returnoftheshadow72

by Miguel

  (1) Page 212.

  Original text:

  (the original text has no passage corresponding)

  First Edition: 'That is Loudwater, the Bruinen of Rivendell,' answered Strider. 'The Road runs along it for many leagues to the Ford.'

  Second Edition: 'That is Loudwater, the Bruinen of Rivendell,'

  answered Strider. 'The Road runs along the edge of the hills for many miles from the Bridge to the Ford of Bruinen.'

  (2) Page 214.

  Original text: The hills now shut them in. The Road looped away southward, towards the river; but both were now lost to view.

  First Edition: The hills now began to shut them in. The Road bent back again southward towards the River, but both were now hidden from view.

  Second Edition: The hills now began to shut them in. The Road behind held on its way to the River Bruinen, but both were now hidden from view.

  (3) Page 200.

  Original text (p. 194): Eventually they came out upon the top of a high bank above the Road. This was now beginning to bend rather away from the river, and clung to the feet of the hills, some way up the side of the narrow valley at the bottom of which the river ran.

  First Edition: After a few miles they came out on the top of a high bank above the Road. At this point the Road had turned away from the river down in its narrow valley, and now clung close to the feet of the hills, rolling and winding northward among woods and heather-covered slopes towards the Ford and the Mountains.

  Second Edition: After a few miles they came out on the top of a high bank above the Road. At this point the Road had left the Hoarwell far behind in its narrow valley, and now clung close to the feet of the hills, rolling and winding eastward among woods (etc.)

  Taking first citation (2), from small-scale and large-scale maps made by my father there is no question that the Road after passing south of Weathertop made first a great swing or loop to the North-east: cf. FR p. 211 - when they left Weathertop it was Strider's plan 'to shorten their journey by cutting across another great loop of the Road: east beyond Weathertop it changed its course and took a wide bend northwards.' This goes back to the original text. The Road then made a great bend southwards, round the feet of the Trollshaws, as stated in the original text and in the First Edition in citation (2). All my father's maps show the same course for the Road in respect of these two great curves. The two sketches on p. 201 are redrawn from very rough large-scale maps which he made (the second in particular is extremely hard to interpret owing to the multiplicity of lines made as he pondered different configurations).

  In 1943 I made an elaborate map in pencil and coloured chalks for The Lord of the Rings, and a similar map of the Shire (see p. 107, item V). These maps are referred to in Letters nos. 74 and 98 (pp. 86, 112). On my LR map the course of the Road from Weathertop to the Ford is shown exactly as on my father's maps, with the great northward and southward swings. On the map that I made in 1954 (published in the first two volumes of The Lard of the Rings), however, the Road has only a feeble northward curve between Weathertop and the Hoarwell Bridge, and then runs in a straight line to the Ford. This was obviously simply carelessness due to haste on my part. My father doubtless observed it at the time but felt that on so small a scale the error was not very grievous: in any case the map was made, and it had been a matter of urgency. But I think that this error was the reason for the change in the Second Edition given in citation (2), from 'the Road bent back again southward towards the River' to 'the Road behind held on its way to the River Bruinen'. my father was making the discrepancy with the map less obvious. A similar instance has been seen already in the change that he made in the Second Edition in respect of the direction of Bucklebury Ferry from Woodhall, p. 107. In his letter to Austin Olney of Houghton Mifflin, 28 July 1965 (an extract from which is given in Letters no. 274) he said: I have finally decided, where this is possible and does not damage the story, to take the maps as "correct" and adjust the narrative.'

  Barbara Strachey (who apparently used the First Edition) deduced the course of the Road very accurately in her atlas, Journeys of Frodo (1981), map 13 'Weathertop and the Trollshaws'.

  Citation (1) from the First Edition is perfectly illustrated in the sketches on p. 201, which precisely show the Road running alongside the Loud water 'for many leagues to the Ford.' My father made various small- scale maps covering a greater or lesser part of the lands in The Lord of the Rings, on three of which this region appears; and on two of these the Road is shown approaching the Loudwater at a fairly acute angle, but by no means running alongside it. On the third (the earliest) the Road runs close to the river for a long distance before the Ford; and this is less because the course of the Road is different than because on this map the river flows at first (after the Ford) in a more westerly direction towards the Hoarwell (as in the sketch-maps).* On my 1943 map (see above) this is also and very markedly the case. On the published map, on the other hand, the Road approaches the river at a wide angle; and this was another error. It is clear, I think, that the changed Second Edition text in citation (1), with 'runs along the edge of the hills' instead of 'runs along it [the Loudwater]', was again made to save the appearance of the map.

  (* Barbara Strachey makes the Loudwater bend sharply west just below the Ford and Row in this direction (before turning south) much further than on my father's maps, so that the land between the Hoarwell and the Loudwater (called 'the Angle' in LR Appendix A, p. 320) ceases to be at all triangular. She makes this assumption because from the high ground above the Last Bridge the travellers could see not only the Hoarwell but also the Loud water, whereas going by the published map the rivers 'would have been some 100 miles apart and the hill [on which they stood] would have had to have been a high mountain for it [the Loudwater] to have been visible.' By bringing this river so far to the west on her map the distance from the hill above the Last Bridge to the nearest point of the Loudwater is reduced to about 27 miles. On my father's maps the shortest distance from the Bridge to the Loudwater varies between (approximately) 45 (on the earliest), 60, and 62 miles; on the published map it is about 75 miles. Thus the objection that the Loudwater was too far away to be seen is real; but it cannot be resolved in this way.)

  Citation (3) in the First Edition seems to contradict (1): the Road runs along the Loudwater for many leagues to the Ford (1), but when the travellers came down to the Road out of the Trollshaws it had turned away from the river (3). But it is probably less a contradiction than a question of how closely 'runs along the Loudwater' is interpreted. The second sketch-map seems clear at least to this extent, that it shows the Road approaching the river, running alongside it for a stretch, and then bending somewhat away and 'clinging to the feet of the hills' before returning to it at the Ford.

  The changed reading of the Second Edition in (3) - made so as not to alter the amount of text - makes the words 'narrow valley' refer to the Hoarwell, and there is no longer any statement at this point about the course of the Road in relation to the Loudwater. This was clearly another accommodation to the published map (and is not an entirely happy solution), as also was 'northward' (cf. Sketch II) to 'eastward'.

  Note on the River Hoarwell.

  The absence of the River Hoarwell (p. 192), which had still not emerged in the next version of this part of the story (p. 360), is interesting. In the original story in Chapter II of The Hobbit, when Bilbo, Gandalf, and the Dwarves were approaching the hills crowned with old castles on an evening of heavy rain, they came to a river:

  ... it began to get dark. Wind got up, and the willows along the river- bank [no river has been mentioned] bent and sighed. I don't know what river it was, a rushing red one, swollen with the rains of the last few days, that came down from the hills and mountains in front of them. Soon it was nearly dark. The winds broke up the grey clouds...

  The river here ran alongside the road (described as 'a very muddy track'); they only crossed it finally by a ford, beyond which was the great slope up into the Mountains
(beginning of Chapter III, 'A Short Rest'). In the third edition (1966) the passage quoted was changed:

  ... it began to get dark as they went down into a deep valley with a river at the bottom. Wind got up, and willows along its banks bent and sighed. Fortunately the road went over an ancient stone bridge, for the river, swollen with the rains, came rushing down from the hills and mountains in the north. It was nearly night when they had crossed over. The wind broke up the grey clouds...

