The History of the Hobbit Read online

you] sit on the back doorstep long enough I daresay we should [> you will] think of something. And well, don’t you know, I think you have said [> talked] enough for one night, if you see what I mean. What about bed, and an early start. I will give you a good breakfast before you go’.

  ‘Before we go’ said Gandalf. ‘Aren’t you the burglar,TN8 and isn’t the side door your job? But I agree about bed and breakfast’.

  So they all got up. And Bilbo had to find room for them all, and filled all his spare-rooms, and made beds on couches and chairs; and when he went to his own little bed very tired and not altogether happy, he could still hear Gandalf humming to himself in the best bedroom

  ‘Far over the misty mountains cold

  To dungeons deep and caverns old

  We must away ere break of day

  To find our long forgotten gold’

  He went to sleep with that in his ears and it gave him uncomfortable dreams, and it was after break of day when he woke up.

  TEXT NOTES

  1 For another example of a composite typescript/manuscript text, see the initial draft of ‘The Great Cake’ (i.e., Smith of Wootton Major), published in facsimile on pages 102–29 of the Extended Edition of SWM edited by Verlyn Flieger [2005].

  2 The ‘County Round’ of the Pryftan Fragment has now become the ‘Country Round’ of the published text, the precursor for what would, in the sequel, become the Shire.

  3 A similar sentiment is expressed in Farmer Giles of Ham, which was first drafted either immediately before or immediately after The Hobbit (see pp. 492–3):

  . . . dragons on their side may have been forgetting about the knights and their swords, just as the knights were forgetting about the real dragons and getting used to imitation tails made in the kitchen.

  —FGH [50th anniversary extended edition, 1999], pp. 84–5.

  This passage from the second draft text was recast in the third draft of the story (‘The Lord of Thame’), about the time Tolkien was putting the final text of The Hobbit in order for submission to Allen & Unwin, into a form much more closely resembling the phrasing in The Hobbit:

  ‘So knights are mythical!’ said the younger and less experienced dragons. ‘We always thought so.’

  ‘At least they may be getting rare,’ thought the older and wiser worms; ‘far and few and no longer to be feared.’

  —ibid., p. 25.

  4 Here the name ‘Smaug’ occurs for the first time as part of the original text (as opposed to a later revision); in the Bladorthin Typescript it appeared only as a revision replacing Pryftan. The name change may be taken as one indication of a gap in time between composition of these two (for more evidence, see the commentary on ‘The Third of March’ beginning on p. 84).

  5 This habit of sleeping atop a mound of treasure is indeed traditional, and is shared by Beowulf’s dragon, Sigurd’s Fafnir, and dragons of medieval romance such as the dragon slain by Fulk Fitzwarrin (an exile from King John’s court), of which we are told that its treasure consisted of ‘the cool gold upon which alone it could sleep, because of the hot fire in its belly’ (Jacqueline Simpson, British Dragons [1980; rev. ed. 2001], p. 57). It is also a hallmark of Tolkien’s dragons: Glorund (see pp. 529–30), the nameless dragon of ‘The Hoard’ (first published in 1923 as ‘Iúmonna Gold Galdre Bewunden’), and Snaug himself, and presumably also of Giles’ Chrysophylax Dives (who certainly has a mort of treasure in his lair) and Scatha the Worm (from whose horde come heirlooms still treasured by the Rohirrim eleven centuries later).

  6 Tolkien began to write another word, which may have begun with a capital letter, before cancelling it and writing ‘a goblin’, but the cancellation is so complete that I cannot make out any letter(s).

  7 As originally drafted, this paragraph reads

  ‘Well’ said Bilbo ‘I should say we ought to go East and have a look round, at least. After all there is the back door, and dragons must sleep sometimes, and well, don’t you know. I think we have talked as much as is good for us. What about bed, and an early start. If we sit on the back doorstep long enough I daresay we should [> will] think of something. And well, don’t you know, I think you have said [> talked] enough for one night, if you see what I mean. What about bed, and an early start. I will give you a good breakfast before you go’.

  The portion printed in italics here was cancelled and that text repeated after the following sentence, incorporating the revision ‘. . . as much as is good for us [> you]’ made before the cancellation. By the simple expedient of changing ‘we’ and ‘us’ to ‘you’ throughout the first few sentences, this whole passage was revised to mute Bilbo’s newfound enthusiasm and distance the hobbit from the rest.

  8 Gandalf’s speech originally ended here after a short cancelled word or phrase, possibly ‘after all’ (i.e., ‘aren’t you the burglar after all’).

