The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  By the skirts of the wood as he did go,

  He was ’ware of a hind as white as snow;

  Oh, fast she ran, and fast he rode,

  That the earth it shook where his horse-hoofs trode.

  Oh, fast he rode and fast she ran,

  That the sweat to drop from his brow began –

  That the sweat on his horse’s flanks stood white;

  So he rode and rode till the fall o’ the night.

  When he came to a stream that fed a lawn,

  Hard by the grot of a Corrigaun.

  The grass grew thick by the streamlet’s brink,

  And he lighted down off his horse to drink.16

  Around 1930 – that is, about the same time that he started writing The Hobbit, or no more than a year or so before he was working on the Mirkwood chapter – Tolkien wrote his own version of this traditional poem, eventually published in 1945. Called ‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’ (the names in Breton simply mean ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’), Tolkien’s poem not only includes but expands the episode of the white doe:

  Beneath the woodland’s hanging eaves

  a white doe startled under leaves;

  strangely she glistered in the sun

  as she leaped forth and turned to run.

  Then reckless after her he spurred;

  dim laughter in the woods he heard,

  but heeded not, a longing strange

  for deer that fair and fearless range

  vexed him, for venison of the beast

  whereon no mortal hunt shall feast,

  for waters crystal-clear and cold

  that never in holy fountain rolled.

  He hunted her from the forest-eaves

  into the twilight under leaves;

  the earth was shaken under hoof,

  till boughs were bent into a roof,

  and the sun was woven in a snare;

  and laughter still was on the air.

  The sun was falling. In the dell

  deep in the forest silence fell.

  No sight nor slot of doe he found

  but roots of trees upon the ground,

  and trees like shadows waiting stood

  for night to come upon the wood.

  —‘The Lay of Aotrou and Itroun’

  [1945 version], lines 259–282.

  Many of the elements in the Enchanted Stream scene in The Hobbit are here, albeit used very differently: the strange white hind, the fruitless hunt (as also in Sir Orfeo), the eerie laughter in the dark wood, even (in lines 69–76 and 151–155) the enchanted water that, when drunk, brings disaster upon the intruder.17 Similarly, in Marie de France’s ‘Guigemar’, the first in her collection of twelve Breton lays, her titular hero is out hunting one day when

  Guigemar saw a hind with a fawn;

  a completely white beast,

  with deer’s antlers on her head.

  Spurred by the barking of the dogs, she sprang

  into the open.

  Guigemar took his bow and shot at her . . .

  —The Lais of Marie de France tr. Rbt Hanning & Joan

  Ferrante [1978], ‘Guigemar’, lines 90–94.

  In Guigemar’s case, his shot does strike and mortally wound the deer, but he is unable to enjoy the meat because the arrow rebounds and injures him grievously as well; if there were any doubt that the ‘completely white’ hind with antlers like a stag were magical, they disappear when she speaks, laying a curse upon him for wounding her. Perhaps an echo of this appears in The Hobbit, when Bombur is stricken at the exact moment Thorin shoots the stag. Finally, in the Welsh tale ‘Pwyll, Prince of Dyfed’, the First Branch of the Mabinogi, Pwyll meets with misfortune while hunting a deer, although in this case it is not the deer but the hounds who are hunting it who are white:

  . . . of all the hunting dogs he had seen in the world, he had never seen dogs the colour of them: the redness of the ears glittered as brightly as the whiteness of their bodies.

  —The Mabinogi and Other Medieval Welsh Tales,

  tr. Patrick Ford [1977], page 37.

