'... What a pity Bilbo did not stab that vile creature, before he left him!'
'What nonsense you do talk sometimes, Frodo! ' said Gandalf.
'Pity! Pity would have prevented him, if he had thought of it. But he could not kill him anyway. It was against the Rules....'
'Of course, of course! What a thing to say. Bilbo could not do anything of the kind, then. But I am frightened. And I cannot feel any pity for Gollum. Do you mean to say that you, and the Elves, let him live on after all those horrible deeds? Now at any rate he is worse than a goblin, and just an enemy.'
'Yes, he deserved to die,' said Gandalf, 'and I don't think he can be cured before he dies. Yet even Gollum might prove useful for,good before the end. Anyway we did not kill him: he was very old and very wretched. The Wood-elves have him in prison ...'
It is not often that the precise moment at which my father returned to and changed a passage much earlier in The Lord of the Rings can be determined, but it can be done here. When he came to write the passage in the manuscript (D) of 'The Taming of Smeagol', Frodo's recollection of his conversation with Gandalf began at an earlier point than it had in the draft cited above:
It seemed to Frodo then that he heard quite plainly but far off voices out of the past.
What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, before he left him!
Pity! Pity would have prevented him. He could not kill him. It was against the Rules.
I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.
It was at this point that my father perceived that Gandalf had said rather more to Frodo, and on another page of drafting for 'The Taming of Smeagol' he wrote:
Deserved it! I daresay he did I does, said Gandalf. Many that live do deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then be not eager to deal out death even in the name of justice. For even the very wise cannot see all ends. I do not much hope that Gollum can be cured
This was then (as I judge) written into the manuscript of 'The Taming of Smeagol', in a slightly different form:
Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. Maybe the Enemy will get him. Maybe not. Even Gollum may do some good, willy nilly, before the end.
It was certainly at this time that my father changed the passage in 'Ancient History'. Omitting the words 'fearing for your own safety', he joined the new passage into that given on p. 96: '... Even the wise cannot see all ends. I do not much hope that Gollum can be cured before he dies. Yet even Gollum might prove useful for good before the end.' The two passages, that in 'The Shadow of the Past' (FR p. 69) and that in 'The Taming of Smeagol' (TT. p. 221), remain different in detail of wording, perhaps not intentionally at all points.
Lastly, there is an interesting difference between the passage in which Gollum makes his promise to Frodo as it was at this time and as it stands in TT. When Gollum said 'Smeagol will swear on the precious', there followed both in initial drafting and in the manuscript:
Frodo stepped back. 'On the precious!' he said. 'Oh, yes! And what will he swear?'
'To be very, very good,' said Gollum. Then crawling to Frodo's feet ...
This was changed at once, again both in draft and manuscript, to:
Frodo stepped back. 'On the precious?' he asked, puzzled for a moment: he had thought that precious was Gollum's self that he talked to. 'Ah! On the precious!' he said, with the disconcerting frankness that had already startled Sam [draft text: that surprised and alarmed Sam, and still more Gollum].
'One Ring to rule them all and in the Darkness bind them.
Would you commit your promises to that, Smeagol? ...' (&c. as in TT, pp. 224-5]
The final text of this passage was not substituted till much later.(15)
NOTES.
1. For the earliest ideas for this part of the narrative, when Sam crossed the Anduin alone and tracked Frodo together with Gollum, see the outline 'The Story Foreseen from Lorien', VII.328 - 9.
2. See the Note on Chronology following these Notes.
3. In 'The Story Foreseen from Lorien', VII.328, Frodo put on the Ring to escape from Gollum.
4. An argument against this is that in the 1957 letter my father gave the page-reference II.209, whereas this text extends to II.210. But there are various ways of explaining this, and the evidence of the manuscripts seems to me to count more heavily.
5. Together with these earliest manuscripts of 'The Taming of Smeagol' was found a slip bearing the following pencilled notes, which may very well not have been written all at one time (I have added the numbers)
(1) Account of Rings in Ch. II ['Ancient History'] needs altering a little. It was Elves who made the rings, which Sauron stole. He only made the One Ring. The Three were never in his possession and were unsullied.
(2) Tom could have got rid of the Ring all along [? without further]....... - if asked!
(3) The Company must carry ropes - either from Rivendell or from Lorien.
(4) Emyn Muil = Sarn Gebir as a knot or range of stony hills. [Sern Erain >] Sarn Aran the King Stones = the Gates of Sarn Gebir.
With (1) cf. VI.404; VII.254-5 and 259 - 60. In (2), most frustratingly, I have not been able to form any guess even at the altogether illegible word. (3) seems quite likely to have arisen while my father was pondering the descent from Sarn Gebir (Emyn Muil). On the absence of the mentions in LR of Sam's having no rope, and the absence of the passage concerning ropes at the leaving of Lothlórien, see VII.165, 183, 280. As regards (4), in the long-abandoned opening of the chapter the hills were
still called Sarn Gebir, but when my father took it up again in 1944 they had become the Emyn Muil (note 7). Many ephemeral names to replace Sam Gebir are found in notes given in VII.424. Sern Aranath replaced the Gates of Sarn Gebir on the manuscripts of 'The Great River' (VII.362 and note 21).
6. This sentence, little changed, is given to Frodo in TT (p. 211).
7. The first occurrence of Emyn Muil as written in a text ab initio. See note 5.
8. 30 fathoms: 180 feet.
9. leant forwards: i.e. sloped down outwards from the vertical, what my father earlier in this account called 'backward': 'The cliff was indeed no longer sheer, but sloped somewhat backward.'
10. In the following text the corresponding passage has: 'He cast the end to Sam, who tied it about his waist, and grasped the line above his head with both hands.' In the present text the sentence seems to have been left unfinished and in the air.
11. These figures were much changed. At first, as shown in any case by hobbit-ells, my father did not intend the 'English ell' of 45 inches, for by that measure 80 ells is 300 feet or 50 fathoms, getting on for double the height of the cliff as Frodo had reckoned it: whereas Sam thought that the rope of 80 ells would only be 'near enough' to Frodo's guess of 30 fathoms or 180 feet. My father seems first to have changed '80' to '77', and in the margin he wrote '2 feet' and '154'. He then changed '2 feet' to '2 1/2 feet', by which measure 77 ells would give 192 1/2 feet. At some point he struck out hobbit- in hobbit-ells; and finally he substituted 50 ells for the length of the rope. He had then evidently decided on the measure of 1 ell = 45 inches, according to which 50 ells would be equivalent to 187 1/2 feet, just a little longer than the height of the cliff as Frodo had estimated it. This was the measure in TT, where the cliff was about 18 fathoms, and the rope about 30 ells; taking these figures as exact, there would be 4 1/2 feet of rope to spare ('there was still a good bight in Frodo's hands, when Sam came to the bottom', TT p. 216).
12. The meaning is presumably 'I think I can just hold you', but hold is certainly not the word written.
13. See the Note on Chronology below.
14. My father now introduced a further obstacle to the sleuth by using the same piece of paper to write, one on top of the other, drafts for wholly different por
tions of the narrative.
15. In these texts the word precious when referring to the Ring is not capitalised, but capitals were introduced in subsequent type- scripts before the passage was changed to the final form.
Note on the Chronology.
In this chapter the narrative opens on the fifth evening since Frodo and Sam had fled from the Company. That night also they passed in the Emyn Muil, and it was at dusk on the following day (therefore 'the sixth evening') that they made their descent. Since the date of the Breaking of the Fellowship and the flight of Frodo and Sam was 26 January (for the chronology at this period see pp. 3 - 4, and VII.368, 406), this should mean that the chapter opens on the evening of the 30th, and that they climbed down from the hills on the evening of the 31st. On the other hand, the great storm is described (p. 95) as 'hastening with wind and thunder over the Emyn Muil, over Anduin, over the fields of Rohan, on to the Hornburg where the King Théoden stood at bay that night'. But the Battle of the Hornburg was fought on the night of 1 February (pp.5-6).
Two brief time-schemes, which I will call Scheme 'A' and Scheme B', bear on the question of the chronology of Frodo's wandering in the Emyn Muil relative to events in the lands west of Anduin. Scheme 'B', which begins at this point, is perfectly explicit:
Thursday Jan. 26 to Wednesday Feb. 1 Frodo and Sam in Emyn Muil (Sarn Gebir).
Night Feb. 1 - 2 Frodo and Sam meet Gollum. (Storm that reached Helm's Deep about midnight on Feb.1 - 2 passed over Emyn Muil earlier in the night.)
Scheme 'A', also beginning here, has:
Jan. 31 Cold night
Feb. 1 Descend, dusk (5.30). Meet Gollum about 10 p.m. Journey in gully till daybreak.
According to these, it would have been on the sixth evening since the flight of Frodo and Sam, not the fifth, that the chapter opens.
Since Vol. VII The Treason of Isengard was completed I have found two manuscript pages that are very clearly notes on chronological alterations needed that my father made in October 1944, some four and a half months after he had reached the end of The Two Towers (see VII.406 - 7). On 12 October (Letters no. 84) he wrote to me that he had 'struck a most awkward error (one or two days) in the synchronization', which would 'require tiresome small alterations in many chapters'; and on 16 October (Letters no. 85) he wrote that he had devised a solution 'by inserting an extra day's Entmoot, and extra days into Trotter's chase and Frodo's journey ...'
These notes refer chapter by chapter to the changes that would have to be made (but not to all). Some of them have been encountered already: the complex alterations to 'The Riders of Rohan' in VII.406; the additional day of the Entmoot in VII.419; and the changes in 'The White Rider' in VII.425. Nothing further need be said of these. But in a note on 'The Taming of Smeagol' the question of the storm is raised; and here my father directed that the reference to Théoden and the Hornburg should be cut out, because it 'won't fit'. He noted that the thunderstorm over the Emyn Muil was at about five o'clock in the evening of 31 January, while the thunder in the Battle of the Hornburg was about midnight of 1 February, and that 31 hours to travel a distance of some 350 miles was too slow; but no solution was proposed.
I have referred (VII.368) to an elaborate time-scheme that was made after the changes of October 1944 had been introduced. This, being a major working chronology, is in places fearsomely difficult to interpret, on account of later alterations and overwritings in ink over the original pencil. It is arranged in columns, describing 'synoptically', and fairly fully, the movements of all the major actors in the story on each day. It begins on the fifth day of the voyage down Anduin and ends at the beginning of the ascent to the pass of Kirith Ungol; and I would guess that it belongs with the work on chronology in October 1944, rather than later. On this scheme, which I will call 'S', my father afterwards wrote 'Old Timatal stuff' (Iceiandic timatal 'chronology'). In this scheme S the death of Boromir and the Breaking of the Fellowship was put back by a day, to Wednesday 25 January.
Jan.25 Company broken up. Death of Boromir.... Frodo and Sam cross river eastward and fly into E. of Emyn Muil.
Jan.26 Frodo and Sam wandering in Emyn Muil (1st evening since flight).
Jan. 27 In Emyn Muil (2nd evening).
Jan. 28 In Emyn Muil (3rd evening).
Jan. 29 In Emyn Muil (4th evening).
Jan. 30 On brink of Emyn Muil. Spend cold night under a rock (5th evening).
Jan. 31 Descent from Emyn Muil at nightfall. Meet Gollum about 10 p.m.
Journey in the gully (Jan.31/Feb.1).
Here therefore the opening of the story in 'The Taming of Smeagol' was on the evening of Jan. 30, and that was explicitly the sixth evening since the flight; but my father was for some reason not counting the first evening in the Emyn Muil (Jan. 25), and so he called that of Jan. 30 the fifth. Perhaps it was the same counting that explains the discrepancy between Scheme B and the text of the chapter (p. 100). And it may well be in any case that the records of these complicated manoeuvres are insufficient, or that there are clues which I have failed to perceive.
In Scheme B, as in the completed manuscript of the chapter (p. 95), it is explicit that the storm over the Emyn Muil reached the Hornburg later that same night; it was moving fast ('hastening with wind and thunder'). In Scheme S, however, this is not so; for (just as in the note of October 1944 referred to above) the descent of Frodo and Sam from the Emyn Muil was at nightfall of Jan. 31, but the Battle of the Hornburg began on the night of Feb. 1. S as written had no mention of the great storm, but my father added in against Jan. 31 'Thunder at nightfall', and then subsequently 'It crawls west', with a line apparently directing to Feb. 1. The storm over Rohan, slowly overtaking the Riders as they rode west across the plains on their second day out of Edoras (at the beginning of the chapter 'Helm's Deep') and bursting over the Hornburg in the middle of the night, was already present when my father came to write 'The Taming of Smeagol'. The storm over the Emyn Muil moving westwards, if not actually conceived for the purpose, obviously had the desirable effect of drawing the now sundered stories, east and west of Anduin, together. The revised passage about the storm in 'The Taming of Smeagol' given on p. 95 was clearly intended to allow for another day in the storm's progress, and implies that Frodo and Sam climbed down out of the hills on the day before the Battle of the Hornburg, as in S; and this resolves the problem of time and distance stated in the note of October 1944 by asserting that the great storm did not 'hasten', but 'rolled on slowly through the night.'
But in The Tale of Years the relative dating is entirely different:
Thus in the final chronology the Battle of the Hornburg took place four nights after the descent of Frodo and Sam and the meeting with Gollum. Yet the revised description of the westward course of the storm in 'The Taming of Smeagol' (p. 95) survived into the proof stage of The Lord of the Rings. On the proof my father noted against the passage: 'Chronology wrong. The storm of Frodo was 3 days before Théoden's ride' (i.e. 29 February and 2 March, the day on which Théoden rode from Edoras). The passage as it stands in TT, pp. 215-16, was substituted at the eleventh hour: giving the great storm a more widely curving path, and suggesting, perhaps, a reinforcement of its power and magnitude as it passed slowly over Ered Nimrais.
II. THE PASSAGE OF THE MARSHES.
The writing of this chapter can again be closely dated from the letters that my father wrote to me in South Africa in 1944. On the 13th of April (Letters no. 60) he said that on the previous day he had read his 'recent chapter' ('The Taming of Smeagol') to C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams, and that he had begun another. On the 18th April (Letters no. 61) he wrote: I hope to see C.S.L. and Charles W. tomorrow morning and read my next chapter - on the passage of the Dead Marshes and the approach to the Gates of Mordor, which I have now practically finished.'(1) And on the 23rd of April (Letters no. 62) he wrote: 'I read my second chapter, Passage of the Dead Marshes, to: Lewis and Williams on Wed. morning [19 April). It was approved. I have now nearly done a third: Gates of the Land of
Shadow. But this story takes me in charge, and I have already taken three chapters over what was meant to be one!' The completed manuscript of 'The Passage of the Marshes' was indeed first entitled 'Kirith Ungol' (that being still the name of the main pass into Mordor) - for he began writing the manuscript before he had by any means finished the initial drafting of the chapter.
Essential ideas for this part of the narrative had in fact emerged a long time before, in the outline The Story Foreseen from Lórien (VII.329 - 30) - when he estimated that the chapter would be numbered XXV, eight less than the event had proved. In that outline he wrote:
Gollum pleads for forgiveness, and promises help, and having nowhere else to turn Frodo accepts. Gollum says he will lead them over the Dead Marshes to Kirith Ungol. (Chuckling to himself to think that that is just the way he would wish them to go.) ...
They sleep in pairs, so that one is always awake with Gollum.
Gollum all the while is scheming to betray Frodo. He leads them cleverly over the Dead Marshes. There are dead green faces in the stagnant pools; and the dry reeds hiss like snakes. Frodo feels the strength of the searching eye as they proceed.
The History of Middle Earth: Volume 8 - The War of the Ring Page 13
