The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  Whatever their origin, the goblins in The Hobbit seem as capable of free thought and action as any of the other races in the book, whether dwarves or elves or men or hobbits. There seems to be no connection between the goblins of the Misty Mountains and the Necromancer who lurks in Mirkwood – Thû the Necromancer may have been served by wolf-packs and orc-patrols in ‘The Lay of Leithian’, but not even a hint suggests that the Great Goblin owes the Necromancer of our story allegiance or is in any way under his sway. Instead, just as dwarves come into their own in this book, so too are the goblins presented for the first time as something more than swordfodder, having their own (admittedly wicked) culture and civilization, complete with poetry, commerce, an apparently thriving slave-labor industry5, a hierarchical society (from the Great Goblin on top down through the warriors to the slaves), and xenophobia. In fact, they greatly resemble the goblins of one of Tolkien’s precursors.

  Up until this point in the story, Tolkien himself has been his own chief source – such once well-known works as Christina Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market’ [1861] and James Whitcomb Riley’s ‘Little Orphant Annie’ [1885], with its famous refrain

  And the Gobble-uns’ll git you ef you Don’t Watch Out!

  apparently having no discernible influence on him. Now, however, he draws directly from an outside writer popular to an earlier generation: George MacDonald. Tolkien himself freely acknowledged the debt in his 1938 letter to The Observer, noting that one of his chief sources had been ‘fairy-story – not, however, Victorian in authorship, as a rule to which George Macdonald is the chief exception’ (Letters, p. 31; see Appendix II). He was more explicit in the draft of his Andrew Lang Memorial Lecture, ‘On Fairy-Stories’:

  . . . But in the short time at my disposal I must say something about George Macdonald. George Macdonald, in that mixture of German and Scottish flavours (which makes him so inevitably attractive to myself), has depicted what will always be to me the classic goblin. By that standard I judge all goblins, old or new.6

  Elsewhere he admitted that his goblins ‘owe, I suppose, a good deal to the goblin tradition . . . especially as it appears in George MacDonald’ (JRRT to Naomi Mitchison, 25th April 1954; Letters pp. 177–8) and again contrasted his own goblins with ‘the goblins of George MacDonald, which they do to some extent resemble’ (JRRT to Hugh Brogan, 18th Sept 1954; Letters p. 185).7

  A look at MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin [1872] confirms Tolkien’s debt. MacDonald’s goblins, like Tolkien’s, are ugly, cunning, wicked,8 and technologically advanced, delighting in waylaying benighted travellers or lone miners. At times they plan war or other mischief against the people who live nearby, aided by weird misshapen goblin animals called cobs – a possible inspiration for the goblin-warg and goblin-bat alliances in the chapters to follow later in The Hobbit. Moreover, MacDonald’s goblins can interbreed with humans, although the only offspring of such a union that we see resembles his orc father more than his human mother – a probable forerunner of the half-orcs of The Lord of the Rings (some of whom, like Saruman’s Uruk-hai, are orc-like, while others, like the spy at Bree, can pass for human). They greatly dislike daylight, being most active at night, and their homes are a mix of mines and caverns, just like the goblin-caves of the Misty Mountains.

  However, Tolkien was nothing if not selective in his borrowings, picking and choosing to suit his own ends and the needs of his story. Even where his sources can be identified through his own admission, he adapted what he borrowed and made it his own. For example, although MacDonald’s goblins are ruled over by a goblin king rather like the Great Goblin, there is nothing in Tolkien’s story to parallel MacDonald’s indomitable goblin queen, who stomps on her enemies’ feet with her great stone shoes. MacDonald’s goblins were originally humans who withdrew below-ground to escape persecution and now prefer a subterranean life, although they harbor a very understandable grudge against the king who wronged them and his descendants, including the princess of the title. All Tolkien’s goblins remain nameless in the original draft, and when he did add names (Azog, Bolg) it was in one of his invented languages, while MacDonald’s have comic names like Podge, Glump, Helfer, and Hairlip. The Princess and the Goblin even includes a comic scene of goblin family life that would be entirely inappropriate to the sense of menace Tolkien creates in this chapter, where the characters reel from peril to peril to peril. MacDonald’s goblins have hard heads and soft, toeless feet – their one vulnerable point, which the hero of his story is quick to exploit. Tolkien gave this idea short shrift; in the letter to Naomi Mitchison already cited, he continues, after acknowledging his debt to MacDonald’s goblin-lore, ‘. . . except for the soft feet which I never believed in’ (JRRT to Mitchison, 25th April 1954; Letters p. 178). Tolkien’s goblins, like hobbits, apparently go barefoot as a rule, only adopting footware at special need (such as to quiet the flapping of their feet when pursuing escaping guests).9

