With the charming naiveté endemic among nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers on mythology, who assume that all deities among any Indo-European people must correspond to some familiar figure in the Greek pantheon, Grimm confidently identified this Radegast as the Slavic equivalent to Wuotan (Wotan/Odin) in Germanic mythology, and Hermes (Mercury) in the classical pantheon (Teutonic Mythology, Preface pages xxx & liv, vol. I pages 130 & 248–9).39 Nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to re-construct the lost Slavic pantheon eagerly seized upon the references in Adam of Bremen and a later chronicler, Helmold’s Chronica Slavorum [‘Chronicle of the Slavs’; later twelfth century], and the conclusions of Grimm to create a god, variously known as Radegast, Ragidost, Redigast, who may never have actually existed: a (modern) statue of him now stands on Mount Radhost in the Czech Republic near the Slovakian and Polish borders, and since the 1970s Radegast has been the name of a premium Czech beer named not for Tolkien’s character but after the presumptive and possibly fictitious ‘god of hospitality’.40
Tolkien, who was always intrigued by attempts to recapture lost myths and preserve the last fragments of a people’s folklore (e.g., his fascination with Lönnrot’s Kalevala), might have been drawn to the presumptive Slavic Radegast by the references in Grimm, an author for whom he had a great deal of respect and with whom he identified in some respects.41 We have the example in his piece ‘The Name “Nodens”’ [1932] of his attempt to use all the tools of philology ‘to recall forgotten gods from their twilight’ (Report on the Excavation . . . [at] Lydney Park, Gloucestershire, page 135), and of course his borrowing of the name Eärendel from Cynewulf’s Crist, so it is entirely possible that ‘Radegast’ is another borrowing of the same type, lifted from its shadowy and debatable original context and given a wholly new meaning within his legendarium by Tolkien.
A final plausible candidate for Tolkien’s inspiration, and to my mind the most convincing of all, is the Gothic king or war-chieftain Radagaisus (died 406 AD), whose name is rendered Rhadagast in some eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sources.42 Tolkien’s great interest in the Goths (especially their language) was responsible for his vocation as a philologist specializing in the Germanic languages; his mentor when an undergraduate at Oxford was Joseph Wright, perhaps the world’s leading expert in Gothic at the time, and Tolkien’s first significant invented language was Gautiska or ‘Neo-Gothic’, in which he wrote one of his finest poems (‘Bagme Bloma’, appearing in Songs for the Philologists [1936], page 12).43 He was also, as might be expected, well-versed in Gothic history.44 Radagaisus’s story is told in Isidore of Seville’s History of the Goths, Vandals, and Suevi, but the story was familiar to all readers of Edward Gibbon’s monumental The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776–88]. As Isidore [d. 636 AD] describes it, in the year 405 AD:
Radagaisus, king of the Goths, a Scythian by birth, a man devoted to the cult of idolatry and most savage in the fierceness of his barbaric cruelty, attacked with violent devastation the regions of Italy, together with two hundred thousand soldiers, vowing, in contempt of Christ, that he would make a libation of the Romans’ blood to his god if he should win. His army, after being surrounded by the Roman general Stilicho on the mountainous ground of Tuscany, was destroyed by hunger rather than by battle. Finally the king was captured and killed.
[Four years later] . . . now that Radagaisus was dead, Alaric, his colleague in kingship, who was a Christian in name but professed himself a heretic, grieving that so great a number of Goths had been slain by the Romans, waged war against Rome to avenge his countrymen’s blood . . . and so the city which had been the conqueror of all nations was conquered and overpowered by the triumph of the Goths[.]
—Isidore of Seville, History of the Goths . . .,
tr. Guido Donini & Gordon B. Ford Jr. [1966], pp. 8–9.