  Naturally enough, since these particular hounds (the cwn annwn) belong to Arawn, King of Annwn, the Welsh Otherworld (which is conceived of as both Faerie and the Land of the Dead, depending on who is telling the story, rather like the faerie realm in Sir Orfeo).18 White hounds also appear in Tolkien’s ballad ‘Ides Ælfscýne’ (‘Lady Elven-fair’), his own version of the belle dame sans merci legend which appeared in Songs for the Philologists [1936] but had been written at Leeds sometime in the first half of the 1920s as part of the Scheme B Songbook, where the narrator describes his beloved’s unearthly homeland:

  þær gréne wæs grund, ond hwít hire hund,

  ond gylden wæs hwæte on healme

  This passage may be translated as

  There green was the ground and white her hound

  And golden was the wheat in the fields [or: on the stalk].19

  Even the horses being ridden by the elvenking, his knights, and damsels in Sir Orfeo were ‘snow-white steeds/and white as milk were all their weeds’ [i.e., clothes] (lines 145–146), as is the horse (‘her milk-white steed’) upon which the Queen of Elfland takes Thomas Rhymer away with her after their tryst under the Eildon tree (Child Ballad number 37, text A, stanza six); according to some versions of the story, the two deer she sent years later to recall Thomas to Elfland were white as well. Note the repeated insistence not just on whiteness as a feature of creatures native to Faerie but on the strange intensity of the whiteness, which glimmered (The Hobbit), glistered (‘The Lay of Aotrou & Itroun’), or glittered (The Mabinogi). And once again we have the motif of a fruitless hunt that leads the hero into danger – the deer Pwyll is hunting is actually killed before his pack reaches it by a strange pack of white hounds, whom he drives from the kill, thus deeply offending their lord, the King of the Underworld. Pwyll does not feast on deer-meat any more than Guigemar or Bilbo’s companions, but instead rather than bear Arawn’s enmity he willingly enters Faerie at Arawn’s bidding to take the faerie king’s place for a year and, at the end of that time, kill Arawn’s great enemy and rival – a deed he accomplishes so chivalrously that he thereafter to the end of his life bears the cognomen Pwyll Pen Annwfn (‘Pwyll, Head of Annwn’).

  Pwyll enters Faerie willingly, in order to make good on a debt he has incurred, and perhaps for this reason comes back safely in the end to his own world and time, winning the friendship of the Faerie King in the process and, shortly afterwards, a faerie bride of his own, the Lady Rhiannon. More often, those who enter Faerie do so unwillingly or unwittingly, like Lady Heurodis in Sir Orfeo, Lord Nann in the old ballad, or the many prisoners carried off by the fairies – Briggs not only mentions many similar tales in passing but devotes an entire chapter to the topic (The Vanishing People, pages 104–17), as does Jacob Grimm in Teutonic Mythology (volume three, chapter XXXII). And this in turn brings us to Tolkien’s final major borrowing from fairy tradition in his depiction of the wood-elves: the theme of imprisonment within an elf-mound.

  For although Tolkien never calls it by that name, the Elvenking’s Halls in many ways fit the folktale descriptions of an elf-mound or fairy hill. A number of the hills so identified in the British isles are barrow-mounds, and it is perhaps significant that in several of the pictures he drew of the scene Tolkien gave the entrance to the Elvenking’s Halls a lintel gate (trilithon) such as those found on many real-world megalithic tombs.20 Even without the neolithic associations, that Tolkien’s wood-elves live in caves (as did the elves of Doriath and Nargothrond in The Book of Lost Tales and other stories in the Silmarillion tradition) may be yet another of his realistic touches rationalizing fairy mythology: many of the traditional tales feature a cave as the entrance into a fairy realm or, in at least one famous case, out of the fairy realm into our world.21 The Tuatha dé Danaan, the fairy-folk of Ireland whose martial prowess seems to have been Tolkien’s main model for the great warrior-elves of the Quenta Silmarillion (and who were to
have featured in an unwritten chapter of The Lost Road [1936]; cf. HME V.77–8),22 were so closely associated with the elf-mounds or fairy hills that they came to be more commonly known as aes sidhe or daoine sidhe, both literally meaning ‘the people of the fairy hill’, until sidhe shifted from its original meaning of ‘elf-mound’ to mean the elves themselves (as in the anglicized banshee, or bean sidhe: ‘woman of the sidhe’, faerie-woman). The sidhe were thought to live within the hollow hills, a conception that no doubt gave rise to the modern idea that fairies were smaller than humans in size, but in earlier lore these were simply the entrances to the Otherworld, as in Sir Orfeo, where the hero follows the faerie ladies when they enter an elf-mound:

  with right good will his feet he sped,

  for stock nor stone he stayed his tread.

