The History of the Hobbit Read online

  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 than that, and it was years before his story grew. I don’t know where the word came from. You can’t catch your mind out. It might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt.2 Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that
hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.