The History of the Hobbit Read online

  13 An ink revision here changes ‘Fingolfin’ to ‘Golfimbul’.

  14 Here ‘burglar’ was changed in ink to an illegible word, possibly ‘hunter’, which is then rejected in favor of ‘burglar’ once more.

  15 References to the ‘shetland’ pony and the aforementioned wireworms ‘of the Chinese’ survive here from the previous draft, while the Gobi (famous at the time for Roy Chapman Andrews’ fossil-hunting expeditions there throughout the 1920s, which led to the discovery of the first dinosaur eggs in 1923) has become ‘the last desert in the East’; also gone is the Hindu Kush (already marked for deletion in the Pryftan Fragment). Through these exotic but real features, Bilbo’s world remains firmly tied to our own.

  16 Both this paragraph and the one before it were extensively reworked, with marginal additions in dark ink:

  . . . plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward’; that is how it is usually read. You can say ‘Expert treasure-hunter’, if you like, instead of ‘Burglar’. Some of them do. It’s all the same to us. Bladorthin told us there was a man of the sort in these parts looking for a job at once, and that he would arrange for a meeting this Wednesday tea-time.’

  ‘Of course there is a mark’ said the wizard [cancelled: not letting Bilbo speak] I put it there myself. For very good reasons. I chose Mr Baggins for your fourteenth man, and let any one say I chose the wrong man who dares. If any one does you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal.’ He scowled so angrily at Gloin, that the dwarf huddled back in his chair; and when Bilbo tried [to speak >] to open his mouth to ask questions, he turned and frowned at him and stuck out his eyebrows, till Bilbo shut his mouth tight with a snap. ‘That’s right’ said Bladorthin. ‘Let’s have no more argument. I have chosen Mr Baggins, and that ought to be enough for all of you. If I say he is a Burglar, a Burglar he is, or will be when the time comes. There is a lot more in him than you guess, and a lot more than he has any idea of himself. You may (possibly) all live to thank me yet. Now Bilbo, my boy fetch the lamp and let’s have a little light on this.’

  17 These three paragraphs were reproduced with only minor changes in the First Typescript (that is, the first complete typescript of the entire book, begun after the manuscript draft had reached the scene on Ravenhill), but there they were recast by black ink revisions (indicated below in italics) written interlinearly in Tolkien’s neatest script:

  On the table in the light of a big lamp with a red shade he spread a piece of parchment rather like a map.

  ‘This I got from your grandfather, Thorin’ he said in answer to the dwarves’ excited questions. ‘It is a plan of the Mountain.’

  ‘I do’nt see that this will help us much’ said Thorin disappointedly after a glance. ‘I remember the Mountain well enough, and the lands about it. And I know where Mirkwood is, and the Withered Heath where the great dragons bred.’

  ‘There is a dragon marked in red on the Mountain’, said Balin, ‘but it will be easy enough to find him without that, if ever we arrive there.’

  As may be seen, this closely approaches the text of the published book, although the phrase ‘This I got from your grandfather’ was not replaced by ‘This was made by your grandfather’ until the final page proofs.

  18 Both here and at its next occurrence ‘Pryftan’ was later changed in dark ink to ‘Smaug’.

  (i)

  Baggins of Bag-End

  From this typescript, we can see that while the story underwent considerable rewriting, its general outlines remained stable from the very earliest drafts. Actors and dialogue shifted around, names changed, and details were in flux, but the essential narrative remained from first germ to final flowering. Indeed, the evidence of this typescript shows that, once he turned his attention to finding out what that opening line meant, hobbits arrived fully developed in Tolkien’s mind, right down to their eating habits and hairy feet.1 The use of the present tense quietly establishes that although this story is set ‘long ago in the quiet of the world when there was less noise and more green and hobbits were still numerous and prosperous,’ hobbits are in fact still around today, if elusive and shy around ‘ordinary big people like you and me.’ The lighthearted comparison to lilliputians, surprising as it is to readers approaching The Hobbit from the more somber perspective of The Lord of the Rings, survived into the published text and was only removed almost three decades later, in the third edition of 1966.2

  Bilbo himself is introduced gradually, almost casually, first as ‘a hobbit’, then ‘the hobbit and ‘he’; not until the second paragraph do we find out that the name of ‘This hobbit’ is Baggins, and we have to wait another paragraph before the full name is dropped in parenthetically in passing: ‘(Bilbo Baggins, that is)’. The gradual introduction of the main character is only one of Tolkien’s many rhetorical devices that establish the relationship between the narrator and the reader; here Tolkien entices the reader’s curiosity by feeding him or her information bit by bit. In contrast, Bladorthin’s sudden intrusion, which begins the actual story, echoes the abruptness of the book’s opening line, creating the feeling that the thing named exists before, and outside of, the tale about to be told.

