returnoftheshadow72

by Miguel

  'Get into a blanket and have a sleep, my lad! ' he said in a more kindly tone. 'You could sleep, I guess. I can't, so I may as well do the watching.'

  'I know what is the matter with me,' he muttered. 'I need a pipe; and I think I'll risk it.' The last thing Sam saw before sleep took him was a vision of the old wizard squatting on the floor shielding a blazing chip in his gnarled hands between his knees. The flicker for a moment showed his sharp nose and the puffs of smoke.

  It was Gandalf who roused them all from sleep. He had watched all alone for about six hours and let the others rest. 'And in the meantime I have made up my mind,' he said. 'I don't like the feel of the middle way, and I don't like the smell of the left hand- there is foul air down there, or I am no guide. I shall take the right hand way - it's time we began to go up again.'

  For eight dark hours, not counting two brief halts, they marched on, and met no danger, and heard nothing and saw nothing but the faint gleam of the wizard's light bobbing like a will-o'-the-wisp in front of them. The passage they had chosen wound steadily upwards, going, as far as they could judge, in great curves, and growing steadily wider. On neither side were there now any openings to other galleries or tunnels, and the floor, though rough in many places, was sound and without pits or cracks. They went quicker than the day before, and must have covered some twenty miles or more, perhaps fifteen in a straight line eastwards. As they went upwards Frodo's spirits rose a little; but still he felt oppressed, and still at times he heard or thought he heard away behind and through the patter of their own feet a following footfall that was not an echo.

  They had gone nearly as far as the hobbits could endure without rest and sleep, and they were all thinking of a place to halt for the night, when suddenly the walls to right and left vanished. They halted. Gandalf seemed well pleased. 'I think we have reached the habitable parts,' he said, 'and are no great way from the eastern side. I can feel a change in the air, and guess we are in a wide hall. I think I will risk a little light.(31)

  He raised his wand and for a brief moment it blazed out like a flash of lightning. Great shadows leapt up and fled, and for a second or two they saw a vast roof high above their heads. On every side stretched a huge empty hall with straight hewn walls. Four entrances they glimpsed: dark arches in the walls: one at the west by which they had come, one before them in the east, and one on either side. Then the light went out.

  'That is all I shall venture on for the present,' said the wizard. 'There used to be great windows on the mountain-side, and shafts leading out to the light and the upper reaches of the mines. I think that is where we are. But it is night now, and we cannot tell till morning. If I am right, tomorrow we may actually see the morning peeping in. But in the meanwhile we had better go no further without exploration. There will still be a good way to go before we are through - the East Gates are on a much lower level than this, and it is a long road down. Let us rest if we can.'

  They spent that night in the great empty hall, huddled in a corner to escape the draught - there seemed to be a steady flow of chill air in through the eastern archway. The vastness and immensity of the tunnels and excavations filled the hobbits with bewilderment.(32) 'There must have been a mighty tribe o' dwarves here at one time,' said Sam; 'and every one as busy as a badger for a hundred years to make all this - and most in hard rock too. What did they do it all for? They didn't live in these darksome holes, surely? '

  'Not for long,' said Gandalf;(33) 'though the miners often took long spells underground, I believe. They found precious metals, and jewels - very abundantly in the earlier days. But the mines were most renowned for the metal which was only found here in any quantity: Moria-silver, or true-silver as some call it. Ithil (34) the Elves call it, and value it still above gold.(35) It is nearly as heavy as lead, and malleable as copper, but the dwarves could by some secret of theirs make it as hard as steel. It surpasses common silver in all save beauty, and even in that it is its equal. In their day the dwarflords of Uruktharbun (36) were more wealthy than any of the Kings of Men.'

  'Well, we haven't clapped eyes on any kind of silver since we came in,' grunted Sam; 'nor any jewels neither. Nor on any dwarves.'

  'I don't think we are likely to until we get further up (37) and nearer to the eastern entrances,' said Gandalf.

  'I hope we do find dwarves in the end,' said Frodo. 'I would give a great deal to see old Balin. Bilbo was fond of him and would be delighted to have news of him. He visited him in Hobbiton once long ago, but that was before I went to live there.'

  But these words carried his thoughts far away from the darkness; and memories of Bag-end while Bilbo was still there crowded [? thickly] into his mind. He wished with all his heart that he was back there, mowing the lawn, or pottering among the flowers, and that he had never heard of the Ring.(38) It was his turn to watch. As silence fell and one by one the others fell asleep he felt the strange dread assail him again. But though he listened endlessly through the slow hours till he was relieved he heard no sound of any footfall. Only once, far away where he guessed the western archway stood, he fancied he saw two pale points of light - almost like luminous eyes. He started - 'I must have nearly fallen asleep,' he thought; 'I was on the edge of a dream.' He rubbed his eyes and stood up, and remained standing peering into the dark until he was relieved by Merry. He quickly fell asleep, but after a while it seemed to him in his dream that he heard whispers, and saw two pale points of light approaching. He woke - and found that the others were speaking softly near him, and that a dim light was actually falling on his face. High up above the eastern arch, through a shaft near the roof, came a grey gleam. And across the hall through the northern arch light also glimmered faint and distantly.

