14 Like the approach to Elrond’s house and the climb up into the Misty Mountains, this scene derives from memories of Tolkien’s Alpine journey of 1911: ‘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’ – JRRT to Michael Tolkien, c. 1967; Letters p. 391; italics mine.
15 Here ‘the dwarves’ is changed to ‘Bombur’ and then stetted back again to ‘the dwarves’. However, both typescripts (1/1/56:4 and 1/1/37:4) give the reading ‘Bombur’, as does the published book.
16 Added at this point: ‘Then they turned aside northward’, changed in a darker ink to ‘Southward’. See Text Note 12 above for the significance of this change.
Bracken, by the way, are dense stands of tall ferns, especially those found in wastelands.
17 This adventurous Took cousin is never identified in the later genealogies. The forests to the north of Bilbo’s land never appear on the maps in the sequel, although it’s not safe to conclude they were deliberately removed from the later geography as some features disappeared or were not included in these maps through accident, not design. Indeed, the tree-men seen walking in the North Farthing (LotR.57) may be a relic of these unmapped forests.
The wolves from the north, at any rate, reappeared in the Prologue to The Lord of the Rings, where we are told that by Bilbo’s time ‘the wolves that had once come ravening out of the North in bitter white winters were now only a grandfather’s tale’ (LotR.17).
18 The typically Tolkienian parenthesis – ‘you would have laughed (from a safe distance)’ – was not added until the First Typescript (1/1/56:5).
19 In pencil, this phrase was changed to ‘much the tallest’, perhaps reflecting a shift of Gandalf from ‘little old man’ to a somewhat grander and more dignified figure. Compare the reading in the First Typescript (1/1/56:6), ‘a good deal taller than the others’, which is also that found in the published book (DAA.146).
20 In the First Typescript (1/1/56:6) and all subsequent texts, this conversation takes place between Nori and Dori, as in the published book; see Text Note 3 above for the shift from Bombur to Dori as Bilbo’s chief ‘porter’.
21 At its first occurrence the word was written ‘weorg’, then overwritten ‘warg’, the term used throughout thereafter. For more on the significance and origin of the name, see the commentary below.
22 Note the significance of the phrasing: that men are moving into those lands again. We were told as far back as Chapter I about ‘the mortal men who lived to the south, and even up the Running river as far as the valley beneath the mountain’ in Dale (see p. 71), but the real significance of Tolkien’s phrasing is that it gives a sense of underlying history, of more story than can be told in this one book – cf. ‘If you had heard only a quarter of what I have (and I have heard only a little tiny bit of what there is to hear)’. Tolkien later changed his ideas about the ‘pre-history’ of the Anduin vale, as it came to be called; see Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings and the essay printed as ‘Cirion and Eorl’ in Unfinished Tales for his final thoughts on the matter.
23 Note that the phrasing of the published text, where the wizard feels ‘dreadfully afraid, wizard though he was’ at hearing the warg-talk, is absent in the original, first appearing in the typescript (1/1/56:7). Bladorthin still calls the goblins ‘naughty little boys’ to ‘show them he was not afraid of them (though of course he was, wizard though he might be)’ a few pages later, in a passage that changed little from manuscript to publication aside from the alteration of ‘afraid’ to ‘frightened’ and a slight adjustment of the punctuation, both done at the time of the First Typescript. The epithet ‘naughty little boys’ was challenged by Arthur Ransome in his 1937 letter to Tolkien, but while he made most of the other changes Ransome suggested Tolkien kept the phrasing here. For more on the Ransome letter, see Appendix IV.
24 Originally this sentence ran ‘They kill things for their food, but only’. Left unfinished, it was abbreviated to simply ‘They kill.’ Later, perhaps feeling that this was too bald, Tolkien added ‘& hunt’ to the sentence above the cancelled passage.
25 Later ‘summer’ was changed to ‘late summer’ in pencil, probably at the time of the creation of the First Typescript. This change creates difficulties, however, as one would expect berries to be in fruit by ‘late summer’, and we are explicitly told earlier in this same chapter that it’s too early for blackberries (cf. p. 201). Such a time-frame would also, given the length of their time in Mirkwood, give some nuts time to ripen while they were in the forest, yet we are told this is not the case. Tolkien solved this problem by changing the phrase ‘late summer’ – the original reading in the First Typescript (typescript page 56; 1/1/56:8) – to ‘high summer’; the later reading then appears in both the Second Typescript (1/1/37:8) and published book (DAA.150).
