Bofur and Bombur were left below with the ponies. The rest carrying all they could went back by the newly found path, and came to the narrow ledge. But they could not carry bundles nor packs along there – as [they >] they ought to have thought of before. But luckily they had
Bifur and Bomfur
Aside from the miscalculation of bringing baggage inappropriate to the route and the narrator’s unsympathetic comment thereon, and the curious portmanteau combination of Bofur’s and Bombur’s names, the only significant difference here from the published text is Tolkien’s apparent hesitation over whether Bifur or Bofur would be the dwarf who stayed below with Bombur.
12 Since Thorin & Company cannot explore the rest of this path for fear of exposing their presence to the dragon, we never learn anything more about where this path ultimately leads, though given the difficulty of building it, it must have some important purpose. Presumably it terminates in a lookout post at the mountain’s peak, also accessible from other paths – cf. the account of the Battle of Five Armies in Chapter XVII, where the goblins scale the Mountain from the north and hence are able to attack the defenders’ positions up against the spurs on either side of the river-valley, because ‘[e]ach of these could be reached by paths that ran down from the main mass of the Mountain in the centre’ (DAA.343).
13 The original concept of Durin’s Day coming on the first new moon of autumn, not the last, is still in place (see Chapter III, page 116). Accordingly, in the manuscript, this scene is envisioned as taking place just before the equinox, or around 21st–22nd September. By contrast, in the First Typescript this passage is replaced by ‘“Tomorrow begins the last month [> week] of Autumn” said Thorin one day. “And winter comes after autumn” said Bifur. “And next year after that” said Dwalin . . .’ (1/1/61:4). Similarly, the passage earlier in the chapter ‘. . . now the summer of the year after was drawing to a bleak end’ is replaced in the typescript by ‘. . . autumn was now crawling towards winter’ (1/1/61:2); see Text Note 5.
This revised timeline as it appears in the published book introduces a major difficulty into the chronology by placing this scene in December (around the end of the second week in December, or 14th–15th December to be precise, if we assume the winter solstice occurs on or around December 21st). This hardly seems to allow enough time for the death of the dragon, the siege, and the battle to all occur and yet leave Bilbo time to travel to the far side of Mirkwood (by a more circuitous route) and celebrate Yule with Medwed/Beorn (see page 682, Chapter XVIII). Even if we were to assume ‘Yule-tide’ here corresponds not to Christmas but to the last day of the year, as in the later Shire-calendar (see Appendix D, LotR.1143), still we are told that Bilbo and the wizard on their return journey reached Beorn’s house ‘by midwinter’ – e.g., the solstice† – which cannot easily be reconciled with the statement here that Thorin & Company only gained entrance into the Mountain a week before, in the last week of autumn.
No such difficulty occurred in the original conception, of course, in which Durin’s Day fell near the beginning of autumn (e.g., late September), allowing more than three months for the events of the final chapters to take place.
† ‘Midwinter’ traditionally means not halfway between the solstice (circa 21st December) and the vernal equinox (circa 21st March) – that is, around Groundhog’s Day/Candlemas – but the day of the winter solstice itself, the shortest and darkest day of the year. Similarly ‘midsummer’ (cf. pp. 115–16 and DAA.95) means not the dog days of late July/early August but the longest day of the year, the day of the summer solstice (circa 21st June). This association is ancient; the OED traces it back for more than a thousand years. Essentially it dates back to a time when the year was divided into two seasons: summer (our spring and summer; the warm months of the year) and winter (our autumn and winter; the cold months of the year).
14 Given all the restless activity depicted in ‘The Back Door’ (Plate IX [top]), this sketch at first glance seems to be intended as an illustration for this scene, showing what Bilbo and the dwarves (some of whom are ‘out of shot’) were doing on Durin’s Day. But, on closer examination, it is clear that the scene presented is a composite, not a single moment in time. Apparently unseen by any of the characters, the secret door stands open, revealing a dark tunnel going down into the mountain. We see Bilbo sitting between the door and the rock, apparently watching a dwarf at work with a pick-axe on the bay’s wall who seems to be looking for the door in the wrong place (note that according to the text they couldn’t tell exactly where it was). In the background, higher up the mountain behind the door, we see two dwarves (no doubt the intrepid Fili and Kili) exploring the path’s higher reaches. In the foreground, a dwarf is just arriving up the high path to the right, a coil of rope slung over his shoulder, while to the left another carefully raises or lowers something by rope from the base camp. A third dwarf lies flat between them, looking straight down the cliff, his beard hanging down over the edge. There is no sign of the third ‘camp’ in the little bay, and more importantly the rock is not ‘in the centre of the grass’ as described in the text but off-center to the left. Tolkien originally called this drawing ‘The Back Gate’ to correspond to ‘The Front Gate’ (DAA.256; H-S#130) but changed the name to the more accurate ‘The Back Door’. See Plate IX [middle] for an unfinished companion piece to this drawing that shows the same scene facing west rather than east (that is, looking out from the secret door rather than looking towards it). While the rock outcroppings in these two companion pieces exactly correspond, ‘View from Back Door’ too omits the central thrush’s stone and, while it shows the setting sun, there is no sign of the new moon.
15 Unfortunately for Bilbo, the wizard’s return was still several chapters away (cf. the end of Chapter XVI) and in fact would not occur until well into the Third Phase manuscript; see page 663. This is the first reminder of the wizard since Chapter IX (the one in Chapter X having first appeared in the typescript) and reminds the reader of this off-stage character and so anticipates his eventual return.
16 This is the first appearance in text of Gandalf as the wizard’s name – appropriately enough, in the mouth of the character who had originally been named ‘Gandalf’ himself; earlier in this same chapter (see page 472 and Text Note 2 above) it had still been ‘Bladorthin’. After this scene the name ‘Gandalf’ only reappears once before the end of the Second Phase manuscript, near the end of Plot Notes D. When the name ‘Bladorthin’ next appears it has already been re-assigned to the long-dead King Bladorthin; cf. Chapter XII page 514. The directions set down in Plot Notes A (see page 293) to change several of the major characters’ names had now finally been carried out.
17 Cf. the end of Chapter II, where among the items in the troll’s lair they found ‘. . . a bunch of curious keys on a nail’ which they almost left behind, until Bladorthin notices them and decides to take them along at the last minute (page 97). Elrond in Chapter III had identified one of these as a ‘dwarf-key’, not a troll-key, and advised Gandalf (the dwarf) to ‘keep it safe and fast’, which he does by ‘fasten[ing] it to a chain and put[ting] it round his neck under his jacket’ (page 115), hence incidentally preserving it from confiscation when he is captured first by goblins and later by elves. Tolkien seems to have forgotten this detail, since he added a rider into the parting scene in Chapter VI where at the last minute Bladorthin remembers the key and gives it to Gandalf (see the additional text on page 244). This rider was probably added back into the manuscript of Chapter VII as a result of Tolkien’s note to himself in Plot Notes A: ‘Don’t forget the key found in troll’s lair.’ (see page 293). Here in the present scene it is clear that Gandalf is carrying not a single key on a chain but the whole ring of keys; Bilbo says the wizard ‘gave us [> you] the troll-keys’ (emphasis mine), and this is borne out by the statement that ‘[he] . . . fitted in the only key that was small enough
’ (ibid.). Had Tolkien retained this plot-thread into the published book, he would have resolved these discrepancies, which are merely an artifact of the difficulty of keeping track of minor details in a complicated story composed in several distinct stages.
The idea that the key to the secret door was found somewhere along the journey survived into the First Typescript (1/1/61:5), where it is replaced by a pasteover (‘The key that went with the map’); this revision was done before the Second Typescript was made, since the latter incorporates the pasteover silently into its text (1/1/42:6).
18 Interestingly enough, these dimensions, which have remained in the text of the published book to this day (cf. DAA.266), do not match those set down on Thror’s Map: ‘Five feet high is the door and three may walk abreast’, a reading that goes all the way back to the Pryftan Fragment (see page 22 and the Frontispiece to Part One; italics mine) and remained remarkably stable through all iterations of the story. Granted that this ‘seems like a great big hole’ to Bilbo, and that dwarves are undoubtedly smaller than humans, still it seems unlikely that three dwarves could walk side-by-side in a passage only three feet wide.
(i)
The Desolation of the Dragon
The land grew barren, though once, as Thorin said, it had been green and fair. There was little grass. Soon there were neither bush nor tree, and only broken stumps to speak of ones long vanished. They were come to the desolation of the Dragon . . .
One of the more interesting bits of Tolkien’s dragon-lore, as presented in The Hobbit and elsewhere, is the idea that dragons are not only found in desolate places (like the ‘Withered Heath’ north of the Lonely Mountain),1 but that they make places desolate simply by dwelling in them. The connection between dragons and wastelands is ancient, going all the way back to the tannin (taninim) of the Bible, the great dragons who were named in Genesis as the first created beings.2 In most dragon-legends, however, the countryside surrounding the dragon’s lair is not described as desolate or destroyed. This is certainly not the case with Beowulf’s dragon, who until disturbed was sleeping peacefully in a barrow among the rich farms and fields of the Geatish lands. We might extrapolate and conclude that, once roused, if left unchecked he would eventually have reduced the kingdom to a wasteland as ruined as the moors surrounding Grendel’s mere,3 but the poem itself does not even hint at such an out-come. Nor does it apply to the most famous retelling of the St. George & the Dragon story, that found in Book I Canto XI of Spenser’s Faerie Queene [1590], where the dragon lives in paradisial surroundings (in fact, the land that was once Eden) that seem to have escaped his depredations relatively unscathed. Nor, to speak of Tolkien’s favorite dragon,4 do the Fáfnismál and the Reginsmál in the Elder Edda hint that the area around Fafnir’s lair is a barren wasteland, unless this is implied in its name, Gnitaheath (‘The Glittering Heath’). It seems rather that dragons live in remote and hence wild areas than that they have reduced their surroundings to ruination.
Tolkien, on the other hand, goes beyond this. For him, dragons don’t seek out wastelands to live in: areas become wastelands because dragons live there. This idea almost certainly derives from William Morris’s treatment of the Fafnir story, first in his translation (with Eiríkr Magnússon) of the twelfth-century Volsunga Saga [1870], then in his long narrative poem Sigurd the Volsung (in full The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs [1877]). Tolkien’s first introduction to this work came when he was still a child, through the juvenilized redaction published as the final story in Andrew Lang’s The Red Fairy Book [1890], ‘The Story of Sigurd’ (the only story in the volume adapted by Lang himself), which makes no mention of a desolation in its text though the accompanying pictures do suggest a barren, rocky landscape.5 The actual saga, which derives directly from the Sigurd poems in the Elder Edda but greatly expands upon them, with typical saga conciseness does not talk much about the landscape any more than do the highly elliptical poems but does at one point say that Fafnir lies ‘on the waste of Gnita-heath’ (Morris & Magnússon, page 44). That this ‘waste’ (i.e., wasteland) is unnatural is established not in the saga itself but by Morris’s expansion and adaptation of it into Sigurd the Volsung. In Morris’s development of the tale, when Fafnir’s brother Regin returns to his homeland long after being expelled by the greedy dragon, he finds all fallen into ruin and transformed into desolation:
And once . . .
I wandered away to the country from whence our stem did grow.
There methought the fells6 grown greater, but waste did the meadows lie,
And the house was rent and ragged and open to the sky.
But lo, when I came to the doorway, great silence brooded there,
Nor bat nor owl would haunt it, nor the wood-wolves drew anear.
—Sigurd the Volsung, page 98.
Long years, and long years after, the tale of men-folk told
How up on the Glittering Heath was the house and the dwelling of gold,
And within that house was the Serpent . . .
Then I wondered sore of the desert; for I thought of the golden place
My hands of old had builded . . .
This was ages long ago, and yet in that desert7 he dwells.
—Sigurd the Volsung, page 99.
In addition to Morris, the idea that dragons are bad for the surrounding countryside and, over time, reduce it to a desolate condition can also be found in various ballads and folktales, most notably ‘The Laidly Worm’ and ‘The Lambton Worm’. In one nineteenth-century version of the former, it is said of the Laidly Worm that
For seven miles east and seven miles west,
And seven miles north and south,
No blade of grass was seen to grow,
So deadly was her mouth.
—Jacqueline Simpson, British Dragons [2nd ed., 2001], page 59.
Similarly, the hero of ‘The Lambton Worm’ returns from a seven years’ absence to find ‘the broad lands of his ancestors laid waste and desolate’ and his aged father ‘worn out with sorrow and grief . . . for the dreadful waste inflicted on his fair domain by the devastations of the worm’ (‘The Wonderful Legend of the Lambton Worm’ [circa 1875]; reprinted in Simpson, British Dragons page 138). The same idea also appears in somewhat more whimsical form in the work of another of Tolkien’s favorite fantasy writers, Lord Dunsany, who has one of his heroes seek out
a dragon he knew of who if peasants’ prayers are heeded deserved to die, not alone because of the number of maidens he cruelly slew, but because he was bad for the crops; he ravaged the very land and was the bane of a dukedom.
—‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’,
The Book of Wonder [1912], page 77.
Building then from hints in Morris’s work and perhaps also influenced to some degree by ballad and folktale tradition, Tolkien places his great wyrms in ‘desolations’ or wastelands of their own devising. Dragon-made wastes appear in three of Tolkien’s works: in the story of Turin, in The Hobbit, and in Farmer Giles of Ham.8 Of these, ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ [circa 1919], the earliest version of the Turin story, predates The Hobbit by more than a decade and probably had the most influence on the depiction of the Desolation of Smaug and the lands around the Lonely Mountain. In The Hobbit itself, the effect is rather understated – for example, with the exception of birds (crows, ravens, and the thrush) and some snails there is no mention of Bilbo and the dwarves encountering a single living creature once they leave the Lake-Men behind other than the ponies they brought with them. Instead we have a careful description of a landscape so desolate that the presence of grass in one protected nook (see pp. 473–4 & DAA.285) is cause for comment, a point made more forceful by the contrast between the ruins of Dale and the once-prosperous town of farmers and craftsmen who had lived there in the days before the dragon came; we know this barren valley (depicted in ‘The Front Gate’, DAA.256) was once fertile enough to grow food for both the town of Men and the entire dwarven community within the Mountain as well
(DAA.55). Finally, although it adds little to these two accounts, Farmer Giles of Ham (which in its original form is roughly contemporaneous with the composition of The Hobbit, either immediately preceding or immediately following it)9 serves rather to confirm the pattern.
The Túrin story clearly sets a precedent: when Tinwelint [Thingol]’s band of would-be dragon-slayers warily scout out the area the dragon has made his own, they are appalled to discover that what had been ‘a fair region’ surrounding an underground city, a river-valley ‘tree-grown’ on one side and ‘level and fertile’ on the other, has been utterly ruined:
. . . they saw that the land had become all barren and was blasted for a great distance about the ancient caverns of the Rodothlim [Nargothrond], and the trees were crushed to the earth or snapped. Toward the hills a black heath stretched and the lands were scored with the great slots that that loathly worm made in his creeping . . .
Now was that band aghast as they looked upon that region from afar, yet they prepared them for battle, and drawing lots sent one of their number . . . to that high place upon the confines of the withered land . . .
—‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, BLT II.96–7.
Indeed, so destructive is Glorund the firedrake that when he later sets forth to seek out Turambar (Túrin), he leaves behind him so great a ‘path of desolation’ and broken trees that from afar off can be seen ‘that region now torn by the passage of the drake’ (ibid.103–4). When Túrin and his band seek him out for a final combat they see ‘a wide tract10 where all the trees were broken and the lands were hurt and scorched and the earth black’, and this scorched earth aspect of the dragon’s passage is so pronounced that it complicates their tactics: ‘not by day or by night shall men hope to take a dragon of Melko unawares . . . behold, this one hath made a waste about him, and the earth is beaten flat so that none may creep near and be hidden’ (ibid.105).
The History of the Hobbit Page 60
