The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  It took a deal of shaking to wake him, and when he was awake he was not pleased at all.TN17

  ‘I was having such a lovely dream,’ he grumbled, ‘all about having a most gorgeous dinner’.

  ‘Good heavens! he has gone like Bombur,’ they said. ‘Don’t tell us about dreams. Dream dinners aren’t any good, and we can’t share them’.

  ‘They are the best I am likely to get in this beastly place’ he muttered as he lay down beside the dwarves and tried to go back to sleep and find his dream again.

  Finally, the description of the third feast is recast to greatly enhance the level of detail and make the whole scene of what the hungry dwarves and hobbit see more vivid, and to include a glimpse of the woodland king mentioned by Bombur from his earlier dreams:

  ‘There’s a regular blaze of light begun not far away – hundreds of torches and many fires must have been lit suddenly and by magic. And hark to the singing and the harps!’ [added: said Kili]

  After lying and listening for a while, they found they could not resist the desire to go nearer and try once more to get help. Up they got again; and this time the result was disastrous. The feast was a far greater and more splendid one that they saw, this time; and at the head of a long line of feasters sat a woodland king with a crown of leaves upon his golden hair,TN18 very much as Bombur had described the figure in his dream. The elvish folk were passing bowls from hand to hand and across the fires, and some were harping and many were singing. Their gleaming hair was twined with flowers; green and white gems glinted on their collars and their belts; and their faces and their songs were filled with mirth. Loud and clear and fair were those songs, and out stepped Thorin in to their midst.

  Dead silence fell in the middle of a word . . .

  From this point onward, the typescript for this chapter generally resembles the published book in its sequence of events, except for the changes to the spider-battle already discussed under Note 24 following the commentary on Chapter VIII (pp. 345–6).

  TEXT NOTES

  1 For the name change Medwed > Beorn, and Gandalf > Thorin (Oakenshield), see p. 293.

  2 We never learn who built the bridge, but presumably it was the woodelves, since when interrogating the captured dwarves in what became the next chapter the Elvenking states:

  you were in my realm, using the road my people have made

  —(p. 380)

  This is all the more plausible, since both the path and the clearings where the elves feast share the property of keeping the noisome creatures of the forest at bay. However, if the elves made and maintain the path it is odd that they let it fall into decay; we learn later (DAA.242) that its eastern end is no longer passable, ending in debatable marshes, and it is unlike elves to simply let a bridge fall down rotten and leave the empty span. Perhaps the road’s decay is simply part of the overall theme of worsening roads (already alluded to in Chapter II) and general decline. The increasing difficulties of travel is a persistent theme in Tolkien; cf. also the 1960 Hobbit (e.g. pp. 779, 794–5, 818), Boromir’s account of his difficult journey north, particularly because of the ruined bridge at Tharbad (LotR.394), and ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ (UT.343–4).

  By contrast, the Forest Road that appears on the Wilderland Map – the route Bladorthin originally intended Gandalf & Company to use before they got waylaid and driven off their planned path by the goblins – was presumably made and maintained by the Wood-men, one of whose woodland settlements appears just to the south of its western end (a feature missing from the draft map that appears on Plate I [bottom]).

  3 ‘why could it not’ changed to ‘why couldn’t it’ (the reading in the book) in both typescripts, the better to match with the contractions (present from the start) in the dialogue that follows. ‘There is’ in the preceding sentence appears as ‘There’s’ in the Second Typescript, a (no doubt unconscious) unauthorized change by Michael Tolkien, the typist, in keeping with the tone of the passage but not taken up into the published book.

  As for the boat, we learn no details about it except for its colour (black, like most other things in Mirkwood – cf. Gee, ‘Melanism and Middle-earth’, published online at http://greenbooks.theonering.net/guest/files/081104_01.html) and roughly its size (big enough for four dwarves at a time but not more). This lack of information from the narrator here effectively echoes the limits of character knowledge, as in the Gollum scene (‘I don’t know where he came from or who or what he was’), in contrast to later in the same chapter where the narrator shares information with the reader not available to the characters (the nearness of the forest’s eastern edge, the fate of Gandalf, &c).

