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Bilbo follows party into the cave. Description of the Elfking and his halls. The dwarves are put into different cells. Bilbo cannot find the way out through the magic gates. He goes from cell to cell and manages to speak to the dwarves; and he tells them he has found Gandalf in a very deep dungeon. Gandalf will not tell the king his errand, because he will not share his treasure with the wood-elves.
The river flows under part of the caves & issues by a secret water gate. That way the wood-elves get many of their supplies, especially of wine. When the barrels were empty they dropped them into the river, and they floated out through the watergate until the current brought them to a place on the bank not far from the edge of the forest. There they were linked together and floated like a raft down past the marshes and the reedy places to the Long Lake.
Steal jailers keys and lets out a dwarf at a time. Hides them in barrels. In this way they are all <?thrown> [in] water.
Reach Long Lake and a town of men. The dwarves leap out of their Barrels and gallop off with the waggons.TN4 [But only go off towards the Mountain far with >] To the town.
Argument of Gandalf and the Mayor. They buy food, and waggons (but
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All the land desert.TN5
The dwarves camped in a hollow near the skirts of the mountain. From here some went
Then Smaug is still alive? Doesn’t
A whole year had now gone by since they stayed with Elrond. It was summer. But black bleak and lonely. They crept near
Bilbo was wandering disconsolately. The dwarves were silent
Bilbo
The troll-key fits the door swings in. Darkness falls suddenly and the moon goes quickly after the sun.
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—:Bilbo earns his reward:—TN7
The dwarves say he must go in. He begs them to come too. They won’t, until he has explored: all save old Balin yellow-beard. Balin & the hobbit creep into the dark mountain.TN8
Not as difficult as they expected – the tunnel ran absolutely straight and slight[ly] Down. Down down down for ever. Soon they see a light at the end, growing steadily redder and redder. A bubbling snoring
At last they peep into a
The dwarves pleased & pat him on the back.
Wrath of the dragon. He comes out –
Bilbo steals another cup.
Greater wrath of dragon – but this time, Dwarves have dug deep caves to hide in.TN14
Bilbo steals a gem.TN15 Seen by dragon as he escapes up the tunnel. Dragon sends [fire >] fiery
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The dwarves and Bilbo can see this from the mountain side.
The dwarves go in while dragon is away and bring out a store of gold. Bilbo gets them to tell of all the treasure there. And he asks how they are going to get it all backTN16
Bilbo goes back a third time. [added: Steals a marvellous gem] Dragon wakes and speaks to him as he peers from mouth of tunnel into the hall.
‘Who are you’
Says dwarves don’t worry about him – how is he going to get his share home.
B. flatters dragon. D. says he is impregnable. Even on soft underside he is encrusted. B. makes him show. Sees there is a patch.
He goes back to the dwarves filled with misgivings and asks them about their future plans. They tell him of the Jem of Girion king of Dale the gem for the arming of his son. Bilbo keeps on looking at his gem. He must earn it.
He goes in and kills dragon as it sleeps [added: exhausted after battle] with a spear
The text stops here in the middle of the fourth page, with the bottom half of this page, reversed, being a draft of the river-barrel song from Chapter IX. These very rough workings are clearly the initial stage of composition: I have transcribed them as they appear, with cancelled passages here indicated with italics to avoid cluttering the lines with brackets. For the final form of the poem, see p. 386 and DAA.235.
O Down the swift dark stream you go
Back to woods you once did know.
Leave the northern forest deep
Leave the halls and caverns deep
Leave the northern mountains steep
Where the forest wide and dim
Float beyond the world of trees
pass the out into the whispering breeze
past the rushes past the reeds
where past the marsh’s waving weeds
through the mist that rises pale white
up from meres and pools and night
Gather at the town
Find the town of
Where the town is
in lower left margin:
Follow follow
Spring from the mists
Up the
heavens high & steep
Over rapid over sand
South away and south away
Seek the sunlight and the day
Seek the
in top margin:
Seek the garden and the fields
Back to pasture, back to mead
back to where the
Back to gardens on the hills
where the berry swells and fills
in upper left margin:
Under sunlight and under day
South away and south away.
Back to
The following final page of Plot Notes B, originally numbered page 5, had its pagination cancelled in a lighter ink and was renumbered page 6; this occurred when Plot Notes D was incorporated into the composite Plot Notes B/C/D text (see Text Note 2). Significantly, even at that late date (when Tolkien was nearing the end of Chapter XIII) this projection of the ending of the book was still considered current, as indicated by the repagination. Not until the creation of Plot Notes E and F, at the very end of the Second Phase and beginning of the Third Phase, respectively (that is, written after the story broke off part way through Chapter XV) was the following page describing Bilbo’s return journey superceded. The page begins with a small decorative flourish that seems intended to separate it from the preceding and mark the beginning of a new section.
[page] 5
With an army – a battle is gathering in the west. B. puts on [the >] a suit of silver mail made for an elf-king’s son, and goes with the wood-elves to battle.
The men of the woods and the wood elves [and >] gather a great army, and men come from the south, and the goblins of the Misty Mountains & wargs are defeated[.] Beorn Medwed is there with a troop of bears. After the battle the way is clear over the mountains. Bilbo with only a little treasure – a nice set of golden dinner service – and the Gem of Girion – goes home.TN17 The wizard won’t have
Brief stay at Elrond’s. But in end B.
Arrival at own home. ‘Presumed dead’[.] In middle of an auction. Puts Gem in a safe but looks at it every day. Otherwise
Long after when he is very old he returns the Gem.TN18
His ring he used when unwelcome callers came.
Explanation of troll key
The wizard’s reward.
The back of this page (Marq. 1/1/10:8) is a rough pencil map, forerunner of the finished map that accompanied the ‘home manuscript’, showing the relative locations of Mirkwood, the Marshes, the Forest River, Laketown, the Lonely Mountain, and the Withered Heath. As with the final map, this one shows mountains or spurs reaching down in a great crescent from the north-east until they almost touch the outstretched arm of the Mountain; these apparently form the eastern barrier to the Withered Heath.
TEXT NOTES
1 Marquette 1/1/10:1–2 (original pages 1 & 2), 1/1/25:1–2 (original pages 3 & 4), and 1/1/10:7–8 (original page 5 plus the draft penciled map).
2 That is, new page 4 from Plot Notes C was cancelled and replaced by a new sheet containing newer pages 4 and 5 (= Plot Notes D), at which point the final page of text from Plot Notes B (original page 5) was renumbered by Tolkien ‘[page] 6’. The full sequence of the composite manuscript can be shown thusly in tabular form:
original layer (Plot Notes B)
original page 1 (1/1/10:1) [B]
original page 2 (1/1/10:2) [B]
original page 3 (1/1/25:1) [B]
original page 4 (1/1/25:2) [B]
original page 5 (1/1/10:7) [B]
map (1/1/10:8) [B]
replacement layer (Plot Notes B/C)
original page 1 (1/1/10:1) [B]
original page 2 (1/1/10:2) [B]
new page 3 (1/1/10:3) [C]
new page 4 (1/1/10:4) [C]
original page 5 (1/1/10:7) [B]
map (1/1/10:8) [B]
final layer (Plot Notes B/C/D)
original page 1 (1/1/10:1) [B]
original page 2 (1/1/10:2) [B]
new page 3 (1/1/10:3) [C]
newer page 4 (1/1/10:5) [D]
newer page 5 (1/1/10:6) [D]
original page 5, now [B]
renumbered 6 (1/1/10:7)
map (1/1/10:8) [B]
3 The last two words (‘of elves’) were cancelled.
4 Tolkien originally followed this sentence with the word ‘Present’ here at the end of a line and then immediately struck it out; perhaps it would have been the beginning of a line about the dwarves presenting themselves to the Mayor of Lake Town or simply some phrase beginning with the word ‘Presently’.
5 This line, added at the top of the second page, uses ‘desert’ in the old sense of deserted and desolate (‘a desert island’), not dotted with sand and cacti.
6 F.G.: that is, the Front Gate.
7 ‘Bilbo earns his reward’ is written almost as a title, alone at the top of the page, preceded by an inverted triangle of three dots and followed by a small decoration that looks like a colon and a dash. The same words are repeated, like a catch-phrase, in the first line of Plot Notes C: see p. 495.
Although this sheet (1/1/25:1–2) is now brown with age, it is of the same paper and type as the somewhat more well-preserved sheet (1/1/10:1–2) that once preceded it.
8 This and the following two paragraphs were altered so that Bilbo would be forced to explore the tunnel alone, as in the published book, although the alteration was not consistently carried out (note the two accidental retentions of they which should have been changed in each case to he). The revised text reads:
The dwarves say he must go in. He begs them to come too. They won’t, until he has explored: not even old Balin yellow-beard. the hobbit creeps into the dark mountain.
Not as difficult as they expected – the tunnel ran absolutely straight and slight[ly] down. Down down down for ever. Soon they see a light at the end, growing steadily redder and redder. A bubbling snoring
At last he peeps into a large hall, the greatest of all the halls under mountain.
9 burbling: This word is nearly illegible, but certainly begins with a b, which seems to be followed by an -ur-, and ends in -ly or -ling. If my reading is correct, then it’s a very old (Middle and Early Modern English) word meaning a bubbling, gurgling sound. Tolkien’s use, however, probably derives not from the fourteenth- through sixteenth-century usages cited by the OED but from Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky’, from Through the Looking-Glass [1871]:
And as in uffish thought he stood
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood
And burbled as it came!
—lines 13–16.
For Tolkien’s fondness for Carroll, and his propensity for quoting from Carroll’s nonsense poetry (of which ‘Jabberwocky’ is perhaps the most famous), see p. 65, Nt 30.
10 Originally Smaug is described as red; the addition makes him a ‘red gold dragon’.
It’s possible that Tolkien’s use of jem instead of gem in these plot notes was a deliberate archaism; the OED cites examples of that alternate spelling from c. 1400 to as late as 1799. If so he quickly rejected the idea and settled on the standardized spelling. Curiously enough, by the early eighteenth century ‘jem’ had become a slang term among the London underworld for a ring, particularly a valuable (gold or diamond) ring.
11 This last sentence may have been added later; it’s written in a slightly smaller hand than the rest of the preceding paragraph. If so, its purpose was probably to help set up the dragon-killing episode on this outline’s next page.
&
nbsp; 12 The word(s) immediately following the dash appear to be ‘of course’, but it could also be ‘after’, either of which makes sense in the context.
13 ‘sniffs all round the mountain’ was struck out; originally the phrase was preceded by two words which appear to be ‘flying’ and ‘camp’, although this last is doubtful. The general sense, however, is clear even as Tolkien struggled with variant phrasing to best capture the scene of Smaug flying around, searching, attempting to sniff them out. Cf. Smaug’s comment in the published book that he ‘know[s] the smell (and taste) of dwarf – no one better’ (DAA.280), and note also the reappearance of the motif of being hunted by scent in Frodo’s first encounter with the Black Riders in Chapter III of The Lord of the Rings (LotR.88).
14 All the sentence following the dash is struck through, but Tolkien has underlined it with a dotted line and written ‘stet’ in the left margin, indicating that he withdrew the cancellation.
The History of the Hobbit Page 47