The comment about there having been ‘little rain’ also seems odd in light of the torrential storm of two days before, when ‘two thunderstorms . . . come up from East and West and make war’ (p. 128, emphasis mine). Still, Tolkien is careful to specify that he was speaking of ‘this side of the mountains’, and perhaps he was considering having the eastern slopes of the Misty Mountains fall into a rain shadow.
26 The typescript adds ‘and they soon had a plan which seemed to them most amusing’ (1/1/56:9).
27 This passage was revised and expanded to read as follows:
. . . could see the goblins dancing round & round in a ring like people round a mid summer bonfire while some were hacking at the trunks of the trees they were clinging to. Outside the ring of dancers and the goblins with axes stood the wolves at a respectful distance . . .
The lines about the goblins hacking at the tree trunks survived into the page proofs, where this entire paragraph was so heavily revised that Tolkien recopied it neatly onto a separate page for the benefit of the typesetters, in the process achieving the text of this passage exactly as it stands today (see DAA.151): ‘. . . like people round a midsummer bonfire. Outside the ring of dancing warriors with spears and axes stood the wolves at a respectful distance . . .’ (Marq. 1/2/2: page 111 & rider). Thus the ‘goblins . . . with axes’ survive into the published book, although their significance had disappeared.
28 This poem is written directly into the manuscript and has its last two lines crowded into the right margin, with their proper placement indicated by an arrow. Given this roughness, it may represent the initial draft.
It’s possible to catch an echo in these lines of Lewis Carroll’s poem ‘Little Birds’ from Sylvie and Bruno Concluded [1893]. While the verbal echoes are slight, we know that Tolkien was fond of that poem (it ‘formed part of his large repertoire of occasional recitation’, according to Christopher Tolkien – HME IX, Foreword, page x), and he had one of his characters in The Notion Club Papers quote from it. See also p. 660 and Nt 30 on p. 65.
29 Unlike the preceding poem, which shows the hesitations of direct composition, this second goblin-poem is a clean copy with only one (marginal) change. It seems probable that it was copied into the manuscript from a separate rough draft that has not survived, as comparison with other poems in the Hobbit Ms. shows this was Tolkien’s regular practice.
30 This incomplete sentence, the paragraph it is in, and the first three sentences of the following paragraph (everything before ‘[But] Down swept some of the eagles’) were all struck out and replaced by the following, the first paragraph of which was written in the top margin and the second crowded into the left margin:
There was a howl of anger and surprise [
The wolves howled, and gnashed their teeth. The goblins yelled and stamped with rage, waving their tall spears in the air.
The unfinished thought clearly had been a
tactical observation that the goblins would have been better able to resist the eagles’ ambush had they stayed together and kept near the flames.
31 In a rare slip, Tolkien originally wrote ‘dwarfs’ and only later altered it to his characteristic spelling used elsewhere throughout the book: ‘dwarves’.
This entire page (manuscript page 75; 1/1/6:13) was subject to extensive small changes which bring the text closer to, but do not yet achieve, the final version.
32 Added in the left margin and marked for insertion at this point:
He used to feel queer if he looked over the edge of quite a little cliff, & he had never liked climbing trees, (not having had to escape from wolves before). So you can guess how his head swam now,
33 ‘once upon a time’ – despite his praise of this traditional fairy-tale line in ‘On Fairy-Stories’, Tolkien never used it to begin any of his published fiction, and its occurrence here is one of the very rare uses of it anywhere in his work.
34 In a revision to the manuscript (1/1/6:14), ‘men’ is changed to ‘people’, but this emendation is not picked up in either typescript, nor in the published book, all of which have ‘men’.
This chapter introduces not one but two new races, both animal in shape but intelligent, having languages of their own. Each has strong ties to myth and folklore on the one hand and to Tolkien’s earlier writings on the other; the wolves to Draugluin and Carcharoth, the great guardians of Morgoth and Sauron, and the eagles to Thorondor King of the Eagles and the messengers of Manwë.
(i)
The Wolves
Wolves do not, of course, eat people. But legend and folk-belief has maintained otherwise from time immemorial, from Aesop’s fable of ‘The Boy Who Cried Wolf’ [sixth century BC] through fairy-stories like ‘Little Red Riding-Hood’ [seventeenth century French] and ‘Peter & the Wolf’1 to the modern day (Saki’s ‘Esme’ and ‘The Intruders’, Willa Cather’s My Antonia,2 Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and any number of Jack London stories). Perhaps the most famous literary account of a wolf-attack prior to Tolkien’s occurs in Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe [1719] – in the later chapters, after Crusoe’s rescue from the island and return to civilization, he and Friday are set upon by a wolf-pack while travelling with a small group through the Pyrenees, repulsing the attack with great difficulty in a battle described with all Defoe’s characteristic vigor and attention to detail. Tolkien himself cited S. R. Crockett’s The Black Douglas [1899], a now justly forgotten novel, as his chief influence on the scene:
the episode of the ‘wargs’ (I believe) is in part derived from a scene in S. R. Crockett’s The Black Douglas, probably his best romance and anyway one that deeply impressed me in school-days, though I have never looked at it again. It includes Gil de Rez3 as a Satanist.
—JRRT to Michael Tolkien, c. 1967; Letters p. 391.
Closer examination of Crockett’s book shows that while there is indeed a battle with wolves in it, the scene bears little resemblance to Tolkien’s in The Hobbit (in fact, it is far closer to the battle outside Moria in The Lord of the Rings, which it probably did inspire). In Crockett’s historical romance, Chapter XLIX: ‘The Battle with the Were-wolves’ is devoted to a detailed account of how three Scotsmen (two servants and a cousin of the late Lord of Douglas of the title) are set upon by evil wolves in the forest of Machecoul as they attempt to rescue their dead lord’s sister and her maidservant from de Retz, who plans to sacrifice the two in a Satanic ceremony to regain his lost youth. The wolves are led by La Meffraye, a shape-changing witch in de Retz’s service,4 who takes the form of a great she-wolf. But rather than climb trees, as one of the servants prudently advises, the Scots put their backs against a bare lightning-struck pine and wait, watching the wolves muster in a ring all around them before finally charging for an eerily silent attack. The three of them eventually beat off the attack by sheer force of arms. Rather than actual fire, as in Tolkien, the scene is lit by ‘the blue leme of summer lightning’, also described as ‘the wild-fire running about the tree-tops’ and ‘[t]he leaping blue flame of the wild-fire’. The she-wolf (who does not personally take part in the charge, but directs her troops from a safe distance) eventually calls off the attack. The howls fade in the distance, becoming more human-like as they recede (one of the Scots remarks ‘these are no common wolves . . . There will be many dead warlocks to-morrow throughout the lands of France’), finally ceasing suddenly at cock-crow.
As this summary should make clear, Tolkien did not follow Crockett’s scene either in outline or detail: Tolkien’s wolves attack pell-mell and his heroes lack the Scots’ idiotic bravado (having considerably more sense), while Crockett’s villains do not receive timely aid (as per the wargs’ goblin-soldier allies) that requires a deus ex machina for the heroes’ escape. The only points in common are a wolf-attack in a forest clearing, the uncanny fire (magical but real in Tolkien’s case, merely illumination from distant lightning in Crockett’s), and the idea that the wolves are a lesser evil in service or allegiance to the real enemy.5
Tolkien’s wargs owe less to literary tradition than his own imagination, stimulated as always by philology. The word ‘Warg’ itself is derived from the Old English ‘wearg’,6 a word meaning both a literal wolf and also a figurative one, i.e., an outlaw. Clark Hall’s Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary [1894; rev. 4th ed., 1962] defines it as ‘(wolf), accursed one, outlaw, felon, criminal’ and glosses its adjectival forms as ‘wicked, cursed, wretched’. Tolkien himself, in a footnote to an unmailed letter, stated that
The word Warg used in The Hobbit and the L. R. [i.e., The Lord of the Rings] for an evil breed of (demonic) wolves is not supposed to be A[nglo]-S[axon] specifically, and is given prim[itive] Germanic form as representing the noun common to the Northmen of these creatures.
—JRRT to Mr. Rang, c. August 1967; Letters, p. 381.7
He reiterates this point, after distinguishing between the ‘internal’ history of names within the story8 and their ‘external’ history (‘the sources from which I, as an author, derived them’) in a letter to fellow fantasy author Gene Wolfe:
Warg . . . is an old word for wolf, which also had the sense of an outlaw or hunted criminal. This is its usual sense in surviving texts. [O[ld] E[nglish] wearg; O[ld] High German warg; O[ld] Norse varg-r (also = ‘wolf’, espec[ially] of legendary kind).] I adopted the word, which had a good sound for the meaning, as a name for this particular brand of demonic wolf in the story.9
Note that Tolkien stresses the demonic aspect of these creatures (and, in the Wolfe letter, that of their goblin allies: ‘Orc I derived from Anglo-Saxon, a word meaning a demon, usually supposed to be derived from the Latin Orcus – Hell. But I doubt this . . .’),10 a feature which seems more in keeping with the wargs of The Lord of the Rings, whose bodies melt away with the daylight (cf. Note 5), than the wolves that tree Gandalf & Company. It could be argued that Tolkien’s thinking in the 1960s may have been influenced by his late speculations that the orcs, especially orc-leaders like the Great Goblin, Azog, and Bolg, might have been incarnated evil spirits similar in kind, if less in power, to the balrogs (for more on these ‘boldog’, see pp. 149 & 139). However, it can also be seen as a return to Tolkien’s portrayal of wolves in the early Silmarillion tradition, especially in the figures of Draugluin and Carcharoth.
According to ‘The Tale of Tinúviel’, the race of wolves was bred by Melko from dogs (thus reversing the actual historical relationship between the two species), making the wargs Mr. Baggins encounters yet another of the Children of Morgoth, in accordance with the pattern throughout this book. In the earliest story, the Cerberus-like guardian of the gates of Angband (or Angamandi, as it was then called) was Karkaras (‘Knifefang’), the Father of Wolves (eventually changed, through many intermediary stages, to Carcharoth, ‘the Red Maw’). Some characteristics of this monster persisted through all the permutations of the story: that he was greatest of all wolves who ever lived; his role in biting off Beren’s hand, swallowing the Silmaril, an
d eventually giving Beren his mortal wound; his death in the woods of Doriath (originally called Artanor) at the hands of Beren, Huan, and Lúthien’s father, his vitals half-devoured by the Silmaril’s ‘holy magic’ (BLT II.31, 33–4, 36–7, 38–9). The most important alteration, his loss of status as the first wolf or Father of Wolves, came through the introduction into the legendarium of a second great wolf, Draugluin, during the later development of the Beren & Lúthien story for ‘The Lay of Leithian’. This ‘old grey lord/of wolves and beasts of blood abhorred’ (lines 2712–2713, HME III.252), whose authority even Carcharoth recognizes and respects (lines 3754ff, HME III.290), is Sauron/Thû’s trusted pet ‘that fed on flesh of Man and Elf/beneath the chair of Thû himself’ (lines 2714–2715, HME III.252). Like Carcharoth, he can speak,11 perhaps anticipating ‘the dreadful wolf-language of the wargs’ in The Hobbit (p. 204).
The most important of all the legendarium’s wolves, however, is Sauron himself; Tolkien even considered having it be Thû the necromancer in wolf-form who devoured Beren’s companions one by one in the dungeons beneath Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves (cf. the plot-outline for ‘The Lay of Leithian’ that Christopher Tolkien refers to as ‘Synopsis II’, cited on HME III.233). Not only is Thû referred to as ‘the Lord of Wolves’ but after Draugluin’s death at the hands (so to speak) of Huan, Thû takes the form of a demon wolf, hoping thus to fulfill the prophecy of Huan’s being slain by ‘the mightiest wolf of all’. Thû’s identification with wolves in ‘The Lay of Leithian’, which Tolkien was working on simultaneously with the original drafting of The Hobbit, is so great that his title as ‘Master of Wolves’ almost tends to overwhelm his identification in that work as ‘the necromancer’. We should also not forget that after his defeat by Huan and Lúthien he retreats to the forest of Taur-na-Fuin, which Tolkien elsewhere explicitly identified as Mirkwood (‘Taur-na-Fuin, which is Mirkwood’ – 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, HME V.282; see also ‘The Disaster of the Gladden Fields’, Unfinished Tales, page 281), the borders of which Gandalf and Company are approaching when they encounter the wargs. Thus, although Tolkien makes no explicit link in The Hobbit between the appearance of the wargs and the proximity of the necromancer’s tower, any reader of the older tales and lays coming to The Hobbit for the first time would not be surprised to find wolf-packs allied with goblins prowling about near any refuge of The Necromancer.
The History of the Hobbit Page 29
