The History of the Hobbit Read online

  ‘Murderers and elf-friends!’ the great-goblin shouted. ‘Slash them, beat them, gash them – take them away to dark holes full of snakes, and let them never see the light again.’

  He was [so in a >] in such a rage he jumped off his seat and rushed at Gandalf with his mouth open.

  Just at that very moment all the lights went out in [the] cavern, and the great fire went off ‘poof’ into a tower of blue-glowing smoke right up to the roof, and scattered burning white sparks all among the goblins.

  The yells and yammers, croaking, jibbering and jabbering, howls growls and curses, shrieks and skriking that followed passes all description.TN14 Several hundred cats and wolves being roasted alive together could [> would] not have compared with it. The sparks were burning holes in the goblins, and the smoke made the dark too thick for even them to see in it, and soon they were falling over one another and rolling in heaps on the floor and biting and kicking and fighting [like >] as if they had all gone mad. Suddenly a sword flashed in its own light. Bilbo saw it go right through the great goblin where he stood dumbfounded in the middle of his rage. He fell dead, and the goblin soldiers fled before the sword shrieking into the darkness.

  The sword went back into its sheath. ‘Follow me quick!’ said a voice fierce and quiet, and before Bilbo understood he was trotting along again at the end of the line as fast as he could trot, down more dark passages with the yells of the goblin-hall growing fainter behind him. A faint light was leading them on.

  ‘Quicker quicker!’ said the voice ‘the torches will soon be relit’. [Now Dori who was at the back next to Bilbo, and a decent fellow, picked up the hobbit and put him on his shoulders, and off they went as >] ‘Half a minute’ said Dori. He made the hobbit scramble on his shoulders as best he could with his tied hands and chain and everything, and then off they went at a run with a clink clink of chains, and many a stumble, since they had no hands to steady them. Not for a long while did they stop, and they must have been right down in the very mountain’s heart by that time.

  Then Bladorthin lit up his wand. Of course it was Bladorthin, and wait a minute if you want to know how he got there. He took out his sword and it flashed in the dark all by itself. [It was refreshed after >] It burned with rage so that it shone [> gleamed] if goblins were about; and it was brighter then ever after killing the great goblin [> now it was as bright as pale blue flame for pleasure in the killing of the great lord of the cave]. Certainly it made no bother about cutting through the goblin-chains, and setting all the prisoners free as quick as possible. This sword’s name was Glamdring (which means goblin-beater)TN15 and it was if anything [ >] a better sword than Orcrist. Oh no Orcrist wasn’t lost, Bladorthin had [

ut it >] brought it away all right. He thought of most things, and did what he could.

  ‘Are we all here?’ said he. ‘Let me see: one,TN16 two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven (where are Fili and Kili; here they are) twelve, thirteen, and here’s Mr Baggins – fourteen. Well well, it might be worse, and then again it might be a deal better. No ponies, no food, and no knowing quite where we are, and hordes of angry goblins behind! On we go’.

  On they went. He was quite right, they began to hear goblin-noises, and horrible cries far behind in the passages they had come through. That sent them on faster than ever, and as poor Bilbo couldn’t possibly go half as fast (dwarves can shamble along a good pace, I can tell you, when they have to), they took it in turns to carry him on their backs.

  Still goblins go faster, and also the goblins knew the ways (they had made them themselves); so do what they would [> the dwarves would] the cries of the goblins got closer and closer. Now they could even hear the flap of their feet, many many feet, which seemed only just round the last corner. The blink of red torches could be seen [in the tunnel behind >] behind them in the tunnel they were following. They were getting deadly tired. ‘Why o why did I ever leave my hobbit-hole’ said poor Mr Baggins bumping up and down on Bombur’s back; and ‘why o why did I ever bring a wretched little hobbit on a treasure hunt’ thought poor Bombur staggering along with the sweat dripping down his nose in heat and terror.

  Now Bladorthin fell behind. They turned a sharp corner – ‘about turn!’ he said. ‘Draw your sword Gandalf’. There was nothing else to be done. Nor did the goblins like it.

  They came scurrying round the corner to find Goblin-slasher and Goblin-beater shining cold and bright right in their astonished eyes. They dropped their torches and gave one yell before they were killed. The others yelled still more behind, and ran back knocking over the ones that were running after them. ‘Orcrist and Glamdring’TN17 they shrieked and soon they were all in confusion, and most of them hustling back the way they had come.

  It was quite a long time before they dared to turn that corner. By that time the dwarves had gone on again, a long long way on into the dark tunnels of the goblins’ kingdom. When they found out that, they put out their torches and they put on soft soft shoes, and they chose out their very quickest runners. These ran on as quick as weasels in the dark with hardly as much noise as bats (of which there were lots in those nasty holes). That is why neither Bilbo, nor the dwarves, nor even Bladorthin heard them coming. Nor did they see them. But the goblins could see them when they had [come >] nearly overtaken them, for Bladorthin was letting his wand give out a faint light to help them as they went along.

  Quite suddenly Dori at the back (with Bilbo on his shoulders) was grabbed from behind in the dark. He shouted and fell and Bilbo rolled off his shoulders into the dark, bumped his head and remembered nothing more.

  TEXT NOTES

  1 The narrator’s observation that Bilbo’s misgivings were ‘quite right’ (and that Gandalf & Company would not reach the mountain by Durin’s Day) show that the expanded time scheme in which Bilbo and his companions would be more than a year on the road was already in place; see Plot Notes A. In the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/54:1), this paragraph was merged with the one preceding it by the deletion (through erasure) of the narrator’s comment and the addition (in ink, in the left margin) of the others’ ‘equally gloomy thoughts’, and also merged with the one following it by the addition of a sentence about the wizard’s foreboding and the dwarves’ lack of recent experience in these parts. Finally, the paragraph after that was changed from second person to third, so the narrator’s breezy segue (‘Now you will want to know what really happened’) becomes part of the wizard’s forebodings (‘He knew that something unexpected might happen . . .’).

  2 The illegible word before ‘the valleys’ starts with r and seems to end in s, perhaps ruins.

  3 The typescript adds the detail ‘the youngest of the dwarves by some fifty years’ (Marq. 1/1/54:2). From this, combined with the information in the dwarven family tree in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings (LotR.1117), we can deduce that the six dwarves among Bilbo’s companions whose birth dates are not given (Dori, Nori, Ori, Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur) were all born after T.A. 2763 (Balin’s birthdate, since we know he is the eldest after Thorin; see p. 380) but before about T.A. 2809 (fifty years before Fili’s birth), although none of this precision of detail existed at the time The Hobbit was written.

  4 Added in the left margin, and marked for insertion either within the parenthetical after ‘little Bilbo’ or at the end of the sentence: ‘and they had to unpack the ponies or they would have stuck’.

  5 This last line was cancelled and replaced by the following in the margin: ‘And that was the last time they used their ponies, baggage, packages tools & paraphernalia they had brought with them.’ – a change necessitated by their later sight of the ponies & baggage on p. 131.

  6 Therefore there are presumably eighty-six goblins who take part in this ambush: 6 x 13 = 78 for the dwarves, + 2 for Bilbo = 80, + 6 for Bladorthin (all of whom are struck dead) = a total of 86; rather a lot for a cavern of ‘quite a good size, but not too big’, unless more of Bilbo’s dream comes true than he realizes, and the cave actually does grow larger
.

  7 The phrase taken to living is interesting, since it implies that this was not their original habitat; presumably the fallen Dark Lord’s minions are conceived as having hidden themselves in remote places to escape destruction, from which havens they have rebuilt their numbers and are now beginning to assault others again; cf. a similar motif at the end of the Second Age and Third Age.

  8 These three lines (‘Swish smack . . . dare to shirk’) were originally written at the beginning of the second stanza, then cancelled and moved to their present position. That is, lines 9–11 of the final poem were originally lines 5–7 of the draft. The poem is otherwise very neatly written into the page, indicating that this is fair copy from some rough drafting that does not survive; the replacement of ‘laugh’ by ‘quaff’ in line 12 was probably required because of a copying error, not a deliberate change.

  9 This line was later changed to read ‘. . . with a great red fire in the middle & torches . . .’

  10 This passage was revised via deletions and additions to read as follows: ‘. . . also instruments of torture they make very well (or get other people to make to their design – prisoners and slaves that have to work till they die for want of air & light.) I have no doubt they invented a great many of the machines – for wheels and engines, always delighted them, and also not working with their own hands more than they were obliged . . .’

  11 The goblin-chief is referred to in lower case, variously as ‘the big goblin’, ‘the great goblin’, and ‘the great-goblin’; not until the typescript (1/1/54:5) does his description become a proper name: the Great Goblin. Note, however, the reference to the goblin ‘King’ in the next chapter, p. 163.

  12 This sentence was slightly altered to read ‘. . . on a journey to visit our relatives, our nephews and nieces . . .’ Aside from the much later references to Fili and Kili’s mother in Chapters X & XVIII, this is the only reference to female dwarves in The Hobbit.

  13 This is the first appearance of the name Orcrist, a name which as the narrator says indeed means ‘Goblin-slasher’ in Gnomish; cf. the Gnomish Lexicon, page 63, which glosses orc as ‘goblin. (children of Melko.)’, and page 27, which glosses crist as ‘knife. slash – slice’. The Noldorin equivalent given in ‘The Etymologies’ is similar but the slight difference is significant, since it glosses crist as ‘a cleaver, sword’ (HME V.365). The passage in which Elrond names the swords in Chapter III did not appear in the manuscript text of that chapter, entering there instead in the First Typescript (1/1/53:5):

  . . . many ages ago. This, Thorin, the runes name Orcrist, the Goblin-cleaver in the ancient tongue of Gondolin; it was a famous blade. This, Gandalf, was Glamdring, Foe-hammer that the king of Gondolin once wore. I wonder indeed where the trolls found them. Keep them well!

  The word ‘cleaver’ here is written in ink over an erasure, but the word Tolkien originally typed has been obliterated and cannot be recovered. The penultimate sentence in this passage was cancelled in ink and does not appear in the Second Typescript (1/1/34:5).

  14 As Douglas Anderson notes in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.111), ‘skriking’ is not Tolkien’s own coinage but a dialectical word meaning a shrill screeching; Anderson also notes that the word appears in Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, to which Tolkien contributed a Foreword.

  15 This is the first appearance of the name Glamdring, which like ‘Orcrist’ is either Gnomish or Noldorin. The Gnomish Lexicon (page 39) gives ‘glam · hoth’ as the Gnomish word for the orcs. ‘Glam’ (glâm) itself means hatred or loathing, while ‘hoth’ (ibid. p. 49) means a folk, people, or army; thus glam+hoth = ‘People of [the] dreadful Hate’. In ‘The Etymologies’ glam has come to mean ‘shouting, confused noise’ and though glamhoth is still a name for the orcs, in Noldorin the word is said to mean ‘the barbaric host’ (HME V.358). I cannot account for the second half of the name, -dring, in Gnomish, but ‘The Etymologies’ has an entry defining it as Noldorin for ‘beat, strike’ (HME V.355), which is close enough to ‘hammer’ that we can consider them equivalent. The later translation ‘foe-hammer’ is thus a slightly less literal and somewhat more poetic, though still accurate, translation than ‘goblin-cleaver’, and avoids confusing the unphilological reader as why two such different words (Glam-, Orc-) were, in the original, both translated as ‘goblin’.

  16 Added: ‘(that’s Gandalf)’.

  17 Penciled over the Elvish words are the orcish names for these swords: ‘Biter and Beater’.

  (i)

  Goblins

  In keeping with the pattern established in the preceding chapters, this chapter introduces yet another a new race: the goblins. Like the elves and dwarves, goblins already had a long history in Tolkien’s writings predating The Hobbit. Even if we overlook the undifferentiated fairy-folk lumped under the ‘goblin’ label in ‘Goblin Feet’ [published 1915], goblins were featured prominently throughout the early Silmarillion material, especially in ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, and ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ [all written 1916–20]. Goblins fought alongside balrogs and dragons in the sack of Gondolin, and goblin-mercenaries aided the dwarves in looting Tinwelint’s caves in Artanor (the precursors in the legendarium to Thingol’s Thousand Caves of Menegroth in Doriath). The terms ‘goblin’ and ‘orc’ were used more or less interchangeably in the early material – thus in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’ we hear of ‘Melko’s goblins, the Orcs of the hills’ (BLT II.157), ‘the Orcs who are Melko’s goblins’ (BLT II.159), and ‘an innumerable host of the Orcs, the goblins of hatred’ (BLT II.176), while in ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ Beleg tracks ‘the band of Orcs . . . a band of the goblins of Melko’ (BLT II.77). It’s possible to read Orc as the more specific term and goblin as the more generic, but often ‘goblin’ apparently replaces the more common ‘orc’ simply for the sake of variety, especially in the alliterative poetry. On the whole, the evidence suggests that Tolkien preferred ‘orc’ for works in the direct line of the Silmarillion tradition (such as ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’, the narrative poems that make up The Lays of Beleriand, the 1930 Quenta, and so forth) and used ‘goblin’ in more light-hearted contexts, such as The Father Christmas Letters and The Hobbit.

  Also known as the Glamhoth (or ‘people of hate’), goblins seem to be one of the Úvanimor, the monster-folk ‘bred in the earth’ by Melko; a category that includes ‘monsters, giants, and ogres’ and, early on, possibly the dwarves as well (BLT I.236 & 75). In the early myth, they seem to have been created by Melko – according to the elven narrator of ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, ‘all that race were bred by Melko of the subterranean heats and slime’ (BLT II.159).1 Eventually Tolkien adopted the Augustinian view that evil cannot create but only corrupt and that therefore orcs must be one of the ‘Free Peoples’ who have been twisted and corrupted, probably elves (since orcs appear in the stories before the first humans awaken). Both views are present in The Lord of the Rings, where one character asserts that ‘Trolls are only counterfeits, made by the Enemy in the Great Darkness, in mockery of Ents, as Orcs were of Elves’ (LotR.507) and another ‘The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them . . .’ (LotR.948). In his later years, Tolkien wrestled with the problem and attempted to come to a definitive solution in a fascinating sequence of essays printed in Morgoth’s Ring (HME X.409–22; these essays were written c. 1959–60 & 1969). Among the solutions he toyed with were (a) orcs are animals without souls; their speech is parrot-like and what little rational will they seem to have is part of Morgoth’s dispersed personality;2 (b) the original orcs were the least of the spirits corrupted by Morgoth, just as balrogs are greater spirits. Once incarnate, they could procreate (just as Melian could give birth to Lúthien and Morgoth could toy with the idea of taking Lúthien as his wife or concubine; cf. Silm.180) and the very act would trap them within the bodies they had assumed; their descendents
would be weaker and weaker, perhaps dwindling in the end to mere poltergeists; (c) orcs are elves carried off by Morgoth from the awakening place, Cuiviénen, and corrupted. This is the position adopted in The Silmarillion:

  [T]his is held true by the wise of Eressëa, that all those of the Quendi [i.e., elves] who came into the hands of Melkor, ere Utumno was broken, were put there in prison, and by slow arts of cruelty were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs in envy and mockery of the Elves, of whom they were afterwards the bitterest foes . . . This it may be was the vilest deed of Melkor, and the most hateful to Ilúvatar. (Silm.50)

  and again:

  Whence they came, or what they were, the Elves knew not then, thinking them perhaps to be Avari [wild elves] who had become evil and savage in the wild; in which they guessed all too near, it is said. (Silm.94)

  Furthermore, in later times a strong human strain was added to the mix; in the essay on the Drúedain, the Wild Men of the Woods, an author’s note states that ‘Doubtless Morgoth, since he can make no living thing, bred Orcs from various kinds of Men’ and raises the possibility of some distant kinship between orcs and the Wild Men (or woodwoses), noting that ‘Orcs and Drûgs each regarded the other as renegades’ (Unfinished Tales p. 385). Finally, (d) some orc-leaders, the Great Orcs, were Maiar who took on orcish shape,3 but the majority of their followers were mortal and short-lived by elven or Númenórean standards, being bred (by Sauron, not Morgoth)4 from human stock. According to this last theory, orcs were capable of independent thought and even, theoretically, of repentance but were easily controlled by Morgoth or Sauron from afar, having been especially bred to be so dominated.