The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  The dark came into the room from the little window that opened in the side of the Hill; the firelight flickered – it was April – and still they played on, while the shadow of Bladorthin’s beard wagged against the wall.

  The dark filled all the room, and the fire died down, and the shadows were lost, and still they played on. And suddenly first one and then another began to sing as they played, deepthroated singing of the dwarves in the deep places of their ancient homes, and this is like a fragment of their song, if it can be like their song without their music.

  Far over the misty mountains cold

  To dungeons deep and caverns old

  We must away ere break of day

  To seek the pale enchanted gold.

  The dwarves of yore made mighty spells,

  While hammers fell like ringing bells

  In places deep, where dark things sleep,

  In hollow halls beneath the fells.

  For ancient king and elvish lord

  There many a gleaming golden hoard

  They shaped and wrought, and light they caught

  To hide in gems on hilt of sword.

  On silver necklaces they strung

  The flowering stars, on crowns they hung

  The dragon-fire, in twisted wire

  They meshed the light of moon and sun.

  Far over the misty mountains cold

  To dungeons deep and caverns old

  We must away, ere break of day,

  To claim our long-forgotten gold.

  Goblets they carved there for themselves

  And harps of gold; where no man delves

  There lay they long, and many a song

  Was sung unheard by men or elves.

  The pines were roaring on the height,

  The winds were moaning in the night.

  The fire was red, it flaming spread;

  The trees like torches blazed with light.

  The bells were ringing in the dale

  And men looked up with faces pale;

  The dragon’s ire more fierce than fire

  Laid low their towers and houses frail.

  The mountain smoked beneath the moon;

  The dwarves, they heard the tramp of doom.

  They fled their hall to dying fall

  Beneath his feet, beneath the moon.

  Far over the misty mountains grim

  To dungeons deep and caverns dim

  We must away, ere break of day,

  To win our harps and gold from him!TN10

  As they sang the hobbit felt the love of beautiful things made by hands and by cunning and by magic moving through him, a fierce and jealous love, the desire of the hearts of dwarves. Then something Tookish woke up inside him and he wished to go and see the great mountains and hear the pinetrees and the waterfalls and explore the caves and wear a sword instead of a walking-stick. He looked out of the window. The stars were out in a dark sky above the trees. He thought of the jewels of the dwarves shining in dark caves. Suddenly in the wood beyond the Water a flame leapt up – somebody lighting a wood-fire, probably – and he thought of plundering dragons settling on his quiet Hill and kindling it all to flames. He shuddered, and very quickly he was plain Mr Baggins of Bag-End Under-Hill again.

  He got up trembling; he had less than half a mind to fetch the lamp, and more than half a mind to pretend to, and go and hide behind the beer-barrel in the cellar and not come out again until all the dwarves had gone. Suddenly he found that the music and the singing had stopped and they were all looking at him with eyes shining in the dark.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Gandalf, in a tone that seemed to show that he guessed both halves of the hobbit’s mind.

  ‘What about a little light?’ he said apologetically.

  ‘We like the dark’ all the dwarves said. ‘Dark for dark business! There are many hours before dawn’.

  ‘Of course’ said Bilbo and sat down in a hurry. He missed the stool and sat in the fender, knocking the poker and shovel over with a crash.

  ‘Hush!’ said Bladorthin. ‘Let Gandalf speak!’ And this is how he began.

  ‘Bladorthin, dwarves and Mr Baggins, we are met together in the house of our friend and fellow conspirator, this most excellent and audacious hobbit – may the hair on his toes never grow less! – all praise to his wine and ale! –’ He paused for breath and for a polite remark from the hobbit, but the praise was quite lost on poor Bilbo Baggins, who was wagging his mouth in protest at being called audacious and worst of all ‘fellow conspirator’; but no noise would come he was so upsettled. So he went on:

  ‘We are met to discuss our plans, our ways means, policy and devices. We shall soon, before the break of day, start on our long journey, a journey from which some of us, or perhaps all of us (except our friend and counsellor, the ingenious wizard Bladorthin), may never return. It is a solemn moment. The object is, I take it, well known to us all. To the estimable Mr Baggins, and to one or two of the younger dwarves (I think I should be right in naming Kili and Fili, for instance), the exact situation at the moment may require a little brief explanation –’

  This was Gandalf’s style – he was an important dwarf –; in the end he would probably have gone on like this, without telling anybody anything that he didn’t know already, until he was out of breath. But this time he was rudely interrupted. Poor Bilbo couldn’t bear it any longer. At ‘may never return’ he began to feel a shriek coming up inside, and very soon after it burst out like the whistle of an engine coming out of a tunnel.TN11 All the dwarves sprang up, knocking over the table. Bladorthin struck a blue light on the end of his magic staff, and in its firework-glare the poor little hobbit could be seen kneeling on the hearthrug shaking like a jelly that was melting. Then he fell flat, and there he kept on calling out ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning’ over and over again; and that was all they could get out of him for a long while.TN12 So they took him and laid him out of the way on the drawingroom sofa, with a lamp and a drink beside him, and they went back to their dark business.

  ‘Excitable little man’ said Bladorthin, as they sat down again. ‘Gets funny queer fits but he is one of the best, one of the best – as fierce as a dragon in a pinch’. If you have [ever] seen a dragon in a pinch you will realize that this was only poetical exaggeration applied to any hobbit – even to Old Took’s great-uncle Bullroarer, who was so large that he could just ride a shetland pony, and charged the ranks of the goblins of Mount Gram in the Battle of the Green Fields. He knocked their king Fingolfin’sTN13 head clean off with a wooden club; it sailed a hundred yards through the air and went down a rabbit-hole, and in this way the battle was won and the game of Golf invented at the same moment.

  In the meanwhile, however, Bullroarer’s gentler descendant was reviving in the drawing-room. After a while, and a drink, he crept nervously to the door of the parlour. This is what he heard: Dwalin speaking.

  ‘Humph! will he do it, d’you think? It is all very well for Bladorthin to talk about this hobbit being fierce, but one shriek like that in a moment of excitement would be enough to wake the dragon and all his relatives and kill the lot of us. Personally, I think there was more fright in it than excitement, and if it hadn’t been for the secret sign on the door, I should have been sure I had come to the wrong house. As soon as I clapped eyes on the little fellow bobbing and puffing on the mat I had my doubts. He looks more like a grocer than a burglar!’TN14

  Then Mr Baggins turned the handle and walked in. Took had won. He felt he would go [added: without] bed and breakfast to be thought fierce. As for ‘little fellow bobbing on the mat’ it almost made him feel really fierce. Many a time afterwards the Baggins part regretted what he did now, and he said to himself ‘Bilbo, you were a fool, you walked right in and put your foot in it’. He did.

  ‘Pardon me’ he said ‘if I have overheard some words that you were saying. I don’t pretend to understand what you are all talking about, but I think I am right in believing’ (this is what is ca
lled ‘being on one’s dignity’) ‘that you think I am no good. I will show you. I have no magic signs on my door – it was painted a week ago – and I am sure you have all come to the wrong house; as soon as I saw your funny faces on the door-step I had my doubts. But treat it as the right one. Tell me what you want me to do, and I will try it, if I have to walk from here to the last desert in the East and fight the Wild Wireworms of the Chinese. I had a great-great-great-uncle, Bullroarer Took, and –’TN15

  ‘We know, we know’ said Gloin (he was very fond of golf); ‘holed out in one on the Green Fields! But I assure you the mark was on the door – “Burglar wants a good Job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable Reward” it means – it was there last night. Oin found it, and we all came tonight as soon as we could get together; for the mark was fresh. Bladorthin told us there was a man of the sort in this neighbourhood, and that he was seldom out of a job’.

