The History of the Hobbit
Page 64
[‘Yes and why did you let him find out your way of escape?’ said they >] ‘Well you found out one useful thing at any rate’ Balin comforted him ‘ – the bare patch in old Smaug’s diamond waistcoat may come in useful yet.’ Then they fell to discussing stabs and jabs and weapons and the various dangers attending prodding a sleeping dragon.TN35 [added in margin: and all the while the thrush listened, and at last as the sun sank towards the forest he flew away.] All the while as [evening drew > the sun went West >] the long shadows lengthened B. became more and more unhappy.
‘I am sure we are very unsafe here’ he said
The page of new material (‘151b’) ends here, and the text resumes with what had been the third paragraph on the original manuscript page 151, now marked by Tolkien ‘151 (c)’.
‘You had better look out’ said he – ‘[added: let’s go on &] close the door and risk being shut in. The dragon [> Smaug] will
The delight of the dwarves at seeing him was overwhelmed in terror [> fear]. ‘What have you been saying’ they asked him; and though B. gave them as close an account of all his words as he cd. they were far from satisfied.TN36
[All was now quiet, and >] [added in margin: Still the > The dwarves > The > When evening came on the dwarves took his advice as far as going inside the tunnel went.] But they delayed shutting the door – it seemed a desperate plan, and they were not willing yet to take the risk of cutting themselves off from the outer air with no way of escape except through the dragon’s very lair. All was quiet below at any rate.TN37 So for a while they sat near the tunnel’s mouth and talked on.
Bilbo wished he cd. feel quite certain that they were being honest when they swore that they had never had any clear idea of what to do after the recovery of their treasure.
‘As for your share Mr Baggins’ said Thorin ‘I assure you we are more than satisfied with your professional assistance; and you shall choose it yourself, as soon as we have it! I am sorry we were so stupid as to overlook the transport problem – it is many years since the eldest of us were in these lands, and the difficulties have not grown less with the passing of time. But what can be done [added: for you] we will do it. For ourselves well that is our affair. We shall see when the time come.’
There they sat and the talk drifted on to things they remembered, that must now be lying in the hall below – the spears that were made for the armies of Bladorthin,TN38 each with a thrice forged head, each shaft
[Their speech was interrupted by the >] All the while Bilbo was only half-listening. He was near the door with an ear cocked for any sound without, his other was listening to the dwarves, but over and beyond straining for any sound from far below. Evening fell and deepened and became uneasy. ‘Shut the door’ he begged them. ‘I fear that dragon in my bones. I like this silence less than the uproar of last night: Shut the door before it is too late’.
Something in his voice [made > moved >] gave the dwarves an uncomfortable feeling. Grumbling Thorin rose and pulled the door towards him ‘How can we close it’ he said ‘without bar nor handhold this side?’ He pushed the door and kicked [added: away] the stone that blocked the door. Then he thrust upon it and it closed with a snap and a clang. [They were shut >] No trace of a key hole was there left. They were shut in the Mountain. And not a moment too soon. A blow smote the side of the Mountain like a crash of battering rams made of forest oaks and swung by giants. The rocks boomed; stones fell on their heads. They fled far down the tunnel glad to be [added: still] alive, pursued by the roar without where Smaug was breaking the rocks to pieces smashing wall and cliff with his great tail till their little lofty camping ground, the thrush’s stone the scorched grass the narrow ledge and all disappeared in a jumble of smashed boulders, and an avalanche of splintered stone fell over the cliff into the valley underneath.
Smaug had left his lair in silent stealth and crept to the west of the mountain [a heavy floating slow >] floating heavy and slow in dark like a crow down the wind, in the hopes of catching somebody or something there, or of spying the outlet to the tunnel which the thief had used. This was his outburst of wrath when he found nobody and could see nothing, even where he knew the outlet must in fact be.
Still he was well pleased; he thought in his heart that he would not be troubled again from that direction; [or he would hear and have ample warning >] or would have ample warning of any hammering or tunnelling.
But in the meanwhile he had revenge of his own to wreak. ‘Barrel rider’ thought he ‘– your feet came from the water side, and up the water you came without a doubt. If you are not one of those men of the Lake, you had their help; and now you shall see who is King [> They shall see me and remember who is King under the Mountain].’ He rose in fire and went away South towards the Running River.
The text continues with only a line break before starting the account of Smaug’s attack on Lake Town, what is now Chapter XIV of the published book but was Chapter XIII of the manuscript version of the tale. Much later, when preparing the First Typescript, Tolkien added in pencil at this point (between the first and second paragraphs of manuscript page 153 [Marq. 1/1/15:1]):
Here insert ‘Not at home’
and at the same time added a chapter title – the first to appear in the manuscript:
Ch. Fire and Water
For more on the re-arrangement of the story that reversed the order in which the next two chapters appeared, see page 548.
TEXT NOTES
1 Note that the genealogy of the ‘text tradition’, with Thrain as Thorin’s father rather than his grandfather, is firmly in place; see the section of commentary entitled ‘Thorin, son of Thrain, son of Thror’ following Chapter X.
2 ‘two messes already’: Bilbo is referring of course to rescuing the dwarves (sans Gandalf/Thorin) from the Spiders of Mirkwood and also to freeing all the dwarves from the dungeon of the Elvenking.
3 This, the first of Bungo Baggins’ sayings recounted by his adventurous son in the Lonely Mountain chapters, is Tolkien’s adaptation of an actual medieval proverb occurring in line 1680 of the Tolkien-Gordon edition of Sir Gawain & the Green Knight (published in 1925, with a revised printing in 1930), where the phrase ‘þrid tyme þrowe best’ is placed in quotation marks and glossed ‘third time turn out best’ (SGGK pages 52 & 201). Tolkien’s note (page 109) slightly recasts it as an expression of hope rather than a statement of fact, ‘third time, turn out best’ and comments:
þrid tyme, þrowe best is a proverbial expression which is quoted also in Seven Sages 2062 ‘Men sais þe þrid time þrowes best.’ The modern equivalent is ‘third time pays for all’.
The Seven Sages of Rome [fourteenth century] is another Middle English romance, about twice the length of SGGK, preserved in the famous Auchinleck Manuscript; this is an English translation of a French original of seven misogynistic tales within a frame narrative. For Tolkien’s own commentary on the proverb as it appears in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, see his letter of 31st July 1964 to Jared Lobdell, quoted in Anderson’s Annotated Hobbit, page 2
67:
It is an old alliterative saying using the word throw: time, period (unrelated to the verb throw); sc. this third occasion is the best time – the time for special effort and/or luck. It is used when a third try is needed to rectify two poor efforts, or when a third occurrence may surpass the others and finally prove a man’s worth, or a thing’s.
Anderson also notes that Tolkien translates þrid tyme þrowe best as ‘third time pays for all’ in his own translation of Sir Gawain (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Sir Orfeo, tr. JRRT, ed. Christopher Tolkien [1975; 1978]; stanza 67, page 66).
4 ‘the year before’: As elsewhere throughout the first draft, the extended time-scheme for Bilbo’s adventures with a longer journey through Mirk-wood and lengthy imprisonment by the elves is still in place. See also, for example, ‘He hadn’t had [a] pocket hank[erchief] for a year’ three paragraphs later or the reference to his journey having begun ‘the spring before last’ a paragraph earlier.
5 The plural is remarkable, but the manuscript clearly reads doors not door at this point. I suspect that as usual Tolkien was describing the scene as he happened to envision it, ignoring for the moment possible contradictions until he had committed the scene to paper and trusting to the next draft to iron out any inconsistencies, as in fact it did: the First Typescript (1/1/62:1) reads ‘door’, along with all subsequent texts.
6 Added in pencil (i.e., at the time of the creation of the First Typescript): ‘and now you’ve got to pull it out or pay for it.’
7 The idea that dragons purr is not Tolkien’s invention, but derives from Kenneth Grahame’s ‘The Reluctant Dragon’, a short tale originally published as part of Dream Days [1898] and later as a separate small book illustrated by Ernest Shepherd [1938], who is most famous for his work on Winnie-the-Pooh. Tolkien was conversant with Grahame’s work; see the commentary following the Bladorthin Typescript (pp. 45–6) and Note 3 on page 58 for more on Tolkien’s familiarity with, and admiration for, Grahame’s writings. It is characteristic of Tolkien’s eclecticism that he could combine in the figure of Smaug elements from sources as disparate as Grahame’s whimsical little tale, the grim Volsunga Saga, and the Book of Job (see Text Note 33 below).
8 This word is very difficult to read in the manuscript and might just as well be ‘worst’. ‘Vast’ is the reading of the First Typescript (1/1/62:2) and published book (DAA.270).
9 The sudden brief shift in perspective here to second person and present tense and then back again is anomalous and striking, but it persists through all subsequent versions of the passage (cf. DAA.270). The idea that the tunnel ended in a square opening was rejected at once, probably because he had already described the secret passage as ‘straight as a ruler, smooth-floored and smooth-sided, going . . . with a gently never-varying slope direct . . . to some distant goal in the blackness below’ and hence the exit should exactly match the entrance. The lower exit is not shown on Tolkien’s painting of Smaug’s chamber, ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]), but its size and shape can be guessed by comparison with the upper entrance shown in ‘The Back Door’ (Plate IX [top]), which is definitely taller than it is wide – i.e., rectangular, not square.
10 Although often used interchangeably, ‘gems’ here indicate carved precious stones, while ‘jewels’ are gemstones set in items of jewelry. Thus the ‘Gem of Girion’ (the later Arkenstone), ‘like a globe with myriad facets’ is correctly named, while the ‘five hundred emeralds green as grass’ that make up the ‘necklace of Girion’ (which makes its first appearance in a pasteover in the First Typescript; Marq. 1/1/62:11) are jewels.
11 This sentence was slightly revised to read ‘and here great jars stood filled with wealth . . .’ Compare the painting ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]), where several such jars, one marked with Thror’s rune (?), do indeed stand in an archway by the far wall. The two great jars in the foreground therefore probably stand against the near wall of the chamber, which would be out of our sight to the left; similar jars are probably hidden from our view behind the mound of Smaug’s treasure. See ‘The Dwarvenkings’ Curse’ in part i of the commentary following Chapter XIV (pp. 602–3).
12 See ‘The Only Philological Remark’, part iii of the commentary following this chapter.
13 Having spent months travelling on the road with dwarves, it would have been surprising if Bilbo had not ‘heard tell and sing of dragon-hoards’. For example, the dwarves’ first poem, ‘Far Over the Misty Mountains Cold’ – only ‘a fragment’ of which is set down in Chapter I – describes ‘many a gleaming golden hoard’ (page 37) and details of the wonderful things in them. Likewise, at Medwed’s house the dwarves tell ‘many stories . . . about gold and silver and jewels and the making of them’ (page 238), and at Lake Town the townspeople are full of songs and speculation about the King under the Mountain’s treasure (pp. 439–40). Also, of course, we know from his very first conversation with Bladorthin that Bilbo was already familiar, before he ever set out on the quest of Erebor, with stories about dragons (see page 31 and DAA.35); cf. his knowledge of their weak spot (‘“I have always understood” murmured Bilbo . . . “that dragons were tender underneath, especially in the region of the – er chest”’ [page 512]), which precedes the dwarves’ discussion of the best way to attack a dragon by more than a page [page 513].
14 The detail of the stolen cup is a homage to a similar scene in Beowulf; see part ii of the commentary following this chapter.
15 ‘More like a grocer than a burglar’: Dwalin’s dismissive words (spoken by Gloin in the published book) go all the way back to the Pryftan Fragment (see page 8), as does Bilbo’s reaction to them, his desire ‘to be thought fierce’, even if it meant travelling to a desert far to the east and fighting a dragon. Given that he is currently in the midst of the Desolation of the Dragon and soon to engage Smaug first in a battle of wits and then, according to Plot Notes C, to kill him, his earlier words have in a sense come true, and would have done so more literally had Tolkien stuck to his original outline.
16 In fact, from its shape, general topography, and isolation from other heights, the Lonely Mountain is almost certainly an extinct volcano; compare its outline with that of such real-world volcanoes as Mt. Rainier or Mt. St. Helens.
17 Note that this description, which is amusingly ironic in the published book, was written when the idea of Bilbo killing the dragon himself with his little sword was still Tolkien’s intention (see Plot Notes C). Hence, Smaug is in effect having a prophetic dream of his own approaching death here.
18 Added in left margin in cursive script and marked for insertion at this point: ‘of late he had half fancied he had caught the din of echo of a knocking sound from far above.’ This is marked for insertion at this point, but more properly goes at the end of the sentence, its corresponding placement in the published story.
19 The manuscript actually has ‘frightened’ here (‘the frightened eyes of the hunting dragon’; 1/1/13:4); I have supplied the reading ‘frightful’ from the First Typescript (1/1/62:4).
20 This sentence was slightly altered with the addition of the word ‘lost’ following ponies, then replaced by ‘They will be slain, and all our ponies too, and all our stores lost’ in the typescript (since the stores could not be ‘slain’). Note that in the next sentence in the manuscript it is Bilbo, not Thorin as in the published book, who makes the panic-strickened dwarves rescue their fellows. The paragraphs describing Thorin’s coolly taking command to leave no dwarf behind while sending Bilbo, Balin, and Fili and Kili into the tunnel (so that if worse comes to worse ‘the dragon shan’t have all of us’) first appear, without any surviving drafting, in the First Typescript (typescript page 118; 1/1/62:4), in exactly the words used in the final book (cf. DAA.274), except that Bifur at first refers to Bombur and Bofur as ‘My brothers!’, altered in ink to ‘My cousins’. See Text Note 34 following Chapter VIII for more about this change in their family relationships.
21 ‘whirring’: to make
a continuous vibrating sound (OED). Note that this word falls within the portion of the OED upon which Tolkien worked during his time on the Dictionary staff in 1919–20, a decade before starting The Hobbit, although so far as we know ‘whirr’ was not one of the words which Tolkien personally researched; see Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, page 278; Winchester, The Meaning of Everything, pages 206–8; and Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the Untrodden Forest, ed. Lynda Mugglestone, Appendix I (particularly pages 229–31). The best account of Tolkien’s time on the Dictionary, and his contributions to that vast ongoing collaborative project, can be found in The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary by Gilliver, Marshall, and Weiner [2006].
22 A new ink begins at this point, indicating at least a short break in composition. The same ink was also used to touch up some words in the preceding lines and make them easier to read.
23 Tolkien is probably not using the word in the generic sense here (cf. the exchange with Arthur Ransome discussed in Appendix IV); although Smaug knows dwarves are present (see page 510), he also believes that lake-men are with them, of whom the unseen ‘thief’ is one (ibid.). Had he captured and eaten all fourteen ponies,† no doubt he would have been better informed about the composition of the intruders. Still, Smaug does know that there are fourteen individuals among the group camped on the mountain (‘why not say “us fourteen”’? and ‘a fourteenth share’, both page 511).
† Apparently Thorin & Company have sixteen in the published book; contrast the manuscript account of their approach to the mountain described on page 471, where Bilbo and Balin are on the same pony leading a single pack-pony, with the account in the published book where Bilbo and Balin each lead a pack-pony and appear to be riding separate ponies themselves (DAA.255).
24 ‘almost dead and dark’: That is, his fires seem to have died down, leaving the room almost dark.