Despite the obvious similarity of the names Radagaisus/Rhadagast and Radagast, the actual historical figure seems an odd choice to have inspired Tolkien to create his character, since one of the few things we know about Radagast in The Hobbit is that he gets along well with his neighbors, even the notoriously irascible Medwed. The historical Radagaisus was a sort of Gothic Boadicea, a pagan leader noted for his hostility to Christians, who fought Huns, Romans, and fellow Goths in a violent and ultimately disastrous campaign in 405–6 AD. Gibbon, for example, describes him as ‘the implacable enemy of Rome’ and ‘a devout Pagan’ who practiced human sacrifice.45 However, we should note that Tolkien was quite willing to borrow a name from a less than attractive historical figure when it suited his purposes (that is, when something about the name attracted him), the best example being Alboin of the Lombards (Longbeards), whom even his namesake Alboin Errol in The Lost Road thinks less sympathetic than the rivals he destroyed, the Gepids (HME V.37; see also Christopher Tolkien’s commentary in ibid.53–4). In fact, Alboin’s career was remarkably like Radagaisus’s some two and a half centuries before, except that Alboin was successful in leading his people (described as being both pagans and Arians) into Italy and conquering and settling a large section of it; compare also Tolkien’s interest in and apparent admiration for Hengest, who led the (successful) Germanic invasion of Britain (Finn and Hengest, The Book of Lost Tales). Of course, there is always the possibility that Tolkien may simply have been amused by the comic possibilities of assigning a grandiose or otherwise inappropriate name, something he does over and over again in his works, from Galathea the cow (who shares the name of the statue brought to life in the story of Pygmalion) and Julius Agricola (the Roman general who conquered the part of Britain Tolkien considered his home county) in Farmer Giles of Ham to Fortinbras, Odovacar, and Sigismond as hobbit-names46 (cf. the family trees in Appendix C of The Lord of the Rings [LotR.1137] and HME XII.85–118 for many more examples), not to mention using ‘Fingolfin’ as the name of the goblin-king whose decapitation created the game of golf.
In the end, it seems likely that Tolkien was attracted to the name precisely because of its ambiguity and uncertain status, just as he was to the cruxes in Beowulf and puzzling words preserved in old manuscripts like ‘Earendel’ and ‘sigelwara’ (see p. 719), to the explication of which he devoted much of his career, both philological and creative. The ‘Radegast’ of the chronicles probably represents an attempt to record in Old High German a now-lost Slavic name which might originally have referred to a place, or to a forgotten god, or been an epithet for another god that was later mistaken for a separate deity.47 The ‘Radagaisus’ of late Roman history similarly represents an attempt to capture in Latin a Gothic name, possibly *Radagais (Gothic: ‘counsel-spear’),48 rendered Rœdgota (OE: ‘counsel-Goth’) in Alfred’s Boethius and Rhadagast by early modern writers. Out of these Tolkien chose Radagast as the name he wanted for his character, who proves just as elusive as his namesake(s).
Plot Notes A
These Plot Notes (Marq. 1/1/23:5–10) consist of six pages (three sheets), each numbered by Tolkien in the upper right-hand corner. I give the text of these plot notes in full, followed by textual notes and brief commentary.
Change name of Bladorthin > Gandalf.
Gandalf > Thorin (Oakenshield)
Medwed > to Beorn. Let bear be enchanted
Don’t forget the key found in troll’s lair.TN1
After visit to Beorn
They tell Beorn of their quest.TN2
Darkness falls. They are given beds in the hall. Moon shines in through the louver. Beorn stands up and bids them goodnight, but warns them they must not stray outside the hall till dawn on their peril. He goes out. They go to sleep.
Bilbo wakes up to hear growling outside, & scraping & snuffling at the doors. Next morning no sign of Beorn; but they find breakfast laid on the veranda. The sheep horses and dogs wait on them. Night comes again. More growling. Next morning Beorn is there. He is very pleasant to them. They find out he has been right away back to the mountains & found out their story was true. He has caught a warg and a goblin. He is delighted to thin
k of the death of the chief goblin. So they tell him of their quest & ask his help. He lends them ponies and food. They are to ride these as far as the edge of the great forest, then to send them home; but to treat them well and not ride them fast.
They start off – [or so it >] and ride till dark. Bilbo thinks he sees a big bear sneaking in the trees at their side. Sh! says GandalfTN3 (=Blad) – take no notice.
They camp at edge of the great forest; and send back the ponies. In the moon they see them trotting back with a big bear trotting after them.
In the morning it is as dark in the forest almost as night.
‘Do we have to go through?’ says Bilbo.
Yes says Bladorthin – we shd. have to goTN4 a hundred miles either way to get round it – and the North we should be back at the Misty Mountains again and [added: at the] south end the Necromancer lives. At this point there is a track through. But it is a narrow one. Don’t stray off it – if you do you won’t find the path again & I don’t know what will happen. When you get to the other side you will come to the Long marshesTN5 but you will already see far and faint the Lonely Mountain in the East. There is a path across the Marshes. We know, we know said Gandalf – that is on the borders of our own land, & we have not forgotten – beyond the marshes are the wide fields and then at last we come if we turn half south to Long Lake, but
All right, then said Blad. Now off you go. Take care of yourselves & goodbye.
He wouldn’t stay. No he said. This is your affair I have come much farther than I meant. I have other business on hand now that can wait no longer. And off he went back towards Medwed.TN7
The dwarves & Bilbo plunge into the forest. Very dark and silent. Black squirrels peep at them; and all kinds of queer
The spider comes at him. He kills herTN11 – takes her thread and in dim light of day has marvellous luck to come across the track. Ties thread to a tree; puts ring onTN12 and goes off. back towards spiderwebs – which he finds by thread.
He calls Dori Nori, Oinn & Gloinn, Balin Dwalin, Bivur & Bombr, Fili Kili Gandalf.TN13 Faint answer comes, and he finds them all hung up, in webs twined round – like spider-meat. All except Gandalf who with orcrist had killed a spider & escaped. He cuts down Dori and with his help is releasing others when the spiders come back swinging from the branches of the trees.
Battle with spiders. When the spiders cannot overcome them they go off and spin black webs all round so that the dwarves are shut in – and hundreds more come up: poisonous spiders.TN14
The spiders are sitting up in the branches spinning black webs – and guarding their prisoners. Bilbo hears them talking about the nice
Then when they have all swung down on the ground he sings a song.
Old fat spider spinning in a tree
" " " can’t spy me
Attercop! Attercop!
Won’t you stop,
Stop your spinning and seek for me?
Old Tom-noddy all big body
Old Tom noddy can’t spy me
Attercop! Attercop
Down you drop,
You never will catch me in your tree.TN15
Then he threw another stone. Only spiders came down, others ran along the branches and swung from tree to tree. They wove webs all round the clearingTN16 He went to a different place and sang.
Lazy lob and crazy Cob
Are weaving webs to wind me.
Then he
but still they can not find me.
Here [am] I naughty little fly
[I go by and laughing fly >] You are fat and lazy
[Th I go by >] and [I] laughing fly as I go by
Through your cobwebs crazyTN17
Then he slashed one of their webs to pieces.
They all came in that direction and so he led them far away & then crept back and loosed the dwarves.
The spiders found out before he
They had a dreadful time following Bilbo’s thread. Spiders after them. Spiders in front weaving thick webs to stop them. But the dwarves beat them off with branches at the rear while Bilbo cut the webs ahead.
At last the spiders got tired of following. So they got back to the track.
Where was Gandalf?
Caught by wood elves. Took him to the caves of their king. they had had a battle with dwarves long ago and did not like them so he shut Gandalf up and sent people to look for the
The dwarves were all captured by the woodelves but Bilbo popped on his ring and followed them into the caves.
Description of the woodelves caves.TN19
Bilbo stuffs his pockets
Bladorthin angry. He comes and speaks to the woodelves king, and the dwarves are released, under pressure of
Bladorthin says ‘Now really good bye.’
Over the marshes. First sight of the lonely Mountain All burnt.TN23
[added in top margin:]
In spring
All shut up in it. Bilbo can’t find his way out [> get out the magic gates].TN24 lives by stealing food. Finds Dori’s cell.
[added at bottom of page:]
In Spring
Bilbo escapes by
TEXT NOTES
1 The underlined phrase and the line about the troll-key are written in slightly smaller and hastier handwriting and may have been added later.
For the uncertainties about whether or not Medwed was enchanted, see p. 247 & 259. And for more on the enchanted bear theme, see the commentary on Bothvar Bjarki starting on p. 256 above and also Plot Notes F (p. 629).
2 This line and the one immediately preceding it each have a line drawn through them, indicating that they are false starts which were soon cancelled.
3 The word ‘Gandalf’ is struck through here. This first hesitant application to the wizard of the name under which he has long since become famous did not stick; within six lines Tolkien was once again calling the character ‘Bladorthin’. Not until near the end of the Second Phase, in the Lonely Mountain chapters, was the wizard’s new name actually adopted (see pp. 476 & 482 below).
4 A cancelled word or partial word follows ‘to go’ here which might read ‘near’ (i.e., nearly) or ‘nor’ (i.e., north).
In addition to Tolkien�
�s reversion to the name ‘Bladorthin’ here and henceforth, only six lines after adopting ‘Gandalf’ as the name of the wizard and despite the confident listing of name changes at the start of the document, note the wizard’s use of first person plural here: ‘we shd. have to go’ and ‘we should be back’. This usage is curious, given his immediate departure from them at the top of the next page; along with the sketchy ‘First Outline’ given on p. 229 above this suggests that Tolkien was undecided about the exact point at which the wizard and the others would part company, although the departure itself had been foreseen from the very first chapter (see the references to ‘Mr. Lucky Number’). In any case, his reversion to ‘you’ a few sentences later simply highlights the fluidity of these notes, with ideas emerging in the process of putting words to paper.
5 The ‘Long Marshes’, capitalized as if a proper name, appears in Chapter VII (p. 244; cf. also DAA.189) but the name appears nowhere else in the book. The marshes themselves go all the way back to ‘The Pryftan Fragment’, appearing on Fimbulfambi’s Map (cf. Frontispiece), although in the event neither Bilbo nor the dwarves ever have any adventures there. See also p. 370 below.
The History of the Hobbit Page 38
