The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  . . . a huge bear advanced before king Hrolf’s men, and always next at hand where the king was. He killed more men with [that] paw of his than any five of the king’s champions. Blows and missiles rebounded from him, and he beat down both men and horses from king Hjorvarth’s host, and everything within reach he crunched with his teeth, so that alarm and dismay arose in king Hjorvarth’s host.

  — ‘King Hrolf and His Champions’, tr. Gwyn Jones, p. 313; cf. The Battle of Five Armies, pp. 679–80.

  So long as the bear fights for them, Hrolf Kraki’s forces triumph against overwhelming odds. However, one of the champions (the redeemed coward mentioned earlier, who has now become the most brutal of the champions) frets that Bothvar is nowhere to be seen on the battlefield and leaves the field seeking him. He finds Bothvar sitting in a trance and awakes him, urging him to be mindful of his glory, to join the battle and not hide like a coward. At that moment, Bothvar wakes and the bear vanishes. Bjarki berates his fellow champion (‘You have not been so helpful to the king by this action of yours as you think’) and the two men go outside, where they find that the tide of battle has turned against the heroes. Queen Skuld now begins to use black magic against them (‘she . . . had not brought any of her tricks into play while the bear was in king Hrolf’s host; but there was now such a change as when dark night follows the bright day’ – Gwyn Jones, p. 315), summoning up a monstrous boar and causing the dead to rise again when slain and continue fighting. Bothvar, King Hrolf, and the rest are all slain, only to be later avenged by Bothvar’s two brothers (the half-human outlaw Elgfrothi and King Thorir Houndsfoot) aided by a force sent by King Hrolf’s other half-sister (who is also his mother – it’s a complicated family tree), the Swedish Queen Yrsa.

  Yet despite his apparent derivation from, or inspiration by, Bothvar Bjarki, Medwed/Beorn differs greatly from the ancient hero of the North. Medwed is a solitary, without wife or kin, living alone with his animals (indeed, it’s hinted that he might be an animal, or at least as much animal as human). Bothvar is one of three brothers (in the best fairy-tale tradition), each as extraordinary in his own way as he. Bjarki has parents and grandparents, and his father’s and mother’s tragedy is directly responsible for his prowess and strange powers. By contrast, Medwed notably lacks the ancestry established for most other characters in Tolkien’s story, including Bilbo, Gandalf/Thorin, Elrond, and later Bard. Wifeless and childless, he seems wholly without kinsmen or friends of his own kind (whatever that is), unless we count the unseen bears who rendezvous with him in the forest. Bothvar, by contrast, marries King Hrolf’s daughter Drifa and has several children by her. In this, and in personality, Medwed/Beorn seems less like Bothvar and more like his eldest brother Elgfrothi, the wildest of the three.

  This Elgfrothi is ‘of a rather strange kind. He was a man above, but an elk from the navel down’ (hence his name, Elk-Frothi or elk-Frodo).12 Unlike Bothvar, who becomes the champion of Hrolf Kraki’s court, Frothi becomes an outlaw, ‘an evil-doer, killing men for their money,’ living by himself in a hut in the mountains and waylaying travellers. Elgfrothi is unnaturally strong, beginning his exile after he has crippled many men and even killed some at wrestling games (in this he is slightly reminiscent of the hapless Túrin’s early history as an outlaw and robber); however, we are also told (rather ambiguously) that while he kills men for their money, ‘he had given peace to many men who were of little strength’. Despite this, however, he is not all bad: he bears no ill will to his more fortunate brothers and indeed offers to split all his gains with them (which by this point amounted to ‘immense wealth’ – Gwyn Jones, p. 271). After Bothvar has avenged their father, he visits his elder brother and Elgfrothi makes Bjarki drink his blood, making our hero stronger than ever. Together Elgfrothi and Bjarki seem to have provided hints that Tolkien combined into one character, who shares the elusive nature of his inspirations.

