The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  24 The typescript version of this passage reads ‘. . . able to hang on, and whether he should risk the chance of letting go and trying to swim to the bank’. This is notable not just for its realistic treatment of hypothermia (something everyone who, like Tolkien, lived through the era of the Titanic disaster and U-boat campaign of the Great War would have been familiar with) but because it plainly shows that the motif of Shire-hobbits being afraid of water and not able to swim was a late invention, belonging to The Lord of the Rings era, and not part of the original conception at all: Bilbo had shown no disquiet at riding in the little boat during the Enchanted Stream interpolation, and he is apparently at ease as no LotR hobbit would be in his stay at Lake Town, which would have struck one of the Shire hobbits of the later book as a profoundly unnatural and disquieting place. And of course no hydrophobe would conceive of a plan of escaping by barrel down an unknown river, much less be able to carry it out.

  25 The detail that Bilbo rode atop Bombur’s barrel disappeared; the typescript recasts both this and the preceding sentence, replacing them with

  . . . he had as bad a job as he feared to stick on; but he managed it somehow though it was miserably uncomfortable. Luckily he was very light and the barrel was a good big one and being a little leaky had shipped a small amount of water. All the same . . .

  The first sentence was revised again sometime after the Second Typescript had been made (that is, probably at the time of revising the book to send it to the printer):

  he found it quite as difficult to stick on as he had feared; but he managed it somehow . . .

  26 The intended correction to change ‘the Forest Stream flowing from the king’s great doors’ to ‘. . . flowing past the king’s great doors’ either postdates the typescripts or else failed to get picked up by them and so does not appear in the final book (cf. DAA.237). Note, however, that this intended change would have made the text match the scene shown in the final picture of those doors (‘The Elvenking’s Gate’; DAA.224/H-S#121), which clearly depicts the water as flowing moat-like past the entrance, not issuing forth from it (a motif apparently displaced to the Lonely Mountain’s Front Gate; contrast Plate VII [bottom] with ‘The Front Gate’, DAA.256/H-S#130).

  27 The manuscript page was revised to read ‘. . . drawing near the end of the Eastward journey, and the last & greatest end of the adventure’ – i.e., the and back again element of ‘there and back again’ seems suppressed at this point. This is the first of several remarks by the narrator about the story’s approaching end, which nevertheless remains farther off than it seemed, and doubtless further than the author anticipated, if we are to judge by the plot-notes.

  28 Bilbo’s nefarious adventures in the raft-elves’ village were recast several times, first in the manuscript by the replacement of ‘flagon’ with water-flask on its first occurrence – though the second occurrence of ‘flagon’ remains unchanged in the next sentence, where it becomes all too clear it was not filled with water. By the First Typescript, the water-flask has become ‘a leather bottle of wine’ and it is the contents of ‘the bottle’ that enable Bilbo to sleep warmly, cold and wet as he is.

  The pie Bilbo steals, by the way, is almost certainly a meat-pie – the original meaning of the word, according to the OED – rather than the fruit-pie that the word conjures up for modern American ears: marvellous as the elves may be, it’s unlikely they have a pastry-chef making dessert among their huts for the raft-workers; cf. the simple travel-food (bread, fruit, and wine) Gildor and his fellows share with Frodo in Chapter III of The Lord of the Rings. Even the great open-air feasts that lured Gandalf and company from the path are noted more for free-flowing drink and smell of roasting meat than for sweets or dainties; cf. DAA/.204.

  Bilbo’s exploits in the typescript and final version are complicated by his catching a cold from his dunking: ‘. . . wet footsteps and the trail of drippings that he left wherever he went or sat; and also he began to sneeze, and whenever he tried to hide he was found out by the terrific explosions of his suppressed sneezes. Very soon there was a fine commotion . . .’ (1/1/59:10).

  29 This paragraph appears in the typescript in slightly revised form that exactly achieves the text of the published book; the most significant changes are the splitting off of the final sentence to form the core of a short paragraph of its own and the addition to this sentence of the clause ‘and for a mercy he did not sneeze again for a good while’.

  30 The corresponding word in the typescript and published book reads ‘shoved’, but the illegible word in the manuscript seems to begin with an l and to end with ly. Note also the indecision throughout this scene of whether the raft-workers were ‘men’ or ‘elves’, anticipating Arthur Ransome’s objection (see Appendix IV) and creating some confusion whether men from the Long Lake or servants of the elven-king are intended here.

  31 For the ‘little point of rock’ which they must round before getting fairly underway in the main current, see Plate VIII [top] and also Tolkien’s painting ‘Bilbo Comes to the Huts of the Raft-elves’ (DAA plate II [bottom]; H-S#124); the point in question lies almost in the exact center of each picture but is more prominent in the coloured pencil sketch reproduced in this book. A slightly different depiction of the scene appears in his watercolour sketch for this scene (Pictures by Tolkien plate 13; H-S#122), where the point lies upstream of the little settlement (although the watercolour sketch is more accurate in showing Bilbo’s arrival at night, not at sunrise as in the final piece).

  Once Tolkien had divided the book up into chapters, during the Third Phase of his work on the book, he either re-wrote what became the final lines of each chapter to end on a more dramatic note or inserted short chapter-ending paragraphs. In this case, he chose to do the latter, with the following paragraph first appearing in the typescript. Note the use of present tense, which associates it with the (well-informed though not omniscient) narrator’s voice rather than the story proper:

  They had escaped the dungeons of the king and were through the wood, but whether alive or dead still remains to be seen.

  (i)

  The Vanishing People

  With the wood-elves, we have finally come full circle to what, had this been one of the Lost Tales, would have been either the starting point or the core of the book. With the inversion of Tolkien’s invented races we have already discussed back in the commentary to the conclusion of Chapter I (see pp. 76 & 78), The Hobbit starts far from the elf-centric core of all Tolkien’s earlier works in the legendarium1 (perhaps one reason why he was sometimes ambivalent about whether it was or was not part of the mythology). Bilbo’s story only comes to a sustained treatment of the elves mid-way through the book, and even then views them only from outside, and relatively briefly, before passing on. The flighty elves in the trees surrounding the Last Decent House (Rivendell) had been more like the fairies of Elizabethan and Victorian tales, a tradition Tolkien was probably first exposed to in Knatchbull-Hugesson’s Stories for My Children [1870] – see Letters pp. 407 & 453 – and himself contributed to in ‘Goblin Feet’ [1915], ‘Tinfang Warble’ [1914], and similar early poems during the era when that tradition reached its lowest ebb in Barrie’s Tinkerbell [1904] and Conan Doyle’s flower-fairies of the Cottingley Photographs [1920]. By contrast, the wood-elves harken back to a more sinister side of faerie belief, one dominant throughout the Middle Ages and surviving into at least the nineteenth and possibly early twentieth century in Ireland and the more isolated parts of Britain.2

  Tolkien professed, in his Andrew Lang lecture (revised and expanded as ‘On Fairy-Stories’), not to be an expert in faerie lore,3 but this is simply typical modesty on his part, as the essay itself shows; his definition of ‘expert’ required exhaustive, comprehensive knowledge of all the publications in a field (cf. his Beowulf essay, which although well-researched includes his disclaimer against having read every book ever written about his topic). His interest in elves dates back at least to his undergraduate days4 and possibly much ear
lier – the wood-elves of Mirkwood display so many traditional traits ascribed to elves in folklore that it is clear Tolkien knew and directly drew on those folklore traditions.5 Although he chose not to draw from modern works such as Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (published in 1924, only some seven years earlier, by an author Tolkien admired and who had heavily influenced his earlier work),6 even a cursory examination of traditional elf-behavior in folklore as described in Katharine Briggs’ A Dictionary of Fairies [1976] or in The Vanishing People: Fairy Lore and Legends [1978] shows that Tolkien had not chosen to call his Eldar ‘elves’ haphazardly but, like the cooks in his metaphor of the great Cauldron of Story (OFS.31), had picked and chosen from among the various strands of tradition with a fine, discriminating eye: his wood-elves are recognizably the elves of folk-lore belief.

  Consider, for example, the elves of British folk-lore as described by Briggs. Among their characteristics was their ability to vanish from mortals’ sight in the blink of an eye (a characteristic Tolkien refers to pointedly early in ‘On Fairy-Stories’; cf. OFS.11); this feature is in fact one of the reasons Briggs calls her book The Vanishing People.7 In The Hobbit this is paralleled by the scenes where the elven feasters thrice disappear when all their lights are suddenly and simultaneously extinguished. In itself, this looks like a realistic rationalization of how the old legend might have started (‘Somebody kicked the fire’, p. 306), but an uncanny element remains: how to explain ‘hundreds of torches and many fires’ which on the one hand appear so suddenly that they ‘must have been lit . . . by magic’ (‘The Enchanted Stream’ p. 354), only to have all the lights disappear ‘as if by magic’ (Ch. VIII, pp. 306–7), all simultaneously snuffed out in an instant. These elf-lights seem to have something of the air of a will-o’-the-wisp about them; we have already been told that the feast thus illuminated had an ‘enchanting’ aroma (p. 353) that lured the travellers to stray from their way and meet disaster, and there are hints that the forest clearings are enchanted spots (e.g., elf-rings or fairy circles) – cf. a passage in the typescript when the spiders suddenly break off their pursuit of the fleeing dwarves as soon as the latter enter the fairy-ring:

  The dwarves then noticed that they had come to the edge of a ring where elf-fires had been. Whether it was one of those they had seen the night before, they could not tell. But it seemed that some good magic lingered in such spots, which the spiders did not like . . .

  —First Typescript 1/1/58:15; italics mine.

  The motif of enchantment falling upon a mortal who steps into a fairy-ring, as happens to first Bilbo and then Gandalf (Thorin), also derives from traditional folklore: Briggs gives several examples, most of which involve the mortal joining briefly in a fairy dance (rather than, as here, a feast)8 only to discover that vast stretches of time had passed in what seemed mere minutes – cf. Bombur’s dream of ‘a great feast going on, going on for ever’ (‘The Enchanted Stream’ p. 352; emphasis mine).9 To have the hobbit or dwarves caught up in a tarantella would hardly have suited the solemn mood Tolkien had worked so hard to establish for the Mirkwood chapter; the substitution of enchanted sleep makes a reasonable equivalent but raises some interesting questions of its own. Bombur’s dream of enjoying a great feast while in fact he is slowly starving in an enchanted sleep, and Bilbo’s dream of joining the feast when he too is enchanted upon stepping into the elf-ring and is in fact not eating but lying sleeping on the ground, suggests that we are seeing here examples of what Tolkien in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ called ‘Faërian drama’:

  If you are present at a Faërian drama . . . [t]he experience may be very similar to Dreaming . . . [b]ut in Faërian drama you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp . . . You are deluded – whether that is the intention of the elves . . . is another question. They at any rate are not themselves deluded. (OFS.49)

  I take this to mean that what among the elves is a high art presents itself to mortal minds, like Bilbo’s and Bombur’s (and presumably Gandalf’s), as a dream. In short, those who fall under the spell of the elves’ enchantment are overwhelmed and can no longer distinguish fantasy from reality; they may even come to prefer the pleasant dream over the harsh reality:

  ‘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.

  —First Typescript; see p. 354.

  Casting people into a trance or sleep while they carried them off, as the elves do here with Gandalf, is yet another well-known fairy trick; Briggs cites a number of examples in her chapter ‘Captives in Fairyland’ in The Vanishing People (cf. page 104):

  Gandalf was caught much more fast than those bound by spiders! You remember Bilbo falling like a log into sleep as he stepped into the feasting ring? Next time Gandalf had stepped forward; and as the lights went out he fell like a stone enchanted. All the noise of the dwarves lost in the night, their cries as the spiders caught them, and all the sounds of the battle next day, had passed over him. Till the wood-elves (and wood elves the people were of course) came to him and bound him, and carried him away.

  —Chapter VIII, pp. 314–5.

  Similarly, in Sir Orfeo, a thirteenth-century adaptation of the classical Orpheus story to fit medieval faerie-lore, Lady Heurodis (Eurydice) is first approached and claimed by the elves in her dreams, and only later carried off bodily; made to vanish in broad daylight when the elves come for her, disappearing ‘by magic’ (line 193) out of the middle of a circle of armed guards.10

  The parallel to Sir Orfeo is significant, for while we cannot say that Tolkien was familiar with any specific folk tale about the elves in the more modern (nineteenth- and twentieth-century) collections cited by Briggs, he was intimately acquainted with medieval literature and seems to have drawn most of the inspiration for his elves from glimpses of elf-lore in works such as Sir Orfeo, The Mabinogion (more properly, The Four Branches of the Mabinogi; [fourteenth century]), the Lais of Marie de France [twelfth century], and the Breton lay ‘Lord Nann & the Korrigan’ [first recorded in the nineteenth century but embodying a legend that is presumably much, much older].11 For example, Sir Orfeo not only has the association between elves and enchanted dreams and the motif of elven invisibility already mentioned, both of which fit very well with Tolkien’s wood-elves, but also contains another motif introduced into The Hobbit as part of the typescript expansion to the Mirkwood chapter (see ‘The Enchanted Stream’): the elven hunt. Elves were believed to be fond of hunting according to a very ancient tradition, and legends of trooping faeries, wild hunts, and the like are a constant feature of tales about the Fair Folk from the time of Walter Map (twelfth century) onward.12 Orfeo, during the long years he spent searching for his abducted wife, sees the elven hunt from afar:

  There often by him would he see,

  when noon was hot on leaf and tree,

  the king of Faërie with his rout

  came hunting in the woods about

  with blowing far and crying dim,

  and barking hounds that were with him;

  yet never a beast they took nor slew,

  and where they went he never knew.

  —Sir Orfeo, lines 281–288, pages 129–30.13

  By contrast, Gandalf & company never see the elven hunt, but they hear it often, and are deeply disquieted by the sound:

  . . . they became aware of the dim blowing of horns in the wood and the sound as of dogs baying far off. Then they all fell silent; and as they sat it seemed they could hear the noise of a great hunt going by to the north of the path, though they saw no sign of it.

  There they sat for a long while and did not dare to make a m
ove.

  —‘The Enchanted Stream’, p. 350.

  In the original draft of the Mirkwood chapter, Tolkien vividly evoked the sense of unease the travellers felt at the discovery that they were surrounded by an unseen people:

  [T]he path straggled on just as before, and there was no change in the forest. The only new thing that happened was the sound of laughter often, and once of singing, in the distance. The laughter was the laughter of fair voices not of goblins, and the singing was beautiful, but it sounded so eerie and strange, that they were not at all comforted.

  —Chapter VIII, p. 304.14

  Here the elves are simply unseen rather than actually invisible, perhaps in another realistic rationalization of how the old legends started, but it is nonetheless remarkable that the dwarves could journey for weeks and weeks within earshot of the elves, travelling on the main elf-road through the forest, and simply happen not to encounter the elves all around them in all that time (or indeed that the elves would remain unaware of their presence until the dwarves enter their elf-circles on the night of the festivals, as seems to be the case).

  Significantly, the dwarves first hear the sounds of the unseen hunt just after they have crossed over the enchanted stream; many traditional tales place a stream as the border between the mortal world and Faerie (cf. Briggs, p. 86), and we should note that another stream flows immediately before the gates of the Elvenking’s Hall which must be passed over by anyone entering the elf-mound (see plate VII [bottom]).15 As for the hunt itself, the dark stag shot by Gandalf shares the dark coloration of almost all the other Mirkwood fauna and may or may not be a normal animal; its ability to jump a stream more than thirty feet wide suggests otherwise, as does the exchange-of-misfortunes motif (see below). The white doe and her snowy white fawns encountered immediately afterwards are clearly faerie creatures: they appear suddenly (unlike the hart, whose hoofbeats the dwarves heard before it ran into view), glimmer in the darkness, and somehow avoid being hit by all the arrows fired by the dwarves (‘None seemed to find their mark’). Furthermore, white animals – specifically, white deer – are a well-known harbinger of faerie; encountering one is a sign that you have strayed out of our world into the borderlands of another realm. Thus, in ‘Lord Nann and the Korrigan’, the hero’s encounter with the perilous fairy comes about because he follows a white deer to her lair: