The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  This very identification, however, raises the first of the two disconnects between Thingol and the Elvenking that form the major objections to the possibility that the two characters might be one and the same at different points in Middle-earth’s history. A key part of Thingol’s legend was the account of his death at the hands of the dwarves he had cheated, the sudden and shameful death of one of the greatest of all the elves over a petty quarrel. If our Elvenking is Thingol, then how can he still be alive at the time of our story? Either Tolkien has removed the quarrel from the Thingol legend and given it to a new character, modifying it so that the chief elven protagonist survives, or he is making the same modification while leaving Thingol as its protagonist, thus extending Thingol’s story forward into a much later era and setting aside the old account of Thingol’s death and the destruction of Doriath. That he was willing to recast his stories in ways with far-reaching consequences we know from other evidence, a prime example being his decision no more than five years earlier between the original and revised versions of the 1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ to change Beren from an elf to a human (HME IV.23–5).

  And indeed there is already precedent for ambiguity over Thingol’s fate (or Tinwë Lintö/Tinwelint as he was then called) within The Book of Lost Tales itself. The story of the Nauglafring near the end of the collection recounts his violent death (offstage in the narrative, while on one of the hunts so beloved of the wood-elves – BLT II.231–2), yet in the section of The Book of Lost Tales that describes the origins of the elves and their coming to Valinor (‘The Coming of the Elves and the Making of Kôr’), we are told ‘yet ’tis said [Tinwë] lives still lord of the scattered Elves of Hisilómë [Hithlum, later a region in northwest Beleriand], dancing in its twilight places with Wendelin [Melian] his spouse’ (BLT I.115) – that is, that according to this version of the story Tinwelint/Thingol is still alive at the time Eriol the narrator is being told the story in the early fifth century AD.

  Unfortunately, none of the later versions of the legendarium recount the story of Thingol’s death and the fall of Doriath, all breaking off incomplete before this point (see Note 39). So what evidence we have for Tolkien’s intentions regarding the latter parts of the Silmarillion cycle must derive from sources such as the ‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’ [c. 1937] and ‘The Tale of Years’ ([c. 1951]; cf. HME XI.345), which recount the old story of Thingol’s death at the hands of the dwarves in almost the same terms as in the the ‘(Earliest) Annals of Beleriand’ [c. 1931]. In essence, then, between the time The Hobbit is drafted and its unexpected publication, and indeed well into the drafting of The Lord of the Rings,41 we seem to have two competing traditions: one in which Thingol dies as in the old story (the Annals) and one in which the issue is left open (The Hobbit). Since both existed at that time only in unpublished manuscripts, it’s impossible to say which of the parallel traditions was more definitive; The Hobbit’s version was certainly the first to reach print and might thus be thought to be more authoritative, yet it was at least partly superseded by the later account of the elvenking in The Lord of the Rings.

  The second disconnect is an absence rather than a presence: namely, that there is no Faërie Queen at the Elvenking’s side in Mirkwood. As great a figure as Thingol himself is in the legendarium, he is just as famous for his wife (and daughter) as for his own deeds, just as King Arthur is ultimately more famous for the deeds of the knights of his Round Table than for his own exploits (aside from the realm-establishing feat of drawing the sword from the stone). Thingol’s daughter Lúthien Tinúviel is the fairest creature that ever walked the earth, and his wife Melian of Valinor (Wendelin/Gwendeling/Tindriel the fay in the earliest versions of the story) of another order of being altogether, as high above Thingol as Lúthien is above Beren (or Arwen above Aragorn). It is Melian’s power that protects the woodland realm of Doriath from its enemies, just as Galadriel later protects Lothlórien in The Lord of the Rings. Such a figure could hardly escape Bilbo’s notice during the weeks and months he was forced to lurk within the wood-elves’ halls and ‘go on burglaring’, yet no queen is mentioned, either by the side of the woodland king in Bombur’s visions and the description of the third great feast that followed in the Enchanted Stream interpolation, nor anywhere in this chapter’s account of the wood-elves’ halls. We can only infer her existence indirectly from much later evidence, long after the time of our book: the fact that in The Lord of the Rings we are told the Elvenking has a son, Legolas, who becomes one of the Fellowship of the Ring. If Tolkien’s projected rewriting of our story in 1960 had proceeded as far as the Mirkwood chapters, we might have been able to discover whether he intended to bring Legolas into Mr. Baggins’ story (after all, in the light of later knowledge we can say he would almost certainly have been present at the Battle of Five Armies); there is no sign of it in the admittedly sketchy notes that survive. But even this would hardly have resolved the question of what was in Tolkien’s mind almost thirty years earlier when he wrote The Hobbit, since by that later date he was committed to the decision that Thingol and the Elvenking were two different characters.