  The dichotomy of Elgfrothi and Medwed’s solitariness contrasted with Bjarki’s gregariousness as a natural leader of men may explain one curious feature of the Beorn story: at the end of the book (here we are anticipating a bit), Tolkien breaks narrative continuity to tell us that Medwed/Beorn gathered the woodmen to him and ‘became a great chief afterwards in those regions & ruled a wide land between the mountains & the wood; & it is said that for many generations the men of his line had the power of taking bear’s shape, & some were grim men & bad’ – shades of Elgfrothi, perhaps? – ‘but most were in heart like Beorn, if less in size & strength. In their day the last goblins were hunted from the Misty Mountains & a new peace came over the edge of the Wild’.13 We are also told, in The Lord of the Rings, that at the time of Frodo’s journey some 80 years later the ‘Beornings’, as they were now called, were ruled by Beorn’s son, Grimbeorn the Old (LotR.245).

  The motif of Medwed-Beorn as a chieftain or leader of an independent people would seem to derive from the hitherto neglected middle brother, Thorir Houndsfoot (‘He had hound’s feet on him from the instep . . . though for the rest he was the most handsome of men’ – Gwyn Jones pp. 268–9). When it comes his turn to set out and seek his fortune, he travels to the land of the Gauts, who make him their king ‘by reason of his size’ (the Gauts very practically pick whoever fits the throne best as their next king, rather than the other way around – Gwyn Jones, pp. 271–2). Thorir resembles Bothvar so much that when the latter shows up for a visit Thorir’s wife the queen mistakes him for her husband, and only Bothvar’s innate chivalry prevents him from cuckolding his brother the king in a scene strongly resembling an episode in the Welsh tale ‘Pwyll Prince of Dyfed,’ the first of the four branches of the Mabinogi. By incorporating echoes of the displaced prince becoming a king of men in his own right (or, in this case, creating a new people named after himself, along the lines of the historical Scyldings), Tolkien seems to be harkening back to the third of these three remarkable brothers.

  One curious theme, hinted at in Tolkien’s notes and outlines, was never fully realized in the finished book. As the section of drafting given in Text Note 15 above indicates, Tolkien hesitated over whether or not Medwed was under some sort of enchantment, finally coming down with the magnificently equivocal statement that he is ‘under no enchantment but his own’. However, against this we must set the plot notes given between this and the next chapter, sketching out events between the guests bedding down for the night in Medwed’s hall in what is now the middle of Chapter VII to their capture by wood-elves at the beginning of Chapter IX. Written while Chapter VII was still being drafted, in these plot notes Tolkien states unequivocally: ‘Let bear be enchanted’ (1/1/23:5; see p. 293), underlining the point for emphasis. Nor did he forget this motif: Plot Notes F, a half-page of late pencilled notes written on the back of an unsent letter, ends with a mention of ‘Battle of Five armies and disenchantment of Beorn’ (1/1/23:3; see p. 629).

  The idea underlying these two isolated references is never made explicit, but taken in context with Medwed/Beorn’s altered personality and behavior at the end of the book, they suggest that his ‘disenchantment’ and becoming a leader of men are linked. The exact nature of the enchantment, and the circumstances of its breaking, are obscure; mysteries like so much else about Medwed-Beorn. Perhaps it is even self-imposed (‘under no enchantment but his own’). In any case, in some way his role in the battle – killing the goblin-chief, slaying and scattering his followers – apparently fulfills the unknown conditions for breaking his ‘enchantment’. But unlike Bothvar, who projects his bear-form once and once only, Medwed/Beorn retains his shape-shifting ability and passes it along to his descendants. Even more curiously, the scanty information in LotR does not refer to his death but merely indicates that the rule has now passed to his son; from the text it is impossible to say that he did not eventually return at last to the mountains, vanishing back into his origins like Scyld Scefing (Shield Sheafing).14

  (iii)

  Beorn’s Hall

  Like the figure of Medwed/Beorn himself, the illu
stration of his hall that accompanies the published book marks another mingling of Tolkien’s erudition with his storytelling gifts. A moody, evocative drawing in its own right, it exists in two distinct variants. The earlier, ‘Firelight in Beorn’s house’, is the more striking of the two, making more use of shadows and having red flames emanate from the central fire-pit. It also presents the hall from a decided slant, leaving the far end out of the viewer’s line of sight. A black and white reproduction of this piece appears in Artist & Illustrator (H-S#115) and in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.171), but the original with its touch of colour has so far as I know never been published before: see Plate VI [bottom] in this book. The slight use of colour probably led to this original depiction of Beorn’s hall being rejected for publication: even a speck of colour would require the entire picture to be produced in colour, a much more expensive process than that for black-and-white art. The similar ‘Troll’s Hill’ – see Plate IV [bottom] – which was also not used in any edition of The Hobbit published in Tolkien’s lifetime, was probably rejected for the same reason.15

  The second or replacement illustration, ‘Beorn’s Hall’ (DAA.170, H-S#116), offers a straightforward look down the length of the hall at more or less eye level, with a clear view of the long table (now with stump-seats), the fire-pit, a doorway at the far end, and a louver in the roof allowing smoke to escape. This drawing, being entirely in black and white, was used in the 1937 Hobbit and has been reproduced many times since.

  A curious feature of the original, rejected illustration was discovered by Tolkien scholar J. S. Ryan in 1990:16 Tolkien had modelled ‘Firelight in Beorn’s house’ very closely on an illustration of a Norse mead-hall that had appeared in a work published just a few years before, An Introduction to Old Norse (1927), by his friend and collaborator, E. V. Gordon.17 And not just any mead-hall: the illustration appears in the midst of Gordon’s excerpt from Hrolf Kraki’s Saga, a section he titles ‘Bothvar Bjarki at the Court of King Hrolf’ (EVG, pp. 27–8). What’s more, since Hrolf Kraki is the same figure as Beowulf’s Hrothulf, nephew to the Danish king, his hall is better known to modern-day readers by its Old English name: Heorot, the Grendel-haunted seat of old King Hrothgar. Tolkien, then, has modeled Medwed-Beorn’s hall on a building he had studied carefully – in fact, the most famous such hall in Old English literature, every detail of whose description had been scrutinized by generations of philologists and archeologists.18 It’s just another example of his fiction bringing vividly to life something that came out of his scholarship, offering us a re-creation of what it’d be like to spend the night in such a building.

  (iv)

  The Carrock

  [R]ight in the path of the stream which looped itself round it, was a rock – almost a hill of stone, like a last outpost of the mountains, or a large piece cast miles into the plain by some giant among giants . . . There was [a] flat place on the top of the hill of stone, and a well worn path with many steps leading down it, to the river side, and a ford of huge boulders which led across to the grass land beyond the river. There was a little cave (a wholesome one) with a pebbly floor at the foot of the hill opposite the boulder-ford. Here the party gathered and discussed what was to be done.

  As noted above (cf. Text Note 12), Tolkien did not originally bestow upon this geographical feature the name it bears now. Instead in the top margin of the page (manuscript page 79; 1/1/7:3), he scribbled the sequence Sorneldin > Sinrock > Lamrock > the Carrock.

  Sorneldin would seem to derive from Tolkien’s invented languages, possibly the Gnomish (Sindarin) words for rock (sarn) and point (nel) – cf. the Gnomish Lexicon [1917], pp. 67, 60. More probably, it derives from the Qenya (Quenya) word for eagle (sorn, sorne), one of the derivatives of which is soron (high peak, pinnacle, crag) – cf. the Qenya Lexicon [1917–1920], p. 86. If so, then a memory of the rejected name might have influenced Tolkien when he came to illustrate the scene; see below.

  Sinrock seems not to be Elvish at all, unless I have misread the (hastily scribbled) word and the third letter is actually -r-: sir being the Sindarin word for ‘river’ (Gnomish Lexicon p. 67) – cf. the great river of Beleriand, the Sirion, and Moria’s ‘Gate-stream’, the Sirannon. ‘River-rock’ suits the Carrock exceptionally well as a name, but it is unlike Tolkien to use mixed (Elven/English) forms by combining a Sindarin prefix with an English root, which may have lead to the word’s rejection. It seems far more likely that the name is a modernization of Old English: sin- (great, huge) + -rocc (rock): ‘The Great Rock’.

  Lamrock I can find no explanation at all within the invented languages, the closest equivalents being Qenya lama (flock) and lambe (tongue), neither of which seems appropriate. Nor does the Old English word lam seem a likely candidate, as it means earth, dirt, or soil (all preserved in its modern descendant, loam). The answer probably lies, as in so much else of Tolkien’s non-Elven geographic nomenclature, in the rich field of English place-names.

