The History of the Hobbit
Page 59
There was excitement in the camp that night. In the morning they prepared to move. Bofur and Bombur were left behind to guard the ponies and the stores. The others went down the valley, and up the newly found path, and so to the narrow ledge, along which they cd. have carried no bundles or packs, so narrow and breathless was it, with a fall of a hundred and fifty feet beside them. But each of them carried a coil of rope tight about his waist. And so they reached the little grassy bay.TN11
There they made their third camp, hauling up what they needed by
Nor did they succeed in discovering the secret of the door, or where exactly it was in the flat face of rock. [added in margin: They had brought picks and tools of many sorts from Lake Town. But they soon gave up trying these on this part of the rock. Their handles splintered and jarred their arms with
‘You said sitting on the doorstep [added: & thinking] would be my job, not to mention getting inside the door’, said he, ‘so I am sitting and thinking’. But I am afraid he was not often thinking of the job, but of what lay beyond the blue distances, the western land and The Hill and his hobbit-hole under it. A large grey stone lay in the centre of the grass, and he stared moodily at it; or watched the great snails that seemed to love this little shut in bay with its rocky wall [> sides] crawl slow and stickily along the sides.
‘Autumn will be in tomorrow’ said Thorin one day.
‘And winter comes after autumn’ said Bifur.
‘And next year after that’ said Dwalin. ‘And our beards will grow till they hang down the cliff to the ground, before anything happens here.TN13 What is our Burglar doing for us! Seeing he has got an invisible ring and so ought to be a specially excellent performer, I am beginning to think he ought to go through the Front Gate, and spy things out a bit.’
Bilbo heard this – he was on the rocks up above the enclosure. ‘Good gracious!’ thought he ‘ – So that’s what they are beginning to think are they? What ever am I going to do. I might have known something dreadful would happen to me in the end. I don’t think I could bear to see the ruined valley of Dale again, and as for that steam
That night he was very miserable and hardly slept. Next day the dwarves went wandering off in various directions. Some were exercising the ponies down below; some were on the mountain side. All day Bilbo sat gloomily in the grassy bay gazing at the stone or out West through the opening.TN14 He had a queer feeling that he was waiting for something. ‘Perhaps the wizard will suddenly come back to day’ he thought.TN15
He could see then a glimpse of the forest. As the sun turned west there was a gleam of yellow light upon its distant roof, going brown towards autumn. Suddenly [> At last] he saw the orange sun sinking towards the level of his eyes. He went to the opening and there pale and faint was a thin new moon above the rim of the earth. At that very moment he heard a sharp crack behind him. There on the [added: grey] stone in the grass was a large thrush, nearly coal black its pale yellow breast freckled with dark spots. Crack. it had caught a snail and was knocking it on the stone. Crack, crack!
Suddenly Bilbo understood. Forgetting all caution he stood on the ledge and hailed the dwarves, shouting and waving. Those that were nearest came tumbling over the rocks to him, wondering what on earth was happening, the others made for the path from the valley as fast as ever they could. You can just picture Bilbo standing now beside the thrushes’ stone, and the dwarves with wagging beards watching excitedly by the walls. The sun sank lower and lower. Then their hopes fell. It sank into a belt of red-stained clouds and disappeared. The dwarves groaned, but still Bilbo stood almost without moving. The little moon was dipping to the [river >] horizon. Evening was coming on. Then suddenly when their hope was lowest, a red ray of the sun escaped like a finger through a rent in the bars of cloud. A gleam of light came straight through the opening in the bay, and fell on the smooth rock face. [There was a loud crack >] The old thrush which had been watching from a high perch with beady eyes [& head] cocked on one side gave a sudden trill. There was a loud crack. A flake of rock split from the face and fell. A hole appeared suddenly about three feet from the ground.
Quickly trembling lest the chance shd fade [Thorin fitted >] the dwarves rushed to the rock and pushed. ‘A key a key’ said Bilbo ‘we need a key’.
‘But we have no keys’ said the desperate dwarves.
‘GandalfTN16 gave me my father’s map not keys of his’ said Thorin. ‘Gandalf –’
‘Gandalf!’ said Bilbo. ‘He gave us [> you] the troll-keys.TN17 Try them quick. You never know’.
Thorin stepped up and fitted [> put] in the only key that was small enough. It fitted it turned. Snap! and the sun gleam went out, the sun sank, and evening sprang into the sky. The moon was gone.
Now they all pushed together, and slowly a part of the rock-wall gave way. Long straight cracks appeared and widened. A door five feet high and three broad was outlined,TN18 and slowly without a noise swung inwards. It almost seemed as if darkness flowed out like a vapour from the mountain side; deep darkness in which nothing could be seen lay before their eyes, a mouth leading in and down.
The manuscript continues on the same page (manuscript page 142; 1/1/13:1), but after the next sentence (see page 504) the ink becomes noticeably darker, indicating at least a brief pause in composition.
TEXT NOTES
1 This store of provisions would later become important; see Plot Notes E (‘Little Bird’), a hasty half-page of notes describing Tolkien’s original conception of the Siege of the Mountain, page 626.
2 This ‘camp’ can be seen, in exactly the position described here, on Fimbulfambi’s Map (see plate one of the Frontispiece). It also appears on Thror’s Map I (Plate I [top]), which follows the earliest map very closely. However, it is probable that this and other details were added to Fimbulfambi’s Map long after the Pryftan Fragment was originally drafted, as part of the drafting for Thror’s Map I, and thus dates from the time the latter was created. The location of the camp does not appear on the final map (Thror’s Map II, DAA.97) that appeared in the published book.
Note that Bladorthin is still the name of the wizard here – that is, although ‘Gandalf’ had been dropped as the name of the chief dwarf before Chapter X was written, it was not immediately transferred to the wizard, although that would in fact occur later in this same ‘chapter’; see Text Note 16 below.
3 T
his is our first indication that Balin, like Thorin, is a survivor of ‘the day the Dragon came’. Taken altogether, his is perhaps the most eventful life of any dwarf on record, rivaled only by the great Dain Ironfoot. He was not only one of the few† who survived Smaug’s attack upon the Lonely Mountain and the destruction of the dwarven Kingdom there but almost certainly also fought in the Battle of Azanulbizar to avenge Thror’s murder, where the death rate among the dwarven combatants approached 50% (a casualty rate exceeding that of the Battle of the Somme) – not only did his father die there but Balin is mentioned as being among Thrain’s and Thorin’s company immediately after the battle (cf. LotR.1113). He accompanied Thrain on his ill-fated quest that ended with Durin’s heir imprisoned in the dungeons of the Necromancer (LotR.1114), fought alongside Thorin in the Battle of Five Armies (see page 672), and finally reconquered Moria for a time and reclaimed the crown of Durin himself (LotR.258 & 338–41).
All this is all the more remarkable because according to the family tree presented in ‘Durin’s Folk’ (LotR Appendix A part iii), Balin would have been only seven years old at the time of Smaug’s attack and thus an unlikely candidate to be a companion of the twenty-four-year-old Thorin. This is obviously too young to match the information given in The Hobbit by at least a decade and probably more; while it is implied that Balin must be younger than Thorin from a remark in Chapter IX (‘“What have we done, O king?” said Balin, the oldest left now that Gandalf [Thorin] was gone’ – cf. page 380 and Text Note 4 to Chapter IX), there’s no indication that they’re separated by more than a few years, nor any descriptions of Thorin to indicate that he is or looks old (unlike Balin, who from the first description of him on Bilbo’s doorstep is ‘a very old-looking dwarf’ with a white beard, and whose age is reinforced by the many references to him throughout the story as ‘old Balin’). By the official reckoning of The Lord of the Rings, Balin was thirty-six at the time of the Battle before Moria (when Dain, described as ‘only a stripling’, was himself thirty-two). He and his brother Dwalin – the latter not even born at the time of Smaug’s attack – must therefore have been among the youngest members of Thrain’s expedition, being at that time seventy-eight and sixty-nine respectively; compare Fili and Kili from Thorin’s group, constantly referred to as youngsters, who are eighty-two and seventy-seven respectively, and Gimli, who at sixty-two was considered too young to accompany his father Glóin on Bilbo’s adventure (‘The Quest of Erebor’, Unfinished Tales page 336 and DAA.376). At the time of his death in Moria, King Balin is officially two hundred and thirty-one, a respectable age considering that Thror, who is described as ‘old’ and ‘crazed perhaps with age’ (LotR.1110) is not that much older at the time of his murder (two hundred and forty-eight), nor is the ‘old’ and ‘venerable’ Dain (LotR. 245), whom Gandalf describes as being of a ‘great age’ (two hundred and fifty-one; LotR.1116). In fact, given the unlikelihood that he was only seven when the Kingdom under the Mountain fell or merely a dignified one hundred and seventy-eight at the time of Thorin’s quest (when Thorin, who is never described as old, is himself one hundred and ninety-five), Balin was probably at least two hundred and forty at the time of his death and possibly, if we discount the reference in Chapter IX, much older; Thorin, had he lived, would then have been two hundred and forty-eight, the same age as old Thror at the time of his murder. See also The Peoples of Middle-earth, HME XII.284–5 & 288 for more on dwarven longevity.
† In the original conception as described in The Hobbit, it is clear that very few indeed escaped Smaug’s attack, only Thror and Thrain (through the secret door) and ‘the few’ who like Thorin and Balin were outside at the time. When Tolkien revisited the history of the dwarves while constructing Appendix A of LotR, he greatly increased the number of survivors, stating (in contradiction to the account in The Hobbit) that ‘many’ of Thrór’s kin escaped, including not just his son Thráin and grandson Thorin but Thorin’s younger brother Frerin (later killed at the Mines of Moria) and his sister Dís (then only a child of ten, later the mother of Fíli and Kíli); furthermore, they were joined with ‘a small company of their kinsmen and faithful followers’ – the former including presumably Balin and his parents (Dwalin’s having not yet been born until two years later indicates that their unnamed mother survived the disaster, and his father Fundin being among Thrain’s company at the disastrous battle of Moria). A footnote adds that ‘It was afterwards learned that more of the Folk under the Mountain had escaped than was at first hoped; but most of these went to the Iron Hills.’ – LotR.1110.
4 Balin’s distaste and distrust for the ravens shows that the idea of the ancient friendship between the dwarves and the ravens of the mountain had not yet arisen – there being no reference to conversations with either ravens or crows in Plot Notes B, nor in Plot Notes C (which followed immediately upon the writing of this chapter). There is however a very important reference to a crow in the earliest draft of the moon-runes passage all the way back in the Pryftan Fragment, where the secret writing had read ‘Stand by the grey stone when the crow knocks and the rising sun at the moment of dawn on Durin’s Day will shine upon the keyhole’, but this had quickly been changed to a thrush (see page 22).
Crows do appear in Plot Notes D, but it seems that there the dwarves overhear the carrion fowl speaking rather than meet with them (see page 571). Not until Tolkien comes to write the last few pages of the Second Phase manuscript, the first third or so of what became Chapter XV – the last bit of writing Tolkien completed before breaking off the Second Phase and returning to the beginning of the story to create the First Typescript – do the ravens finally appear, with such suddenness that Bilbo himself comments upon it (see page 618). It is possible that they first appeared in the lost drafting of which the only surviving fragment is the half-page upon the back of which Tolkien jotted down Plot Notes E (‘Little Bird’); at any rate, having introduced them as friends and allies of the dwarves, Tolkien initially projected the ravens of the mountain to play a larger part in the Siege; see page 626.
Since ravens appear in that later scene as much more sympathetic figures than those described here, Tolkien recast this passage in several stages to remove the incongruity. Thus ‘a dark and ominous raven’ becomes in the First Typescript ‘a black and ominous crow’ (1/1/61:2), while ‘every now and again a raven’s croak’ becomes ‘every now and again the harsh croak of a crow’, which in turn at some point after the Second Typescript was made is changed to ‘croak of a bird’ (ibid. & 1/1/42:2). However, just a few paragraphs later ‘followed ever by croaking ravens’ was changed to ‘by croaking crows and ravens’, which did not resolve the problem at all. This latter reading survived into the page proofs (Marq. 1/2/2 page 211), where the words ‘and ravens’ was deleted (and ‘above them’ inserted so that the following lines would not need to be reset), thereby achieving the wording in the published book.
5 Tolkien originally wrote ‘A year or more had passed since they had been guests at the fair house of Elrond, in June. The next . . .’ before striking out the last two words and replacing the period with a semicolon and continuing ‘. . . and now [added: the] summer of the year after was drawing to a bleak end’. Once again, we see the more leisurely timeframe of the original draft is still in place; rather than it only being five or six months since their setting out as in the published book, here it is fifteen months or more since Bilbo left his hobbit-hole.
In the First Typescript (1/1/61:2), this passage was replaced with
. . . made their weary way back to the camp. Only in June they had been guests in the fair house of Elrond, and though autumn was now crawling towards winter that pleasant time now seemed years ago. They were alone in the perilous waste without hope of further help . . .
See also Text Note 13.
6 In the text of Chapter II (page 116), these had read ‘Stand by the grey stone where the thrush knocks. Then the rising [> setting] sun on the last light of Durin’s Day will shine upon the key hole’. This is
very similar to the revised text that appears on Fimbulfambi’s map; see page 22.
7 This sentence was originally followed by an unfinished sentence beginning ‘[One day they >] Day by day they would toil in small parties up the lower slopes and’; a revised form of this sentence appears later in the paragraph.
8 This is the point at which the ‘horses’ described in the final paragraph of the preceding chapter and the opening paragraphs of this chapter become instead ‘ponies’, in keeping with Thorin and Company’s two previous sets of mounts (cf. pages 89 & 131, and 241–3). Despite much equivocation in later chapters, where Tolkien would occasionally write ‘horses’ and then alter it to ‘ponies’, they remained ponies henceforth.
9 This passage seems to ignore the idea, stated back in Chapter VI, that Bilbo is afraid of heights; see page 209 and Text Note 32 for Chapter VI. Possibly we are meant to conclude that Bilbo has simply learned how to face his fears better after his experiences in Mirkwood.
10 Later Tolkien created a schematic drawing of the mountain to help clarify the relationship of the first camp, second camp, hidden high path, and grassy bay hiding the secret door; see Plate II [top]. The second camp seems to be displaced in this illustration from the position described in the text; since ‘looking down on their own camp below’ suggests it was directly below the cliff they were atop – i.e., nestled against the right-hand spur (that is, the more southernly of the mountain’s two short western spurs), not off on the other side of the valley below the left-hand (more northernly) spur, especially since they continue on past this point to reach the hidden bay at the head of the valley.
11 In the original (cancelled) drafting of this passage, the sequence of events was slightly more complicated: