The History of the Hobbit
Page 18
a broad crescent]. He held up the map and its white light shone through it. ‘What is this?’ he said.
‘There are moon-letters underneath the plain-runes, which say “five feet high the door and three may walk abreast”’.
‘What are moon-letters?’ asked Bilbo full of excitement. He loved maps (as I have told you before); and also he liked runes and letters and cunning hand writing, though his own hand was a bit thin and spidery.
‘Moon-letters are rune-letters, but you can’t see them’ said Elrond ‘not when you look straight at them. They can only be seen when the moon shines behind them, and what is more it must be [the same shaped >] a moon of the same shape and season as the day they were written. The dwarves invented them, and wrote them with silver pens. These must have been written on a midsummer’s eve [with the moon >] in a crescent moon – a long while ago.’
‘What do they say?’ asked BladorthinTN15 – a bit vexed, perhaps, that even Elrond should have found this out first, though really there hadn’t been a chance before, and [added: there] wouldn’t have been another till goodness knows when.
‘Stand by the grey stone where the thrush knocks. Then the [rising >] setting sun on the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key hole.’TN16
‘Durin, Durin’ said Gandalf. ‘He was the father of the fathers of one of the two races of dwarves, the Longbeards, and my grandfather’s ancestor.’
‘Then what is Durin’s Day?’ said Elrond.
‘The first day of the dwarves’ New Year’ said Gandalf ‘and that is, as everyone knows, the day of the first moon of autumn. And Durin’s day is that [added in pencil: first] day when the first moon of autumn and the sun are in the sky together. But I do not see that all this helps much.’TN17
‘That remains to be seen’, said Bladorthin. ‘Is there any more writing?’.
‘None to be seen by this moon’ said Elrond, and he gave him back the map, and they went down the water to see the elves dance and sing.
The next morning was mid-summer morning and as fair as fair could be: blue sky and never a cloud and the sun dancing on the water.
Now they rode away with their hearts ready for more adventure, and a knowledge of the road they must follow over the mountains to the land beyond.
TEXT NOTES
1. Added in the top margin: ‘They had begun to feel that danger was not far away on either side’.
2. This marks the first occurrence in the text of ‘the Misty Mountains’ used as a proper name; earlier (in the dwarves’ song and on p. 90) it had been treated as a (lower-cased) description, not a name (as indeed it is again in Bladorthin’s speech later on this same manuscript page).
3 This was altered to ‘or else you will get lost in them, and have to come back and start at the beginning again – if you ever even get back.’ Note that the change distances Bladorthin from the rest, implying that he will survive no matter what happens to the rest of them, an implication that ties in with Gandalf’s words in the Pryftan Fragment about Bladorthin being the ‘probable exception’ to the possibility that they may all never return from the quest (p. 7).
4 The ‘Last Decent House’ was changed to the ‘Last Homely House’ by a revision in the right-hand margin. This change must have taken place very soon after this page was written, since ‘Last Homely House’ is the form used the next time Elrond’s house is named.
5 This passage was revised to read as follows:
There seemed no trees, and no hills, or valleys to break the ground in front, which sloped ever up ahead to meet the feet of the mountain, the colour of heather and rock, with grass green and moss green where the rivers and rivulets might be.
6 The word ‘enough’ here is circled, as if for deletion, but not actually cancelled.
7 As in the preceding note, the word ‘it’ here is circled but not cancelled.
8 This sentence was cancelled.
9 The word ‘feels’ here is written over another word, but I cannot make out the overwritten word it replaced (it may even have been the same word less legibly written). The sentence does raise the question of how Bilbo knows what elves ‘feel’ like; Bladorthin had not mentioned elves at all as having anything to do with their destination. The reading ‘it feels like elves’ also appears in the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/53:2), where it is altered in ink to ‘smells like elves’, the striking phrasing of the published book.
10 This sentence was revised to read ‘He loved them as hobbits do, but he was a little bit frightened of them as well’; added in the top margin and marked for insertion at this point is the rather ominous phrase ‘as people are who know most about them’. The original inclusion of ‘nice hobbits’ carries an implication of other, unnamed, not so nice hobbits, but we will not meet them (in the persons of the Sandyman family) until The Lord of the Rings.
11 This is an early example of the preternatural abilities of elven senses, best known through Legolas’s phenomenal eyesight in The Lord of the Rings (LotR.443, 446, 450, [528]–529).
12 This sentence was slightly revised to read ‘how these people knew his name and all. Elves are wondrous folk for news . . .’
13 These ‘strange stories of the beginning of history and the wars of the Elves and goblins, and the brave men of the North’ are, of course, the Lost Tales and Long Lays, another allusion by Tolkien within The Hobbit back to the core of the legendarium.
14 Pencilled additions change this phrase to read ‘The elves that are now called Gnomes, but were once called Noldor’. Since most of the pencilled changes to the Second Phase manuscript date from the time when Tolkien was creating the First Typescript, this addition was probably made a year or two after this page was originally written.
15 Tolkien began to write ‘Ga’ – i.e., the name ‘Ga[ndalf]’ – here, then cancelled it and wrote the wizard’s name instead.
16 At the end of this paragraph, Tolkien has added the following in smaller letters and within brackets:
[I have marked the moon letters in red on the map]
Tolkien may be referring here to a lost copy of the Lonely Mountain map that came between Fimbulfambi’s Map (see Frontispiece) and Thror’s Map I (Plate I [top]); so far as I know no copy of Thror’s Map with the moon-letters in red survives. See ‘The First Map’ (p. 23) for more evidence of this lost map.
Tolkien and, later, Allen & Unwin’s production department, struggled over the best way to produce the secret writing on the map. The ideal solution would have been to have the moon letters as a watermark that only showed up when the page was held up to light, but this would have been prohibitively expensive. Tolkien’s preferred solution was to write the moon-letters in reverse on the back of the page, producing a similar effect much more economically.† Unfortunately, Allen & Unwin decided to use both maps in The Hobbit as endpapers, meaning that they were glued into the inside front and back covers of the book, so that the ‘secret writing’ had to appear on the front of the map. In the end, the best compromise they could contrive was to have the letters of the ‘invisible writing’ be drawn in outline to show that they were different from the rest of the detail. Compare Douglas Anderson’s simple but elegant low-tech solution in The Annotated Hobbit of printing the map twice, once in Chapter I without the hidden writing (DAA.50) and then again in Chapter III with the moon-letters revealed (DAA.97).
† Not until 1979 was Tolkien’s idea finally put into practice, when the two maps from The Hobbit were published in poster format; Thror’s Map has the moon-runes printed in reverse on the back, clearly visible when the map is held up to the light [copyright 1979 Allen & Unwin, printed by Henry Stone & Sons, Banbury].
17 The next paragraph, on the top line of the next page (Ms. page 39; Marq. 1/1/3:7), began ‘Well, well’, but this was rubbed out in an inky smear and a new paragraph begun beneath (‘That remains to be seen’).
(i)
The Last Decent House
This brief chapter contains the most explicit references yet linking The Hobbit to th
e mythology out of which it grew. Elrond and Gondolin come directly from the Silmarillion tradition, while the ‘Last Decent House’ (renamed the Last Homely House before the end of the chapter) is clearly inspired by the Cottage of Lost Play that had appeared in the frame story of The Book of Lost Tales, where ‘old tales, old songs, and elfin
(ii)
Elves in the Moonlight
One can sympathize with the dwarves for thinking the elves of the valley foolish: despite the narrator’s protest, nothing about their behavior in this chapter indicates anything differently. Their depiction owes something to the frivolous elves of much of The Book of Lost Tales – as for example the original version of ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, where Lúthien dances among white moths in a ‘silver-pearly dress’ and hides herself ‘beneath a very tall flower’ after her brother bolts at the sight of Beren (BLT II.11). Alongside the grave, even grim, elves of some of the early tales – Fëanor and Turgon come readily to mind – are the stereotypical dancing fairies of Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature2 (for example, the Solosimpi or ‘shoreland dancers’ in BLT I.129). Tolkien is blending two traditions here. The one, of elves as sages and warriors and lovers, derives from medieval works such as Sir Orfeo, the Mabinogion, certain Arthurian romances, and the legends of the Tuatha de Danaan,3 and is represented here by Elrond and later the Elvenking (and in The Lord of the Rings by Glorfindel, Elrond, Legolas, Galadriel, and Arwen). The other, the image of elves as delicate little fairy dancers or pipers, derives from Jacobean writers like Drayton and Shakespeare and is represented here by the elves in the trees. This latter strand found expression in Tolkien’s work mainly through his poetry, especially poems such as ‘The Princess Ni’ (published 1924, revised as ‘Princess Mee’ ([ATB poem #4, pp. 28–30]), ‘Tinfang Warble’ (first published in 1927 and reprinted in BLT I.108), and ‘Goblin Feet’.
‘Goblin Feet’ is of some importance, despite its stark contrast to Tolkien’s subsequent treatment of Faerie,4 because insofar as Tolkien had any reputation at all outside his own family as a writer for children prior to the publication of The Hobbit, it rested upon this slight little poem, which originally appeared in Oxford Poetry 19155 but was quickly reprinted in much less academic surroundings, such as The Book of Fairy Poetry (a lavishly-illustrated coffee-table book that appeared in 1920) and Fifty New Poems for Children [1922].6 Tolkien later came to disavow the idea of elves as cute little fairies and moved his own elves firmly in the direction of medieval elf-lore; the Rivendell episodes in The Hobbit mark virtually its last appearance in the ‘main line’ of his legendarium.
Within Tolkien’s own family, of course, there was already a well-established tradition of frivolous elves in The Father Christmas Letters, and these probably had a greater impact on the depiction of the elves in The Hobbit than any other single factor, since both those annual letters and Mr. Baggins’ story were originally written for the same audience: Tolkien’s own children. The ‘Snow-elves’ had already appeared in the annual letters by 1929,7 before writing on The Hobbit itself had begun, and were soon joined by the ‘Red Gnomes’ in 1932 (written just when The Hobbit was reaching its climax). In later letters, we find various references to ‘Elves and Red gnomes’ [1934], ‘Red Elves’ who ‘turn everything into a game’ [1935] and ‘Red and Green Elves’ [1936]; while these postdate the drafting of our story, they predate its publication and reflect the attitude towards elves prevalent among its intended audience (some later elements, such as the elves’ war with the goblins in 1932 and again in 1941, seem to derive from The Hobbit itself).
If in some features the elves of the valley echo the worst excesses of Edwardian and Georgian fairy sentimentality, other elements suggest traditional fairy lore – i.e., folk-lore rather than fairy tales. The approach to Rivendell mingles realistic detail, probably derived from Tolkien’s 1911 Alpine walking tour,8 with the eeriness traditionally associated with the borders of Elfland; we are clearly entering a secret world of heightened sights, sounds, and colours (cf. the smell of the trees). Another good example of the mix of realism and fantasy that is so much a hallmark of Tolkien’s work are the stars that appear brighter when seen from Elrond’s valley – a happy mix of myth (stars shine brighter on an elven place) and fact (stars can in fact be seen better when the observer is in a valley or pit looking up than when he or she is in a flat, open space). The chapter is filled with hints that elves can be dangerous, perfectly in keeping with the terror the Fair Folk inspired in most folk who believed in them – many of the recorded encounters with them in medieval lore are in the form of cautionary tales, like Tolkien’s own ‘Ides Ælfscýne’ (see pp. 57–8 & 59), and charms against elf-shot remained current from Anglo-Saxon times to the nineteenth century.9 Elves were blamed for everything from developmentally disabled children (‘changelings’) to sudden deaths, from lamed horses to mysterious pregnancies. Perilous yet fair, they were treated with the same wary respect as the Furies and God: to speak their proper name was to invite their attention and hence court disaster. Note Bladorthin’s use of the traditional euphemism ‘good people’ (p. 114) and his ‘laying’ of them when he commands them to hush. Their mocking of others’ difficulties (people who can’t swim crossing the fast-running stream) shows a traditional heartlessness out of keeping with Tolkien’s elves elsewhere;10 Bilbo is wise to feel ‘rather afraid’ of them. Their being uncannily well-informed, even to the extent of knowing Bilbo’s name (and, in the typescript and published text, his errand), is here just another example of elven magic; in later versions, where Bladorthin explicitly states at the end of the preceding chapter that during his scouting ahead he had spoken to some of Elrond’s people and gotten word of the trolls from them (DAA.83), we can rationalize this away by assuming that the wizard had at that earlier meeting told the elves all about his companions and their quest.
