘seemed to have grown almost to giant-size in his wrath’ upon his appearance on the battlefield (DAA. 349). Clearly, the silly old bear could, upon provocation, become a dangerous foe – just as Tolkien says of Medwed, he is a good friend and a dangerous enemy (‘Medwed could be a fierce enemy. But now he was their friend; and encouraged by his kindness, they told him all their story . . .’ – p. 241).
This sense of danger held in check is very much present throughout the Medwed section, especially in its account of their first night in his hall (Bladorthin having already warned Gandalf & Company that the skin-changer can be ‘appalling when angry’). After welcoming them into his hall and feeding them ‘[s]uch a dinner [as] they had not eaten since they left the house of Elrond’,4 he warns them not to go outside till sun is up ‘on your peril’ (p. 239). Add to this Bilbo’s fears of being killed in his sleep when he hears growling in the night ‘and a noise as of some great animal scuffling at the door’ (ibid.), and the scene with the murdered orc and skinned warg (p. 241) which reveals just what Medwed does to those he considers his enemies.
All of this alarm is, of course, fully justified: unlike wolves and eagles, bears really DO eat people – a fact of which Shakespeare was well aware, hence his famous stage direction for one doomed character: ‘Exit, pursued by a bear’ (A Winter’s Tale, Act III scene iii), followed by a gruesome off-stage mauling as the character is torn limb from limb. The largest land predators, bears maul people every year even today. Yet, perhaps due to the influence of the teddy bear,5 they have ironically enough escaped the sinister reputation acquired by their lupine and aquiline cohorts. Many people who would be terrified to encounter a wolf in the wild actually approach bears they encounter in wilderness areas and national parks, often with tragic results. Bilbo knows better, and his attitude toward bears is wary caution, even after friendly relations with Medwed are firmly established.
(ii)
Bothvar Bjarki
Now that we know more about the dating of The Hobbit (see ‘The Chronology of Composition’), we can see that Medwed’s resemblance to the North Polar Bear is a case of source rather than influence. Indeed, NPB’s transformation in the 1932–33 letters from a figure of fun to a heroic doughty warrior (a process paralleled in The Hobbit with the dwarves and Bilbo himself as the tone shifts in the final chapters to become less like a fairy-tale and more like a saga – as CSL put it, ‘as if th
e battle of Toad Hall had become a serious heimsókn and Badger had begun to talk like Njal’)6 might be attributed to the influence of The Hobbit on the older series, particularly since it occurs just at the time when our best evidence suggests Tolkien was writing the story of Bilbo’s adventures. A far more promising source (as opposed to parallel) for Tolkien’s werebear lies in his professional interests. As so often, the figure of Medwed/Beorn marks one of those grounds where Tolkien’s scholarship and his storytelling for his children meet.
In this case, the flash-point is the story of Bothvar Bjarki. The lost Bjarkamál, a poem apparently similar to those preserved in the Elder Edda, told the story of a man who could at times assume the form of a bear. The original story is lost, but elements of it can be glimpsed from works it influenced, including both Beowulf and Hrolf Kraki’s Saga.7 Underlying both the epic poem and the saga according to some theories is a folk-tale about a feral child raised by bears, the Bear’s-Son Story. Tolkien himself was greatly interested in these speculations, and actually re-created the lost folktale in an unpublished short story, ‘Sellic Spell’.8
Bothvar’s story is only part of the greater saga of King Hrolf and his champions,9 which has been compared to the King Arthur and Charlemagne cycles: the story of a great king and his magnificent court, his brave champions (of whom Bothvar is the greatest) and his vile, deadly foes. In the best tradition the saga is full of bravery, treachery, lust, incest, enchantments, transformations, and battles. Bothvar himself is one of three sons of an unlucky prince who, rejecting the improper advances of his stepmother (a Lappish witch), was turned into a bear by the evil queen. A bear by day and a man by night, he begets triplets on a childhood sweetheart10 before being killed by hunters: the eldest child is only half-human, the middle one human save for a distorted foot, and the youngest, Bothvar, fully human – in appearance at least.11 Eventually Bothvar grows up, avenges his father, and sets out on a heroic career, two of his greatest deeds being the transformation of a coward into a hero and the slaying of a Grendel-like beast that haunted King Hrolf’s hall. Becoming the chief of Hrolf’s champions, he marries the king’s daughter and becomes literally his right-hand man (‘Bothvar was prized and esteemed above them all, and sat on the king’s right hand next to him’). The most extraordinary event of his career, however, comes at its very end: in the final battle where Hrolf Kraki’s champions are besieged by an army of elves, norns, and evil men led by the king’s half-sister (the elf-woman Skuld) and her husband Hjorvarth. Although vastly outnumbered the king and eleven of his twelve champions fight bravely, aided by a mysterious ally:
The History of the Hobbit Page 34