The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  In point of fact, Tolkien could not have been ‘stung by a tarantula’ as a child because these spiders are not native to the Orange Free State or indeed southern Africa at all. Instead, the name is locally applied to solifugae, an aggressive arachnid also known as ‘wind scorpions’, ‘sun-spiders’, or ‘camel spiders’ but in fact neither a spider nor a scorpion but a cousin of both.16 The true tarantula (L. tarantula) of southern Europe is a type of wolf spider, a free-ranging hunter very like the Mirkwood spider pictured in Tolkien’s halftone of Mirkwood (Plate VII [top]; cf. also Plate VII [detail]). The name’s most common usage today is through its application in the New World to various large hairy spiders of North, South, and Central America (Theraphosidae), some of which are so large that they can prey upon frogs, birds, and very small mammals (the so-called ‘bird-eating spiders’ and ‘monkey spider’).

  In the end, it is perhaps unfair to hold Tolkien to a higher standard than God – or at least the authors of the Old Testament, which at one point describes grasshoppers as four-legged (Leviticus 11:20–23). After all, once the reader has accepted the idea of talking giant spiders (who speak in language that Bilbo can understand, unlike the wargs or even elves), quibbling over details seems, well, quibbling.

  The Mirkwood Halftone

  Finally, there is Tolkien’s illustration of the forest of Mirkwood which appeared in the first two printings of the English edition of The Hobbit (see Plate VII [top]). The picture itself has a rather complicated history, first discussed in Christopher Tolkien’s notes in Pictures by J. R. R. Tolkien (1979) [picture #37] and again by Hammond and Scull in Artist & Illustrator (1995), pages 96–8 and 54–5, 58. In essence, Tolkien took a painting of Taur-na-Fuin he had made in 1928 to illustrate a scene from the story of Túrin Turambar and redrew it in black, white, and delicate shades of grey to serve as an illustration of Mirkwood in The Hobbit.17 While many of the trees in both pictures correspond exactly, point-by-point, he deleted the two elves from the original painting and instead inserted a big black spider in the foreground. While it’s impossible to tell exactly how large the spider is in this picture, if the same scale holds here as in the original painting (as seems to be the case), then comparison between the two shows that it is about half as large as an elf. While this may not seem all that big, especially since Tolkien’s elves were originally somewhat smaller than humans – after all, Bilbo is able to down one of these spiders with a single thrown stone – it still means they are a match for the halfling and dwarves, who are themselves considerably shorter than any full-grown man (Shelob and Ungoliant are, of course, much much larger).

  It is not possible to make out many details of the spider as it appears in this picture, even with enlargement (see Plate VII [detail]), but it is interesting to note that it looks much more like a real spider than Tolkien’s description discussed in detail above would seem to indicate. There is no sign of compound eyes, for example, or any sort of neb or beak. It even roughly resembles a wolf spider, who like the Mirkwood spiders are highly mobile and aggressive in chasing down prey rather than remaining in webs. A very similar spider appears in a drawing Tolkien made ten years earlier, in 1927, to accompany Roverandom (see the illustration opposite page 27 in Scull & Hammond’s 1998 edition of this early work). Here we once again see a spider walking by, this time in pursuit of a lunar insect (probably a moonbeam or dragon-moth), its body about the same size as Rover, who we are told several times is a small dog. By contrast, both the lower left corner of the final version of Thrain’s Map (DAA.97) and the upper half of the final Wilderland Map (DAA.[399]) show spiders which are much more stylized in appearance, almost insectlike (though still with the correct number of legs).

  (ii)

  Butterflies

  If Tolkien’s spiders are his own creation, not quite like anything else in fantasy literature before or since, the brief but memorable scene in which Bilbo discovers the ‘black emperor’ butterflies is by contrast a piece of strict fidelity to observed phenomena:

  When at last poor little Bilbo . . . poked his head out of the leaves he was nearly blinded . . . The sun was shining brightly . . . he saw all round him a sea of dark green ruffled here and there by the breeze. And there were hundreds [of] butterflies. I expect they were a kind of ‘purple emperor’, but they were dark dark velvety black without any markings at all. (p. 305)

  Not only are purple emperors (Apatura iris) quite real, but their preferred habitat is the upper canopy of mature oak forests. Tolkien even gets the time of year right when they can be seen in the greatest numbers (late summer), and may have known about the occasional rare dark (melanic) specimens, an aberration known as Apature iris ab. iole.18

  Among Britain’s largest butterflies, with a wingspan of more than three inches (up to 84 mm), purple emperors are now almost extinct in England, limited mainly to the south-central portion of the isle (Wiltshire, Hampshire, and West Sussex). But at the time Tolkien was writing The Hobbit their range extended up into the Oxford area, and there are some indications that thirty or forty years earlier they could still be found in the Birmingham area when Tolkien was growing up there. It is entirely possible, therefore, that what Bilbo sees evokes such a vivid picture for the reader because Tolkien is drawing upon a real memory here, just as he used his memories of Switzerland in his descriptions of Rivendell and the Misty Mountains.

  Where Tolkien departs from reality is not in his depiction of the butterflies but their predators, the tree-spiders (‘small ordinary ones’). These are almost certainly huntsman spiders of some sort (that is, free-range hunters who chase down their prey), but they seem purely fictional: no English spider is large enough to bring down butterflies of this size.19

  (iii)

  The Theseus Theme

  One of the most remarkable features of the manuscript of The Hobbit, as will be readily apparent from this edition, is the degree to which the story remained essentially the same from the very first time it was set down in words through into the published book. There was great variation of phrasing, and many details changed – and details matter greatly to an author whose fictional world is as fully realized as Tolkien’s – but the essentials did not change. The Plot Notes and outlines show that at times he envisioned the story very differently from what he came to write, but once written it mostly stayed fixed.

  This is not the case with the Mirkwood chapter, the only one in the book to undergo substantial re-writing before the book was published. In specific, Tolkien dropped what we may call the Theseus theme, wherein Bilbo uses a ball of spider-thread to find his way back to the path and, later, to help rescue his friends as well. At the same time, he inserted the story of the enchanted stream (which Medwed had warned them against before their entry into Mirkwood), Bombur’s being cast into a sleep from which they cannot awaken him, and the dwarves’ loss of their last arrows (thus providing an explanation for why they do not use them in their battles against the spiders or when ambushed by the elves). For more on the Enchanted Stream interpolation, see the section beginning on p. 347.

  The Theseus theme derives from a very ancient folktale or myth, the story of Theseus and the minotaur.20 In brief, like Bilbo Theseus set out with thirteen companions (in this case, as one of seven youths and seven maidens) from Athens, where his father was king, to travel to Crete as human sacrifices to the Minotaur, a bull-headed monster who preyed upon all who entered his Labyrinth. Ariadne, daughter of Crete’s King Minos, gave Theseus a ball of thread (and, in some versions of the story, a knife), with which he was able to find his way to the heart of the maze, kill the monster, and then find his way back out again by following the thread.21

  Tolkien was certainly familiar with this myth, one of the most famous in all Greek literature: it is often forgotten that, as previously stated, Tolkien began his career as a Classical scholar, and did not switch to Old English until near the end of his second year at Oxford (Carpenter, pages 54–5 & 62–3). He was so proficient in Latin and Greek as a schoolboy tha
t he not only took active part in his school’s Debating Society, where it was the custom to hold debates entirely in Latin, but once appeared as the ‘Greek Ambassador’, speaking entirely in (Classical) Greek (Carpenter, page 48). His very first published piece of creative writing, ‘The Battle of the Eastern Field’ [1911], was a parody of one of Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome [1842], wherein Lord Macaulay had attempted the very Tolkienesque enterprise of trying to re-create the lost ballads he believed lay behind the great legends of Roman history, the ‘lost tales’ behind once-familiar but now almost forgotten events – in short, an ‘asterisk-text’ of the kind that fascinated Tolkien.22 Nor did he abandon interest in his former subject once he found his vocation in Gothic, Old English, Middle English, and Old Norse; as late as 1936, roughly half a decade after writing this chapter of The Hobbit, he compared Virgil’s Aeneid to Beowulf as examples of ‘greater and lesser things’, respectively, clearly identifying the greatest work of Old English poetry as the lesser of the two (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, page 22).

  Tolkien’s use of the Theseus story is typically subtle: he never mentions any names from the classical tale, and knowledge of the myth is not necessary to follow his own tale. Rather than a gift from the princess Ariadne, his thread is a ball of spider-thread unintentionally left for him by the arachnid he killed, ‘horrible string’ wildly spun out in her battle with him, that enables Bilbo to find his way through the trackless forest – and it may be significant that this Spider is the only character in the book explicitly identified as female (see Text Note 11 for Plot Notes A and Text Note 22 following Chapter VIII),23 or that Bladorthin, echoing Medwed’s earlier warning (p. 242), speaks of Mirkwood in terms that make it sound very like a maze or labyrinth:

  ‘Don’t stray off the track – if you do it is a thousand to one you’ll never find the path again, or ever get out of Mirkwood; and then I don’t suppose I (or anyone else) will hear of you again!’ (p. 244).

  Aided by this thread, Bilbo is able to find the path again, whereupon he indulges in the very hobbitlike act of making a little feast on the few remaining overlooked crumbs among their abandoned food-bags. As with his earlier experience when separated from the dwarves under the Misty Mountains (p. 198), he decides he is duty-bound to try to find and rescue his lost comrades. That he is mounting a rescue expedition is a point made more strongly in the draft than in the book where, still lost himself, he decides to look for his missing companions in the direction from which he thinks he heard cries for help the night before; here he has already reached the safety of the path and decides to go back into the treacherous woods after them.

  The scene where he names his little sword Sting is absent, being introduced for the first time in the typescript, although he is still changed by the experience of ‘winning his battle all by himself alone in the dark’ (words that could apply equally well to his earlier battle of wits with Gollum or his later struggle with himself in the tunnel leading to Smaug’s lair). Bilbo is also comforted in his solitude by the thought of his string, which has already proven its usefulness. Equipped with sword in one hand, ball of string in the other, and his magic ring upon his finger he sets out to find the dwarves, first following the spider-thread back to the spot where he killed the spider and then exploring onwards until he finds ‘a place of dense black shadow like a patch of night’. This was expanded in the typescript first to ‘a place of dense black shadow, black even for that forest, like a patch of night that had [not >] never gone away’ (Marq. 1/1/30:1), then that section of the page was cut away and new text pasted in its place: ‘. . . like a patch of midnight that had never been cleared away’ (Marq. 1/1/58:10), the same reading as in the published book (DAA.209). This reference to primordial night is probably a deliberate evocation of Ungoliant, the Spider of Night; cf. p. 328.

  Having found his friends, he proceeds to rescue them as in the published book, with the exception that he forgets to tie off the string first and is thus forced to retrace the wild zig-zag course he took while dodging about mocking the spiders before he can once again find the main thread leading back to the forest-path. In this original conception, Bilbo’s revealing the secret of his ring to his fellow travellers was specifically tied up with the need for him to rewind the string beneath the eyes of the angry spiders, whereas in the published account it is so he can use it in his decoy mission to lure spiders away and improve their odds of escaping. The thread’s importance is stressed by the fact that Bilbo is ‘ready to collapse’ at the thought of having lost it; with its assistance, he succeeds in bringing his rescued friends back to the path.24

  That Bilbo and his friends regain the path has another significance. In the published book, when captured by the elves they are hopelessly lost in the woods, making ‘one last despairing effort’ to find the path before they die of thirst and hunger. The dwarves are not even sure of where they are or which way they are going, just ‘stagger[ing] on in the direction which eight out of the thirteen of them guessed to be the one in which the path lay’ (DAA.222). But in the draft, Bilbo and twelve of the dwarves are back on the path and on their way out of the forest when ‘waylaid’ by the wood-elves. They might indeed have ‘[fallen] down and died’ of starvation before reaching their goal, particularly given the dangers of the Marsh ahead, but the fact remains that they were ambushed while pursuing their quest, not while off on a disastrous tangent; this somewhat undercuts the element of rescue-by-capture in the final version.25

  Finally, we should note that this original version of events bears a striking similarity to another dwarven quest as Tolkien set it down some twenty-odd years later: the attempt of Thrain (as he was by then called) to regain his father’s hoard. The opening chapter of The Hobbit included a brief account of how after the death of the former King under the Mountain in the mines of Moria, his son, Gandalf’s father, ‘went away on the third of March a hundred years ago last Tuesday, and has never been seen (by you) since’. As Bladorthin tells Gandalf,

  Your father went away to try his own luck with [the map] after his father was killed [in the mines of Moria]; and lots of adventures he had, but he never got near the Mountain.

  – in fact, winding up a prisoner of the Necromancer (p. 73). Many years later, when drafting the section of Appendix A about Durin’s Folk, Tolkien returned to Thrain’s story to flesh out this episode with a few more details about the fate of the last bearer of one of the seven Rings of Power given to the dwarves:

  Partly by the . . . power of the Ring . . . Thráin after some years became restless and discontented. He could not put the thought of gold and gems out of his mind. Therefore at last when he could bear it no longer his heart turned again to Erebor and he resolved to return. He said little to Thorin of what was in his heart. But with Balin and Dwalin and a few others he arose and said farewell and departed ([Third Age year] 2841) [from their homes in the Blue Mountains].

  Little indeed is known of what happened to him afterwards. It would seem (from afterknowledge) that no sooner was he abroad with few companions (and certainly after he came at length back into Rhovanion) he was hunted by the emissaries of Sauron. Wolves pursued him, orcs waylaid him, evil birds shadowed his path, and the more he tried to go north the more he was driven back. One dark night, south of Gladden and the eaves of Mirkwood, he vanished out of their camp, and after long search in vain his companions gave up hope (and returned to Thorin). Only long after was it known that he had been taken alive and brought to the pits of Dol Guldur (2845). There he was tormented and the Ring taken from him; and there at last (2850) he died.

  —HME XII.280–81.

  The parallel passage in the final book differs only by slightly improved clarity and phrasing:

  . . . the more he strove to go north the more misfortunes opposed him. There came a dark night when he and his companions were wandering in the land beyond Anduin, and they were driven by a black rain to take shelter under the eaves of Mirkwood. In the morning he was gone from the camp, and
his companions called him in vain. They searched for him many days, until at last giving up hope they departed and came at length back to Thorin . . .

  —LotR. 1114.

  Had Bilbo and the twelve remaining dwarves somehow made it through Mirkwood (and although in desperate straits we know they are very near the eastern border), they could hardly have continued their original quest any more than Thrain’s companion did, though no outline continues the story in that direction to give a hint of what they might have done next: the capture by wood-elves had been foreseen as far back as the sketchy list of plot-points given back in Chapter VII (the First Outline, p. 229), although the means whereby the dwarves would escape remained undetermined for a long time (contrast the evolving ideas in Plot Notes A on p. 296 with Plot Notes B on p. 362). It is not unreasonable, however, to think the much later account of Thrain’s loss an extrapolation by Tolkien, an author fond of reusing favorite motifs, from a plot-thread not followed up on in The Hobbit. Both dwarven expeditions, after encounters with wolves and orcs, lost their leaders in Mirkwood (and not far from the edges of the woods in both cases), neither group knew where their leader had gone or who had taken him, each captive was imprisoned in a dungeon, and father and son were even carrying the same map at the time they were captured.26

  The one incongruity between this later account of Thrain’s loss in Appendix A and that given earlier in the opening chapter of The Hobbit is the fact that Thorin should have known far more about his father’s fate than seems to be the case, since two of Thrain’s companions from that earlier expedition, Balin and Dwalin, are among his own companions on this quest. Although a relatively minor point, this is still notable as one of the very few points where the two books fail to completely sync up, like Bilbo’s apology to Gloin at the Council of Elrond (see LotR.266 and also Text Note 36 following Chapter VIII).