The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  The ancient English . . . would have felt no hesitation in using ‘man’ of elf, dwarf, goblin, troll, wizard or what not, since they were inclined to make Adam the father of them all . . .

  – Tolkien to Ransome, 15th December 1937; cf. Appendix IV.

  Obviously, Tolkien’s mythos provided the elves, dwarves, and others with their own creation myths, but the inclusion of ‘wizard’ here implies that they too stood apart in a separate category, distinct from Men (humans), whom Tolkien associates in his letter to Ransome with Elves as the Two Kindreds (anticipating here perhaps the five Free Peoples of The Lord of the Rings; LotR.485–6). Within this context, we should note that Tolkien’s Roverandom [1925–7], which he wrote a few years before The Hobbit, begins with an unsuspecting innocent encountering an ‘old man’ who turns out to be a wizard (page 3), and the Man-in-the-Moon in the same story is repeatedly called ‘an old man’ (or, in one case, ‘an old man with a long silvery beard’; page 22), as is his friend Father Christmas in the Father Christmas Letters, although the latter is certainly not human.

  If Bladorthin, Roverandom’s Artaxerxes, and similar figures appearing in Tolkien’s earlier writings are not human, is it possible to determine where they fit within the context of Tolkien’s legendarium? Granted that the early stages of his mythology were less structured and more inclusive than it later became, the key figure in answering that question is Túvo the wizard, a figure who evolved into Tû the fay and eventually Thû the necromancer (see BLT I.232–5 and the discussion of this character beginning on p. 81 below). Túvo is emphatically neither elf nor human – in fact, he plays a part in the discovery and awakening of the first humans in Middle-earth – but rather a fay, the catch-all term Tolkien used at the time for beings created before the world and who came to inhabit it, including the Maiar. Thus from Tolkien’s very first wizard, who existed in the unfinished ‘Gilfanon’s Tale’ at least a decade before Bladorthin first came on the scene, can already be found the conceptual precedent for Tolkien’s much, much later bald statement that ‘Gandalf is an angel’ – or at least, in the case of Bladorthin, a supernatural being incarnated within the world, neither human nor mortal but very human in his behavior and character.

  Whether or not this was in Tolkien’s mind when he wrote the opening scenes of The Hobbit, or indeed was merely present in the background as a potentiality, it is clear that, just as the power of Bilbo’s ring was subtly altered between the original book and its sequel, so too were the wizard’s powers enhanced. Contrasting Bladorthin’s and Gandalf’s behavior when battling wargs (pages 203–8 vs. LotR.314–16) shows that while Bladorthin is perhaps the more resourceful of the two, Gandalf’s resources are greater; the wargs and goblins are almost too much for Bladorthin, while Gandalf can ignite a whole hillful of trees at a gesture. As Sam says, ‘Whatever may be in store for old Gandalf, I’ll wager it isn’t a wolf’s belly’ (LotR.315), while Bladorthin is only saved from leaping to his death in a final blaze of glory by the timely intervention of the eagles. Bladorthin’s greater vulnerability is also shown by the wound he receives in the final battle; it is hard to imagine the Gandalf of The Lord of the Rings walking around after the battle of Helm’s Deep or siege of Minas Tirith with his arm in a sling.

  Unlike Gandalf, Bladorthin is very much a traditional fairy-tale enchanter: among his recorded exploits are rescuing ‘many princesses, earls, dukes, widow’s sons and fair maidens’ and slaying ‘unlamented giants’, exactly what we would expect of a hero from one of the old stories collected by Joseph Jacobs or Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm.16 Although his magical skills extend far beyond fireworks – we learn that he ‘turned the dragon of the Far Mountains inside out’ – he prefers trickery and glamour, as in the troll-scene, to more obvious displays of magic.

  When we first meet him, Bladorthin is busy organizing an adventure, and not having an easy time of it. From various hints in this first chapter we can reconstruct his movements in the days immediately preceding the unexpected party and conclude that Bilbo was not, in fact, his first choice. On ‘last Thursday’ the wizard met with the thirteen dwarves and convinced them to hire a professional burglar to help in their quest (having already tried and failed to find them a warrior or hero; cf. p. 10), assuring them he knew of one in the vicinity ‘seldom out of a job’. The dwarves separate to look for the burglar. The following Tuesday, Bladorthin met Bilbo and put the sign on his door; that Bilbo was probably far down on his list17 is indicated by the wizard’s complaint that he is ‘on the way to an adventure, and . . . looking for some one to share it – very difficult to find!’ (to which Bilbo retorts ‘I should think so – in these parts’). Later that same day, Oin spotted the sign and informed the others, who meet by appointment the next day (‘as soon as we could get together’; cf. Gloin’s speech on p. 40).

  That Bladorthin’s chief occupation lay in the organizing and expediting of adventures seems indicated not just by his role here but by Bilbo’s recollection: ‘dear me! – not the Bladorthin who was responsible for so many quiet lads and lasses going off into the blue for mad adventures, everything from climbing trees to stowing away aboard the ships that sail to the Other Side’.18 We are not told his motivations, other than the passing hint that the adventure will be ‘Very amusing for me, very good for you’; it is simply who he is and what he does (‘I am Bladorthin, and Bladorthin means me!’). It is amusing to note that, before Bladorthin is through with him, Bilbo does indeed vanish on what his hobbit neighbors would call a mad adventure (eventually passing into hobbit legend as ‘Mad Baggins’; cf. LotR.55), during the course of which he is forced to climb a tree not once but twice (to escape the wargs and to try to look for a way out of Mirkwood) and stow away invisibly on board a ship (actually a raft, on the way to Lake Town).19 He does not, in the course of this book, ever reach the Other Side (i.e., Valinor),20 although eventually, in the sequel, Bilbo ends his career by undertaking just such a voyage. At one point, early on in the composition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien even considered making the main focus of that story Bilbo’s voyage into the West:

  . . . Elrond tells him of an island. Britain? Far west where the Elves still reign. Journey to perilous isle. (HME VI.41)

  – i.e., Tol Eressëa or Elvenhome. Had this story-idea been carried out, the hobbit-hero might well have replaced Eriol/Ælfwine from the Lost Tales as the travelling adventurer who journeys to the Lonely Isle that later became Britain and hears there the tales that eventually make up The Silmarillion.21 There is no reason to think Tolkien intended this when he drafted this passage in The Hobbit – indeed, it is clear he did not; rather, the possibilities implicit within it became one of the ‘loose ends’ he picked up on and ultimately addressed in the second book.

  The Name ‘Bladorthin’

  The name Bladorthin is difficult to gloss, and Tolkien never explained its meaning, although it is clearly Gnomish (or perhaps Noldorin). We can best approach its meaning by comparison with other words in Tolkien’s early writings containing the same elements.

  The first of these, Bladorwen, appears in the Gnomish Lexicon [circa 1917] as the Gnomish equivalent for Palúrien, an early honorific for Yavanna, the goddess of the earth and all growing things. There Bladorwen is glossed as ‘Mother Earth’, as well as ‘the wide earth. The world and all its plants and fruit’ (Parma Eldalamberon XI.23); related words include blath (‘floor’), blant (‘flat, open, expansive, candid’), and bladwen (‘a plain’). Hence blador probably applies to wide open country.

  This guess is reinforced by the second name, Bladorion. In the earliest ‘Annals of Valinor’ and ‘Annals of Beleriand’ (which are associated with the 1930 Quenta, and hence contemporary with the First Phase of The Hobbit), this is the name given to the great grassy plain dividing Thangorodrim from the elven realms to the south before it is turned into a wasteland (Dor-na-Fauglith) in the Battle of Sudden Fire. Again the meaning seems to be something close to ‘wide, flat, open country’, with the added connotation of a green
and growing place (since the name is changed after the plantlife is destroyed). Curiously enough, the Qenya Lexicon [circa 1915 & ff] gives -wen as the feminine patronymic, equivalent to the masculine -ion (BLT I.271 & Parma Eldalamberon XII.103), raising the possibility that Bladorion and Bladorwen are simply gender-specific alternatives that share exactly the same meaning, despite the different applications given to them.22

  Finally, -thin is a familiar form: this word-element entered in at the very end of the Lost Tales period [circa 1919–20] when Thingol replaced the earlier Tinwelint as the name of Tinúviel’s father in the typescript of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, the last of the Lost Tales. I have not found a gloss of ‘Thingol’ from this early period, but there is no reason to doubt that it would have been the same as the later Sindarin translation: ‘grey-cloak’, with thin = grey. A second, apparently unrelated, occurrence of this element can be found in the Gnomish Lexicon as a plural indicator; we are told that Qenya silmaril, silmarilli = Gnomish silubrill/silubrilt, silubrilthin, where it is clear that -thin is a plural suffix equivalent to the English -s (Parma Eldalamberon XI.67).

