The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  16 Unlike the many shifts in assigning an action to a specific dwarf (e.g. Text Note 12 above), the detail of Dori as the watchman who next spotted the lights persisted unchanged from the first draft through into the published book. The same applies to Kili as the watcher for the third (ultimately disastrous) encounter with the elf-lights.

  17 All but the first two words of this sentence was later cancelled and replacement text written in the top margin: ‘send Mr Baggins forward alone first, to talk to them and ask for food. They won’t be frightened of him – (‘what about me of them?’ thought Bilbo) – and I hope they won’t do anything nasty to him!’ The slightly revised version of this that appears in the First Typescript (1/1/58) corresponds exactly to the published text (DAA.205).

  18 This paragraph was heavily revised to fit the change from Gandalf to Bilbo having been the one to step forward on the second try:

  Then Gandalf pushed Bilbo forward and he quietly stepped into the ring. Out went all the lights again, and if it was bad collecting themselves before it was worse still this time. Bilbo simply couldn’t be found. Every time they counted themselves it only made thirteen, and though they shouted and called ‘Bilbo Baggins. Hobbit. You dratted hobbit. Hi hobbit confusticate you’ & other such things there was no answer. Dori found him. He fell over what seemed a log, and found it was the hobbit lying down fast asleep.

  19 The motif of dreaming about a wondrous feast enters the story here, long before the ‘enchanted stream’ interpolation developed the idea, but it is not Bilbo or Bombur but Gandalf himself who is the dreamer. This passage is another striking example of how a scene, image, or speech could remain practically unchanged while its application and significance altered greatly. The shift from Gandalf to Bilbo must have occurred almost at once, since Gandalf’s statement that this time he will step forward himself in their third attempt to beseech charity immediately follows only a few paragraphs later.

  20 Tolkien seems have initially forgotten about Ori (who along with Bofur had also been omitted in the draft of this passage in Plot Notes A; see Text Note 13 on p. 298); the name appears as an addition to the line. The sequence of names is changed slightly in the typescript: the first eight are the same, but there Bombur is followed with ‘Bifur, Bofur, Dwalin, Balin, Thorin Oakenshield.’

  21 This point, the bottom of manuscript page 106 (1/1/8:6), marks the second of the three times in the story Bilbo will be all alone in the dark. This dramatic moment seems to correspond to a brief pause in the writing, since the top of the next page on a new sheet (manuscript page 107; 1/1/8:7) shows a marked change in Tolkien’s handwriting style, which for the next page or two becomes thin and spidery but also more elaborate, with many more flourishes.

  Only a few paragraphs into this new section, the text begins to show signs of being very quickly written, with many small mistakes (e.g., ‘seemed and endless’, ‘they way they grow’, ‘before it his casting around’, &c.). It clearly represents the very first stage of composition, the initial expansion of the skeleton given in Plot Notes A.

  22 Remarkably enough, the spider that attacks Bilbo is initially referred to using female pronouns (she/her), though this is quickly switched to the gender-neutral pronouns (it/its) used in the published book. This carryover from the Plot Notes draft of the scene (see p. 294) is significant because it makes the giant spider the only female character to actually appear in the book.

  See also Text Note 31 below.

  23 Missing from this initial version of the scene is Bilbo’s naming his blade: the name Sting does not appear until the First Typescript version of the scene (typescript page 85; 1/1/58:10).

  24 Added in the top margin and marked for insertion at this point: ‘It was a bit of struggle’ said one ‘– but worth it. What nasty thick skins they have to be sure, but I’ll wager there is good juice inside’. This addition called for small changes in the following lines; ‘said one’ becomes ‘said another’; in the next line ‘another’ becomes ‘a third’; in the next ‘said a third’ becomes ‘said a fourth’, and finally the line after that (‘They’re dead now I warrant’) was ascribed back to the first spider (‘said the first’).

  25 Quoits, dart-throwing, shooting at the wand, bowls, and ninepins are all traditional English games.

  Quoits: A game very similar to horseshoes, in which small hoops or rings are tossed at a spike or stake. Its modern descendant, the ring-toss, is still a favorite at carnivals and fairs.

  Dart-throwing: Still a popular pastime, traditionally played in pubs.

  Shooting at the Wand: According to Anderson (DAA.210), an archery game wherein players shoot at a ‘wand’, or flat slat of wood. If Bilbo were a good shot with a bow, one might expect him to have been given one of Medwed’s bows (see p. 250). Probably Tolkien never linked the two passages, and there is in any case a great difference between a bow used in a game and a hunting-bow (comparable, say, to the difference between badminton and professional tennis); Bilbo could probably not even pull a heavy bow such as Medwed provided.

  Bowls: Better known today as lawn bowling, this is played with wooden balls on a grassy lawn. The winner is usually the player whose ball ends closest to a specific point.

  Ninepins: Also known as skittles, this is the ancestor of modern bowling. Tolkien originally wrote ninepines, but this seems a simple error rather than a variant. Ninepins is mainly famous in literature through its appearance in Washington Irving’s ‘Rip Van Winkle’ [1819] as the game played by the magical dwarves in that story.

  26 The spider-poem had already appeared in Plot Notes A; Tolkien clearly had his notes before him when writing this passage and simply copied the poem into the text here with only minor changes (see pp. 295 & 299).

  27 Attercop is simply the Old English word for spider (attercoppe), first attested circa 1000 AD; a modernized spelling would be adder-cob (poison-spider). The ‘coppe/cobbe’ element is sometimes thought to mean ‘head’ but was more probably simply ‘spider’, which is still its meaning in some Germanic dialects (Flemish cobbelcoppe, Westphalian cobbe, Dutch spinne-cob); the word survives in modern English cobweb (spider-web).

  Our modern word spider, while also derived from an Old English root (in this case, one meaning ‘spinner’), did not appear in English until around 1340 and was not definitely established for another century: early versions of Wycliffe’s Bible [circa 1440] use attercoppis while later versions use spiþers in its place. Cf. the OED, pages 138, 451, & 2960.

  More recently, ‘attercop’ was revived within a technical context when the name was given to the earliest known spider fossil, Attercopus fimbriungis, which lived in the Devonian Period some three hundred and eighty million years ago.

  28 Tom-noddy: Tom-fool. While ‘Tom-noddy’ is nineteenth-century, ‘noddy’ (fool, simpleton) itself goes back to Henry VIII’s time. Like booby, noddy is both a word for a fool and a seabird.

  29 Like the first spider-taunting poem, this one originates in Plot Notes A; see p. 299 for comments on its composition. The only change made here in this version is the capitalization lob > Lob, which is in contemporary black ink.

  ‘Cob’ = spider (preserved in modern English cobweb: ‘spider-web’); see Text Note 27 above.

  ‘Lob’ is a neat piece of Tolkienian linguistic doubling, since the word means both spider (OE lobbe, loppe) and also a rustic or country bumpkin. Hence it is both accurate and insulting at the same time. Its use here is interesting because, as Tolkien may have been aware, ‘lob’ is also a variant for ‘hob’ or house-spirit, the probable root-word for hobbit; examples include the Taynton Lob and Lob-Lie-by-the-Fire – cf. Katharine Briggs, Hobberty Dick [1955] and A Dictionary of Fairies [1976], especially the latter’s entry under ‘Lobs and Hobs’.

  Much later, Tolkien used ‘lob’ as part of the name for his most fully realized spider character, Shelob (= ‘she-spider’).†

  † ‘Do you think Shelob is a good name for a monstrous spider creature? It is of course only “she+lob” (=
spider), but written as one, it seems to be quite noisome’ (JRRT to CT, 21st May 1944; Letters p. 81).

  30 At this point, near the bottom of manuscript page 111 (1/1/8:11), Tolkien drew a line or bracket in red pencil between this and the next word, accompanied by a blue pencil annotation in the lower left margin:

  begins 88

  – that is, the next word corresponds to the top of page 88 in the First Typescript (1/1/58:13).

  31 The male pronouns (he, him) for this spider appear only in the manuscript; by the time of the First Typescript they have already shifted to neutral gender (it, its), which remained thereafter.

  32 The minor detail of Fili’s having a long nose is the only indication in the book that Fili and Kili are not, as many readers imagine them, identical in appearance; it is one of the very few bits of physical description of any character. The parenthetical comment about long noses proving useful first appears in the typescript.

  33 The sentence about Bilbo’s having taken his ring off before helping the dwarves, added to the Ms., was moved to the end of the preceding paragraph in the typescript, where it has remained ever since.

  34 Throughout the manuscript of The Hobbit the exact relationship between Bifur, Bofur, and Bombur remained in flux. Here we learn for the first time that they are kinsmen, and it is specifically stated that Bifur and Bofur are Bombur’s cousins, which in turn suggests that Bifur and Bofur are themselves brothers, given the analogy of the two brother-pairs Fili/Kili and Balin/Dwalin. For more on rhyming brother names, see Text Note 13 following Chapter XVII. When their relationship is mentioned again, in Chapter XII, all three dwarves have become brothers (‘“Bombur and Bofur!” cried Bifur their brother. “They are down in the valley!” “They will be slain . . .” moaned the others’ – see p. 508 and Text Note 20 following Chapter XII.

  Several pages in the original First Typescript of this chapter were replaced at some point before the Second Typescript was made,† including the page describing this scene (typescript page 89). The reading where Bifur and Bofur are Bombur’s cousins persisted here through both the original and replacement pages in the First Typescript (1/1/30:2 and 1/1/58:14), as well as the Second Typescript (1/1/39:17); not until black ink revisions to the page proofs was ‘his cousins Bifur and Bofur’ replaced by ‘his cousin Bifur and his brother Bofur’ (1/2/2 page 169), the reading of the published book (DAA.215). Similarly, the passage wherein Bifur describes Bofur and Bombur as ‘My brothers!’ appeared in the First Typescript, where it was altered in ink to ‘My cousins’ (typescript page 118; 1/1/62:4). This change was made before the Second Typescript was created, since the latter gives ‘My cousins’ as originally typed (1/1/43:5), the reading in the published book (DAA.274). Thus the final relationship between these three is that Bombur and Bofur are brothers, and Bifur is their cousin.

  † These were the bottom half of original typescript page 85 (now 1/1/30:1), the top half of which was retained and completed by new text pasted on to create a new composite page (1/1/58:10), and the original typescript conclusion to the chapter, original typescript pages 89–92 (now 1/1/30:2–5), which were replaced by new pages 89–92 (1/1/58:14–17). The replacement text expands upon the original somewhat, giving a more vivid account of the battle against the spiders. In addition, the bottom fifth of typescript page 83 (1/1/58:8) was covered by a pasteover of new text directly over the old; the three paragraphs of replacement text describe Bilbo’s stepping into the elf-circle and the dwarves’ search for him after he falls under the sleep enchantment. See Text Note 18 above and pp. 353–4 below for more on the evolution of this passage.

  35 At this point, a pencil line is drawn in the left margin alongside four lines of text (from ‘It was then’ to ‘went in and out round’), and the words

  make him it by a tree

  written in the margin; this of course refers to the ball of spider-thread.

  The other two changes to this paragraph – changing ‘old’ to ‘all’ and inserting the negative (‘had struck one of their biggest colonies’ > ‘had not struck one of their biggest colonies’) – are also in pencil and thus postdate the writing, probably by a considerable time.

  36 ‘The whole tale’: A revised version of this passage later introduced a crux into the text and became a disconnect between The Hobbit and its sequel The Lord of the Rings: see p. 739.

  37 At this point, and on the next three mentions of the chief dwarf’s name, ‘Gandalf’ has been changed to ‘Thorin’ in pencil. This is clearly a much later emendation, only made on this single page (Ms. page 116; 1/1/8:16), probably when Tolkien was looking over the chapter in anticipation of preparing the typescript, since Thorin did not become the chief dwarf’s name until he emerges out of the barrel outside Lake Town (see p. 437 & Text Note 7 on p. 444).

  38 This revelation is a good example of Tolkien’s narrative legerdemain, and the extent to which he rewards the attentive reader by letting them be in on the joke. He has been careful at three points in the preceding pages to enumerate the twelve dwarves without calling attention to the fact that there should have been thirteen: ‘a dozen bundles hanging up from a branch’ (p. 310), the fact that after having rescued seven dwarves (Kili, Fili, Bifur, Bofur, Dori, Nori, and poor old Bombur) there were ‘still five dwarves hanging up at the far end of the branch’ when the spiders returned (7+5=12, not 13; p. 313), and the final mention of eleven dwarves scrambling down to join Bombur on the ground (‘there they were twelve together’; ibid.).

  39 ‘The great FairyLand of the west’: this is Eldamar or Elvenhome, also called ‘Fairyland’ in ‘Ælfwine of England’ [circa 1920] (BLT II.316) and in Roverandom [circa 1927] (pp. 103 & 73–74). Fairyland (so spelled) also originally appeared in the First Typescript of this chapter (original typescript page 91; 1/1/30:4), but the replacement typescript page (1/1/58:16) and the Second Typescript (1/1/39:20) has ‘Faerie’, the reading of the published book.

  40 Light-elves, Deep-Elves (Gnomes), and Sea-elves: the Three Kindreds of the Elves go back to the earliest stages of Tolkien’s mythology; in the Book of Lost Tales period they were called the Teleri, the Noldoli (or Gnomes), and the Solosimpi (or Shoreland Pipers). By the time of ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ [1926] and the 1930 Quenta, these had shifted to become the Quendi or Light-elves, the Noldoli or Deep-elves (also called Gnomes), and the Teleri or Sea-elves (also called Solosimpi, the Shoreland Pipers). The dwarves’ ‘capture by the Sea-elves’ had been foreseen in the very first rough outline, given back on p. 229 in the middle of Chapter VII. The wood-elves, according to this schema, are Ilkorindi or Dark-elves, those who never came to Valinor or saw the Two Trees (HME IV.85).

  For more on the Wood-elves, see the section titled ‘The Vanishing People’ following the next chapter (pp. 395ff).

  41 These lines about the raising of the sun and moon, and the great woods that grew after the sun’s rise, make it clear that we are definitely in a world of Tolkien’s mythology here; Bilbo’s world shares the creation myth that underlies all the early versions of the legendarium. See in particular ‘The Tale of the Sun and Moon’ (BLT I.174–206), ‘The Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.20), and the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.97).

  42 The reference to the Elvenking’s treasure is interesting; although there are a number of pointed hints throughout about the Elf-king’s love of treasure, there is little indication that he already has much hoarded, aside from this passage. However, the opening canto of ‘The Lay of Leithian’ devotes several lines to Thingol’s hoard, both in its first and closing stanzas (see lines 15–18 and 93–5; HME III.155, 156, 157), and it seems clear that Tolkien’s older conception of the Woodland King strongly influenced his description here and throughout the wood-elf section of The Hobbit.

  The motif of elves living in caves not only harkens back to the ancient folklore tradition of fairy-mounds but was a firmly established part of Tolkien’s elf-lore: the great woodland realm of Doriath, the oldest elf-realm in Middle-earth and the closest a
nalogue in the older legendarium to the wood-elf realm of Mirkwood, was ruled from the great underground hall known as ‘the Thousand Caves’ (‘Sketch’, HME IV.13), later named Menegroth. Similarly, Nargothrond (‘fair halls beneath the earth’ – ‘Sketch’, HME IV.30) was a cave-kingdom, while Gondolin was a hidden city in a caldera that could only be reached through a natural tunnel. The late account of Tuor’s coming to Turgon’s abandoned halls in Nevrast also stresses the degree to which that was a hidden land, accessible from Hithlum only by a secret tunnel (Unfinished Tales, pp. 20–23).

  43 This passage refers to the Nauglafring, or ‘Necklace of the Dwarves’, made by the dwarves of Nogrod for Tinwelint, king of Artanor (the figure who in later stages of the mythology came to be called Thingol Greycloak, King of Doriath); see ‘The Nauglafring’ (BLT II.221–51) and the commentary under the header ‘The King of Wood and Stone’ following Chapter IX.

  44 Elves & Spiders: for the origins of this enmity, see commentary, p. 328.

  45 Arrows pointed with bone or stone: a reference to the neolithic arrowheads occasionally uncovered in plowing, digging, or construction. In the United States, where they were still made by native peoples as recently as the early nineteenth century, these are called ‘Indian arrowheads’; in medieval England such finds were called ‘elf-shot’ and believed to be the physical evidence left behind by an elf-stroke. Briggs (A Dictionary of Fairies, pp. 118 & 385) notes that our modern word stroke (for what is more technically termed a cardiovascular accident) is a shortened form of ‘elf-stroke’, itself the folk-explanation of why a person might be suddenly laid low with no apparent cause.

  In addition, note the use of present tense here by Tolkien’s narrator: even now few woodelves use metal weaponry – yet another of his subtle hints that the elves are still among us, though few know of or can detect their presence.

  In this chapter, Tolkien depicts Mirkwood in ways that conjure up not just one but two archetypes: The Dark Wood and The Enchanted Forest. The realistic description of a desperate journey through primal woodlands, struggling against starvation and thirst, exhaustion and despair, dominates the first half of the chapter and represents yet another tour de force as Tolkien uses sensory details to build up a claustrophobic impression of a nightmarish journey in darkness and near-darkness that never seems to end. Tolkien’s other journeys into darkness are relatively brief in duration: Bilbo’s journey under the Misty Mountains, the Fellowship’s trek through Moria, the Grey Company’s passage of the Paths of the Dead, and Frodo and Sam’s disastrous trip through Shelob’s Lair all take a few days at most, in some cases only hours. By contrast, Bilbo and the dwarves’ trip through Mirkwood lasts for weeks if not months; in some outlines Tolkien projected that as much as an entire year might pass while they remained lost or captive within the forest. For more on Mirkwood, or Taur-na-Fuin as it was sometimes called, as it had appeared in Tolkien’s earlier works in the Silmarillion tradition, see the commentary on The Pryftan Fragment, p. 20.