  ‘Of course’ said the wizard. ‘[I] put the mark there myself. For very good reasons. I chose Mr Baggins for your fourteenth man, and let any one say I chose the wrong man who dares. If any one does you can stop at thirteen and have all the bad luck you like, or go back to digging coal. Bilbo, my boy’ (he went on, turning to the hobbit), ‘fetch the lamp and let’s have a little light on this matter.’TN16

  On the table in the light of a big lamp with a red shade he spread a parchment map.

  ‘This I got from your grandfather, Gandalf’ he said in answer to the dwarves’ excited grunts. ‘It shows the Mountain and the surrounding country. Here it is. Over there is the Wild Wood, and far beyond it to the North, only the edge of it is on the map, is the Withered Heath where the Great Dragons used to be’.

  ‘We know all that’ said Balin. ‘I don’t see that this will help us much. There is a picture of a Dragon in red on the Mountain, but it will be easy enough to find him without any picture – if ever we arrive at the Mountain’.TN17

  ‘There is one point which you haven’t noticed’ said the wizard ‘and that is the secret entrance. You see that rune* on the East side, and the hand pointing from it from the runes below? That marks the old secret entrance to the Lower Halls’.

  Typed in the margin and marked for insertion at this point is the following authorial aside:

  * Don’t ask what that is. Look at the map and you will see.

  ‘It may have been secret once’ said Gandalf ‘but why should it be any longer? Old PryftanTN18 has lived there long enough now to find out anything there is to know about those caves’.

  ‘He may – but he can’t have used it for years and years’.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it is too small. “Five feet high is the door and three abreast may enter it” say the runes, but Pryftan could not creep into a hole that size, not even when he was a very young dragon, certainly not after he had devoured so many of the maidens of the valley’.

  ‘It seems a great big hole’ squeaked Bilbo (who had no experience of Dragons and only of hobbit-holes). He was getting excited and interested, so he forgot to be shy and keep his

  The typescript ends here, at the bottom of the twelfth page but not, interestingly enough, the end of a line. The text is continued, resuming in the middle of the same sentence, by the first page of the Second Phase manuscript, Marq. 1/1/1:3, which continues the pagination of the Bladorthin Typescript; see p. 70.

  TEXT NOTES

  1 ‘some of the others have come’ was later changed to the more precise ‘one of them has come already!’

  2 The colour of Balin’s hood was changed in ink from yellow to red (to match the mention of his ‘scarlet hood’ in the preceding paragraph), but this slip was probably not corrected until a much later date than the others noted in this section; not only is it made in a different colour of ink than that used in most of the other revisions to this typescript but Balin’s hood is still mistakenly described as ‘yellow’ as late as Chapter VI (see pp. 198 & 210–11).

  3 Note that here Fili names himself first, rather than Kili, just as in the list of names written across the top of the last page of the Pryftan fragment (see p. 11); the order was reversed in the Third Phase typescript (Marq. 1/1/51:6) and all subsequent texts, including the published book (DAA.39).

  4 Added in the later ink: ‘in fact none other than the great Thorin Oakenshield’. Since the name ‘Thorin’ did not arise in the Ms. until a much later stage – in fact, the arrival at Lake Town in Chapter X, although it had been suggested in Plot Notes A, written during the drafting of Chapter VII (see p. 293) – this is another late addition, made long after the original typescript.

  5 Both here and at the next occurrence (when they all sit down to dinner), ‘twelve’ is corrected to ‘thirteen’.

  6 The word ‘through’ is hand-written over an erasure, but whatever word was originally typed here has been completely obliterated.

  7 American readers should take note that the ‘biscuit’ Bilbo nibbles on is not a flaky wheat roll leavened with baking soda but a cookie (one of the few points where English and American usage diverge, so far as understanding the book goes).

  8 This, the first of what would be many poems in The Hobbit, appears here already in nearly final form, clearly preceded by drafting that does not survive (presumably in the lost pages of the Pryftan Fragment, although we cannot be certain it was included). Aside from minor adjustments to punctuation only three lines have any variants: (1) in the second half of line 8 ‘the cellar’ would be replaced with ‘every’ (‘Splash the wine on every door!’), (2) in the first half of line 9, ‘Put the things’ would be replaced by the more colourful ‘Dump the crocks’ (‘Dump the crocks in a boiling bowl’), and (3) in the last line, ‘careful, carefully’ is replaced by ‘carefully! carefully’ (‘So, carefully! carefully with the plates!’). All these changes already appear in the next text of the poem, that appearing in the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/51:8).

  9 ‘Dwalin’ was emended to ‘Gandalf’, a change necessitated by the fact that Dwalin, like the other twelve, was busy with the washing up; only Gandalf had stayed behind. The rather more prominent role Dwalin played in the First Stage texts may be due to his name having been taken from one of the most famous of all dwarves in Norse lore, Dvalin. As Christopher Tolkien notes in his edition and translation of Heidreks Saga,

  Dwalin seems to have been one of the most renowned of all dwarfs, and often appears in the Eddaic poetry (especially Volospá 14, Fáfnismál 13, Hávamál 143).

  —The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise [1960], page 15.

  In ‘The Waking of Angantyr’, one of several ancient poems incorporated into the much later (late twelfth/early thirteenth century) prose saga,† it is said that the cursed sword Tyrfing was forged by Dvalin (ibid., page 15). An alternate opening of the saga given as an appendix to Christopher Tolkien’s edition gives the full story of how Dvalin and Durin, ‘the most skillful of all dwarfs’, were captured and forced to forge a magnificent magical sword, upon which they put a curse (The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise, page 68); the saga is essentially the story of the subsequent owners of the cursed sword. It is ironic that in Norse lore Dvalin was far better known than Durin, whereas through Tolkien’s usage in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that situation has now reversed.

  † another being ‘The Battle of the Goths and Huns’, a probable remote inspiration for the character Éowyn in The Lord of the Rings.

  10 Several small changes were made to the poem: ‘to claim our long forgotten gold’ is written in the margin alongside the line ‘To claim our pale enchanted gold’ in the fifth stanza. In the sixth stanza, ‘cups’ is changed to ‘goblets’, in the eighth ‘vale’ is changed to ‘dale’, and in the final line ‘take’ is changed to ‘win’. That these minor refinements were all that was needed to bring the poem into its final form was due to the fact that the missing section of the Pryftan Fragment contained a draft of this poem, although only a single line of it survives; see p. 14.

  11 As this line shows, The Hobbit’s tr
ademark mix of the familiar and the strange is perhaps at its strongest in this chapter: references to pop-guns, trains, tea-parties, and familiar names for days of the week lie alongside wizards, dwarves, dragons, and hobbits, just as the ‘Wild Wireworms of the Chinese’ is juxtaposed against the Battle of the Green Fields and the goblins of Mount Gram. Tolkien had good precedent for his mentions of tobacco and tomatoes;† even the Brothers Grimm allowed potatoes and contemporary coaches into their folk-tales. Some of the so-called anachronisms, however, are nothing of the sort; it is the narrator, not one of the characters in the story, who compares the scream welling up inside Bilbo to a train-whistle, just as in The Lord of the Rings it is again the narrator who compares the noise made by the firework dragon to an express train rushing by (LotR.40).

  † In the third edition of 1966, Tolkien changed the tomatoes to pickles (see pp. 777 & 786) but let the tobacco stand, despite having used the less specific ‘pipeweed’ in the sequel. A devoted rather than a heavy smoker himself, Tolkien once recorded an amusing dialogue in praise of tobacco called ‘At the Tobacconist’s’ for the Linguaphone Institute.

  12 Bilbo’s cry ‘struck by lightning, struck by lightning’ refers not to anything in Gandalf’s speech but to Bladorthin’s staff with its blue light and ‘firework glare’. Compare the scene several chapters later when the goblins try to capture the wizard in the mountain-cave. There we are told ‘there was a terrific flash like lightning in the cave and several fell dead’ (p. 130); the goblin guards later report to the Great Goblin that ‘Several of our people were struck by magic lightning in the cave, when we invited them to come below, and are dead as stones’ (p. 132).