  Given these various elements, what then is the meaning of Bladorthin? The simplest translation would be ‘the Grey Country’ (blador+thin). Alternatively, if we stress the -or element, this becomes ‘Grey Plains Fay’ or even ‘Grey Master of the Plains’. If we interpret blador less literally and take ‘wide’ in the sense of ‘far and wide’, the name could even be interpreted as ‘Grey Wanderer’ (i.e., one who travels far and wide), thus becoming an early precursor of Gandalf’s Lord of the Rings-era elven name, Mithrandir.23 In any case, whatever its original meaning the name must have been capable of yielding a meaning appropriate to its re-assigned application to King Bladorthin, perhaps there meaning the ruler over wide (grey?) lands (see pp. 514 & 525).

  (iii)

  Dwarven Magic

  The thirteen dwarves round out the rest of the main cast, and again the general outlines remained while phrasing and details were endlessly revised. Thus the motif of Bombur’s obesity has not yet emerged24 and it is still Dwalin, not Gloin, who bluntly expresses his doubts over whether Bilbo ‘will do’. The most striking thing about this earliest draft lies in its emphasis on ‘dwarven magic’: whereas in later revisions Tolkien was at pains to make the opening scenes more realistic, particularly in the 1960 Hobbit (see pp. 778 & 812), in the early drafts he stressed the wonder and magic of the scene. Detail after detail – the dwarves’ coloured beards, the musical instruments they pull out of thin air, the magical smoke rings – are all inessential to the plot but important to establish a sense of the uncanny, a world of wonder. The brightly-coloured hoods and beards are a good example of this light-hearted fairy-tale tone, obviously decorative rather than functional: thus Fili and Kili, the youngest of the dwarves, have white beards, while Balin, ‘a very old-looking dwarf’, has a yellow beard and no good reason is given for why Dwalin’s beard is blue, like the fairy-tale villain (indeed, one of the Lost Tales features a dwarf named Fangluin the aged – literally ‘Beard-blue’; cf. BLT II.229–30). We can rationalize that perhaps dwarves dye their beards or grow hair in tints that would be unnatural on a human head, but all that matters for the tale at hand is to make these strangers who have thrust their way into Bilbo’s predictable little world as outlandish as possible, both from our point of view and that of the hobbit. The musical instruments provide another good example, where Bifur and Bofur turn their walking-sticks into clarinets while Bombur produces a drum ‘from nowhere’, as if they were travelling conjurers entertaining their host rather than seasoned adventurers about to depart on a desperate journey from which some or all may never return.25

  But nothing is ever simple or one-dimensional in Tolkien’s world, and the mood very quickly darkens. Once established, the uncanny wonder of dwarven magic is seasoned with somber warnings of the danger ahead; even the oddness of the visitors turns suddenly sinister with details like the dwarves’ eyes shining in the dark (‘dark for dark business’). The turning point is the dwarves’ song ‘Far Over The Misty Mountains Cold’. Against the comedy of confused expectations on all sides is set this poem describing the lost kingdom of the dwarves and its fiery destruction by the dragon. More than a reminder of the grim task awaiting them, although it is that too, like the passages about Tooks and Bagginses it opens up a sense of history behind the tale. What is more, it forms yet another link between this tale and the mythology, for the third and fourth stanzas of the poem clearly allude to the story of Tinwelint (Thingol) and the Nauglafring from the Book of Lost Tales, the ‘old quarrel’ referred to elsewhere in the book that soured relations between the dwarves and elves.26

  (iv)

  The Voice of the Narrator

  Finally, there is the voice of the narrator, an essential element in establishing the overall tone of the story and hence of the book’s success. In a way, the unnamed narrator, who blends seamlessly in and out of the story, leaving his mark behind everywhere, is one of the most important characters in the tale.27 Through his interpolations in these opening pages, Tolkien develops several motifs that run throughout the book: a concern for etiquette, an ear for oral (and easily-visualized) elements, an interest in word-play. Intrusive narrators were once common in English fiction – Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones [1749] uses one with great flair, and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy [1759–67] raised it to an art form. Closer to Tolkien’s own time and tastes, Lord Dunsany – after Morris, the chief influence on The Book of Lost Tales and Tolkien’s other early work28 – made adroit use of narrators who flitted in and out of their stories (e.g. in such tales as ‘A Story of Land & Sea’ [The Last Book of Wonder, 1916] and ‘Bethmoora’ [A Dreamer’s Tales, 1910]). Tolkien himself also employed the same device elsewhere with great aplomb; as in Farmer Giles of Ham (‘There was no getting round Queen Agatha – at least it was a long walk’) and its famed definition of the blunderbuss, lifted directly from the OED. Critics who have dismissed the narrative voice in The Hobbit out of hand have overlooked its purpose: Tolkien uses it to interact with his audience, and much of the book’s charm would be lost by its absence.

  The voice of the narrator is by turns professorial and playful, now answering rhetorical questions from the reader (‘what is a hobbit? I meant you to find out, but if you must have everything explained at the beginning, I can only say . . .’), now delivering a learned discourse on hobbit culture or wry comments on Bilbo’s faulty memory. The narrator is not omniscient – he has heard only ‘a little tiny bit of what there is to hear’ regarding Bladorthin’s exploits, and several chapters later he will introduce Gollum with the words ‘I don’t know where he came from, or who or what he was’ (pp. 154–5). But he gives us the information we need to understand a scene, fills us in on the background as new people or places enter the narrative, and injects a great deal of humor into the book.

  Aside from teasing the reader by foreshadowing or by withholding information, the narrator also frames the story by occasional direct addresses to the reader (‘I imagine you know the answer, of course, or can guess it . . . since you are sitting comfortably at home and have not the danger of being eaten to disturb your thinking’; ‘yes, I’m afraid trolls do talk like that, even ones with only one head’; ‘Tom-noddy of course is insulting to anyone’) and rhetorical interruptions; these help establish that the story is only a story and that the reader is, after all, ‘sitting comfortably at home’ – very important for any children’s story as dark and nightmare-inducing as this one. They deliberately break the illusion of secondary reality that the rest of the story is creating, thus defying all Tolkien’s rules and theories regarding the necessity of creating secondary belief, as later presented in his essay ‘Of Fairy-Stories’ (no doubt a major reason for his later strictures on the book).29

  The playfulness of the narrative perhaps comes out best in the wordplay. The Hobbit delights in using odd, archaic words, intermixing them with neologisms of Tolkien’s own invention, so t
hat only a scholar familiar with the OED and various dialectical dictionaries (the special province of Joseph Wright, Tolkien’s mentor in his undergraduate days; Tolkien himself had provided the Foreword to one such work, Walter E. Haigh’s A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District, only a few years before, in 1928) could tell which was which: bewildered and bewuthered, upsettled, flummoxed, confusticate and bebother, cob, tomnoddy and attercop, hobbit. The blurb on The Hobbit’s original dustjacket compared Tolkien with Lewis Carroll, a point taken up by several early reviewers bemused by the idea of two academics writing fantasies for children; despite Tolkien’s objection that Through the Looking Glass was a better parallel to his own work than Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,30 the comparison is apt. Both authors share the trick of taking everyday expressions quite literally (as in Bladorthin’s response to Bilbo’s phrase ‘I beg your pardon’). Even more Carrollingian is the use of the same word or expression to mean different things, as in Bilbo’s three separate ‘good mornings’.31

  In addition to a fascination with wordplay, The Hobbit also shares with the Alice books a concern for etiquette. Whatever situation Alice finds herself in, she tries to mind her manners (often in the face of much provocation), and Bilbo is similarly careful to be polite even to uninvited guests: