As might be expected, the sequence of three drawings shows some variation as Tolkien refined his image of the city over the water: the hut beside the head of the bridge in the text wherein Bilbo, Thorin, Fili, and Kili meet the story’s first humans to appear on-stage (see part ii of the commentary, below) becomes a gate-house attached to the bridge in the first drawing (‘Esgaroth’), through which one must pass to enter the city. By contrast, a gap intrudes between gate-house and bridge in the second drawing (‘Lake Town’), offering no explanation of how visitors climb up onto the elevated bridge. This same image also includes an archway in Lake Town’s southern side, allowing access to the water-market at the city’s center described in the text. The most dramatic of the three, ‘Death of Smaug’, depicts the burning city, its bridge already cast down (only the easternmost link can be seen, on the left). It also substitutes long rowhouses for the grander individual buildings shown along Lake Town’s western edge in the two earlier drawings. Similar but smaller buildings had appeared in Lake Town’s southeast quadrant in the second drawing (‘Lake Town’) and, less elongated, in the first (‘Esgaroth’), but we can tell we are not simply looking at the lake-dwelling from a different angle by the position of the moon (just past new) in the upper left (i.e., the northwest) and a dim glimpse of the Lonely Mountain to the north, just left of the center of the picture.7
While Tolkien’s debt to Keller et al. seems clear, it is interesting to note that by the time Tolkien was writing The Hobbit Keller’s theory was under attack by a new generation of archeologists. It is now generally believed that the majority of ‘lake-dwellings’ were not actually out on platforms above the water but built on marshy ground along the shore or on low islands or peninsulas surrounded by marsh or bog; they were more wetland settlements than lake-dwellings per se, and this is definitely the case with the ‘lake villages’ of Somerset at Glastonbury [discovered 1892] and Meare [1895], the latter of which was actually still under excavation throughout the time Tolkien was working on The Hobbit.8 However, we will badly misunderstand any influence on Tolkien from contemporary science and scholarship unless we look not at modern ideas and interpretations regarding a given field but instead at the scholarly consensus of Tolkien’s day. For example, Keller asserted that many of the lake-dwellings seem to have been destroyed by fire (cf. Keller pages 8, 28–9, 33, 43–5, &c.), laying far less stress on the fact that, as modern archeology notes, many were simply abandoned. Tolkien, unrestrained by the demands of historical probability, took the lake-dwellings discovered by Keller, de Mortillet, Bulleid, and their peers and incorporated them into his fiction in their classic, raised-platform-on-pilings-above-the-water form. In the process, he provided a mythic explanation of why Neolithic folk sought such protection and undertook the enormous labor required to construct a lake-town: in a world inhabited by predatory dragons, it would be worth almost any pains to carve out a home in an environment dragons would instinctively avoid. Similarly, he picked up on the theme of destruction by fire, which has inspired many a speculation about warfare and pillage among the historians,9 and gave it an epic interpretation of destruction by dragon in a holocaust worthy of the Beowulf-poet. Just as significantly, he departed from the archeological record when it suited his purpose – for example, while many lake-dwellings were destroyed and rebuilt several times, they were usually rebuilt on the same spot (the lake-dwelling at Robenhausen on Lake Pfaffikon just north of Lake Zurich, discovered in 1858 and described by Keller on pages 37–58, fits Tolkien’s pattern particularly well, since it was built three times, burned down twice, and finally abandoned). By contrast, our Lake Town in The Hobbit shifted its site each time it was rebuilt, and the ultimate fate of its third incarnation is unknown, being beyond the scope of our story.
(ii)
‘The Mayor & Corporation’
It is wholly remarkable that, in current editions of The Hobbit, incorporating Tolkien’s second and third edition changes (as well as others made subsequently since Tolkien’s lifetime), we come two-thirds of the way through the story before we meet our first humans, these being the guardsmen in the hut before Lake-town – and that when at last we do so little is made of the fact. The event is somewhat obscured by the description of Gandalf the wizard as ‘an old man’ (DAA.32), or Beorn as ‘a huge man’ (DAA.167), or of the raft-elves as ‘raftmen’ (cf. DAA.240, 241, 250), whereas in fact none of these are truly human (Gandalf the Grey being one of the Istari, an incarnate Maia or angel, Beorn a werebear, and the ‘raftmen’ more properly ‘raft-elves’ – cf. ‘the raftsmen of the elves’, p. 439). The mention of the Men of Dale in Chapter I and the Men of the Long Lake on Thror’s Map, and of the ‘woodmen’ in Chapter VI (see especially DAA.147–8) and on the Wilderland Map, has introduced the idea of off-stage humans from very early on, although the woodmen do not actually appear in the story until very near the end, at the Yuletide celebrations in Beorn’s halls on Bilbo’s return journey (see p. 682 and DAA.353). In addition, modern readers of the book as often as not come to it armed with knowledge from a prior reading of The Lord of the Rings and thus know that Bilbo would have passed through Bree on his journey east and encountered humans there, a fact Tolkien made explicit in the timeline he drew up to accompany the 1960 Hobbit (see ‘Timelines & Itinerary’, pp. 816, 818, 828, 834). Matters would of course have been quite different for a reader of the original manuscript, who would have no reason not to accept the text’s description of Bladorthin as ‘a little old man’ quite literally and at any rate knew Bilbo and company had passed through lands inhabited by ‘men or hobbits, or elves’ in the early stages of their journey (contrast p. 90 with DAA.65). Hence the moment is momentous only because changes made in the course of later editions removed previous encounters with humans, and would itself have been superseded had Tolkien’s proposed 1960 revision been carried to completion and seen print.
The woodmen, from what little we are told of them, are clearly very much in the vein of William Morris’s Goths as described in works such as The House of the Wolfings [1888] and The Roots of the Mountains [1889], which pit Germanic tribesmen against expansionist Romans and marauding Huns, respectively. Compare Tolkien’s account of the villages of the ‘brave woodmen and their wives and children’
In spite of the dangers of this far land bold men had lately been pushing up into it from the south again, and cutting down trees, and building themselves places to live in among the more pleasant woods farther down in the valleys away from the shadows of the hills, and along the river-shores. There were many of them and they were brave and well-armed (p. 205)
with Morris’s Men of the Mark, who live in
a dwelling of men beside a great wood . . . this great clearing in the woodland was not a matter of haphazard: though the river had driven a road whereby men might fare on either side of its hurrying stream. It was men who had made that isle in the woodland.
. . . [T]hey had no lack of wares of iron and steel, whether they were tools of handicraft or weapons for hunting and for war. It was the men of the Folk, who coming adown by the river-side had made that clearing . . . they came adown the river . . . till they had a mind to abide; and there as it fell they stayed their travel, and . . . fought with the wood and its wild things, that they might make to themselves a dwelling-place on the face of the earth.
So they cut down the trees, and burned their stumps that the grass might grow sweet for their kine and sheep and horse; and they diked the river where need was all through the plain . . . and they made them boats to ferry them over . . . and [the river] became their friend, and they . . . called it . . . the Mirkwood-water . . .
In such wise that Folk had made an island amidst of the Mirkwood, and established a home there, and upheld it with manifold toil too long to tell of.
—The House of the Wolfings, pages 1–2.10
In a sense, if Morris is describing the moment when prehistory (the Germanic-Roman strife from the point of view of the tribesmen resisting Roman encroachment) mee
ts history (this war being known to history only from the other point of view through Roman writers such as Caesar and Tacitus), then Tolkien is offering a prequel to that transitional moment, when mythic monsters rather than ambitious empires were the greatest threat to existence; not the time when the Men of the Mark were defending their land against invaders but the earlier time when they themselves were first coming into that part of the world. Perhaps significantly, the Wolfings keep hanging from the roof of their hall a great work of art, the origins of which they have forgotten:
a wondrous lamp fashioned of glass . . . clear green like an emerald, and all done with figures and knots in gold . . . and a warrior slaying a dragon . . . an ancient and holy thing
—The House of the Wolfings, page 6.
This is probably a passing reference by Morris to the story of Sigurd dragon-slayer, which he had translated only the previous year, but within Tolkien’s larger reconstructed prehistory it could just as easily be seen as preserving, like the Franks Casket, a fragment of the story of Bilbo dragon-slayer long after the details of what actually happened have been forgotten. Similarly, Tolkien may have decided to invent a different history for one of the Wolfings’ neighbouring tribes, the Bearings, which is simply the modern English cognate of Beornings, the name bestowed upon those woodmen who later choose to take Beorn/Medwed as their leader; instead of merely being their totem-animal it would thus have been the name of the tribe’s original leader, Beorn/Bear, who himself had long since been forgotten.
That the woodmen were an archetype that strongly appealed to Tolkien can be shown by the presence in the Silmarillion tradition during the First Age of the People of Haleth, a woodland folk who later become the Men of Brethil, the Second Kindred of the Elf-friends. Also very similar are the Northmen of eastern Rhovanion (Wilderland), whom Tolkien created to serve as the common ancestors for the Lake-men, the Men of Dale, the woodmen, and the Men of Rohan; they figure in the history of Gondor told in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings and in ‘Cirion and Eorl’, especially part (i) ‘The Northmen and the Wainriders’ in Unfinished Tales (cf. UT.289–90 & 295, 297–8). Significantly, the woodmen’s culture and way of life seem to have changed little in the seventeen hundred years that separates them from the Northmen of Vidugavia’s day (a name which, as Christopher Tolkien points out, is itself Gothic for ‘Wood-dweller’, Widu-gauja; UT.311).
It is rather surprising, then, that the first humans we see close-up in the story are quite different. Rather than an Iron Age culture like the men on the other side of the forest (whom Tolkien makes their kinsmen when he comes to write Appendix A of LotR), the Men of Lake Town are urban, even urbane, with a culture right out of the High Middle Ages.11 Lake Town is a free city (at least until the re-establishment of the Kingdom of Dale at the end of the story), belonging to no nation and owing allegiance to no king. It is also Tolkien’s only oligarchy, ruled by a Master of the Town ‘elected from the old and wise’ (p. 551; cf. p. 639 & DAA.309) rather than a noble lord.12 We are told about the Lake-men’s concern with commerce, and how the Master has ‘a good head for business – especially his own business’ (p. 550) and a mind devoted to ‘trade and tolls, cargoes and gold’ (p. 439; the typescript rather tartly adds ‘to which habit he owed his position’ – cf. DAA.250). This, along with two references to ‘the Master and his councillors’ (p. 441), suggests that Lake Town is probably dominated by Merchant Guilds, the guildmasters of whom would choose one among their number to serve as Master of the Town (‘the mayor perhaps we should call him’). As supporting evidence for this, note the Lake-men’s disparagement of ‘old men and money-counters’ (p. 551) after the Master’s poor showing during the attack by Smaug in contrast to Bard’s heroism, and their cry in the typescript of ‘Up the Bowman, and down with Moneybags’ (typescript page 138; 1/1/64:4).
The Master of Lake Town is one of Tolkien’s most interesting minor characters in his own right: an essentially unsympathetic figure who knows so little about his own town’s history that he doubts there ever was a King under the Mountain yet who nonetheless helps our heroes a great deal when they need it most, giving them food and clothing and shelter and sanctuary when they most need it. Indeed, he treats them with a generosity that borders on extravagance, feasting them at banquets and clothing them in fine cloth (‘of their proper colours’ adds the First Typescript), granting them their own large house to stay in and even refusing the wood-elves’ implied request for extradition despite the elvenking’s being his primary trading partner. Yet in all this he is simply cynically going with the tide of public opinion; privately ‘he believed they were frauds who would sooner or later be discovered and turned out’. Later he does them an ill turn just as crucial as the help he had given them earlier, when he defuses his people’s criticism of his behavior during the attack on Lake Town by Smaug by shifting their anger onto the absent dwarves, stirring the lake-men up by reminding them that Thorin & Company must have disturbed the dragon and are thus responsible for his attack on the city (an accusation that is, of course, quite true, although inadvertent on their part) – though typically he frames the accusation in terms of profit and loss, payment and recompense. He thereby helps set in motion the conflict that soon results in the Battle of Five Armies. Yet he is not without skills, as the narrator himself notes (p. 639): it is he who plans out the new Lake Town that rises from the ashes of the old (pp. 552 & 641), and does it so well that the new is fairer than the old (DAA.313).
A wily politician (the only one in Tolkien’s work),13 the Master is sophisticated, subtle, and just a touch corrupt, and his advent on the scene is a harbinger of the ambivalence that is so much a feature of the final chapters, culminating in the tangle of rights and wrongs over ownership of the dragon-hoard. In fact, as Douglas Anderson points out, he is highly reminiscent of that touchstone of bureaucratic greed and double-dealing, the Mayor of Hamelin in Robert Browning’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hamelin’ [1842].14 Like the Mayor of Hamelin (who is similarly unnamed, identified only by title), the Master of Lake Town makes whatever bargain suits his goals at the time, and abandons it without conscience when circumstances change. It is possible that in this wholly unflattering depiction of a town official Tolkien may also owe something to the ‘Town & Gown’ rivalry that had divided Oxford since the thirteenth century; riots between students (‘Gown’) and shopkeepers (‘Town’) persisted until as late as the mid-nineteenth century,15 and the Miller in Farmer Giles of Ham shows that Tolkien was quite willing to use medieval stereotypes when they would yield comic effect. Of course, if we are seeking for applicability it is only fair to point out that while Master of the Town (to give him his full title; cf. p. 439) is a title for what we would now call a mayor, more familiar today in its Middle English form burgomaster (literally ‘town master’), the title Master is also used for the head of several Oxford colleges, including Pembroke, Tolkien’s college at the time he was writing The Hobbit. Anyone who has witnessed academic politics can testify that here is a masterly portrait of a certain type of head of college, or department, or school, pleasant but not trustworthy, accommodating but not sincere.
In the end, though, what is important is not what the Master may or may not symbolize but his role within the story; to first help our heroes and then to greatly complicate their existence. He can fill both roles equally well because the keystone to his personality is that he is motivated entirely by self-interest, and it is a fitting though cruel fate that he winds up starving to death, entirely dependent upon his own too-inadequate resources and abilities, when he seizes for his own what should have been shared among his fellows.
(iii)
Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror
With this chapter, the sequence of names familiar from the published books finally makes its appearance, although as we have seen at least one of these changes (Gandalf > Thorin) was mooted as far back as Plot Notes A (see p. 293), written before the Mirkwood chapter had been tackled. And as we shall see, elements of this genea
logy remained in flux even while the book was at the printers, with some associated issues not being finally resolved until many years later. Nonetheless, ‘Thorin’ henceforth replaces ‘Gandalf’ as the chief dwarf’s name, and the father and grandfather of Bilbo’s employer finally receive names.16
The History of the Hobbit Page 57