  4 The sentence continues in the First Typescript ‘but it is so dark it almost looks’. This is then erased before the next line is typed; the deleted passage does not appear in the Second Typescript.

  5 ‘I thought it was a river not a little stream’, the reading in both typescripts, changed to ‘I shd have thought it was thirty at least’ (the reading in the published book) in the First Typescript only; this hasty ink revision accordingly belongs to the later stage of revision when Tolkien was preparing the book for publication.

  6 This line is the only place where it is stated that Fili is younger than Kili, a fact not in the original draft of the story. It is also rather surprising, given Tolkien’s usual practice of naming the elder of a pair first. In The Lord of the Rings Appendix A part iii: Durin’s Folk, written more than twenty years later, Tolkien provides a family tree of Durin’s line by which we learn that that Fili was born in Third Age 2859 and Kili five years later in T.A. 2864, contradicting the information given in The Hobbit. This is one of the few direct contradictions between The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, even more overt than Bilbo’s apology to Gloin at the Council of Elrond. Tolkien’s failure to correct it in later editions undoubtedly means he never noticed the discrepancy – after all, the dwarven family tree in Appendix A probably did not exist when the second edition of The Hobbit was accidentally created in 1947. The thoroughgoing revisions that made up the 1960 Hobbit did not extend this far into the text, having halted at Thorin & Company’s arrival at Elrond’s House, and this small detail seems to have been overlooked in the great pressure to produce the third edition in the summer of 1965 in order to resecure the American copyright.

  7 painter: A rope hanging from the bow of a boat and used to moor it. The speaker here is Balin.

  8 Both here and at the next mention the word ‘hart’ is written in ink over an erasure. The original word underneath can no longer be made out, but since it was of the same length as its replacement it was probably ‘deer’, hart and hind being a male and a female deer, respectively.

  The sudden, disastrous appearance of the hart, the motif of a white deer, and the distant sound of hounds evoke echoes of such medieval tales as Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed (the First Branch of the Mabinogi), Sir Orfeo, or the lais of Marie de France; see ‘The Vanishing People’ following Chapter IX.

  9 span: One would expect ‘spun’ instead, but ‘span’ is the reading from the First Typescript through into the current edition of the published book.

  10 dim horns blowing: No doubt a deliberate echo of Tennyson’s ‘the horns of elfland faintly blowing’. For more on the slightly sinister motif of the elven hunt, see ‘The Vanishing People’, p. 399.

  By contrast with the horns, this is the only mention of dogs baying in the Mirkwood chapter. No dogs are referred to in the descriptions of the woodland feasts, nor are any encountered by Bilbo during his sojourn in and about the Elvenking’s halls. Their absence in the elf-mound helps make plausible Bilbo’s success in evading detection for weeks on end, and suggests that Tolkien inserted this reference to them for its evocation of old legends and then simply forgot to integrate it into the next chapter.

  11 north of the path: Throughout the interpolated section Tolkien is consistent that all the sounds and sightings associated with the wood-elves take place north of the path. For example, when they spot the feast th
at ultimately lures them off the path, they see it ‘in front of them and to the left of the path’ – i.e., on the north as they are facing east.

  12 three dwarves shooting arrows: This precision goes back to the original idea that Medwed (= Beorn) gave his guests four bows (see p. 241). One is in Thorin’s possession, since he just used it to shoot the hart that leapt the stream; add in the three who shoot wildly at the hind and it equals four. The specific detail of how many bows Medwed/Beorn gave them dropped out of Chapter VII, appearing in the corresponding passage of the First Typescript (1/1/57:12) merely as ‘some bows’, the reading preserved through into the published book (cf. DAA.183), but clearly it remained in Tolkien’s mind and underlies the precision of the present passage, presumably written before that detail had dropped out of the Medwed section.

  Rendering their bows useless, of course, was probably one of Tolkien’s narrative goals in creating this interpolated passage; see commentary below.

  13 trees in rows like grey columns: Cf. JRRT’s illustration ‘The Elven king’s Gate’ (DAA.224 [top]), which appeared in the original and most subsequent editions of The Hobbit. Tolkien experimented with several different views of the forest surrounding the elf-mound, such as the one reproduced on Plate VII [bottom]; see Pictures by Tolkien plates 11 & 12, DAA.224, and H&S#s117–121. But only this one (the last in the sequence, apparently drawn over the 1936 Christmas vacation – cf. Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, page 10) matched the description in the text of the elven section of the great forest.

  14 beech-mast: beechnuts. See Chapter VIII, p. 304 and Text Notes 5 & 7 following that chapter.

  15 May: The revised time-scheme introduced in the latter (Second Phase) half of Chapter I is in place here; see ‘The Third of March’, p. 84.

  16 This rather startling threat is entirely unlike Thorin, whose team has all along taken great pains to leave no dwarf (or hobbit) behind; his snapping at the distraught and starving (but undeniably annoying) Bombur, who after all has not eaten for a full week, is a sign of just how stressed the entire party has become by this point: starving, desperately thirsty, and close to despair. Unfortunately, Bombur calls him on the empty threat at the end of that same day when he plops down and refuses to go forward any more, preferring enchanted dreams to a depressing reality (a recurring motif in legends and folklore about people stolen away or enchanted by the elves).

  17 This passage was in turn replaced by yet another version of the scene, which approaches but does not quite achieve the text of the published book; Bilbo now is taken by surprise and does not have time to put on the ring. This new text was pasted over the old (typescript page 83, the bottom quarter of 1/1/58:8). The substitution predates the creation of the second typescript, since it follows the pasteover version (Bilbo does not use the ring), not the earlier version hidden beneath it (Bilbo uses the ring, to no avail).

  My thanks to Matt Blessing of the Marquette Archives for providing a transcription of the two paragraphs covered by the pasteover.

  18 The detail of the woodland king’s golden hair, which only enters in with the typescript, is interesting, since it complicates his identification; see ‘The Three Kindreds of the Elves’, p. 407.

  Mirkwood Reconsidered

  The chief question posed by this extensive interpolated passage and the associated changes made to accommodate it in the text is the simple one of why. Why did Tolkien feel the need to add this complication to the story, the only major addition between the manuscript and typescript phases of the book? It’s possible that he wanted to insert some folklore motifs (enchanted sleep, the white deer, the dire consequences of breaking a fairy-tale prohibition no matter what the temptation, echoes of the wild hunt) to make the dwarves’ passage through Mirkwood even more eerie and unsettling than it already was, and quite distinct from the earlier journey in the dark through the Misty Mountains. Certainly the additions help enhance Bilbo’s standing by providing another example of his usefulness with appropriate tasks in the episode of securing the boat, and they develop Bombur’s character by making him a complainer and a drag upon the party, even more of a weak link than little Bilbo.1

  The most likely answer, I think, is that the passage was created to pay a narrative debt once Tolkien realized he had incurred one. While he was dealing with that, he seems to have decided to settle several other points that had occurred to him after finishing the story, explaining why the dwarves didn’t hunt food when they were starving (especially since the original draft already mentioned the black squirrels), or use the bows to defend themselves against the spiders or the elves.

  Back in what ultimately became Chapter VII, Medwed warned his guests of the dangers they would face in Mirkwood:

  [Y]our road through the forest is difficult and dangerous . . . Water is not easy to find there, nor food. For the time is not come for nuts which is all there is growing there that can be eaten . . . I will provide you with skins for carrying water, which you had better fill before you enter the forest. You will see one stream, a strong black one, if you hold to the path, but I doubt if it is good to drink. I have heard that it carries enchantment, and brings a frightful drowziness. I will give you four bows and arrows, but I doubt if you will shoot anything in the dim shadows of that place, without straying from the path – which you MUST NOT DO. And I doubt if it would be good to eat if you shot it.

  —pp. 241–2 (emphasis mine).

  There is no mention of the enchanted stream in the first rough outline (p. 229) nor in the Plot Notes describing their adventures in Mirkwood (Plot Notes A, pp. 294–6) which Tolkien used as his pre-draft guide when actually composing the chapter, but Medwed’s warning suggests that this was an episode Tolkien intended to include and then simply forgot about. Re-reading the book as he was creating the First Typescript, he seems to have noticed the dropped motif and decided to recast the chapter to include it; hence the interpolation. While he was at it, he accounted for the dwarves not shooting food when they were starving by letting them try with the squirrels and discover them inedible, just as Medwed had predicted (‘I doubt [anything] would be good to eat if you shot it’).

  The scene with the dark hart and white hind rather neatly first precipitates the disaster of Bombur’s dunking and subsequent enchantment and then renders the bows useless when the desperate dwarves expend their last arrows.2 And, although this may be unintentional on Tolkien’s part, the revised text fits into the ‘rule of three’ that he consciously applies elsewhere (the three attempts to approach the feasting elves, Bilbo’s three descents into Smaug’s lair)3 with the three warnings Gandalf’s party receive. On Bladorthin’s advice, the dwarves keep their first promise, to send Medwed’s horse back. They try to keep their second promise not to drink from the enchanted stream, and only the thirteenth dwarf does so and then only by mischance, itself the result of an uncanny, unexpected intrusion; while inconvenienced the group is able to continue on with their quest afterwards. The third promise, to stay on the path, they finally break in extremis, and it brings disaster on their heads just as Bladorthin predicted:

  ‘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.

  However, had Tolkien kept to the manuscript version of events the wizard would have proved a false prophet, for Bilbo does find the path again, rather easily, and after rescuing his friends leads them back to it as well (see ‘The Theseus Theme’, pp. 337–8). With the revision, Medwed’s and Bladorthin’s dire warnings more closely resemble the results.

  Finally, a few miscellaneous points. The ‘little black boat’ itself is interesting, since we are never given any indication whose boat it is nor how it came to be there. If the elves placed it there to replace the fallen bridge, it’s surprising they would prefer to bring an oar with them (a seven days’ journey) each time they wanted to cross the stream, rather than simply
leaving one with the boat. Usually the narrator either provides the reader with information where the characters are stumped or admits to his own ignorance on a given point; here there is only silence. All we really know about the boat is that it is small (just large enough for four dwarves at a time), black, and has laid undisturbed for some time (since the painter snaps).4 Thorin’s prudence of standing guard lest ‘any hidden guardian of the boat’ appear not only shows him well-versed in fairy-tale tradition but proves justified by the event, though there’s nothing to indicate that the hart itself, for all the misfortune it brings upon them, is anything but a fugitive from the elven hunt.

  Plot Notes B

  This rough drafting, which obviously preceded the first full draft of what is now Chapter IX, I have designated ‘Plot Notes B.’ It represents either Tolkien’s attempt, after he had broken off composition at the start of a new school term, to jot down ideas for the continuation before he forgot them or, as seems more probable, his initial effort months later to get the story going again after having put it aside. For the break in composition, corresponding to the change in paper between manuscript page 118 (Marq. 1/1/8:18) and manuscript page 119 (1/1/9:1), see pages 316 and 379 and also ‘The Chronology of Composition’; Plot Notes B is written on the later type of paper (lined on one side, unlined on the other). Each page except the final one bearing a map is numbered, by Tolkien, in the upper right-hand corner.

  The three sheets (five pages plus a full-page draft map) that make up this outlineTN1 were later separated, long before the material came to Marquette, when the second sheet (original pages 316 & 379) was replaced by another sheet (new pages 3 & 4) giving a revised and further developed form of that section; I have given this newer material the name Plot Notes C to distinguish it from the original layer it replaced. At a still later date, the verso of this replacement sheet was in turn supplanted by the insertion of another two pages which I have designated as Plot Notes D.TN2 In its final form, then, this set of plot notes (Plot Notes B/C/D; Marq. 1/1/10) is a composite document written in three distinct stages – the first layer (B) after Chapter VIII, the second layer (C) during or after Chapter XI, and the third and final layer (D) near the end of Chapter XIII. Since all the plot notes associated with The Hobbit are of interest mainly for what they reveal about Tolkien’s ideas of what might happen in the as-yet-unwritten chapters ahead, I here present Plot Notes B as it was originally written, followed by commentary; for Plot Notes C (text and commentary) see pages 495–503 and for Plot Notes D (ibid.) see pages 568–76.