The History of the Hobbit Read online

  In the top margin of this sixth and final page of the fragment, Tolkien wrote the following list of dwarves’ names:

  Dwalin Balin Fili Kili Dori Nori OiTN17 Oin & Gloin Bifur Bofur Bombur Gandalf

  It will be noted that all the dwarves are named here, and in the order of their appearance in the typescript made from the now-vanished opening pages of this chapter, even down to the detail of Fili naming himself before Kili (their names being transposed in the final book; cf. DAA.39). From the ink, this list of names probably dates from the original period of composition or shortly thereafter. Much later, probably at the same time as he added the note to the other side of this sheet that it was the ‘Only page preserved . . .’ (cf. Note I above), Tolkien added the following in pencil at the end of the line:

  NB Gandalf was originally

  Chief Dwarf (=Thorin) and

  Gandalf was called Bladorthin.

  Here the fragment ends, in mid-sentence at the bottom of a page, and it is probable that no more was written at this stage. But from what we have we can, after the fashion of Sir Thomas Browne,TN18 make some deductions about the contents of the missing pages that once preceded it; see the commentary that follows.

  TEXT NOTES

  1 This sentence originally continued with a semicolon followed by the word ‘and’, but these were cancelled and the period inserted.

  2 Originally this was followed by the word ‘and’ and the beginning of another word that either started with h-, tr-, or possibly th-; these were cancelled at once and the sentence continued as shown.

  3 Here ‘go out to fetch it’ was replaced by ‘pretend to fetch it’. Earlier in the sentence, in the haste of capturing the thoughts before they got away, Tolkien actually wrote ‘and more and half a mind’, which I have altered editorially to ‘and more than half a mind’.

  4 This sentence was revised to read ‘Suddenly he found the [singing >] music & song had stopped and they were all looking at him . . .’

  5 Tolkien originally began to write ‘Bilbo’ here – i.e., ‘both halves of B[ilbo’s mind]’.

  6 This appositive, which originally followed ‘fellow conspirator’ on the next line in the manuscript, was bracketed and marked for insertion at this point. Tolkien originally began the line with ‘Dwa’ (i.e., Dwarves), which was immediately cancelled; similarly, initially the name ‘Bladorthin’ was followed by an incomplete phrase (‘Bladorthin of the’), but this too was immediately cancelled and we have no way of knowing what the wizard’s completed title or derivation might have been.

  7 The name of this battle (in the published book simply ‘the Battle of the Green Fields’) underwent several changes in this earliest manuscript mention. First Tolkien wrote ‘the Battle of the’ followed by a cancelled, illegible word of four or five letters that ended in -ll (possibly ‘Bull-’?). Then he resumed with ‘Green Fields of Fellin’. Later he cancelled ‘Fellin’ and wrote ‘Fao’ above it, but struck this out in turn (probably at once, without completing the word) and replaced it with ‘Merria’. None of these names appear elsewhere in the legendarium, the closest approach being the Merrill, one of the rivers of Rivendell (HME VI.205). I cannot identify the meaning of these names, nor the language(s) to which they belong, although Taum Santoski left behind a linguistic note associating Fellin with Noldorin fela (cave) – cf. Finrod Felagund (‘Finrod, lord of caves’) – and suggesting a connection between Merria and Quenya merka (‘wild’); cf. ‘The Etymologies’, HME V.381 (under the root PHÉLEG-) and 373 (under the root MERÉK-). In any case, it appears not to have been a direct translation of ‘Green Fields’, since the Elvish words for ‘green’ are laeg or calen (Sindarin) [Letters pp. 282 & 382] and laiqa (Quenya) [‘The Etymologies’, HME V.368], respectively, each of which has deep roots to the early days of the mythology.

  8 The name ‘King Fingolfin’ is written in the left margin alongside this line. See pp. 15 & 24–5 for commentary on Tolkien’s unexpected use here of this elven name, which in The Silmarillion is given to the High King of the Noldor, one of the greatest of the elf-princes fighting in the wars against Morgoth.

  9 This long parenthetical kept expanding as Tolkien wrote; originally he intended it to end after ‘exaggeration’, then after ‘any hobbit’, but deleted the closing parenthesis each time and in the event failed to ever provide one, so I have added it editorially at what seems the appropriate place.

  10 This sentence was altered through deletions to read ‘In the meanwhile Bullroarer’s gentler descendant was recovering in the drawing room.’

  11 The question mark is in the original, and probably indicates Tolkien’s uncertainty about the appropriateness of the name. Like the other dwarf-names in this chapter, ‘Fimbulfambi’ is Old Norse and comes from the Elder Edda; see pp. 15 & 24 for the name’s source and meaning.

  12 Here we have, for the first and only time, the original name for the landmark that plays such a large part in the second half of the book. Tolkien originally wrote ‘the Black mountain’, then capitalized ‘Mountain’ and cancelled ‘Black’ to give just ‘the Mountain’, the designation it thereafter retained within the opening chapter; unnamed on the map, it does not gain its full name as the Lonely Mountain until early in what is now Chapter III (cf. p. 111 for its first appearance in the draft manuscript, and DAA.87 for the corresponding published text).

  Just before the word ‘country’ later in the same sentence, Tolkien began to write a word which seems to have started with a capital ‘K’; if so, then this might be the first (abortive) reference to the Kingdom under the Mountain.

  13 The rest of the page, from this point on, is the first map of the Mountain: see the Frontispiece and the commentary beginning on p. 17.

  14 Here Tolkien originally began to write a name beginning with D, but immediately cancelled it and wrote Gandalf instead. While this might have been either Dwalin or Dori, the former is more likely, since the old dwarf had already taken part in the conversation and would do so again a few paragraphs later.

  15 Tolkien originally began the next sentence

  ‘Yes’ said the

  then changed this to

  ‘It w[ould]

  before finally settling on

  ‘I told you last Thursday it would have to be a burglary not a battle . . .

  16 Tolkien struck a line through part of this sentence: ‘. . . and there are none or few left of men dwarves elves and hobbits not to speak of heroes’. Presumably the cancellation of the word ‘left’ was inadvertent, and he intended the revised line to read ‘and there are none or few left, not to speak of heroes’.

  17 Christopher Tolkien reads this name as Oi rather than Ori, the name we would have expected, and notes (Foreword, page iv; personal correspondence, CT to JDR, 4th November 1994) that Ái is a dwarf-name appearing in the Völuspá, one of the component poems that make up The Elder Edda. See the commentary on the dwarves’ names in Appendix III for more on this and other variants.

  18 ‘What song the Sirens sang, or what name Achilles assumed among women, though puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture.’ – Sir Thomas Browne, Urn Burial [1658].

  (i)

  The Lost Opening

  In general structure, the lost opening must have paralleled that of subsequent versions fairly closely, however much it may have differed in detail. We know from other accounts that the opening line was either exactly the same as the familiar one in the published text or some close variation on it: e.g., ‘In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit’ or even ‘At the edge of his hole stood the hobbit’ (see ‘The Chronology of Composition’, pp. xii – xiii). References in the fragment to Bilbo’s ‘Tookish’ side show that the Took/Baggins dichotomy was already well-established, even at this early stage, and the motif of the ‘Unexpected Party’ is clearly present. The two references to Bilbo as the fourteenth member of the party make it quite clear that Bladorthin’s withdrawal from active participation at some point had been foreseen from the outset and was not a later develo
pment (although, as we shall see, the exact timing of his departure remained undecided for a considerable time). The dwarves’ personalities are, for the most part, much as they remain in later drafts, though it is interesting to note that more of them participate in the discussion than will later be the case. Thus Dwalin, Gloin, Balin, and Gandalf all have speaking parts in rapid succession, and references to Fili and Kili’s youth and Oin’s having been the one to find the secret mark on Bilbo’s door bring more of the full cast into play; Tolkien seems to be trying to make use of the full ensemble of his characters. Later streamlining will reduce the number of dwarven speakers in this passage from four to two, reassigning Dwalin’s speech to Gloin and Balin’s to Gandalf, retaining the reference to Fili and Kili while dropping all mention of Oin’s contribution. While some interesting detail is thus lost, Tolkien’s decision to focus the active roles on only a few of the dwarves (primarily Gandalf, Balin, Fili, and Kili, with lesser roles delegated to Dori and Bombur) makes it much easier for someone listening to the story to keep the characters straight. We might regret that some of the dwarves are relegated to such obscurity that they have virtually no speaking parts at all,1 but overall the story is strengthened by the simplification.

  At least one poem, the dwarves’ song about their lost treasure, was already part of the story, as may be deduced from the opening line of the fragment. A single line of this song (‘To claim our long forgotten gold’) survives by chance, thanks to Tolkien’s thrifty re-use of paper: he originally wrote this line on the first surviving sheet of the fragment (Marq. 1/1/22:2), then crossed it out, turned the page upside down and over, and used its reversed back (1/1/22:1) to draft the next bit of text (the section immediately following the now-lost poem; i.e., the beginning section of our fragment).

  (ii)

  Nomenclature in the Pryftan Fragment

  The most startling thing about the fragment, from the point of view of readers familiar with the later published text, are the unfamiliar names given to several of the major characters and places: Pryftan instead of Smaug, the Black Mountain and Wild Wood instead of the Lonely Mountain and Mirkwood, Bladorthin instead of Gandalf, and especially Gandalf the dwarf instead of Thorin Oakenshield (son of Thrain son of Thror). Tolkien prided himself on his nomenclature (radio interview with Denys Gueroult, BBC, 1965; see also JRRT to SU, 16th December 1937; Letters p. 26), and rightly so; it is a point on which he excels any other writer of fantasy, even Dunsany and Morris – he was able to embrace the exoticism of the one and plainstyle of the other as the occasion warrants without ever losing his own distinctive touch. In point of fact, assigning the name ‘Gandalf’ to a dwarf and ‘Bladorthin’ to a wizard is quite appropriate. The dwarf-name comes from the same list in the Elder Edda, the Dvergatal, that provided the names of all but one of the dwarves who accompany Bilbo on this quest;2 like them, it is Old Norse. Fimbulfambi, the original name tentatively given to the King under the Mountain, the character who would later become Thror the Old, likewise comes from Old Norse; this time from the bit of eddic lore known as the Hávamál.3 Bladorthin, by contrast, is Elvish4 – specifically, Sindarin, or ‘Noldorin’ as it was called at the time (see Note 13 below for the distinction between Gnomish, Noldorin, and Sindarin) – and as such helps distinguish the wizard from his associates, just as the very English-sounding ‘Bilbo Baggins’ sets the hobbit apart from the rest of the company.5

  No less surprising is the use of the name Fingolfin for the goblin-king killed by Bullroarer Took: the first of many borrowings that explicitly link Mr Baggins’s world to that of the mythology. While the name was undoubtedly appropriate in form, containing as it does the key ‘golf’ element necessary for the joke, it nonetheless comes as a great shock to readers familiar with the great elven-king as he appears in The Silmarillion, the ‘Sketch of the Mythology’, and ‘The Lay of Leithian’ to have it assigned, even briefly, to a goblin-king.6

  It seems quite clear that Tolkien is here, as elsewhere in The Hobbit, drawing names from already-written tales and fragmentary sketches with little concern for how well their new use corresponds to that of their first appearance. This is quite understandable when we remember that these were, after all, unpublished and mostly unfinished stories known to (at most) two or three other people. We know from other evidence that Tolkien spent a great amount of time crafting names for his characters (in the Lord of the Rings papers, an entire page of rough workings survives to show how Tolkien worked his way through over thirty rejected names for his ranger Trotter (i.e., ‘Strider’) before eventually coming up with Aragorn). Any artist might want to find a way to reuse unpublished material arrived at with such effort, and Tolkien was thriftier than most; the totality of his work also has a unity unusual in any author. His mythology filled his mind to the extent that it is no surprise to find him borrowing names, ideas, and themes from it in a new work; indeed, it would be surprising if he did not. As he himself said in 1950, ‘though shelved . . . the Silmarillion and all that has refused to be suppressed. It has bubbled up, infiltrated, and probably spoiled everything (that even remotely approached “Faery”) which I have tried to write since. It was kept out of Farmer Giles with an effort, but stopped the continuation. Its shadow was deep on the later parts of The Hobbit . . .’ (JRRT to SU, 24th February 1950; Letters p. 136).

  Several other miscellaneous points of the fragment deserve commentary. The golf joke was redoubled by later additions so that the goblin king’s death provided the occasion for the creation of not one but two new games for survivors of the battle: golf and chess. Fortunately, Tolkien soon thought better of this rather forced jollity and it vanishes without a trace at the next stage, where the original joke was restored to its full glory. References to ‘the Water’ and Bilbo’s map of ‘the County Round’ (not, note, ‘The Shire’ – the latter conception did not yet exist) show that the essential neighborhood surrounding Bag-end (already so named) is much as it remains. Indeed, for all the small but significant differences, it is surprising how closely the final story follows this first hasty draft, sometimes even in phrasing. One interesting detail that did not survive is contained in Bladorthin’s cancelled line about his efforts to find a hero or warrior to join the expedition, only to discover that the warriors are all ‘busy fighting one another in far lands’ – echoes of the wars of Beleriand in the Silmarillion tradition, perhaps? – while as for heroes ‘in this neighbourhood . . . there are none or few left, of men, dwarves, elves, or hobbits’. The idea of heroic dragon-slaying hobbit warriors is an intriguing one, and may have influenced both the elusive figure in the Lord of the Rings manuscripts of Peregrin Boffin, or Trotter, the hobbit ranger who eventually metamorphosed into Strider (cf. HME VI.371 & 385), as well as Tolkien’s original plan for the climax of The Hobbit, described in Plot Notes B & C, that it would be Bilbo himself who would slay the dragon (see pages 364 & 496).

  (iii)

  The Geography of the Tale & The First Map

  One of the most remarkable things about this fragmentary draft, and one of the ways in which it most differs from the published text, is the casual use of place-names taken from the real world: China, the Gobi Desert, Hindu Kush, even the Shetland Islands (one assumes, from the mention of the ponies). At first, this gives the reader the impression that Mr Baggins’ world is a totally different place from the legendary world of The Silmarillion. But this impression is deceptive, especially when we consider that in the early stages of the mythology Luthany, the lonely isle later known as Tol Eressëa, was England itself (BLT I.24–5); Kortirion among the trees the city of Warwick; Tavrobel the village in Staffordshire where the Tolkiens lived in the early days of their marriage. As Tolkien originally conceived it, his stories told the mythic history of England and the neighboring lands; a conception he never completely abandoned.7 Christopher Tolkien warns us time and again in his edition of The Book of Lost Tales that just because an element drops out of the later versions of one of his father’s stories does not necessarily mean that
the conception had been abandoned; often it simply shifted into the background, held in abeyance. The same is undoubtedly true of this element of The Hobbit.

  That Bilbo’s world, the lands of The Silmarillion, and our own world are all one (albeit at different points in history) is demonstrable through many of Tolkien’s explicit statements:

  ‘Middle-earth’, by the way, is not a name of a never-never land without relation to the world we live in (like the Mercury of Eddison8). It is just a use of Middle English middel-erde (or erthe), altered from Old English Middangeard: the name for the inhabited lands of Men ‘between the seas’. And though I have not attempted to relate the shape of the mountains and land-masses to what geologists may say or surmise about the nearer past, imaginatively this ‘history’ is supposed to take place in a period of the actual Old World of this planet.

  —JRRT to Houghton Mifflin Co., 30th June 1955; Letters p. 220.

  Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed; but the regions in which Hobbits then lived were doubtless the same as those in which they still linger: the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea.

  —LotR. 14; italics mine.

  The Lord of the Rings . . . takes place in the Northern hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather.

  —JRRT to Forrest J. Ackerman, June 1958; Letters p. 272.

  Thus a real constellation like the Big Dipper (or, as Tolkien preferred to call it, the Sickle), set in the sky by Elbereth ‘as a challenge to Melkor . . . and sign of doom’ (Silm.48) appears on Fimbulfambi’s map and can be seen by Frodo in the night sky over Bree (LotR.191); the calendars in Appendix D of The Lord of the Rings are calculated to fit a planet with exactly Earth’s orbit, and so forth. It is dangerous to extrapolate backwards from The Lord of the Rings into The Hobbit, but it seems safe to conclude that Bilbo’s story shares this one characteristic at least with the works that both preceded and follow it: all are assumed to take place in the legendary past of our planet. The ‘legendary’ part is worth stressing, since Tolkien was writing fantasy, not pseudo-history or pseudoscience à la Ignatius Donnelly or Immanuel Velikovsky. This liberates him from any obligation to make the details of his setting consistent with ‘what geologists may say or surmise’ and to replace real prehistory (insofar as we know it) with a feigned private history of his own devising.9 Like the Britain of Geoffrey of Monmouth and Aegidius of Ham, Bilbo’s world is full of anachronisms, from policemen on bicycles to mantle clocks; in this The Hobbit resembles works like Dunsany’s ‘The Bird of the Difficult Eye’ and ‘The Long Porter’s Tale’ (both in The Last Book of Wonder [1916]) more than, say, the neo-medieval romances of William Morris.