  The only possibility that would unite both traditions would be if Thingol did indeed die in the fall of Doriath but then later returned to Middle-earth after a suitable time in the Halls of Mandos.42 Since elves experience serial immortality, it is quite possible in Tolkien’s metaphysics for us to encounter in The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings an elf who died during events in the First Age, spent time in the Halls of Mandos, was re-incarnated with the same personality and memories, and then returned to Middle-earth during the Second or Third Age. In fact, we have one specific example in the person of Glorfindel, Elrond’s chief advisor in Rivendell, who dies fighting a balrog during the retreat from Gondolin near the end of the First Age (‘The Fall of Gondolin’, BLT II.194; Silm.243) yet re-appears in Middle-earth before the end of the second millennium of the Third Age (LotR.225–6; HME VI.214–5 & HME XII.377ff).

  It might be argued that if the Elvenking in The Hobbit were indeed a figure returned from death then Tolkien would have drawn attention to this fact in some way, but the example of Glorfindel shows this is not necessarily the case; the same could be true of any elf we meet in The Hobbit. However, while entirely possible in terms of what we know to be true of the elves, one nonetheless cannot help feeling that it would be a coming down in the world for Thingol Greycloak, one of the most renowned elves of the First Age, to return to a diminished realm, sans wife and daughter, his original home sunk beneath the waves in lost Beleriand, his kingdom reduced to the wood-elf realm in Mirkwood. Glorfindel clearly had unfinished business drawing him back into the mortal world.43 Thingol has no such motive; having only stayed in Middle-earth originally because of Melian, it seems unlikely that he would have left Valinor a second time without her. Instead, this sense of diminishment may be part of the very reason Thingol and the Elvenking ultimately did become separate characters. As Thingol grew in majesty and wisdom and stature during the long evolution of the legendarium – a process reaching its apotheosis in Narn i Hîn Húrin (cf. Unfinished Tales, page 83) but already well underway in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ (cf. Note 34) – the simple wood-elf king that had been Tinwelint became buried under the weight of glory; re-creating him in the person of the Elvenking enabled Tolkien to recapture something much more like the original character, regaining a quality that had been lost in the ennoblement of Thingol and one which made him much more suited to the role he was to play in The Hobbit.

  In the end it seems clear that when he wrote The Hobbit Tolkien drew on the old story (which was, after all, unpublished and likely to remain so), changing it as he did so, to make the material more suited to his new purpose. But he left his options open as to whether the Elvenking was a new character or an old familiar character appearing in a new story, slightly altered to fit his new surroundings. In time he decided that the Elvenking was indeed a new character and gave him a name (see part iv below) and (sketchy) history of his ow
n, but this decision postdated the publication of The Hobbit, probably by more than a decade, and he never went back and re-wrote the key passage in The Hobbit to distinguish what was now the analogue from the original. Thus to this day we are left with two contradictory accounts of which elvenking was responsible for provoking the elf–dwarf war, the one in the Silmarillion tradition and the other within The Hobbit.

  (iv)

  The Name ‘Thranduil’

  The Elvenking is never named within The Hobbit; like the Mayor of Lake Town (who never does acquire a name), he is always simply referred to by title throughout. Not until The Lord of the Rings is he given a name, Thranduil, and made father of the elven member of the Fellowship, Legolas Greenleaf. Even in The Lord of the Rings most of what we learn about him comes from Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’; he never actually appears in the main story. His name is not easily explicated but seems to be in early Sindarin (that is, Gnomish/Noldorin, later rationalized as a dialectical form), and to contain the same element as the place-name Nargothrond:44 Narog + othrond, ‘fortified cave by the river Narog’ [Salo, p. 386; HME XI.414]. The thrand/(o)thrond element, meaning fortified cave (ost + rond), fits very well with the character as described in The Hobbit, where the chief thing we know about him is that he’s a king dwelling in a cave; the –uil or -duil suffix might relate to dûl (hollow), but more likely links to drui, drû (‘wood, forest’) [Gnomish Lexicon, page 31]. If so, a possible gloss would be ‘(One who lives in) a (fortified) cave in the woods’.