  Most notably of all, MacDonald’s goblins are afraid of singing. They can neither sing nor compose themselves, and the best way to drive them off is to shout out spontaneous rhyming nonsense. Not only are Tolkien’s goblins, the goblins of the Misty Mountains, unafraid of a little verse, they seem as fond of breaking into a song as the villains in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta. The goblin marching song in this chapter, with its alliteration and internal rhyme, might be a well-known chantey among the goblins for all we know, but the one they sing two chapters later (‘Fifteen Birds’) must be a spontaneous ‘occasional’ composition made up on the spot, so well does it fit the situation.

  On one point, it’s difficult to tell if Tolkien and MacDonald are in agreement or not. MacDonald’s goblins are very long-lived (in the comic scene already referred to, the goblin-father remarks condescendingly to one goblin-child that ‘You were only fifty last month’ – The Princess and the Goblin, Chapter 8). The same may be true of Tolkien’s goblins. Upon seeing the sword rescued from the Trolls’ lair, they react instantly, howling and stamping and gnashing their teeth: they all recognize it at once (p. 132). And it is difficult to see how this could be so unless the majority of the goblins present in this scene took part in the siege of Gondolin.10 Even so, this falls short of proof on the point of goblin longevity, as earlier chapters have disagreed on whether the events of our story are taking place ages and ages after the fall of Gondolin (Chapter III, p. 115) or in the same century (Chapter I, p. 73). Perhaps the sword had passed into legend, along with a detailed description of its appearance, though this seems unlikely; in any case, Tolkien never altered this detail in the scene, even when he later firmly embraced the vast separation of time between Mr. Baggins’ world and the First Age.

  No goblins appear in any of his illustrations for The Hobbit, but Tolkien did draw goblins in several of the Father Christmas Letters (see the illustrations for the letters from 1932, 1933, & 1935). These recurrent threats to the timely delivery of presents first enter the epistolary series in 1932, just about the time Tolkien was writing the final chapters of The Hobbit. Father Christmas describes them thusly:

  Goblins are to us very much what rats are to you, only worse, because they are very clever, and only better because there are, in these parts, very few. We thought there were none left. Long ago we had great trouble with them, that was about 1453, I believe, but we got the help of the Gnomes, who are their greatest enemies, and cleared them out.11

  Initially they are drawn as small black figures with pointy heads and large pale eyes,12 given to lurking and peering around corners (1932 Letter; see Plate VI [top left]); illustrations to later letters (1933 and 1935) reduce the size of the eyes somewhat and add a mouth and nose as well as showing them in much more active pursuits (battling elves, being squashed flat or thrown sky-high by the North Polar Bear, &c.). The later illustrations also replace the single crest or point atop the head with two very prominent ears, while the 1935 drawing gives them rather canine faces and very distinct tails. Their size throughout is the same as that of the ‘Gnomes�
� or elves, or about half Father Christmas’s height.

  Like the goblins in The Hobbit, those encountered repeatedly by Father Christmas (in 1932, 1933, and 1941) are experts at tunnelling and mining, laying low for long periods then suddenly coming forth in rampaging hordes to loot and pillage. One of their favorite tricks is to make secret tunnels from which to launch sorties and ambushes, just like the waylayers of the Misty Mountains. They share the latter’s alliances with bats and used to ride into battle on creatures named drasils (described as ‘dwarf “dachshund” horse creatures’) before these became extinct, a strong parallel both to MacDonald’s cob and to the wolf-riders we are shortly to encounter (although there is no parallel in The Hobbit to the bat-riders of The Father Christmas Letters). Finally, goblins are noisy: except when sneaking up on somebody they make all kinds of racket. As Father Christmas observes, ‘Goblins cannot help yelling and beating on drums when they mean to fight’ – a characteristic shared by their cousins in the Misty Mountains; cf. p. 162:

  They saw him at once, and yelled with delight as they rushed at him . . . they yelled all the louder, only not quite so delighted . . . Whistles blew, armour clashed, swords rattled, goblins cursed and swore . . . There was a terrible outcry, to do and disturbance

  and pp. 132–3:

  The yells and yammers, croaking, jibbering and jabbering, howls growls and curses, shrieks and skriking that followed passes all description. Several hundred cats and wolves being roasted alive together could not have compared with it.

