The History of the Hobbit Read online

  ‘Where did you get to, if I may ask?’ said Gandalf to Bladorthin as they went along. ‘To look ahead’ said he.

  ‘What brought you back, in the nick of time?’

  ‘Looking behind!’ said he.

  ‘Exactly’ said Gandalf; ‘but could you be more plain?’

  ‘I went on to spy out our road, which will soon become dangerous and difficult – and I found out a good deal that will be of service (especially in the replenishment of our small stock of provisions). But also I heard about the three trolls from the mountains & their settlement in the woods near the track where they waylaid strangers. So I had a feeling I was needed back. And looking behind I saw a fire and came to it. That’s that’.

  ‘Thank you’ said Gandalf.

  TEXT NOTES

  1 The correct number, fourteen (= the thirteen dwarves plus Bladorthin), appears in the first typescript (1/1/52:1).

  2 The Great Mill remained the rendezvous spot right up until the page proofs (Marq. 1/2/1: page 41), where it was changed first to the Green Man and then to the familiar Green Dragon Inn. Note that even after these changes, the first illustration in the published book, ‘The Hill: Hobbiton-across-the-Water’, traces Bilbo’s entire route from his round green door in the distance right down to the Mill, not the Inn. The Great Mill was based on Sarehole Mill, near which Tolkien lived when a boy (1896–1900); see ‘The Mill on the River Cole’ by Peter Klein in An Afternoon in Middle-Earth [1969], pages 15–16.

  3 Immediately after the word ‘far’ appears another illegible, cancelled word. It appears that Tolkien originally wrote this line to read ‘. . . hadn’t been riding very far ’, but the final cancelled word is too blotted to be sure. If the cancelled word was initially ‘west’, then it shows just how fluid his conception of the tale’s geography was at the time.

  4 This sentence was changed to read ‘They hadn’t camped before & although they knew they would soon have to camp regularly . . . it seemed a bad wet evening to begin on.’ Note that ‘the misty mountains’ remains a descriptive term, as in the dwarves’ song, and has not yet become a proper noun (something which first occurs early in Chapter III; see p. 111).

  5 Added at this point: ‘not even Oin & Gloin who were especially good at it’.

  6 Here ‘Bofur & Bombur tried to light a fire’ is changed to ‘Oin & Gloin went on trying to light a fire’ to tie in with the previous insertion (see TN5).

  7 ‘Dwalin’ is changed here to ‘Balin’, suggesting that Tolkien was initially undecided which of these brothers would be the group’s look-out (a role that ultimately fell to Balin). Note that it was Dwalin who was first to arrive at Bilbo’s house – as we might expect of a look-out man sent ahead to scout out their reception, while it is his brother who sees Bilbo arrive out-of-breath at the Mill; the addition of the phrase ‘looking out for him’ there makes it clear that Balin was acting as look-out at the time.

  8 ‘Dori & Nori’ is changed to ‘Oin & Gloin’ here, as the climax of the little scene inserted in the preceding revisions noted in TN5 and TN6.

  9 This observation was originally followed by the cancelled (and incomplete) lines: ‘Bilbo had no idea what [to do >] a burglar ought to do, or how to do it. we can tell him what of course but how is’.

  Trolls with multiple heads appear in many stories, perhaps the most famous of which is Dasent’s ‘Soria Moria Castle’, where the hero must confront and defeat first a three-headed troll, then a six-headed troll, and finally a nine-headed troll (East o’ the Sun & West o’ the Moon [1888], pages 397–401). This same story might have contributed to the naming of Moria; see Tolkien’s letter to Mr. Rang, August 1967; Letters p. 384.

  10 This passage originally read: ‘. . . pinched the very mutton off their spits, purloined the beer, and if he hadn’t maybe stuck a dagger into each of them without their noticing it – After which the night could have been spent cheerily’ before the latter section was cancelled and moved into its own following paragraph.

  For examples of ‘really good and legendary’ burglars, see Dunsany’s thieves’ tales such as ‘The Bird of the Difficult Eye’,† ‘The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller’,†† ‘The Probable Adventure of the Three Literary Men’,†† A Night at an Inn [1916], and especially ‘How Nuth Would Have Practised His Art Upon the Gnoles’.††

  † From The Last Book of Wonder [1916].

  †† From The Book of Wonder [1912].

  11 These two sentences relating Gandalf’s bluff were cancelled sometime before the first typescript of this passage was made.

  12 This passage was revised to read ‘Shut up yerself’ said Tom, who thought it was William’s voice. ‘Who’s arguing . . .’

  13 This paragraph was cancelled. Upside down on the bottom of the next page (the back of this same sheet) is preserved a scrap of draft dialogue that preceded this exchange – one of several occasions where Tolkien started a piece of draft, abandoned and cancelled it, then flipped the piece of paper over and began again on the other side. The entire cancelled passage reads as follows:

  ‘Which shall we sit on first?’ said the voice.

  ‘Anyone,’ said William,† who thought it was Tom speaking and didn’t mind because he hadn’t been hurt.

  Better sit on the last fellow

  † Here Tolkien began to write ‘Bert’ but changed his mind after writing down only the first two letters and changed it to ‘William’.

  14 ‘little for a dwarf, but a big sword for Bilbo’ was changed to ‘a little penknife for a troll, but . . .’

  (i)

  The Trolls

  We are dealing here with rough, first-draft text, yet the story is already well-advanced, both in general outline and in many details. Some of the wittiest lines and sharpest rejoinders are yet to come – e.g., ‘trolls simply detest the sight of dwarves’ lacks the parenthetical addendum ‘(uncooked)’ – but the draft is recognizably the same book as the final polished text (as when the angry trolls call each other ‘all sorts of perfectly true and applicable names’). Indeed, it is this closeness between first and final text which makes the divergences all the more interesting. As in the first chapter, there is much shifting of the roles assigned to the dwarves, with an eye toward consolidation and simplification. Thus it is originally Dwalin, not Balin, who is ‘always their look-out man’ (despite Balin’s having apparently filled that role only a few pages before). Similarly, it is Bofur and Bombur who try to light the fire, and Dori and Nori who come to blows, before revisions assign both roles to Oin and Gloin, adding an earlier mention that these two dwarves were ‘especially good at it’ (firebuilding, that is), giving the scene a cumulative, cascading effect. Once again Tolkien’s first impulse was to make use of his full cast, whereas the end result is to let a few of the dwarves make a strong impression on the reader while reducing the rest to nonentities.

  Like so much else in Bilbo’s world, trolls enter the mythology through the Lost Tales. However, they played no part in the story of the Elder Days, only appearing on the scene on the cusp of historical times, ‘many ages of Men’ after the War against Melko (Morgoth). They belong rather to the frame story, the tale of Eriol. In an early outline for what later became ‘The History of Eriol’, or ‘Ælfwine of England’, we are told that after the disaster of the Faring Forth and the final defeat and fading of the Elves, ‘Men come to Tol Eressëa [i.e., the isle of Great Britain] and also Orcs, Dwarves, Gongs, Trolls, etc.’ (BLT II.283, italics mine). And while Eriol is himself mythical, Tolkien took pains to tie him to historical figures, making him the father of Hengest and Horsa, the Jutes who led the English invasion of Britain in A.D. 449–455 (BLT II.290; Finn and Hengest [1982] p. 70). Thus, trolls did not enter England until the Germanic invasions (appropriately enough, since they derive from Scandinavian and not Celtic or Roman mythology) and are not yet conceived of as part of Melko the Morgoth’s retinue.

  A less oblique appearance, and more direct precursor for William, Bert, and Tom, co
mes not from the legendarium but in a poem Tolkien wrote while at Leeds (i.e., 1920–25), one of the ‘Songs for the Philologists’ later compiled by A. H. Smith in his 1936 booklet. Originally known as ‘Pero & Podex’ (Latin for ‘boot and bottom’), it appeared in Songs for the Philologists as ‘The Root of the Boot’1 and, in suitably revised form, in Chapter XII of The Lord of the Rings.2 The text of the original manuscript, of interest because here we meet Tolkien’s first troll character with a speaking part, differs slightly from any of the published versions:

  Pero & Podex

  A troll sat alone on his seat of stone

  And munched and mumbled a bare old bone,

  And long and long he had sat there lone

  And seen nor man nor mortal

  Ortal!

  portal!

  And long and long he had sat there lone

  And seen nor man nor mortal

  Up came Tom with his big boots on;

  ‘Hullo!’ says he ‘pray, what is yon?

  It looks like the leg of me uncle John,

  As should be a-lyin’ in churchyard’.

  Searchyard

  birchyard &c.

  ‘Young man’ says the troll, ‘that bone I stole;

  But what be bones, when mayhap the soul

  In heaven on high hath an aureole

  As big and as bright as a bonfire?’

  On fire

  Yon fire &c.

  Says Tom ‘Oddsteeth! ’tis my belief,

  If bonfire there be ’tis underneath;

  For old man John was as proper a thief

  As ever wore black on a Sunday,

  Grundy

  Monday &c.

  But still thou old swine ’tis no matter o’ thine

  A-trying thy teeth on an uncle o’ mine,

  So get to Hell before thou dine

  And ask thee leave of me nuncle

  uncle

  buncle &c.’

  In the proper place upon the base

  Tom boots him right but alas that race

  Hath as stony a seat as it is in face

  And Pero was punished by Podex

  Odex!

  Codex!&c.

  Now Tom goes lame since home he came,

  And his bootless foot is grievous game;

  But troll will not gnaw that bone for shame

  To think it was boned of a boner

  owner!

  donor! &c.3

  Note that while the troll’s speech is somewhat archaic, it is loftier, more formal and correct, than Tom’s, as when the troll speaks airily of an ‘aureole’ (halo), in contrast to Tom’s dropped consonants and low curses.4 The exact opposite applies to the trolls Bilbo meets in The Hobbit, who all speak a comic cockney slang in contrast to Bilbo’s correct, rather formal way of speaking. It may seem odd, at first glance, that William, Bert, and Tom speak cockney rather than some rustic, rural dialect. The later character Sam Gamgee proves that Tolkien could write comic rustic extremely well: why, then, did he assign an urban dialect like cockney, the speech of lower-class Londoners, to these trolls rather than ‘Mummerset’ or some other country dialect?

  The simplest explanation is that he adopted cockney because it was easily recognizable to his intended audience: i.e., John, Michael, and Christopher. As such, it need not be an accurate representation of actual Londoner speech to achieve his purpose, so long as it succeeds in creating the desired comic effect, as it certainly does.5 Incongruity has a charm of its own, and the cockney trolls are of a piece with the anachronisms embedded in the text (the policeman on a bicycle in the current chapter is an obvious example, and very Dunsanian).6 Then, too, with his love of the countryside and idealization of rural life Tolkien may have thought an urban dialect more appropriate to ruffians than any country dialect. In any case, it is hardly credible that marauders in parts where ‘they have rarely heard of the king even’ should speak the King’s English.

  More curious than their speech is the trolls’ fate, the result of the first of a whole string of deceitful, misleading, or riddling conversations that run throughout the book. Despite Tolkien’s breezy addition of ‘as you know’ to the description of their petrification, he seems to have introduced the motif to English fiction;7 allergies to sunlight play no part in the most famous story involving trolls before Tolkien, ‘The Three Billy Goats Gruff’, nor in T.H. White’s short story ‘The Troll’ [1935]. In Dasent’s East o’ the Sun & West o’ the Moon [1859; expanded edition 1888], the trolls ‘burst’ with disappointment when defeated,8 while Lang’s Pink Fairy Book [1897] records a troll whose heart is hidden inside a fish; he dies when the fish is killed and cut up (as Tolkien noted, a very old motif, going back to Egyptian times; OFS.20). Katharine Briggs, who should certainly know, credits Tolkien with popularizing, but not inventing, the motif,9 and the evidence of Stith Thompson’s Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, with its massive listing of every ‘motif’ or plot-element in fairy tales and folklore, bears this out.10

  Tolkien’s source, insofar as he had a specific source, was probably one of two poems from the Elder Edda, Helgaqviða Hjervarðzsonar (‘The Lay of Helgi Hjorvard’s Son’) and Alvíssmál (‘The Lay of Alvis’). In the former, the heroes Atli and Helgi prolong a conversation with the giantess Hrimgerd, who seeks to destroy their ship and drown them all, until the sun rises and petrifies her:

  Atli said:

  ‘Turn your eyes east, Hrimgerd, Helgi’s runes

  have brought you down to death;

  at sea or in harbor the fleet is safe,

  and the warriors with it too.’

  Helgi said:

  ‘It’s day now, Hrimgerd, Atli delayed you–

  now you must face your fate:

  you’ll mark the harbor and make men laugh

  when they see you turned to stone.’