  The opening paragraphs are more concerned to introduce a context than a character, the background which Bilbo will at first seem part of and against which he will later stand out; hence the detailed description not of Bilbo but of his home, the neighborhood, and even bits of family gossip. The use of proper nouns made out of common nouns – The Hill, the Water – once again recalls William Morris, though it may be simple verisimilitude; well-known local landmarks are usually referred to in precisely this way, especially in small towns and rural communities. Some of the details of the description of Bag-End itself conjure up the civilized atmosphere of a comfortable sitting room in an old manor house, with ‘little red lights’ and ‘polished’ seats, while others suggest rather a railway tunnel from the days of steam trains: ‘a tubeshaped hall like a tunnel, but . . . without smoke’ (granting that train stations and underground tunnels had an elegance of their own in bygone days). While the name ‘Bag-End’ appears to be a family joke deriving from the nickname of the farm in Worcestershire where Tolkien’s aunt Jane Neave and his grandfather Suffield lived in the 1920s (Carpenter, p. 106), on another level ‘Bagg-ins of Bag-End’ is a simple word-association joke of the golf/Fingolfin variety. The nearest literary antecedents for Bilbo’s home come from Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows [1908]: the snugness of Mole End, the rambling underground passages of Badger’s home, and the grandeur of Toad Hall (like Bag-End, the grandest dwelling of its type in the neighborhood, inherited by the present owner from his father) all contributed to the portrait of the hobbit-hole.3

  Then there are the neighbors to consider, the other hobbits who while not appearing as characters nonetheless form the backdrop against which the hobbit begins his adventures. Like Giles, Niggle, Smith, and Mr. Bliss, Bilbo does not live in a void, and through reports of what ‘people said’, we soon learn what to expect of a Baggins and of a Took, cluing us in to Bilbo’s typical behavior for the rest of the book. This is not to say that Tolkien had these later incidents in mind when he originally drafted these passages but rather the reverse: he jotted down details as they came to him and then, with typical attention to consistency, he later took those details into consideration as he came to write further chapters, developing the book along the lines he laid down very early on.

  Much is made here and elsewhere of Bilbo’s ancestry and its effect on his character. The rumor of fairy (i.e., elf4) or goblin blood is another point modified in the third edition, where all mention of the malicious slander about possible goblin ancestry was dropped and the idea of a Took ancestor having ‘taken a fairy wife’5 is dismissed as ‘absurd’. This establishes that whereas the Bagginses are archetypical hobbits in being predictable, unadventurous, and respectable,6 Tooks are ‘not entirely hobbitlike’. That is, they are occasionally unpredictab
le, adventurous, and hence not ‘respectable’ – by hobbit standards, anyway.

  Since Bilbo is both a Took and a Baggins, it is worthwhile stopping for a moment to consider what we are told here about his parents. We are never told what was so ‘remarkable’ about Belladonna and her sisters, nor why Bladorthin should refer to her as ‘poor Belladonna’, while we know little of Bungo besides a few of his favorite sayings (which Bilbo tends to repeat to himself when in a tight spot) and the fact that outwardly he looked, and acted, very like Bilbo (who is described as ‘a second edition of his father’ in appearance and behavior). That the Belladonna of the First Phase never had any adventure ‘other than becoming Mrs Bungo Baggins’ makes one wonder if like his famous son Bungo was perhaps also not so ‘prosy’ as he seemed; in the published text ‘other than’ was changed to ‘after’, conjuring up images of a life of dreary respectability. Another First Phase phrasing not appearing in the finished book has Belladonna ‘making Bungo . . . build the most luxurious hobbit-hole either under the Hill or over the Hill or across the Water’; the published version has it that ‘Bungo . . . built the most luxurious hobbit-hole for her (and partly with her money) that was to be found either under The Hill or over The Hill or across The Water, and there they remained to the end of their days’. Tolkien is deft at conveying characterization with extreme economy (so much so that careless readers and critics often miss it entirely); had it been retained we would have here in a single word the shadowy figure of Belladonna T. Baggins indelibly delineated as the first in what becomes in The Lord of the Rings and after a line of indomitable hobbit matriarchs: Smeagol’s grandmother, Lobelia B. Sackville-Baggins, Dora Baggins, and the tyrannical Lalia the Great.7 Years later, when attempting to address all the loose threads left over from The Hobbit for the sequel, Tolkien returned to the question of ‘poor Belladonna’ and drafted a passage relating how Bilbo ‘was left an orphan, when barely forty years old, by the untimely death of his father and mother (in a boating accident)’ (HME VI.25), a fate later transferred to Frodo’s parents rather than Bilbo’s.

  The Name ‘Bilbo’

  Like the similar hobbit names Bingo, Ponto, Bungo, and Drogo, all of which eventually end up in the Baggins family tree (see LotR page [1136] and HME XII.89–92), ‘Bilbo’ is both a short, simple, made-up name appropriate for the hero of a children’s book or light-hearted fantasy story and also the sort of nickname that was actually in use in England at the time (or perhaps, more truthfully, a slightly earlier time), as preserved in the humorous tales of P. G. Wodehouse. Examples of the former include Gorbo, the main character in E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvellous Land of Snergs [1927], a book popular among the Tolkien children,8 and Pombo, the anti-hero of one of Dunsany’s short tales (‘The Injudicious Prayers of Pombo the Idolater’, in The Book of Wonder [1912]).9 Examples of the latter can be found in Bingo (Richard) Little and Pongo (Reginald) Twisleton, both from Wodehouse’s work.10

  Bilbo is also, of course, a real surname which, while rare, survives into modern times: when my father was growing up near Hope, Arkansas in the early 1930s among his neighbors were the Bilbos, some of whom still lived in the area in the mid-1970s.11 Unfortunately, the best-known person with that surname is the notorious Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi (1877–1947), a politician infamous by the not too fastidious standards of the time for his racism and corruption; luckily, he cannot be the source for Tolkien’s use of the name, since he did not rise to national prominence until 1934, by which time Tolkien had already completed the first draft of The Hobbit.

  Finally, as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) bears witness, ‘bilbo’ also exists, alone or in combination, in several archaic common nouns, the most important of which is the name of a type of well-tempered, flexible sword originating from Bilbao in Spain. Such ‘bilbow blades’ were often simply called a ‘Bilbo’, often uppercased (no doubt because of the proper noun nameplace that gave them their name) – e.g., Falstaff’s ‘compass’d like a good Bilbo in the circumference of a Pecke’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor [1598], Act III. scene v. line 112) or Drayton’s ‘Downe their Bowes they threw/And forth their Bilbos drew’ [1603], both cited by the OED. Similarly, a kind of shackles was also known from the mid-sixteenth century as a ‘bilbo’ or ‘bilbow’, and a cup-and-ball game popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was called ‘bilbo-catch’ (earlier bilboquet).12 But it seems unlikely that our Bilbo’s name derives from any of these: his acquiring a little sword early in his adventure is probably a case of the cart following the horse, as Tolkien brought in elements (such as a ‘bilbo-blade’) that would go well with the character he had already named Bilbo. Exploring linguistic associations no doubt gave Tolkien ideas of things he could do with the character, just as scholarly researches seem to have led him to later incorporate some elements of Plato’s ring of Gyges into his own ring of invisibility (see p. 176 & ff), but they are not likely to have been the source of his name. Like hobbit itself, Bilbo is almost certainly Tolkien’s own coinage.

  (ii)