  Right into a rock the ladies rode,

  and in behind he fearless strode.

  He went into that rocky hill

  a good three miles or more, until

  he came into a country fair . . .

  —Sir Orfeo, lines 345–351.23

  One universal feature of elf-mounds, whatever else was believed about them, was the difficulty of escaping from one once inside – cf. the Elvenking’s words (p. 380): ‘there is no escape through my magic doors, for those who are brought once inside’, a point later re-affirmed by Bilbo’s experience (‘Magic shut the gates’, ibid.).24 One motif often tied into this, as old as the myth of Persephone, is the idea that anyone who eats fairy food becomes trapped in fairy-land and cannot thereafter escape; Briggs recounts several tales of visitors being warned not to eat fairy-food, in at least one case by someone who had already done so and become trapped herself who prevents her beloved from sharing the same fate (‘The Fairy Dwelling on Selena Moor’, British Folk-Tales and Legends [1977; rpt. 2002], pages 181–4). It is therefore striking that The Hobbit contains no trace of this motif: the starving dwarves (and the hobbit as well) eat the elven food as soon as it is offered and suffer no ill effects whatsoever; in fact, it saves them from starvation and does not hinder their eventual escape in any way.25

  That eventual escape – originally after months of captivity, reduced in the published version to a matter of weeks (see the calendaric reckonings accompanying Tolkien’s notes for the 1960 Hobbit, p. 823) – comes after ‘a weary long time’. In the folk-tales, those few captives in fairy-land who do succeed in escaping almost always do so by one of two means. They are either rescued by someone outside the elf-mound or fairy-circle – an idea Tolkien toyed with in Plot Notes A, as we have already seen, but ultimately rejected – or they escape on their own by means of a trick. Tolkien adopted the latter solution, and so far as I can discover the idea of escaping in barrels was his own invention;26 there is nothing like it in the traditional literature, and it may be taken as a typical intrusion of practical hobbitry into the elven-dwarven impasse created by stubbornness, arrogance, and an unwillingness to let go of ancient history.

  Out of these motifs, drawn together from scattered passing references in various medieval tales and some of their more modern descendents (e.g., the ballads) – all the record we have left of a once-widespread belief system now recoverable only through imaginative reconstruction of such remaining hints – Tolkien created a seamless and satisfactory whole. To borrow Verlyn Flieger’s analogy, the individual pieces of elf-lore that have by chance and good luck survived but shorn of their original context are rather like broken pieces of ancient stained glass, retaining their striking evocative quality but their original pattern lost; Tolkien has taken these fragments and reassembled them, ‘remounting, as it were, the stained glass into a new window’ (Interrupted Music, page 131).

  (ii)

  The Three Kindreds of the Elves

  Just as Tolkien’s depiction of the elves in The Hobbit draws both on traditional medieval elf-lore and his own legendarium, so too do his larger groupings encompass both the old division between the lios-alfar and the svart-alfar, the light elves and the dark elves of Scandinavian myth, on the one hand27 and his own myth of the threefold division of the Eldar into the Light-elves, the Deep-elves, and the Sea-elves (or, as they are known in The Silmarillion, the Vanyar, the Noldor, and the Teleri – Silm.53) on the other. Both these divisions underlie the passage from the manuscript on p. 315 already briefly discussed in Text Note 40 to Chapter VIII:

  . . . most of [the wood-elves] are descended from the ancient elves who never went to the great FairyLand of the west, where the Light-elves, and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived, and grew fair, and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft and the making of beautiful and marvelous things.

  This passage was greatly expanded in the First Typescript:

  Are the wood-elves wicked? Well, not particularly, or indeed not at all, though they have their faults, and they don’t like strangers. It is quite true that they are rather different from other elves; for most of them, as well as the few elves that live in hills and mountains, are descended from those of the ancient tribes of the elves of old who never went to the great Fairyland of the West, where the Light-elves and the Deep-elves (or Gnomes) and the Sea-elves lived for ages and grew fair and wise and learned and invented their magic and their cunning craft in the making of beautiful and marvellous things, before they came back into the Wide World. Here the wood-elves lingered in the twilight before the raising of the Sun and Moon, and afterwards they wandered in the forests that grew beneath the sunrise. They loved best the edges of the woods from which they could escape at times to hunt or to ride and run over the open lands by sun or moon or star; though after the coming of Men they took ever more and more to the gloaming and the dusk.

  —1/1/30:3–4, rejected ending to the First Typescript.28

  There are two hierarchies of division here: first between those elves who went to Faerie (or Elvenhome, as Tolkien elsewhere calls it) and those who stayed behind, then a threefold division among those elves who set out on that great journey. But the actual situation is much more complicated than this, with many subdivisions and ever-evolving names. For example, the third group Tolkien mentions in The Hobbit, the Sea-elves, became divided between those who actually crossed the sea and reached Elvenhome (the Teleri) and those who remained behind in Beleriand with Thingol (the Sindar or Grey Elves); this latter group became the wood-elves of our story – cf. the reference in the first sketchy outline to the dwarves’ ‘capture by the Sea elves’ (p. 229), meaning the wood-elves of Mirkwood.29 Similarly, the term ‘Dark Elf’ was sometimes applied to those who refused the summons (the Dark Elves of Palisor; cf. BLT I.232–7 & 244) and sometimes to also include those who set out but fell by the wayside along the way (e.g., the Green Elves of Ossiriand), the Ilkorindi (i.e., ‘Not of Kôr’, the great elven city in Elvenhome known in later stages of the mythology as Tirion upon Túna); cf. page 112 of The Silmarillion, where Caranthir son of Fëanor refers (insultingly) to Thingol, the Lord of Beleriand, as ‘this Dark Elf in his caves’.30

  The interrelationship between the various groups of elves was one of the most complex elements in Tolkien’s work, especially since each of these divisions had linguistic ramifications (cf. The Lhammas or ‘Account of Tongues’ [circa 1937], HME V.167–98). Philologist that he was, Tolkien was deeply interested in this aspect of elven history and returned to it over and over throughout his long years of work on the legendarium. Its essentials – the aforementioned twofold division of the elves – remained unchanged, but the names of the various groups were subject to constant change, along with other individual elements within that pattern. For example, the Three Kindreds, the People of the Great Journey (LotR.1171) here called the Light-elves, Deep-elves, and Sea-elves were known in The Book of Lost Tales [1917–1920] as the Teleri, the Noldoli (or Gnomes), and the Solosimpi (or Shoreland Pipers), respectively (BLT I.115, 119). By the time of the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology,’ these had become the Quendi or Light-elves, the Nodoli or Deep-elves (also known as Gnomes on account of t
heir wisdom),31 and the Teleri or Sea-elves (known in Valinor as the Solosimpi) (HME IV. 13). This same terminology carried over into the form of the Silmarillion that was most current when Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.85), and he was clearly thinking of the passage in either the ‘Sketch’ or the 1930 Quenta when drafting this line in The Hobbit, since those names had already been superceded by the time of the book’s publication – in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion the Three Kindreds are the Lindar (the High Elves, no longer the ‘Light-elves’ of The Hobbit), the Noldor (the Deep Elves, also still known as the Gnomes), and the Teleri (the Sea Elves, here called the Soloneldi in Valinor) (HME V.214–5).32

  By contrast, those elves who were lost along the road were originally known as the Lost Elves or the Shadow Folk (BLT I.119) and later as the Ilkorindi (1926 ‘Sketch’, 1930 Quenta) or the Dark Elves (1930 Quenta). By the time of the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, those lost along the way are known as the Lembi (‘the Lingerers’).