  Note, however, one characteristic feature of Tolkien’s writings as a whole is not yet present: the goblins of The Hobbit do not have their own language but speak the same tongue as Bilbo and the dwarves. This feature never changed, so far as The Hobbit was concerned, but in the sequel Tolkien’s love of words led him to create a few snatches of goblin (cf. LotR.466 – Uglúk u bagronk sha pushdug Saruman-glob búbhosh skai – and the discussion of orc-speech later on that same page and in Appendix F, pages 1165–6). But for now, this thoroughly typical expression of Tolkien’s linguistic inventiveness lay in the future.

  (ii)

  The Giants

  If the goblins open up a vast array of questions, the giants glimpsed from a distance during the crossing of the Misty Mountains remain on the fringes of the story. Giants occur in several of Tolkien’s works, but we never learn a great deal about them. Lúthien’s sleep-spell, already cited in reference to the beards of the dwarves (see p. 77), invokes ‘the neck of Gilim the giant’ and ‘the sword of Nan’ (BLT II.19) in its list of the longest things in the world, but little is known of either of these figures beyond the names. The version of this passage in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ names the sword as Glend and calls Gilim ‘the giant of Eruman’ (HME III.205). Christopher Tolkien notes that ‘Gilim’ is glossed as ‘winter’ in the Gnomish dictionary and cites an isolated note to the effect that Nan was a ‘giant of summer of the South’ like an elm (BLT II.67–8).13 The contrast between summer and winter seems obvious, perhaps harkening back to the fire-giants and frost-giants of Eddic lore, but whatever story Tolkien may have had in mind behind these shadowy figures (if indeed he had any at all) was apparently never written down. Nevertheless, Nan may have been in the back of Tolkien’s mind when he created the ents some twenty years later: for ‘ent’ simply means ‘giant’ in Old English, and it seems plain that the giant seen by Sam’s cousin Hal up beyond the North Moors was an ent, described as being ‘as big as an elm tree, and walking’ (LotR.57).14 The detail of the elm may be coincidental, but given Tolkien’s creative reuse of material time and again it would be rash to dismiss the parallel as sheer chance.

  The Book of Lost Tales had referred to giants as one of the Úvanimor, or monster-folk (BLT I.75), a thoroughly traditional touch on Tolkien’s part; giants have a long, long tradition in folklore of being extremely dangerous if not downright wicked. Even Treebeard first appears in the LotR drafts as a distinctly sinister figure. It is initially ‘the Giant Treebeard’, not Saruman, who imprisons Gandalf the Grey and prevents him from warning Frodo to set out at once or accompanying him on his journey (HME VI.363), and an isolated draft passage survives describing Frodo’s encounter with ‘Giant Treebeard’, who here seems entirely tree-like. The episode seems harmless enough, slightly reminiscent of Ransom’s early adventures on Malacandra in Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet [1938], but Tolkien glossed it thusly in tengwar:

  Frodo meets Giant Treebeard in the Forest of Neldoreth while seeking for his lost companions: he is deceived by the giant who pretends to be friendly, but is really in league with the Enemy.

  —HME VI.382–415

  An outline for ‘The Council of Elrond’ contains yet another warning in the midst of notes regarding the route the Fellowship and Ring will take:

  ‘Beware!’ said Gandalf ‘of the Giant Treebeard, who haunts the Forest between the River and the South Mts.’

  —ibid., page 397.

  But then Tolkien had a change of heart, and an outline relating to events in Fangorn Forest contains the suggestion ‘If Treebeard comes in at all – let him be kindly and rather good?’ (HME VI.410), a suggestion taken up in the rest of the outline, where Treebeard not only rescues Frodo when the latter is wandering lost in the forest but takes him to Ond (= Gondor) and raises the siege of the city, thereby rescuing Trotter (= Strider) and the others. The last trace of ambiguity appears in a reversal of the original idea; here it is only after the ‘tree-giant’ (described in terms that sound something like a cross between the Green Man of medieval legend, Sir Bercilak, and an actual tree) has carried Frodo to his castle in the Black Mountains that he is revealed to be friendly, whereas in the earlier draft he had pretended friendship but been false.