  Bladorthin

  After Bilbo, the most important character in this first chapter is Bladorthin. Bladorthin, the wizard in The Hobbit, later developed into the Gandalf the Grey of The Lord of the Rings, but it is difficult to tell in this first appearance how much of the later character was already present in Tolkien’s mind in this first draft and how much he discovered in the course of writing, partly because the character is deliberately kept somewhat mysterious. Certainly the phrase ‘Gandalf the Grey’ is never used in The Hobbit, being part of the many layers of later accretions the character picked up over the years (a process which reached its peak in the 1954 essay ‘The Istari’, printed in Unfinished Tales). Bladorthin by contrast is never associated with any one colour; indeed, the first description of him offers quite a variety: blue hat, grey cloak, silver scarf, white beard, and black boots (we are not told the actual colour of his robe, only these accessories). Separating the ennobled Gandalf we know from The Lord of the Rings from the wandering wizard who flits in and out of the drafts of The Hobbit might be a difficult mental exercise, but it is a worthwhile one; otherwise we’ll make assumptions that may not be justified, and bring things to The Hobbit that simply aren’t there. In the interest of clarity, in this commentary I refer to the wizard in The Hobbit as ‘Bladorthin’, the name Tolkien used right up to the arrival at the Lonely Mountain (and indeed a bit beyond), and the wizard in The Lord of the Rings as ‘Gandalf’ or ‘Gandalf the Grey’ (not to be confused with Gandalf the dwarf, the character later renamed Thorin Oakenshield).

  Late in life Tolkien described Gandalf the Grey as

  a figure strongly built with broad shoulder, though shorter than the average of men and now stooped with age, leaning on a thick rough-cut staff as he trudged along . . . Gandalf’s hat was wide-brimmed (a shady hat, H. p. 14)13 with a pointed conical crown, and it was blue; he wore a long grey cloak, but this would not reach much below his knees. It was of an elven silver-grey hue, though tarnished by wear – as is evident from the general use of grey in the book [i.e., in The Lord of the Rings] . . . But his colours were always white, silver-grey, and blue – except for the boots he wore when walking in the wild . . . Gandalf even bent must have been at least 5 ft. 6 . . . Which would make him a short man even in modern England, especially with the reduction of a bent back.14

  This Odinic figure is an angel in incarnated form (i.e., a Maia), one of the five Istari, bearer of the Ring of Fire, whose other names are Mithrandir and Olórin, who passes through death and returns as Gandalf the White, the Enemy of Sauron; altogether a much more dignified, powerful, and political figure than the ‘little old man’ Bilbo meets on his doorstep one day ‘in the quiet of the world’.

  In the essay on the Istari, Tolkien states that ‘they were supposed (at first) by those that had dealings with them to be Men who had acquired lore and arts by long and secret study’ (Unfinished Tales p. 388). However, it is by no means clear whether or not Tolkien hims
elf was of the same opinion when he first wrote The Hobbit. Like so much else in the story, Bladorthin’s nature is ambiguous, no doubt deliberately so: he might be human, or he might already be something more. If we had only The Hobbit itself to go by, we should certainly have no reason to doubt that he was what he appeared, a ‘little old man’ – the phrase Tolkien twice uses to describe him when introducing the character (the second usage was later changed to ‘old man’ to avoid repetition, the first was likewise altered in the third edition, no doubt to increase the wizard’s stature).15 It might be objected that Tolkien also describes Bilbo as an ‘excitable little man’ in the Ms. and first edition, yet when children’s author Arthur Ransome objected to the loose application of ‘man’ in the first edition, specifically as applied to Bilbo and in Thorin’s concern for his ‘men’ (Ransome to Tolkien, 13th December 1937; see Appendix IV), Tolkien changed the description of Bilbo to ‘excitable little fellow’ and made similar adjustments regarding the dwarves but left the description of the wizard as a ‘little old man’ untouched, implying that it was literal and accurate.

  However, The Hobbit does not stand alone, and once viewed in the context of the early Silmarillion material, Tolkien’s other tales for his children, and its own sequel, the case for Bladorthin’s being more than human grows somewhat stronger. Even if in the early drafts of the sequel Gandalf is still referred to as ‘a little old man’ (HME VI.20), a description retained as late as the sixth draft of the opening chapter (ibid.315), we must admit that within the published Lord of the Rings (where Gandalf’s more-than-human status is firmly established) he is still twice described as an ‘old man’ (LotR.37). Presumably these last, whether literal or not at the time they were written, must within their published context be taken as reflecting the point of view of the hobbits rather than the reality beneath the appearances. In the brief account of the wizards’ coming to Middle-earth that forms the headnote of the Third Age section of Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’, it is said that the wizards came ‘in the shape of Men’ (LotR.1121, italics mine), a statement that ties in closely with the viewpoint from the Istari essay already quoted. Moreover, Tolkien’s reply to Ransome suggests that by that point (December 1937), several days before he wrote the first pages of what would become The Lord of the Rings, he was already thinking of Gandalf as something not quite human: