The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  If Bilbo’s impassioned ‘Tookish’ speech makes it clear that his world is firmly identified with our own, can it likewise be tied to the imaginative geography of Tolkien’s earlier tales? The answer, I believe, can be found by turning to Fimbulfambi’s Map. Although differing in significant details from the final version, it is remarkable how many permanent elements were already present and persisted from this first hasty sketch, which shows the mountain laid out two-dimensionally like a starfish. Among these details are the location of the Front Gate (labelled ‘FG’ on the map), the secret door (marked with an ‘F’ rune, as promised in Tolkien’s footnote on the preceding Ms. page; see p. 9), the ‘Ruins of Dale Town’, and something of the surrounding countryside: the River Running (which originally had an eastward course), the ‘WILD WOOD’, and the ‘WITHERED HEATH’.

  The Mountain’s north-east spur was only separated by a brief gap from another height that disappears off the map to the northeast, probably a chain of mountains – a feature that soon vanished from the Lonely Mountain maps (cf. ‘Thror’s Map I’, Plate I [top]) but remains in both the earliest sketch Wilderland map (part of Plot Notes B; see pp. 366–7) and also in the more polished Wilderland Map that accompanied the ‘Home Manuscript’ (Plate I [bottom]), which brings the Iron Hills down to almost connect with the Lonely Mountain.

  Later the original easterly course of the River Running was scratched out and the river is instead made to bend south once it passes the ruins of Dale Town. Several other new features are added as well: Lake Town upon the Long Lake (the former labeled on the map but not mentioned in the text, the latter named in the text but not labeled on the map), Mirkwood (originally along the bottom or southern border of the map, later expanded up the left margin to form the western border and then the whole southwest corner of the map), and the marshes between them. The Forest River, complete with northern bend before it empties into the lake, is present but not named. The addition of all these extra features makes this first map the ancestor not just of Thror’s Map but of the larger-scale Wilderland map as well. Finally, a third stage of additions to this map, probably made when the story had reached what is now Chapter XI (i.e., about two years after this first drafting), pencils in the dwarves’ first camp just to the west of the mountain’s southernmost spur (the height that would later be called Ravenhill). At the same time, Tolkien added the side view of the mountain (also in pencil) in the lower right-hand corner of this page; compare it with the more careful, nuanced version directly based upon it, drawn to accompany the ‘Home Manuscript’, which is reproduced on Plate II (top).

  Mirkwood and the Wild Wood are probably simply two names for the same place: the great primeval forest that once covered most of Europe, one of the remnants of which bears the name the Dark Forest to this day. As Tolkien notes in a letter to his eldest grandson,

  Mirkwood is not an invention of mine, but a very ancient name, weighted with legendary associations. It was probably the Primitive Germanic name for the great mountainous forest regions that anciently formed a barrier to the south of the lands of Germanic expansion. In some traditions it became used especially of the boundary between Goths and Huns . . .

  —JRRT to Michael George Tolkien, 29th July 1966; Letters p. 369.

  However, this is not just a borrowing from historical scholarship, as in the case of the dwarf-names (although it is that as well), but also from Tolkien’s literary roots: William Morris, perhaps his chief role model as an author, and one of the few whose influence he was proud to acknowledge,10 used the name Mirkwood in his novel The House of the Wolfings [1888] for the name of the great forest where the Germanic woodsmen who are the heroes of the story won a battle against the invading Romans. Furthermore, Carpenter tells us that this book was one of those Tolkien bought with the prize money he received when he won the Skeat Prize for English in the spring of 1914 (Carpenter, p. 69), just at the time when he was creating the first poems of his mythology.

  Can Mirkwood or the Wild Wood be tied to any of the great forests in Tolkien’s early mythology? Certainly Beleriand itself was originally called ‘Broseliand’ (later emended to ‘Broceliand’) in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (HME III.160), the 1930 Quenta (HME IV, pages 107–8, 115, 122, 125, and 131), and on the first Silmarillion map (ibid., between pages 220 & 221); a name clearly borrowed from the great Forest of Broceliand of Arthurian legend.11 A much better candidate, however, is Taur-na-Fuin (also known as Taur Fuin or simply Taurfuin), the Forest of Night. Comparison of the first Silmarillion map in Volume IV of The History of Middle-earth with Fimbulfambi’s Map shows a striking parallelism in the former’s placement of Taur-na-Fuin and Dor-na-Fauglith, the ruined plain to the north between Beleriand and Thangorodrim also known as Anfauglith, and the latter’s Wild Wood and Withered Heath; if the two maps were blended, the Mountain would probably be to the southeast of the highlands later know as Dorthonion, just off the eastern edge of the map, near where Tolkien would later place the Hill of Himring (cf. the published Silmarillion map). We are told by Bladorthin that the Withered Heath is ‘where the Great Dragons used to live’, and I think it more than coincidence that Anfauglith is where Glorund, Ancalagon the Black, and all the rest of Morgoth’s dragons are first seen by the outside world.

  This parallelism is strengthened by the figure of the Necromancer. In ‘The Lay of Leithian’ we are told that, after his defeat by Luthien and Huan, Thû the necromancer took the shape of a vampire (that is, a vampire bat) and flew

  to Taur-na-Fuin, a new throne

  and darker stronghold there to build.

  —‘The Lay of Leithian’, lines 2821–2822; HME III.255.

  The Quenta (circa 1930) simply states laconically that ‘Thû flew in bat’s form to Taur-na-Fuin’ and that after the destruction of his tower and Felagund’s burial there ‘Thû came there no more’ (HME IV.iii). In the published Silmarillion [1977] this becomes ‘Sauron [= Thû] . . . took the form of a vampire, great as a dark cloud across the moon, and he fled, dripping blood from his throat upon the trees, and came to Taur-nu-Fuin, and dwelt there, filling it with horror’ (Silm.175). As we shall see (p. 73), a cancelled manuscript reference early in the Second Phase makes explicit that the Necromancer whose tower Beren and Lúthien destroyed and the Necromancer in whose dungeons Bladorthin encountered Gandalf’s father are one and the same. Hence the conclusion seems inescapable that Taur-nu-Fuin, the forest to which Thû the necromancer fled to build ‘a new throne and darker stronghold’ and Mirkwood, where the Necromancer defeated by Beren and Lúthien now dwells at the time of Mr Baggins’ story, are one and the same. Its geographical location shifts as the ‘Third Age’ of Middle-earth slowly takes shape in its own right through the writing of The Hobbit itself, eventually (as the second layer of changes to Fimbulfambi’s Map show) developing its own landscape that could no longer be fitted easily into the older geography, so that ‘Mirkwood’ comes to occupy a central position in Wilderland (which now seems quite distinct from Beleriand) closer to that of the Forest of Doriath on the old Silmarillion maps rather than Dorthonion (the place of which is eventually taken by the Grey Mountains on the later Wilderland maps).

  A final piece of evidence for the original identification between the Mirkwood, Taur-na-Fuin, and the Wild Wood can be found in the illustrations. The first edition of The Hobbit featured a halftone of Mirkwood (see Plate VII [top]) that was unfortunately dropped from later reprintings. Comparison of this drawing with a painting Tolkien did of Taur-nu-Fuin (H-S#54) to illustrate the story of Túrin the Hapless shows that the two are identical, tree by tree. Only incidental details have changed: the two elves in the painting are not of course in the later drawing, replaced by a large spider and several extra mushrooms. By itself, this could be taken as just another example of Tolkien’s characteristic self-borrowing, but in conjunction with the other evidence, it seems conclusive: the two forests look the same because they are the same; the same patch of woods at two different points in its history.

  Two
curious points about the map itself should be noted. The first is the compass rose:

  Fig. 1: The compass rose from Fimbulfambi’s Map

  The pattern on top is clearly meant to represent the Big Dipper (the dark marks to the left of the constellation as reproduced in the Frontispiece are simply stray stains and splotches on the Ms.), and thus indicates north: the shift in orientation to turn the map on its side and place East at the top would not occur until much later. To the South is the sun. East is indicated by the sun rising above some sort of archway or gate, probably the Gates of Morn mentioned in ‘The Tale of the Sun and Moon’, which is described as ‘a great arch . . . all of shining gold and barred with silver gates’ (BLT I.216). West is marked by a three-tiered mountain, possibly meant to suggest the as-yet-unmentioned Misty Mountains (which do indeed lie west of the Lonely Mountain) but more probably the Mountain of the World, Taniquetil, in the Uttermost West. Only some two years earlier Tolkien had painted the magnificent picture of Mount Taniquetil (H-S#52) featured on the front cover of both the Bodleian centenary exhibition catalogue J. R. R. Tolkien: Life and Legend and of Artist & Illustrator, having already appeared in Pictures (as Plate 31). This famous painting shows Taniquetil as a tall peak surrounded by lesser heights which, in profile, would look very like the small icon on the compass rose.12

  The other puzzling feature about the map is that it does not, in fact, correspond to the one described in the accompanying text. Specifically, Balin points out ‘a picture of a dragon in red on the Mountain’, when there is neither dragon or any trace of red ink on this map. Furthermore, Bladorthin quotes the runic inscription, translating it as ‘Five feet high is the door, and four [> three] abreast may enter it’. In fact, literally transcribed, the runes on the map itself read as follows:

  FANG THE

  SECRET PASAGE

  OF THE DWARVES

  The runic system is the same as that followed in the published Hobbit – i.e., Tolkien used the historical Anglo-Saxon runes commonly known as the futhark rather than one of his invented alphabets such as the Cirth. The use of ‘Fang’ here is interesting, because it is an early example of his usage in The Hobbit of his invented languages (specifically, Gnomish, the language that eventually evolved into Sindarin).13 It is also an explicit link of the new story back to Tolkien’s earlier legendarium, the tales that were eventually published as The Silmarillion. In the earliest version of the legendarium, The Book of Lost Tales (1917–20), one of the two races of dwarves is known as the Indrafang or ‘Longbeards’; indeed, use of the word ‘fang’ for ‘beard’ persisted into The Lord of the Rings (Fangorn, ‘Tree-beard’). And, as we shall learn in the third chapter, Gandalf and all his companions belong to the Longbeards, or Durin’s Folk as they were later called, a fact first adumbrated by this runic passage.

  Below the runes and rather sinister-looking, long-nailed pointing hand was added a version of the text Bladorthin cited, along with the first draft of both the visible message on the map and what became the moon-runes passage:

  five feet high is the door and three may walk abreast

  Stand by the grey stone when the crow knocks and the rising sun [will >] at the moment of dawn on Durin’s Day will shine upon the keyhole.

  This second sentence was at some later point bracketed; the word ‘crow’ was replaced with ‘thrush’ and ‘keyhole’ changed to just ‘key’ (but the cancelled part of the word was underlined, possibly indicating it was to be retained after all). Then the whole sentence was cancelled and replaced with the following:

  Stand by the grey stone where the thrush knocks. Then the setting sun on the last light of Durin’s Day will shine on the key hole.

  The latter, of course, corresponds more closely to Elrond’s spontaneous translation of what he reads from the map in Chapter III; see p. 116.

  Taken together, these discrepancies in a rough draft text would mean little – even after publication, the words on the map and their translation in the text did not agree until this was put right in the second edition (see p. 749) – were it not for the specific reference to something that’s not there; i.e., the image of the dragon in red on the mountain. Given Tolkien’s fondness for ‘handouts’ – actual physical copies of documents seen by his characters, later examples of which include Bilbo’s contract (plate two of the Frontispiece) and the pages from the Book of Mazarbul (a similar impulse can be seen expressed in the Father Christmas Letters) – it’s quite possible that he made a fair copy map that is now lost. Perhaps Tolkien’s choice of words in his comment to Auden that ‘for some years I got no further than the production of Thror’s Map’ (see p. xii; italics mine) suggests a rather more elaborate map than this rough sketch drawn directly into the pages of the ongoing narrative, but this seems too slender a basis upon which to build much. If it ever existed, the lost map must have been quite similar to the next surviving map (Thror’s Map I; see Plate I [top]), which bears the label ‘Thror’s Map. Copied by B. Baggins’, retaining as it does the Northward orientation of Fimbulfambi’s Map and representing the Mountain with a very similar style of hatching. Here the runes translated by Bladorthin are in place, and the back of the map has the moon-runes drafted on the first map. Furthermore, the newer map shows the dragon right on the center of the Mountain, exactly as described by Balin, in contrast with the final published version of the map (Thror’s Map II), where the dragon is flying above the mountain, not resting on it, and the whole scene has been rotated 90 degrees to place East at the top of the map (contrast Plate I with DAA.50 & 97). But for all that, ‘Thror’s Map. Copied by B. Baggins’ cannot be the map Balin and Bladorthin are referring to, since the proper names written on it (Thror and Thrain) did not arise until near the end of the Second Phase, some two years after the Pryftan Fragment was abandoned.

  Chapter I(b)

  The Bladorthin Typescript

  At some point before the first few pages of the Pryftan Fragment were lost, Tolkien made the following typescript (Marq. 1/1/27:1–12). Only twelve pages long, the portion near the end that overlaps the surviving pages of the manuscript shows that it follows the first rough draft very closely, incorporating changes and corrections jotted onto the Ms. pages, along with a few further revisions made in the course of typing (mainly slight improvements of phrasing and substitutions to avoid repetition). This, and the fact that the names have not yet undergone any changes (for example, the dragon’s name is still ‘Pryftan’ and ‘Fingolfin’ is the goblin king), suggests it was made very shortly after the manuscript itself, probably as fair copy. This typescript is, then, the closest approximation we have to the lost opening and marks the fullest extent of the First Phase of the book’s composition. The typescript was, typically, later revised itself, but I give it here as it was originally typed, aside from silently incorporating Tolkien’s corrections of typos and omitted words necessary for the sense; the more interesting revisions are noted in the textual notes, followed by the commentary. A few eccentric spellings have been preserved, where they might be indications of pronunciations (e.g., ‘particularrly’).

  The chapter originally had no title, but much later ‘Chapter I: An Unexpected Party’ was added to the first page.

  In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty dirty wet hole filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry bare sandy hole with nothing in it to eat or to sit down on; it was a hobbit’s hole, and that means comfort. It had a perfectly round door like a porthole, painted green with a shiny yellow knob in the exact middle; and the door opened onto a tubeshaped hall like a tunnel, but a very comfortable tunnel without smoke, and lit by rows of little red lights and provided with polished seats against the walls and lots and lots of pegs for hats and coats: the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel wound on and on, going fairly straight but not quite, under the hill (The Hill as all the people for many miles round called it), and many little round doors opened out first on one side then on another. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bat
hrooms, cellars, pantries (lots of these), wardrobes (he had whole rooms devoted to clothes), kitchens, dining rooms, all were on the same floor, and indeed on the same passage.

  This hobbit was a very well-to-do hobbit and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of the Hill for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not least because they never had any adventures, or did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say about any question almost without the bother of asking him. This is the story of how a Baggins had an adventure and found himself doing things altogether unexpected; he lost the neighbours’ respect, but he gained – well, you will see whether he gained anything in the end.

  The mother of this hobbit – what is a hobbit? I meant you to find out, but if you must have everything explained at the beginning, I can only say that hobbits are small people, smaller than dwarves (and they have no beards), and on the whole larger than lilliputians. There is little or no magic about them, except the ordinary everyday sort which helps them to disappear quietly and quickly when ordinary big people like you or me come blundering along, making a noise like elephants which they can hear a mile off; they are inclined to be fat in the tummy, dress in bright colours (chiefly green and yellow), wear no shoes because their feet grow natural leathery soles and thick warm brown hair like the stuff on their heads (which is curly), have long clever brown fingers, goodnatured faces, and laugh deep fruity laughs (especially after dinner, which they have twice a day when they can get it). Now you know quite enough to go on with. The mother of this hobbit (of Bilbo Baggins, that is) was the famous Belladonna Took one of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of the hobbits who lived across the Water. It had always been said that long ago some or other of the Tooks had married into a fairy family (goblin family said severer critics); certainly there was something not entirely hobbitlike about them, and once in a while members of the Took hobbits would go and have adventures. They discreetly disappeared and the family hushed it up, but the fact remained that the Tooks were not as respectable as the Bagginses, though they were undoubtedly richer. Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventure other than becoming Mrs Bungo Baggins and making Bungo (Bilbo’s father) build the most luxurious hobbit-hole either under the Hill or over the Hill or across the Water. But it is possible that Bilbo, her only son, although he looked and behaved exactly like a second edition of his father, got through her something a bit queer from the Tooks, something that only waited for a chance to come out. And it never got its chance until Bilbo Baggins was grown up and living in the beautiful hole that I have just described to you, and in fact had settled down.