  (i)

  The Dwarves

  Through Bilbo’s request for more information, and first Gandalf’s and then Bladorthin’s explanations, we learn a good deal more about the setting and characters, particularly about the dwarves.1 This is important, for the most significant departure in The Hobbit from the old mythology of the Silmarillion texts lies in the new story’s more or less sympathetic treatment of Durin’s Folk. In their earlier appearances in Tolkien’s tales, the dwarves had always been portrayed as an evil people: allies of goblins, mercenaries of Morgoth, pillagers of one of the great elven kingdoms.2 Thus, their characterization here is totally at variance with what is said and shown of them in the old legends. And the break is both sudden and complete: no intermediate stages prepared the way. For them to be treated sympathetically as heroes of the new story is nothing short of amazing: no less surprising than if a company of goblin wolf-riders had ridden up to Bag-End seeking a really first-class burglar.

  It seems impossible now to pinpoint exactly where dwarves entered the mythology, but it was sometime during the Lost Tales period (i.e., 1917–20). They played a major role in only one of the tales – ‘The Nauglafring: The Necklace of the Dwarves’ – but are mentioned, at least in passing, in three others: ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ (the story of Beren & Lúthien), ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ (the story of Túrin), and the unfinished ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ (the story of the Coming of Men). Throughout these early stories they are viewed exclusively from an (unflattering) elvish perspective, one best conveyed by an entry in the Gnomish Lexicon, where the Goldogrin/Gnomish word nauglafel is glossed as ‘dwarf-natured, i.e. mean, avaricious’ (BLT I.261; Parma Eldalamberon XI.59).

  The Tale of Turambar’s portrayal of Mîm the Fatherless, the first dwarf of note in the legendarium, establishes Tolkien’s dwarves as guardians of vast treasure-hoards as well as the originators of inimical curses. The image of ‘an old misshapen dwarf who sat ever on the pile of gold singing black songs of enchantment to himself’ and who ‘by many a dark spell . . . bound it to [him]self’ (BLT II.113–14), along with the dying curse he lays upon the treasure, comes directly from the Icelandic legends which formed such a large part of Tolkien’s professional repertoire. In particular, the old story of the famous hoard of the Nibelungs that plays a crucial part in works as different as the Völsunga Saga, Snorri’s Prose Edda, the Nibelungenlied, and Wagner’s Ring cycle provides the motif of a treasure stolen from the dwarves which later brings disaster upon all those who seek to claim it, even the descendants and kin of its original owners – the theme which dominates the final quarter of Tolkien’s book.3 Another work that Tolkien was much interested in for the glimpses it provided of ancient lore, Heidreks Saga (edited and translated into English by Christopher Tolkien as The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise [1960]), features an episode wherein a hero captures the dwarves Dvalin and Durin and forces them to forge him a magical sword; they do so but before departing lay a curse upon it so that once drawn it can never be resheathed until it has taken a human life.4

  Of all these early references to dwarves, that in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’ is the slightest and least judgm
ental. As part of her lengthening spell, Lúthien names ‘the tallest and longest things upon Earth’, foremost among which are ‘the beards of the Indravangs’ (BLT II.19). From the Gnomish Lexicon we learn that Indravang is ‘a special name of the nauglath or dwarves’ meaning Longbeards (ibid., p. 344; the ‘vang/fang’ element is the same as that occurring in the later Fangorn or ‘Treebeard’ and written on Fimbulfambi’s Map). Here again we see a tie to Tolkien’s philological studies: for the Langobards, or Longbeards, were one of the Germanic tribes who invaded the crumbling Roman Empire in the sixth century, settling in that area of Italy still called Lombardy in their memory. Tolkien was much interested in the Langobards’ history and legend; in his unfinished time-travel story The Lost Road [circa 1936], he gave the main characters Lombardic names (Alboin and Audoin) and planned a chapter set in Lombardic times (HME V.37 & 77–8). This chapter was never written, but he did recast an episode from Beowulf into an alliterative poem he called ‘King Sheave’, presenting it as the mythical history of the Lombards (HME V.87–91; cf. Christopher Tolkien’s comments on pages 53–5 and 93 regarding his father’s fascination with Langobardic legends). Finally, Gandalf’s curious phrase about ‘money to lend and to spend’ (p. 71) gains new significance in light of the fact that the Lombards became famed bankers, so much so that by the fourteenth century ‘lombard’ had became a common noun in Middle English meaning banker, money-lender, or pawnbroker.

  We learn more of the Longbeards in ‘The Nauglafring’, the one of these early stories in which dwarves play the largest part. Here it is revealed that there are two main races of dwarves: the Nauglath of Nogrod and the Indrafangs (or Longbeards) of Belegost.5 The dwarves in The Hobbit are descendants of the latter, as Gandalf states at Rivendell (p. 116):

  ‘Durin, Durin’ said Gandalf. ‘He was the father of the fathers of one of the two races of dwarves, the Longbeards, and my grandfather’s ancestor.’

  The Indrafangs or Longbeards may have had some special tie to Mîm, for in ‘The Nauglafring’ they join in the planned raid on Tinwelint’s kingdom (Artanor, the later Doriath) only when they hear of Mîm’s death and the theft of his treasure (BLT II.230) – but what this tie may be, we do not know. At any rate, the King of Nogrod’s vow ‘to rest not ere Mîm was thrice avenged’ (BLT II.230) is strikingly echoed in Gandalf’s determination to ‘bring our curses home to Smaug’ and his reflection that ‘The goblins of Moria have been repaid . . . we must give a thought to the Necromancer’.

  Unedifying though it may be, ‘The Nauglafring’ does offer us the first extended view of Tolkien’s dwarves – one so much at variance with that race as developed in The Hobbit that Tolkien was eventually obliged to create a new name for the old race, the ‘petty dwarves’, to distinguish the people of Mîm from Durin’s Folk and their peers, the kindred of the Seven Houses of the dwarves.6 According to the old story,

  The Nauglath are a strange race and none know surely whence they be; and they serve not Melko nor Manwë and reck not for Elf or Man, and some say that they have not heard of Ilúvatar, or hearing disbelieve. Howbeit in crafts and sciences and in the knowledge of the virtues of all things that are in the earth or under the water none excel them; yet they dwell beneath the ground in caves and tunnelled towns, and aforetime Nogrod was the mightiest of these. Old are they, and never comes a child among them, nor do they laugh. They are squat in stature, and yet are strong, and their beards reach even to their toes, but the beards of the Indrafangs are the longest of all, and are forked, and they bind them about their middles when they walk abroad. All these creatures have Men called ‘Dwarves’, and say that their crafts and cunning surpass that of the Gnomes [i.e., the Noldor or Deep-Elves] in marvellous contrivance, but of a truth there is little beauty in their works of themselves, for in those things of loveliness that they have wrought in ages past . . . renegade Gnomes . . . have ever had a hand. (BLT I.223–4)

  Here we see the ‘elvish’ bias of the Lost Tales at its most blatant (a bias altogether missing from the more equitable narrative of The Hobbit), with the elvish narrator of the Tale unwilling even to give the dwarves credit for creating beautiful objects without elven help. Furthermore, we are told that as a result of the estrangement between the races that occurs in this tale (the ‘old quarrel’ referred to in passing in The Hobbit) ‘the Dwarves [have] been severed in feud for ever since those days with the Elves, and drawn more nigh in friendship to the kin of Melko’ (BLT II.230). Thus Naugladur, the dwarf-lord of Nogrod, hires Orc mercenaries to aid in the assault on Artanor, and in the outlines for the unfinished ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ it is a host of Dwarves and Goblins in the service of Melko-Morgoth who attack the first Men and their elven allies in the Battle of Palisor.

  The mysteries surrounding the dwarves’ origins expressed in ‘The Nauglafring’ endured to the time of The Hobbit’s composition and beyond;7 the Silmarillion account of Aulë’s creation of the dwarves did not enter the mythology until around the time of The Hobbit’s publication (and thus postdate the book’s composition by roughly half a decade). Even here, in the (Later) ‘Annals of Beleriand’ (which are associated with the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion), it says that when dwarves die ‘they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made’ (HME V.129). The mystery about the dwarves’ origins go all the way back to Norse myth: Snorri’s Prose Edda mentions the old legend that dwarves ‘had quickened in the earth and under the soil like maggots in flesh’, acquiring ‘human understanding and the appearance of men’ through ‘the decree of the gods . . . although they lived in the earth and in rocks’ (Prose Edda p. 41). The essay ‘Durin’s Folk’, which makes up the final third of Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, mentions ‘the foolish opinion among Men that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves “grow out of stone”’ (LotR.1116) only to dismiss it out of hand, but this was clearly an afterthought: Tolkien’s portrayal of dwarves exclusively as men, and usually old men, wherever they appear as characters in his works, from The Book of Lost Tales through to The Lord of the Rings, agrees with both Norse myth and folklore; the Brothers Grimm are as devoid of any female dwarves as are the two Eddas and the sagas.