  Frodo sat up. 'Good morning! ' said Gandalf. 'For morning it is again at last. I was right, you see. Before today's over we ought to get to the Eastern Gate and see the waters of Helevorn in the Dimrilldale before us.'(39)

  All the same the wizard felt some doubt as to their exact position - they might be far to the north or the south of the Gates. The eastern arch was the most likely exit to choose, and the draught that flowed through it seemed to promise a passage leading before long to the outer air; but beyond the opening there was no trace of light. 'If I could only see out of one of these shafts,' he said, 'I should know better what to do. We might wander backwards and forwards endlessly, and just miss the way out. We had better explore a little before we start. And let us go first towards the light.'

  Passing under the northern arch they went down a wide corridor and as they went the glimmer of light grew stronger. Turning a sharp corner they came to a great door on their right. It was half open, and beyond there was a large square chamber. It was only dimly lit, but to their eyes, after so long in the dark, it seemed almost dazzlingly light, and they blinked as they entered. Their feet disturbed deep dust and stumbled amongst things lying on the floor within the doorway whose shapes they could not at first make out.

  They saw now that the chamber was lit by a wide shaft high up in the far wall - it slanted upwards and far above a small square patch of sky could be seen where it issued outwards. The light fell directly on a table in the midst of the chamber, a square block some three feet high upon which was laid a great slab of whitened stone.

  'It looks like a tomb!' [muttered >] thought Frodo, and went forward to look at it more closely with a curious sense of foreboding. Gandalf came quickly to his side. On the slab was deeply cut in Runes:(40)

  BALIN SON OF BURIN LORD OF MORIA.

  Gandalf and Frodo looked at one another. 'He is dead then. I feared it somehow,' said Frodo.

  Although the outline for the story of the passage of Moria continues well beyond this point (p.443), this first draft of the narrative stopped here. My father pencilled some barely legible notes on the blank remainder of the page, and years later (when, as I think, the page had become detached from the rest of the chapter: see note 40) he deciphered them as follows.

  Balin son of Burin was
changed to Balin son of Fundin, as in The Hobbit (see p. 444).

  At the end of the narrative in ink is written, as in FR: 'Gimli cast his hood over his face.'

  'Runes of? Dwarves'

  '(they) look about and see broken swords and ?axe-heads and cloven shields'

  'The?trodden book is bloodstained & tossed in a corner. Only some can be read. Balin was slain in ? fray in Dimrill dale. They have taken the gates they are coming'

  On the back of the page is a first scribbled sketch of a 'Page of Balin's Book' (see note 40).

  It may be that my father did not at this time feel that he had reached the end of a chapter, and intended to continue the story; but it is known from his own words in the Foreword to the Second Edition (1966), in which he set down some recollections of the stages in the writing of the book, that he stopped for a long time at precisely this point. He said there that by the end of 1939 'the tale had not yet reached the end of Book I' (and it is clear that he referred to Book I of FR, not to Volume I of The Lord of the Rings); and that

  In spite of the darkness of the next five years I found that the story could not now be wholly abandoned, and I plodded on, mostly by night, till I stood by Balin's tomb in Moria. There I halted for a long while. It was almost a year later when I went on and so came to Lothlorien and the Great River late in 1941.

  This can only mean that the story was broken off in Moria late in 1940. It seems impossible to accommodate these dates to such other evidence as exists on the subject. I think it extremely probable, even virtually certain, that these last chapters, taking the story from Rivendell to Moria, belong to the latter part of 1939; and indeed my father himself said, in a letter to Stanley Unwin dated 19 December 1939, that he had 'never quite ceased work' on The lard of the Rings, and that 'it has reached Chapter XVI' (Letters no. 37). The chapter-numbers at this stage are unfortunately so erratic that the evidence they provide is very difficult to use; but when it is observed that the number 'XV' was pencilled on the original manuscript of 'The Council of Elrond', and that the chapter which afterwards continued the story from the point where the present text ends - originally called 'The Mines of Moria (ii)' and afterwards 'The Bridge of Khazad-dum' - is numbered 'XVII', it seems probable that it was to 'The Mines of Moria' that my father referred in the letter of December 1939. In any case 'Chapter XVI' could not by any reckoning be one of the chapters of Book I in FR. I feel sure, therefore, that - more than a quarter of a century later - he erred in his recollection of the year. But it would be out of the question that he should err in his recollection that he 'halted for a long while by Balin's tomb in Moria.' Internal evidence in any case suggests that the 'wave' of composition which had carried the story from the Council of Elrond to the chamber of Balin's tomb came to an end here. All subsequent texts rest on a developed form of the Council and a different composition of the Company of the Ring.

  There this history halts also. But before ending there remains another outline scrap, found on the same isolated page as bears the preliminary sketches for the descent from the Red Pass (p. 431, note 1) and the spell that held the West Gate of Moria (p.444). It is in fact a continuation of the 'Sketch of the Moria chapter' given on pp. 442 - 3, which ends with the words., Pursuit is after them. Here follows the loss of Gandalf. Written in a faint pencilled scribble it is extremely difficult to read.