  (v)

  The Wine of Dorwinion

  It must be potent wine to make a wood-elf drowsy. But this it would seem was the heady brew of the great gardens of Dorwinion in the warm South, not meant for his soldiers or his servants, but for the king’s feasts only, and for smaller bowls, not the butler’s jugs. Soon the chief guard fell asleep and not long after the butler put his head on the table and snored beside him.

  —p. 383.

  The presence of wine from Dorwinion in the Elvenking’s halls is yet another piece of circumstantial evidence demonstrating the affinity in Tolkien’s mind between the elves of Mirkwood and those of Doriath, Thingol’s people, since such wine appears in only two of Tolkien’s works, The Hobbit and ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ [begun circa 1918], and both times in connection with wood-elves. In the alliterative poem, Beleg the hunter gives this same wine to Túrin and his companions after he finds them lost in the woods of Doriath:

  ... their heads were mazed

  by the wine of Dor-Winion that went in their veins,

  and they soundly slept ...

  —‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’,

  lines 229b–231a; HME III.11.

  Furthermore, we are told that this wine

  ... is bruised from the berries of the burning South –

  and the Gnome-folk know it, and the nation of the Elves,

  and by long ways lead it to the lands of the North.

  —ibid., lines 225–227.

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  That this wine would stupefy starving human travellers is no wonder, but its potency is also testified by its effect on Orgof, one of Thingol’s high-ranking thanes (the figure known as Saeros in the published Silmarillion); it is when he is ‘deep drunken’ (line 484) on this same ‘wine of Dor-Winion that went ungrudged/in their golden goblets’ (lines 425–426a) that he taunts Túrin, resulting in his own death. These two incidents are the only two times in Tolkien’s work when he describes an elf becoming drunk, and it can hardly be an accident that the same wine (potent indeed) was involved in both cases.

  Unlike many names in The Hobbit, Dorwinion seems easy to explicate: Dor, land (as in Gondor, Mordor, Dorthonion); winion, wine: Wine-land or Vinland. David Salo (A Gateway to Sindarin, page 374) considers it a mixed Sindarin-Welsh form (Welsh gwin, wine) but it might as easily be taken as a case where Sindarin’s inspiration in real-world Welsh has been less assimilated than usual; many similar instances are cited in An Introduction to Elvish, Jim Allan et al., pages 49–50. However, against this we must set a late linguistic essay Tolkien wrote glossing names in The Fellowship of the Ring, in which he gave a completely different explanation for the name:

  In the Hobbit all names are translated except Galion (the Butler), Esgaroth, and Dorwinion. Galion and Esgaroth are not Sindarin (though perhaps ‘Sindarized’ in shape) or are not recorded in Sindarin; but Dorwinion is Sindarin meaning ‘Young-land country’.

  Above the gloss he has later written in pencil ‘or Land of Gwinion’. The Gnomish Lexicon gives gwinwen as a word meaning ‘freshness’ (Parma Eldalamberon XI.46), with gwion being one of the words meaning ‘young’ (ibid.42). The glosses given above, while authorial, postdate the creation of these names by decades and so may be afterthoughts rather than definitive explanations. But if they do indeed reveal what was in Tolkien’s mind when he first created the name – that is, if Dorwinion in fact meant ‘Land of Youth’ rather than ‘Wine-land’ when Tolkien first created the name – then here he is deliberately drawing on Celtic (specifically Irish) myth. Not only is Tir na nÓg (‘The Land of Youth’) one of the most famous of the Celtic otherworlds that could be reached through imrama (voyages into the mythic West), but it was one that particularly interested Tolkien, who intended to devote a chapter of the unfinished The Lost Road [1936] to ‘a Tuatha-de-Danaan story, or Tir-nan-Og’ (HME V.77), having already mentioned it in his 1924 poem ‘The Nameless Land’, where he describes Tol Eressëa:

  Than Tír na nÓg45 more fair and free,

  Than Paradise more faint and far,

  O! shore beyond the Shadowy Sea,

  O! land forlorn where lost things are,

  O! mountians where no man may be!

  —lines 49–53; HME V.99–100.

  If these associations were present from an early date, it would explain the unusual potency of the wine from this magical land – compare Dunsany’s Gorgondy, the wi`ne of the gnomes; so potent that drinking it can kill even a hardened sailor outright (‘The Secret of the Sea’; The Last Book of Wonder [1916]), so superlative that it surpasses all other wines and its taste can lure a man into fatal risks to gain more (‘The Opal Arrow-Head’ [1920], collected in The Man Who Ate the Phoenix [ 1947]).

  If Dorwinion indeed means ‘The Land of Youth’, then we would expect there to be only one such enchanted land in all the world. On the other hand, if it simply means ‘Wine-land’, that name could plausibly be applied to more than one country. Are we justified in considering the Dorwinion referred to in the Túrin story as the same land referred to in The Hobbit? Certainly Tolkien does seem to have re-used the name at least once, when he included in the final paragraph of the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion a reference to ‘the undying flowers in the meads of Dorwinion’ as part of Tol Eressëa, the Lonely Isle (HME V.334); while this fits in perfectly with the ‘Land of Youth’ gloss it cannot at the same time be accommodated to Dorwinion’s mention in the alliterative poem and The Hobbit – however precious and potent the wine drunken in Menegroth and the Halls of the Elvenking, it certainly had not been imported all the way from Elvenhome. Moreover, in the revised version of The Lay of the Children of Húrin [circa 1923], it specifies that this wine reaches Doriath by way of dwarven traders:

  ... berries of the burning South–

  the Gnome-folk know it, from Nogrod the Dwarves

  by long ways lead it to the lands of the North

  for the Elves in exile who by evil fate

  the vine-clad valleys now view no more

  in the land of Gods.

  —lines 539–544a, HME III.111.

  These two references could be reconciled if we assume that the vine-clad valleys of Valinor were known as Dorwinion, as per the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion, and the elves of Beleriand applied the name to a quite distinct wine district in Middle-earth in memory of that other Dorwinion, but it seems far more probable that Tolkien simply re-used the name in this section of the Quenta Silmarillion (which is more closely related to
the 1930 Quenta than most of the 1937 text; see Note 32 on p. 429). By contrast, I think the two Dorwinions referred to in the alliterative poem and the wood-elf chapter of The Hobbit are one and the same, that Tolkien borrowed the name and concept entire from the old lay and that, given the geographical flexibility of lands ‘off the map’ to the south, the same referents would serve.

  Dorwinion does not appear on any of Tolkien’s Beleriand maps (see ‘The First “Silmarillion” Map’, HME.[219]–234), nor on the Wilderland map accompanying The Hobbit (see DAA.[399] and the maps on Plates I and II), nor on the large fold-out map of Middle-earth published with volumes one and two of The Lord of the Rings. However, it does appear on Pauline Baynes’ version of the Middle-earth map published in 1970, at the mouth of the River Running on the north-west shore of the Sea of Rhûn (in the exact same spot where the label ‘Sea of Rhûn’ appears on Tolkien’s own map, drawn for him by his son Christopher). This is one of a number of new names Tolkien provided Baynes for her map in 1969, not all of which were placed correctly, as noted by Christopher Tolkien (Unfinished Tales, pages 261–2),46 but in this case we can confirm its placement thanks to the same unpublished late linguistic essay already cited, in which Tolkien comments that Dorwinion ‘was probably far south down the R. Running, and its Sindarin name a testimony to the spread of Sindarin: in this case expectable since the cultivation of vines was not known originally to the Nandor or Avari’.47 In any case, its placement here, even if in accordance with Tolkien’s instructions, is a late accretion and almost certainly not what he intended at the time he wrote The Hobbit, when the surrounding geography was as yet undetermined; on Baynes’ map, Dorwinion is no further south than the Necromancer’s tower (Dol Guldur) and roughly equal to the southern edge of the Wilderland map – hardly ‘in the warm South’ (a location more like the later Ithilien would seem to be more in keeping with Tolkien’s original conception, given his descriptions of the latter’s climate in The Lord of the Rings).