  Carrock, the fourth in this hastily-written sequence and the name chosen from that point forward, derives from a dialectical Old English (Old Northumbrian) borrowing from the Celtic. That borrowed word, carr, came to be especially applied to isolated rocks standing in the sea just off the Scottish and Northumbrian coasts, a close parallel to the water-surrounded Carrock of our story. Curiously enough, the root Celtic word (from which our modern word crag also descends) is itself an anomaly that has caused scholars of the Celtic languages much puzzlement. The various forms of it in Welsh, Irish, Scots, and Manx, while obviously sharing a common ancestor, do not follow the normal laws of sound-changes that would enable philologists to establish exactly how that lost ancestor would have been spelled or pronounced. It is thus one of those ‘asterisk words’ which, as T. A. Shippey points out, is exactly the kind of thing that attracted Tolkien’s attention.

  As for the exact spelling ‘carrock’, Jim Allan’s An Introduction to Elvish [1974] states that ‘Carrock Fell is a mountain peak in the Skiddaw group in Cumberland’ (Allan p. 174). However, as Taum Santoski discovered, Tolkien’s source was probably his old mentor, Joseph Wright,19 who lists the word in Volume I of his monumental English Dialect Dictionary, noting that it was variously spelt currick (in Northumberland, Durham, and Cumberland), carrock (Northumberland, Cumberland), corrock (‘North Country’), currack (‘North Country’, Durham), curragh (Durham), currock (Northumberland, Cumberland), and kirock (‘North Country’) and pronounced ke-rek. Wright defines the word as ‘1. A cairn, a heap of stones, used as a boundary mark, burial place, or guide for travellers’ and ‘2. A distant mountain by which, when the sun appears over it, the country folk tell the time of day’ (English Dialect Dictionary, Volume I, page 845).

  We know that Tolkien was familiar with Wright’s book and used it often; in 1923, fresh from completing his A Middle English Vocabulary [1922] and deep into the Sir Gawain project, he wrote to Mrs. Wright (herself a distinguished philologist):

  Middle English is an exciting field – almost uncharted I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces – as far as language goes at any rate. E.D.D. [= Wright’s English Dialect Dictionary] is certainly indispensable, or ‘unentbehrlich’† as really comes more natural to the philological mind, and I encourage people to browze in it.

  —JRRT to E. M. Wright, 13th February 1923; Letters p. 11.

  † Editor’s note: ‘indispensable, essential, absolutely necessary’.

  It seems likely that Tolkien’s interest in the word is linked to his time at Leeds, when he was living near the region where the word had once been used and where remnants of it remained behind in the nomenclature of the area. Tolkien provided ‘advice and encouragement’ as well as a foreword to W. E. Haigh’s book A New Glossary of the Dialect of the Huddersfield District in 1928, in which he talks about the value of such work (Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, p. 290). That interest may also have been sparked by
contact with A. H. Smith, one of his star pupils at Leeds and later the editor, compiler, and printer of Songs for the Philologists. Smith’s special field of study was delving into the origins of English place-names and he eventually published a number of books on the subject, becoming one of his generation’s leading experts in that field and serving as General Editor of the English Place-Name Society’s multivolume series exploring and explicating the place names of each English county.20 Smith himself contributed two volumes to this series (vols. XXV and XXVI, English Place Name Elements, Cambridge Univ. Press, [1956]), in which he gives carrec as a place-name element, citing Carrock Fell in Cumberland as an example. The Cumberland volumes of the series (The Place Names of Cumberland by A. M. Armstrong, A. Mawer, F. M. Stemton, & Bruce Dikins, English Place-Name Society vols XX, XXI, & XXII [1952]) discuss Carrock Fell, near Mosedale in Cumberland, and note that the name had variously been listed in historical records as Carroc [1208], Carrok [1261], verticem de Carrock [1568], the mountain Carrak or Carrick [1610], and Carrock-Fell [1794]. Armstrong et al. simply note that ‘This is a British hill-name’ (vol. XXI, p. 305). Thus, Carrock-Fell was once simply known as ‘Carroc/Carrok/Carrock’, fell being a word meaning a barren or rocky hill. Similarly, verticem (vertex, height) is merely Latin for a mountain peak or high place.