  The river now becomes the Hoarwell, over which the road passed by the Last Bridge (and the river which they forded before climbing up towards Rivendell becomes distinct (the Loudwater), by changing 'they forded the river' to 'they forded a river'.) But my father did nothing to change what follows in the original story. There, the company stopped for the night where they did because that is where they were when it got dart, and it was beside a river. From that spot the light of the Trolls' fire became visible. By the introduction of the Last Bridge at this point into the old narrative, while everything else is left untouched, the company stops for the night as soon as they have crossed it - near enough to the river for one of the ponies to break loose and dash into the water, so that most of the food was lost- and the Trolls' fire is therefore visible from the Bridge, or very near it. And at the end of the chapter the pots of gold from the Trolls' lair are still buried 'not far from the track by the river' - a phrase unchanged from the original story, when the river flowed alongside the track.

  Karen Fonstad puts the matter clearly (The Atlas of Middle-earth, 1981, p. 97), noting the inconsistency between The Hobbit (as it is now) and The Lord of the Rings as to the distance between the river and the Trolls' clearing:

  The Trolls' fire was so close to the river that it could be seen 'some way off', and it probably took the Dwarves no more than an hour to reach; whereas Strider led the Hobbits north of the road [turning off a mile beyond the Bridge], where they lost their way and spent almost six days reaching the clearing where they found the Stone-trolls. Lost or not, it seems almost impossible that the time-pressed ranger would have spent six days reaching a point the Dwarves found in an hour.

  Earlier, apparently in 1960, in an elaborate rewriting of The Hobbit Chapter II which was never used,* my father had introduced the Last Bridge at the same point in the narrative; but there the passage of the river took place in the morning, and the camp from which the Trolls' fire was seen was made at the end of the day and many miles further east. The present text of The Hobbit, deriving from corrections made in 1965 and first published in 1966, here introduces an element from The Lord of the Rings but fails to harmonise the two geographies. This highly uncharacteristic lapse is no doubt to be attributed simply to the haste with which my father worked under the extreme pressure imposed on him in 1965.

  (* My father was greatly concerned to harmonise Bilbo's journey with the geography of The Lord of the Rings, especially in respect of the distance and time taken: in terms of The Lord of the Rings Gandalf, Bilbo, and the Dwarves took far too long, seeing that they were mounted (see Karen Fonstad's discussion in The Atlas of Middle-earth, p. 97). But he never brought this work to a definitive solution.)

  Note on the river of Rivendell.

  Trotter says expressly that the river which the Road crosses at the Ford flows through Rivendell (p. 191). In the corresponding passage in FR (p. 212) Strider names the river: 'That is Loudwater, the Bruinen of Rivendell.' Later, in 'Many Meetings' (FR p. 250), it is said that Bilbo's room 'opened on to the gardens and looked south across the ravine of the Bruinen'; and at the beginning of 'The Council of Elrond' (FR p. 252) Frodo 'walked along the terraces above the loud-flowing Bruinen.' This is quite unambiguous; the maps, however, are not in this point perfectly clear.

  In the map of Wilderland in The Hobbit (endpaper), the unnamed river receives, some way north of the Ford, a tributary stream, and Elrond's house is placed between them, near the confluence, and nearer the tributary - exactly as in Sketch I on p. 201.* On one of his copies of The Hobbit my father pencilled in a few later names on the map of Wilderland, and these included Bruinen or Loudwater against the river north of the house (again as in Sketch I), and Merrill against the tributary flowing just to the south of it (+). When therefore in The Hobbit (Chapter III) the elf said to Gandalf:

  You are a little out of your way: that is, if you are making for the only path across the water and to the house beyond. We will set you right, but you had best get on foot, until you are over the bridge it would seem to be the Merrill that must be crossed by the bridge.

  (* In two of my father's small-scale maps the tributary stream is not marked, and Rivendell is a point on or beside the Bruinen; the third is too rubbed and faint to be sure of, but probably shows the tributary, and Rivendell between the two streams, as in the Hobbit map, and as my 1943 map certainly does (and that published in The Lord of the Rings).

  + This name, which I have found nowhere else, is unfortunately not quite clear, though Me- and -II are certain, and it is hard to read it in any other way. - Another name added to the Wilderland map was Rhimdath 'Rushdown', the river flowing from the Misty Mountains into Anduin north of the Carrock (see the Index to Vol. V, p. 446).)

  Barbara Strachey (Journeys of Frodo, maps 15 - 16) shows very unambiguously the ravine of Rivendell as the ravine of the tributary stream, Elrond's house being some mile and a half from its confluence with the Loudwater; while Karen Fonstad (The Atlas of Middle-earth, pp. 80, 101, etc.) likewise places Rivendell on the southerly stream - calling it (p. 127) the Bruinen.

  The lines of rivers and Road in Sketch I were first drawn in ink, and subsequently coloured over in blue and red chalk. When my father did this he changed the course of the 'tributary stream' south of Elrond's house by bending it up northwards and joining it to the Bruinen some way to the east; thus the house at Rivendell is at the western end of land enclosed between two streams coming down from the Mountains, parting, and then joining again. It might therefore be supposed that both were called 'Bruinen' (discounting the name 'Merrill' written on the Wilderland map in The Hobbit). But I do not think that detailed conclusions can be drawn from this sketch-map.

  Note on the Entish Lands.

  The name Entish Lands on Sketch I needs a word of explanation. Originally the region in which the Hoarwell rose was called Dimrilldale(s) (p. 360), but when that name was displaced it was briefly called Hoardale (p. 432 note 3), and then Entish Dales, Entish Lands. Entish here was used in the Old English sense of ent, 'giant', the Entish Lands were the 'troll-lands' (cf. the later names Ettendales and Ettenmoors of this region in FR, containing Old English eoten 'giant'), and are in no way associated with the Ents of The Lord of the Rings.

  XII. AT RIVENDELL.

  Some preliminary ideas for this chapter (which in FR is Book II, Chapter I, 'Many Meetings') have been given on p. 126. The original narrative draft is extant in a very rough manuscript, first in ink, then in pencil and petering out. It was variously emended and added to, but I give it here as my father seems to have set it down - granting that there is often no clear distinction between changes made at once and changes made after (and probably no significant distinction in time, in any case). This and the two following drafts all bear the number 'IX' without title.

  He awoke to find himself lying in bed; and also feeling a great deal better. 'Where am I and what's the time?' he said aloud to the ceiling. Its dark carved beams were touched by sunlight. Distantly he heard the sound of a waterfall.

  'In Elrond's house, and it is ten o'clock in the morning: the morning of October 24th to be exact,'(1) said a voice.

  'Gandalf!' said Bingo sitting up. There was the wizard sitting in a chair by the open window.

  'Yes,' said the wizard. 'I'm here all tight - and you're lucky to be here too, after all the absurd things you have done since you left home.'

  Bingo felt too peaceful and comfortable to argue - and in any case he did not imagine he would get the best of the argument: the memory came back to him of the dis
astrous short cut through the Old Forest, of his own stupidity in the inn, and of his nearly fatal madness in putting on the ring on Weathertop Hill.

  There was a long silence broken only by the soft puffs of Gandalf's pipe as he blew smoke-rings out of the window.

  'What happened at the Ford?' asked Bingo at last. 'It all seemed so dim somehow, and it still does.'

  'Yes!' answered Gandalf. 'You were beginning to fade. They would have made a wraith of you before long - certainly if you had put on the Ring (2) again. How does the arm and side feel now?'

  'I don't know,' said Bingo. 'It does not feel at all, which is better than aching, but'- he made an effort - 'I can move it a little again: yes: it feels as if it were coming back to life. It is not cold now,' he added, touching his right hand with his left.(3)

  'Good! ' said Gandalf. 'Elrond bathed and doctored it for hours last night after you were brought in. He has great power and skill, but I was very anxious, for the craft and malice of the Enemy is very great.'