  They are pursued by goblins and a B[lack] R[ider] [written above: a Balrog] after escaping from Balin's Tomb - they come to a bridge of slender stone over a gulf.

  Gandalf turns back and holds off [?enemy], they cross the bridge but the B[lack] R[ider] leaps forward and wrestles with Gandalf. The bridge cracks under them and the last they see is Gandalf falling into the pit with the B[lack] R[ider]. There is a flash of fire and blue light up from abyss.

  Their grief. Trotter now guides party.

  (Of course Gandalf must reappear later - probably fall is not as deep as it seemed. Gandalf thrusts Balrog under him and so....... and eventually following the subterranean stream in the gulf he found a way out - but he does not turn up until they have had many adventures: not indeed until they are on [?borders] of Mordor and the King of Ond is being beaten in battle.)

  This seems to show clearly that before ever the story of the fall of Gandalf from the Bridge of Khazad-dum was written, my father fully intended that he should return.

  NOTES.

  1. To this point the text of this 'Sketch' was struck through, but the remainder was not.

  2. See p. 437, note 35; and cf. the corresponding passage in FR (p. 338), where Gandalf says: 'There are Orcs, very many of them. And some are large and evil: black Uruks of Mordor.'

  3. In FR (p. 313) the Company moved south towards Moria by day, and they 'wandered and scrambled in a barren country of red stones. Nowhere could they see any gleam of water...'

  4. My father first wrote here (changing it at once): 'Caradras dilthen the Little Redway'. For Caradras as the name of the river Redway (later Silverlode) on the other side of the Mountains see p. 433, note 15.

  5. It was now the night of 5 December, and full moon was on the 7th (see p. 434, note 19).

  6. This sentence was enclosed within square brackets, and the concluding words 'from whence they heard the splash of running water' struck out. These changes belong with the writing of the manuscript.

  7. Though the word 'pool' is used, the reference is clearly to the lake and not to the 'pool' which they had just walked through. The 'soft bubbling noise' comes from the 'lake'.

  8. The whole passage from 'Well, here we are at last' on p.448 to this point is a rider on a slip, replacing the following in the original text:

  'Here is the gate,' said Gandalf. 'This is where the road from Hollin ended, and the elves planted these trees in old days; for the west-gates were made chiefly for their use in their traffic with the dwarves.'

  The replacement certainly belongs with the first writing of the chapter, for the dispatch of the ponies by Sam and Trotter is subsequently referred to in the text as written.

  9. The word 'wholly' is enclosed in square brackets.

  10. In FR (p. 318) the hammer and anvil are 'surmounted by a crown with seven stars', and 'more clearly than all else there shone forth in the middle of the door a single star with many rays.' The original draft has no mention of the two trees bearing crescent moons.

  11. In FR the inscription on the doors is of ithildin which mirrors only starlight and moonlight (p. 318). In this original draft, of course, the time-scheme is different - the middle of the day, not early night (see note 28).

  12. This was first written: 'Narfi made the Doors'.

  13. Merry replaced Frodo, who replaced Boromir; it was apparently said of Boromir that he was not much disturbed by Gandalfs bristling brows, and that he secretly wished that the doors might stay shut.

  14. I cannot interpret this. In FR (p. 320) Gandalf's invocation means: Elvish gate open now for us; doorway of the Dwarf-folk listen to the word [beth] of my tongue.'

  15. The text of this passage, from 'Then he sat down in silence', as first written read:

  Only Trotter seemed troubled. Boromir was smiling broadly behind his back. Sam ventured to whisper in Frodo's ear: 'I've never seen old Gandalf at a loss for words before,' he said. 'It looks as if we were not meant to pass these gates, somehow.'

  'I have a feeling of dread,' said Frodo slowly, 'either of the gates or of something else. But I do not think Gandalf is beaten - he is thinking hard, I fancy.'

  Subsequently Sam's whispered speech to Frodo was given to Merry, with the addition: 'He ought not to have sent off the ponies till he got them open.'

  16. Written in pencil here: 'Sound of wolves far off at same time as swish in water'. But this would have been added when the time of their entry into the Mines had been altered; cf. FR p. 321 and note 28.

  17. These words were struck out in pencil and the form Melin substituted. In the Etymologies (V.372), stem MEL, are given Noldorin mellon and meldir 'friend', and also Qu
enya melin 'dear'.

  18. In FR there are two doors; and despite the single door described here, the inscription bears the words 'The Doors of Durin'; Gandalf tells them: 'these doors open outwards, but nothing can open them inwards. They can swing out, or they can be broken...'

  19. As first written (and not struck out) this passage read: 'They had just time; Trotter who came last was not more than four steps up when the arms of the creature in the water came feeling and fingering the wall.'

  20. In the first of these lacunas the text seems to read in it, or possibly with (in which case his wand was omitted; cf. FR p. 322, 'he thrust his staff against the doors'). In the second, the word looks like open (perhaps for opening).

  21. The illegible word is just a series of wiggles; certainly not stood, the word here in FR. Just possibly, survived.

  22. The actual reading here is ' - not by accident'. The sentence was enclosed in square brackets at the time of writing, but a similar sentence remains in FR.