  In one important way, The Hobbit is closer to the original Norse lore than ‘The Tale of the Nauglafring’ had been: nomenclature. All but one of the dwarves in our story have Norse names, drawn directly from the Elder Edda (the sole apparent exception being Balin; cf. pp. 23–4), whereas in ‘The Nauglafring’ Tolkien had given them names in his invented languages. Fangluin the Aged, Naugladur king of Nogrod, Bodruith of Belegost, the Indrafangs and the Nauglath, the Nauglafring itself: all the nomenclature is Gnomish, the names the elven historians gave these people and places, not what they called themselves (in the Gnomish Lexicon, ‘Bodruith’ is glossed as ‘revenge’, while ‘Naugladur’ probably means simply ‘Lord of the Dwarves’). By contrast, the name ‘Mîm’ harkens back to Old Norse, like Dwalin, Kili, Gandalf, and the rest.8 Furthermore, there is no hint of any sort that Dwalin, Balin, &c., are not their real names: the ‘secret language of the dwarves’ and the motif of their hiding their true names had not yet arrived.

  One curious motif that I believe was already present by the time this first chapter of The Hobbit was completed was the partial identification of the dwarves, in Tolkien’s mind, with the Jewish people. Tolkien himself made the comparison in his 1965 BBC interview with Denys Gueroult9 (much to the interviewer’s astonishment). This is not to say that The Hobbit is an allegory of twentieth-century Zionism; rather that Tolkien drew selectively on the history of the medieval Jews when creating his dwarves. Some elements, such as the secret ancestral language (Khuzdul, Hebrew) reserved for use among themselves while they adopt the language of their neighbors (Common, Yiddish) for everyday use, were layered on later, during the Lord of the Rings stage.10 But others were clearly present already. Like the ancient Hebrews, the dwarves have been driven from their homeland and suffered a diaspora; settling in scattered enclaves amongst other folk, yet sti
ll preserving their own culture. Their warlike nature could have come straight from Joshua, Judges, or 1st & 2nd Maccabees, while their great craftsmanship harkens back to the Jewish artisans of medieval Iberia, whose work was renowned throughout Christendom. Gandalf’s phrase about ‘money to lend and to spend’ (p. 71) could apply equally to the Lombard-Longbeards, as we have already seen, and to the Jews – banking and money-lending being one of the reserved occupations for the Jews in most Christian countries. To his credit, Tolkien has been selective in his borrowings, omitting the pervasive anti-Semitism of the real Middle Ages expressed in such works as Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale’, Jocelyn of Brakelond’s chronicle, or (to cite a somewhat later but all-too-relevant example) Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.11

  (ii)

  Moria

  With Bladorthin’s offhanded reference to ‘the mines of Moria’, a major element of Tolkien’s dwarven mythology enters the legendarium. This is the first known mention anywhere in Tolkien’s work of Moria, what would later become the Wonder of the Northern world, Khazad-dûm, the ancestral home of Durin’s Folk. However, all this would come later: there is nothing in the text of The Hobbit to identify Moria as a dwarrowdelf (dwarf-delving) nor mark it as having any special significance for Gandalf’s people, other than being the site of his grandfather’s murder; from the context, it is far more likely a goblin-mine (we are told much of their ‘mines’ in the Misty Mountains chapter [Chapter IV]).

  The geography is still murky, and seems to bear little relationship to the well-worked-out geography of the old tale. There is no indication of where Moria lay at this point – north, south, east, or west. In the old tale, the dwellings of the dwarves had lain in the far south: the map made in the mid- to late-1920s and printed in The Shaping of Middle-earth (HME IV, between pages 220 and 221) indicates that the dwarven strongholds Nogrod and Belegost lay far to the south-east of Broseliand/Beleriand, off the map itself; the later ‘Eastward Extension’ of this old map still places their dwellings off the mapped territory, with a note in the lower right corner that ‘Southward in East feet of Blue Mountains are Belegost and Nogrod’ (HME IV.231, 232). Against this is Gandalf’s testimony that his ancestors came to the [Lonely] Mountain when they were driven out of the ‘far north’ by dragons. There is no mention in The Hobbit of Belegost, which in the old story had been the Longbeards’ ancestral home, or of Nogrod. In The Lord of the Rings the dwarves’ history is changed yet again and their movements greatly complicated: here Bilbo’s companions are made descendants of the dwarves of Moria, now described as Durin’s ancestral home, which had been ‘enriched by many people and much lore and craft when the ancient cities of Nogrod and Belegost in the Blue Mountains were ruined at the breaking of Thangorodrim’ at the end of the First Age (LotR.1108).12 After being driven from Moria, the dwarves fled north first to the Lonely Mountain and then passed on to the Grey Mountains (‘for those mountains were rich and little explored’ – LotR.1109). When dragons forced them southward out of the Grey Mountains, some returned to the Lonely Mountain while others settled in the Iron Hills further to the east. Smaug’s attack on the Lonely Mountain destroyed the Kingdom under the Mountain and caused the survivors to flee either east to the Iron Hills or far to the west to the Blue Mountains, not far from where Nogrod and Belegost had stood some six millennia before.