(iii)
Elrond
The most important character in this chapter, however, is neither frivolous nor sinister, but ‘kind as Christmas’.11 Elrond, the Master of the House, comes directly to The Hobbit from the mythology, having first appeared in ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ some four years previously (i.e., 1926), where he is described as ‘half-mortal and half-elfin’
When later the Elves return to the West, bound by his mortal half he elects to stay on earth. Through him the blood of Húrin (his great-uncle)14 and of the Elves is yet among Men, and is seen yet in valour and in beauty and in poetry.
—‘The Sketch of the Mythology’, HME IV.38.
The number and kind of the half-elven or elf-friends had not yet been fixed when The Hobbit was written, and it took Tolkien several years and much experimentation to sort out their exact nature. For one thing, no clear distinction had yet been drawn between the elf-friends, or survivors of the elves’ human allies, and the half-elven, the offspring of unions between elves and men – largely a moot point in any case, since intermarriage between the human chi
eftains and rulers of the elves (Beren and Lúthien, Tuor and Idril, Eärendel and Elwing) and attrition in the wars against Morgoth had so drastically reduced the numbers of both that the few survivors could essentially be considered as one people. This point is made explicit in the 1930 Quenta, where after Morgoth’s defeat the herald of the Valar
summon[s] the remnants of the Gnomes and the Dark-elves that never yet had looked on Valinor to join with the captives released from Angband, and depart; and with the Elves should those of the race of Hador and Bëor alone be suffered to depart, if they would. But of these only Elrond was now left, the Half-elfin; and he elected to remain, being bound by his mortal blood in love to those of the younger race; and of Elrond alone has the blood of the elder race and of the seed divine of Valinor come among mortal Men.
—1930 Quenta, HME IV.157–8.
The manuscript makes clear one puzzling point, first raised I think by Christina Scull, that arises in relation to Elrond’s ancestry: since he is the direct descendant of Turgon, the king of Gondolin (father of Idril mother of Eärendel father of Elrond), why does Elrond not lay claim, as rightful heir, to Glamdring, his great-grandfather’s sword? The answer, of course, is that when the scene was first drafted the swords were not named but merely identified as elf-blades from Gondolin, much as the hobbits’ weapons in The Lord of the Rings are never given specific antecedents beyond being Númenórean blades forged during the war against Angmar. By the time the names and prior owner were added (in the First Typescript; Marq. 1/1/53:5) –
This, Thorin, the runes name Orcrist, the Goblin-cleaver in the ancient tongue of Gondolin; it was a famous blade. This, Gandalf, was Glamdring, Foe-hammer that the king of Gondolin once wore
– Elrond’s tacit abnegation was already part of the story. More importantly, Elrond’s identification of the swords ties The Hobbit very explicitly to the very first of the Lost Tales Tolkien wrote, and evidently one of his favorites: ‘The Fall of Gondolin’.15 While it is very plausible that Turgon’s sword would have fallen into goblin hands, given the scenario described in ‘The Fall of Gondolin’, Elrond’s comment that ‘dragons destroyed that city many ages ago’ creates difficulties in the chronology. The reference only two chapters before to Beren and Lúthien’s activities of less than a century ago – a mere nothing in the elvish scheme of things – and the very presence of Elrond himself, who is certainly not described as an elf (at the end of the chapter Elrond, the hobbit, the wizard, and the dwarves go outside ‘to see the elves’ dance and sing) and seems not to have been conceived of as an immortal or even particularly long-lived at this point, argues against a long gap in time between Gondolin’s fall and Mr. Baggins’ adventure. Indeed, in the first chronology of the war against Morgoth, the ‘Annals of Beleriand’ (which date from the early 1930s), dwarves first appear in the Year of the Sun 163; Thû is cast down by Beren and Lúthien about the same time, in A.B. 163–4; the Fall of Gondolin occurs just over forty years later, in A.B. 207; and the Age ends with Morgoth’s downfall and the departure of Fionwë’s host in A.B. 250 (‘The [Earliest] Annals of Beleriand’, HME IV.300, 307, & 309–10). By that scheme, Mr. Baggins’ unexpected party would have occurred no more than 14 years after the fall of Thangorodrim, which is clearly exceedingly improbable. These difficulties probably led to Tolkien’s deletion of the reference to Beren and Lúthien’s adventure, which together with Elrond’s undefined status and nature enable Gondolin and its ruin to recede into the distant, legendary past.