  While the ents went on to become one of Tolkien’s most original and admired creations – attracting praise from critics as diverse as C. S. Lewis and Edmund Wilson16 – giants in the traditional sense of large, dangerous monsters in more or less human form vanished from the more integrated Middle-earth of Tolkien’s later work. Ents are one of the five Free Peoples; giants one of those races which may be called the Children of Morgoth. We have seen that both dwarves and goblins, who early on also fell under the ‘úvanimor’ rubric, underwent further development in The Hobbit, with the goblins remaining a monster race (‘cruel, wicked, and bad hearted’) and dwarves undergoing a transformation into ‘decent enough people’, if ‘commercial-minded’ (cf. p. 505). What, then, of the stone-giants? Is it possible, from the scanty evidence presented in The Hobbit, to determine whether they should be classified as Children of Morgoth or free agents?

  In purely practical terms, our heroes are less concerned with the giants’ moral standing than the danger they pose. Their antics seem more the result of exuberance than malice, but that would be small consolation for any member of the party ‘kicked sky high for a football’. Similarly, the dim-witted giant of Farmer Giles of Ham blunders about causing all sorts of damage – breaking hedges, trampling crops, knocking down trees, smashing houses, and squashing the farmer’s favorite cow – yet all this destruction is merely the result of lack of attention on the part of the short-sighted and deaf giant, not active malice (unlike the dragon Chrysophylax Dives in the same story, whose depredations are quite intentional). The stone-giants of The Hobbit do not seem to be aware of the presence of the travellers, but then again there’s no indication that they would have behaved any differently had they known; in short, they are portrayed as a perilous but almost impersonal force, rather like the thunder-storm itself.17

  By contrast, a much more traditional view surfaces in the next chapter – when Bilbo is trying to think of the answer to Gollum’s last riddle (‘This thing all things devours’), his mind is filled with ‘all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres he had ever heard told of in tales’ (p. 158). Here we can plainly see the echoes of such traditional tales as ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and ‘Jack the Giant Killer’, with their murderous, man-eating giants.18 Yet n
ot all giants can be such monsters, for a chapter later Bladorthin casually suggests finding ‘a more or less decent giant’ to block up the goblins’ front gate in the mountain pass. It seems, then, that giants occupy a neutral ground, neither good nor evil as a race but varying from individual to individual. Dangerous, certainly – but as Gandalf points out in speaking of Treebeard, powerful and perilous is not the same thing as evil (LotR.521; & cf. also ibid.706).

  (iii)

  Switzerland

  While literature and his own earlier writings contributed much to The Hobbit, one element entered the story directly from personal experience: the descriptions of the mountain-crossing and thunderstorm in the Misty Mountains. As Tolkien recounted in a letter some fifty years after the event:

  . . . with a mixed party of about the same size as the company in The Hobbit . . . I journeyed on foot with a heavy pack through much of Switzerland, and over many high passes. It was approaching the Aletsch that we were nearly destroyed by boulders loosened in the sun rolling down a snow-slope. An enormous rock in fact passed between me and the next in front. That and the ‘thunder-battle’ – a bad night in which we lost our way and slept in a cattle-shed – appear in The Hobbit. It is long ago now . . .

  —JRRT to Joyce Reeves, 4th November 1961; Letters p. 309.

  A later letter provides more details of the events underlying the early parts of Chapters III, IV, & VI:

  The hobbit’s (Bilbo’s) journey from Rivendell to the other side of the Misty Mountains, including the glissade down the slithering stones into the pine woods, is based on my adventures in 1911 . . . One day we went on a long march with guides up the Aletsch glacier – when I came near to perishing. We had guides, but either the effects of the hot summer were beyond their experience, or they did not much care, or we were late in starting. Any way at noon we were strung out in file along a narrow track with a snow-slope on the right going up to the horizon, and on the left a plunge down into a ravine. The summer of that year had melted away much snow, and stones and boulders were exposed that (I suppose) were normally covered. The heat of the day continued the melting and we were alarmed to see many of them starting to roll down the slope at gathering speed: anything from the size of oranges to large footballs, and a few much larger. They were whizzing across our path and plunging into the ravine . . . They started slowly, and then usually held a straight line of descent, but the path was rough and one had also to keep an eye on one’s feet. I remember the member of the party just in front of me (an elderly schoolmistress) gave a sudden squeak and jumped forward as a large lump of rock shot between us. About a foot at most before my unmanly knees . . .