  —Helgaqviða Hjorvarðzsonar, stanzas 30–31;

  [rev. ed., 1990], p. 110.

  Similarly, in Alvíssmál, the dwarf Alvis (‘All-wise’) comes to Valhalla to claim his promised bride and is delayed by Thor, who questions him until sunrise, whereupon he is destroyed:

  Thor said:

  ‘I never met another man

  so learned in ancient lore;

  but too much talk has trapped you, dwarf,

  for you must die in daylight.

  The sun now shines into the hall.’

  —Alvíssmál, stanza 35;

  Poems from the Elder Edda, tr. Terry, p. 95.

  Neither of these victims is what Tolkien would call a troll, but Jacob Grimm notes in his massive compendium and overview of religion and folklore, Teutonic Mythology, ‘numerous approximations and overlappings between the giant-legend and those of dwarfs . . . as the comprehensive name troll in Scandinavian tradition would itself indicate. Dwarfs of the mountains are, like giants, liable to transformation into stone, as indeed they have sprung out of stone’ (Teutonic Mythology, tr. James Stallybrass [1883], volume II p. 552). On page 551 in the same book Grimm alludes to the many legends of neolithic stone circles being petrified giants (indeed, although Grimm does not mention it, one of the old names for Stonehenge was ‘The Giants’ Dance’), and concludes (citing Hrimgerd’s fate as his authority) that ‘It would appear . . . that giants, like dwarfs, have reason to dread the daylight, and if surprised by the break of day, they turn to stone.’ Tolkien obviously chose not to use this motif for his dwarves, but Grimm’s comment about the inclusiveness of ‘troll’ as a descriptive term perhaps helps explain the presence of giants in some of his stories (the nameless giant who starts all the trouble in Farmer Giles of Ham, the stone-giants in Chapter IV of The Hobbit) yet their apparent absence from the final version of his mythology as presented in The Lord of the Rings; see p. 144.

  So while Tolkien is on solid folk-lore ground in having his three trolls petrified by sunlight,† he is strongly at variance with what an English audience of his day had been taught to expect about trolls. In fact, he is ignoring or sidestepping a modern fairy-tale tr
adition in favor of reviving an ancient folk-lore belief once held by people who actually believed in such creatures, just as his elves (whom we shall shortly meet) are the elves of medieval Europe, not the ‘flower fairies’ of Conan Doyle’s gullible imagination. When given a choice, Tolkien opts over and over again for folk-lore over fairy tale (as the term was understood before Tolkien redefined it in On Fairy-Stories), ancient belief over artificial invention.

  The trolls’ hoard is almost as interesting as its owners. Bladorthin’s inability to read the runes on the swords is a simple set-up for the scene with Elrond in the next chapter, which was thus clearly already planned. Later development of the wizard as a peerless lore-master (as in, for example, the Moria gate and ‘Scroll of Isildur’ scenes in The Lord of the Rings) created a paradox that Elrond could read the runes while Gandalf the Grey could not, a puzzle that Tolkien resolved with typical panache in the 1960 Hobbit (see pp. 801 & 813). We will return to the swords and their explicit ties to the older mythology in the commentary following the next chapter.

  In terms of plot, the troll hoard can be viewed as a simple means of getting needed items plausibly into the characters’ hands – most notably the two swords and Bilbo’s dagger. But in the manuscript they find a fourth treasure, ultimately more important than any of the others: the troll-key. This is a major departure from the published text, where the key to the secret door in the Lonely Mountain is given by the wizard to Thorin in the first chapter along with the map, having conveniently been overlooked by the Necromancer’s jailers when they stripped his father and threw him into their dungeons. Tolkien’s original plan, however, was to have the necessary key turn up by chance (‘if chance we can call it’) along the way. This scheme remained in place all through the first draft. This extraordinary bit of luck is really no greater than that involved in Bilbo’s finding the ring or his happening in his wanderings below the mountains upon the one person who could show him the way out, and it avoids the puzzling carelessness of the Necromancer in the published version. Based upon the portrayal in ‘The Lay of Leithian’, Thû is a cunning, careful jailor who might conceivably miss a scrap of parchment or find it amusing to leave someone imprisoned without hope of escape with a map to a treasure he could never reach, but it seems utterly unlikely he would ever allow a prisoner to keep a key anywhere about his person.