25 This line, which survives into the published book, is one more indicator that Tolkien did not, when writing The Hobbit, regard Bilbo’s ring as anything more than a harmless and useful treasure; the One Ring of the sequel cannot by any means be described as a luck-bringer. Cf. also Bilbo’s riddling description of himself, a few paragraphs later, as ‘luck-wearer’.
26 Bilbo’s conversation with Smaug evolved and expanded in the very act of writing; in the lines originally following this sentence, the dragon immediately confronts the unseen intruder with his knowledge that dwarves were involved:
Nor did you walk here unless > all the way here; unless you > let me tell you I ate six ponies last night, shall probably catch and eat the others before long. But never mind about your thirteen companions dwarves of course, don’t tell me! I know the smell and taste of dwarf; and they had left tokens enough on the ponies for me. But
All this was struck through and the dialogue expanded in the telling in order to allow Bilbo to spin out his riddles and pseudo-names alluding to his adventures so far. Similarly, the only significant nom de guerre is ‘barrel-rider’, since it sparks Smaug’s next remark (and determines the course of action that leads to his death); Tolkien twice wrote it and each time crossed it out, deferring it to the end of the passage.
Note that, like Odysseus (The Odyssey, Book IX), Bilbo refuses to tell his foe his real name (which, as Tolkien notes, is wise; cf. ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’, where knowledge of Túrin’s true identity enabled Glorund to beguile the headstrong human into abandoning those who depended upon him and instead rushing off onto a fool’s errand). Sigurd also at first refuses to tell the mortally wounded Fafnir his name in both Fáfnismál (stanzas 1–3) and Volsunga Saga (Morris, page 59); the compiler of the Edda interrupts the poem to prosaically state that ‘Sigurd concealed his name because it was believed in ancient times that the words of a man about to die had great power if he cursed his enemy by name’. Odysseus eventually does tell the Cyclops his true name, which brings down the curse of his long-delayed homecoming upon him; Sigurd likewise, after some hesitation (‘A wanderer named for a noble beast,/the son of no mother,/I had no father as other men do;/always I go alone’), tells the dragon his true name but seems to escape any death-curse from the dragon; it is the treasure itself, Fafnir warns him, that dooms the man who claims it (Fáfnismál, stanzas 9 & 20). Bilbo, wiser than both, never does tell Smaug his name† but nonetheless reveals a little too much about himself (‘barrel-rider’), thus bringing doom down upon the Lake-men – although, given the dragon’s suspicions (page 508), he would sooner or later have attacked the town anyway.
† Note, however, that his having identified himself to Gollum (see page 155) led to much trouble in the sequel; see The Lord of the Rings Chapter II (‘The Shadow of the Past’) and Appendix B: ‘The Tale of Years’, as well as ‘The Hunt for the Ring’ in Unfinished Tales.
27 The typescript (1/1/62:7) adds, parenthetically, ‘(though I expect you do, since you know all about Bilbo’s adventures to which he was referring)’. In fact each self-assumed epithet alludes to one specific episode earlier in the book:
• I am he that walks unseen – because of his magic ring (Chapters V & ff). Note that the shadow which had given Bilbo such trouble in the early days of his possessing the ring – cf. the episode with the goblin guards at the end of Chapter V, or the care needed to keep the sharp-eyed elves of Mirkwood from spotting it (page 381) – is no longer mentioned in the scene with Smaug, probably because the lighting here is dim enough (apparently coming entirely from Smaug himself)† that no shadows can be seen among the mirk, as had presumably been the case during his battle with the Mirkwood spiders.
• I come from under the hill – an allusion to the address of Bilbo’s home, given in the first surviving paragraph of the Pryftan Fragment as ‘Bag-end, Under-Hill’ (page 7); see also Tolkien’s drawing of the outside of Bilbo’s home, labelled ‘Bag-End, Underhill’ (DAA.46).
• and under the hills my paths led – the goblin-caves (Chapter IV). The typescript adds ‘and over the hills’ – i.e., the mountain-path (also Chapter IV, which in the First Typescript is given its now-familiar title, ‘Over hill and Under hill’ [1/1/54:1]).
• And through the air – when carried by Eagles (Chapters VI & VII).
• I am the clue-finder – this probably alludes to Bilbo’s finding the spider-thread and using it to guide his friends through the tangle of Mirkwood in Chapter VIII, since ‘clue’ originally meant a ball of thread, specifically the one used by Theseus to navigate the labyrinth (Concise OED Vol I, page 434, under the spelling ‘clew’). I am grateful to Anders Stenström for drawing this to my attention.
• the web-cutter – in his battle with the Spiders of Mirkwood (Chapter VIII).
• the stinging fly – Bilbo attacking the Spiders with his little sword; he calls himself a ‘naughty little fly’ in his spontaneous song ‘Lazy lob and crazy Cob’ (page 311) and the spiders refer to his little sword in terms they understand as ‘a sting’ (Chapter VIII). Later, of course, the sword would be given Sting as its proper name by Bilbo (DAA.208), but this would not occur until the First Typescript (see Text Note 23 for Chapter VIII).
• I am he that buries his friends alive – this might refer to Bilbo’s getting all the dwarves safely underground inside the secret tunnel just before Smaug’s attack the night before (Chapter XIII).
• that drowns them – i.e., Bilbo’s hiding the thirteen dwarves in the barrels thrown into the Forest River to escape the dungeons of the Elvenking (Chapter IX).
• and draws them alive from the water – by opening the aforesaid barrels upon the arrival at the Long Lake (Chapter X).
• I am come from the end of a bag – cf. the name of Bilbo’s home, Bag-End (Chapter I).
• but no bag went over me – Bilbo and Bladorthin were the only members of the expedition not to have bags thrown over their heads by the three trolls (Chapter II).
• I am the friend of bears – the visit with Medwed/Beorn (Chapter VII).
• and eagles – the rescue by Eagles, and brief sojourn in their eyries (Chapters VI & VII).
• I am ring winner – the riddle-contest with Gollum (Chapter V).
• & luck wearer – see the comment in Text Note 25 above about ‘the luck of his ring’, though we should also note that Bilbo was chosen as the lucky number (Chapter I) and that in the typescript version of Chapter VIII the dwarves come to recognize ‘that he had some wits, as well as luck, and a magic ring’ after he rescues them from the spiders (1/1/58:15; cf. DAA.217).
• and I am Barrel-rider – during the long, dark, cold ride down the Forest River in the first hours after escaping from the Elvenking’s halls (Chapter IX). It is ironic that Smaug quips ‘maybe “Barrel” is your pony’s name’, since at the time the narrator had likened Bilbo’s attempt to stay atop the barrel ‘like trying to ride without bridle or stirrups a roundbellied pony that was always thinking of rolling on the grass’ (page 387).
† E.g., the chamber’s being completely dark the third time Bilbo enters it, in Smaug’s absence (see page 578).
Note that, unlike the actual riddles he had exchanged with Gollum, which rather resemble the riddle-contest in Heidrek’s Saga (see page 168), these here are all tests of knowledge, like the final, fatal ‘riddle’ Odin asks the giant in Vafthrúthnismál (see page 169), where the speaker deliberately refers to events about which his listener is ignorant. It may be significant that in Fáfnismál Sigurd questions the dying dragon, very much as Odin questions the giant in Vafthrúthnismál.
28 The typescript (1/1/62:7) adds the following sentence at the end of this paragraph, which enables us to know that Bilbo’s pony was one of the ones Smaug had eaten: ‘But he did not tell Bilbo that there was one smell he could not make out at all, hobbit-smell; it was quite outside his experience and puzzled him mightily.’
29 This sentence was altered to read ‘He was in grievous danger of comin
g under the dragon-spell’. Compare the Tale of Turambar, where the dragon’s eye held the hero motionless: ‘with the magic of his eyes he bound him hand and foot . . . and he turned the sinews of Túrin as it were to stone’ (BLT II.85–6), while the dragon’s voice beguiled him: ‘for the lies of that worm were barbed with truth, and for the spell of his eyes he believed all that was said’ (ibid., page 87).
30 Presumably the missing word should be something like ‘friends’: i.e., ‘Bilbo’s friends really ought to have warned him.’ The words ‘warned him’ were canceled in pencil and replaced by ‘put him on his guard’, a reading similar to that in the First Typescript and published book (‘Bilbo of course ought to have been on his guard’; 1/1/62:8 and DAA.281).
31 Added in top margin: ‘gold was only an afterthought with us.’
32 The apostrophe marking the possessive is absent in the lightly punctuated original; I have chosen sons’ over son’s here because two pages later in the manuscript Tolkien unambiguously refers to King Girion’s sons in the plural; see page 514 and also Text Note 6 for Plot Notes C.
33 Compare Smaug’s boasts (manuscript page 150), and also the description of Smaug’s attack on Lake Town that follows a few pages later (manuscript pages 154–155), with the description of the great dragon in the deeps in the Book of Job, chapter 41:
Can you draw out Leviathan . . . ?
Will he speak to you soft words? . . .
No one is so fierce that he dares to stir him up . . .
Who can penetrate his double coat of mail?
. . . Round about his teeth is terror.
His back is made of rows of shields,
shut up closely as with a seal.
One is so near to another
that no air can come between them.
. . . [H]is eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.
Out of his mouth go flaming torches;
sparks of fire leap forth.
Out of his nostrils comes forth smoke,
as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.
His breath kindles coals,
and a flame comes forth from his mouth.
In his neck abides strength,
and terror dances before him . . .
His heart is hard as a stone . . .
When he raises himself up the mighty are afraid;
at the crashing they are beside themselves.
. . . [T]he sword . . . does not avail,
nor the spear, the dart, or the javelin.
He counts iron as straw,
and bronze as rotten wood.
The arrow cannot make him flee;
for him slingstones are turned to stubble.
. . . he laughs at the rattle of javelins.
His underparts are like sharp potsherds . . .
He makes the deep boil like a pot . . .
Behind him he leaves a shining wake . . .
Upon earth there is not his like,
a creature without fear . . .
[H]e is king over all the sons of pride.
Tolkien is reported by some sources to have worked on the translation of Job found in The Jerusalem Bible [first edition, 1966], in addition to his recognized role in translating Jonah; cf. Carpenter’s checklist of Tolkien’s publications (Tolkien: A Biography, page 274) and Tolkien’s letter to Charlotte and Denis Plimmer (letter of 8th February 1967; Letters, p. 378). Hammond cites a letter from the bible’s publisher stating that Tolkien ‘also worked on the Book of Job, providing its initial draft and playing an important part in establishing its final text’ (Descriptive Bibliography, page 279), but his role on that book seems to have been limited to reviewing an early draft by another translator. I am indebted to Wayne Hammond for this clarification. According to the Reader’s Guide, vol. two of Christina Scull & Wayne G. Hammond’s The J.R.R. Tolkien Companion and Guide [2006], Tolkien also did some work on Isaiah and probably Job as well, and was offered the Pentateuch or Books of Moses (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, & Deuteronomy) as well as the historical books (Joshua, Judges, and 1st & 2nd Samuel), but ultimately had to decline because of the press of other work (Reader’s Guide pages 437–9).† In any case, that work came many years after he had completed work on The Hobbit.
† Tolkien was of course also familiar with the Jonah story professionally through its vivid and amusing fourteenth-century Middle English retelling in the same manuscript as (and universally believed to be by the same author as) Sir Gawain & the Green Knight and Pearl: the Gawain-poet’s adaptation is known as Patience.
34 ‘The dwarves and the men of Dale’ was changed in the manuscript to simply ‘The men of Dale’; otherwise, of course, some member of Thorin’s company might be expected to be able to talk to the bird. The motif of the dwarves’ special friendship with the Ravens of the Mountain may have originated by the displacement of this motif from the original thrushes to another breed of bird.
35 This sentence is replaced in the First Typescript by the passage essentially as it appears in the published book: ‘. . . they all began discussing dragonslayings historical, dubious, and mythical, and the various sorts of stabs and jabs and undercuts, and the different arts devices and stratagems by which they had been accomplished. The general opinion was that catching a dragon napping was not as easy as it sounded; and the attempt to stick one or prod one asleep was more likely to end in disaster than a bold frontal attack’ (1/1/62:10; cf. DAA.285). The latter sentence, of course, postdates the abandonment of the Bilbo-as-dragon-slayer plot from Plot Notes B & C which had probably still been in place when this chapter was written: originally, the discussion of how to kill a sleeping dragon would have been immediately relevant to the upcoming chapters.
36 This paragraph was bracketed by Tolkien and marked for deletion, probably when the vast expansion represented by 151b replaced it.
37 As written, this sentence reads ‘All was no quiet below at any rate’; this might be a slip for ‘All was now quiet below . . .’
38 Only fourteen manuscript pages after it had been used as the wizard’s name for the last time (see page 472), ‘Bladorthin’ has here been reassigned to an elusive figure who appears only in this single sentence. The First Typescript (1/1/62:11) makes this ‘the great King Bladorthin (long since dead)’, about whom nothing is otherwise told; a sad relic for what had been the name of one of the story’s major characters.
39 The ‘Gem of Girion’ here makes its first appearance in the story, having been long anticipated in the Plot Notes (see page 364). Later this would be replaced by the Arkenstone, which would be given its own earlier history; see commentary following Chapter XIV. Similarly, the coats of mithril mail (although that term had not yet arisen and is in fact never used in The Hobbit), foreseen in Plot Notes C, also now appear in the narrative.
(i)
Tolkien’s Dragons
I first tried to write a story when I was about seven. It was about a dragon. I remember nothing about it except a philological fact. My mother said nothing about the dragon, but pointed out that one could not say ‘a green great dragon’, but had to say ‘a great green dragon’. I wondered why, and still do. The fact that I remember this is possibly significant, as I do not think I ever tried to write a story again for many years, and was taken up with language.
—JRRT to W. H. Auden, 7 June 1955 (Letters p. 214).1
Few elements in Tolkien’s work have had as much influence on modern fantasy, the genre he himself essentially created, as his depiction of dragons. When Tolkien began writing, dragons had dwindled to whimsical fairy-tale creatures in the popular mind, treated more as figures of fun than the deadly menaces they had been in old legend. Even among scholars of those old legends, the feeling ran that dragons were pedestrian, unimaginative, and trivial, ‘the merest commonplace of heroic legend’ (W. P. Ker, The Dark Ages [1904]; quoted more in sorrow than in anger in Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’ [1936], page 7). The great R. W. Chambers (Widsith [1912]) even lamented that the Beo
wulf-poet had given us a story about Grendel and the fire-drake when he and his fellow critics would have much preferred a melodrama of tangled loyalties at the Danish court above ‘a wilderness of dragons’ (quoted in ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, page 8).
There were, of course, notable exceptions to the general neglect; writers who fully appreciated the appeal and impact of what we may call dragons of the old school, such as Lord Dunsany (‘The Fortress Unvanquishable Save For Sacnoth’ [1907], ‘The Hoard of the Gibbelins’ [1912], ‘Miss Cubbidge and the Dragon of Romance’ [1912]) and Kenneth Morris (The Book of Three Dragons [1930]), but by and large the whimsical dragons of E. Nesbit (e.g., The Book of Dragons [1899] and ‘The Last Dragon’ [1925]) and above all Kenneth Grahame (‘The Reluctant Dragon’ [1898 and 1938]) had won the day. Tolkien, who considered dragons the quintessential fantasy creature (‘The dragon had the trade-mark Of Faërie written plain upon him. In whatever world he had his being it was an Otherworld’ – OFS.40), presented them so dramatically and successfully in his own work that he single-handedly reversed the trend of the preceding half-century and more, both in fantasy and in scholarship.2
Tolkien’s interest in dragons was life-long: he recalled in his Andrew Lang lecture that his favorite fictional world when growing up had been ‘the nameless North of Sigurd of the Völsungs, and the prince of all dragons . . . I desired dragons with a profound desire . . . [T]he world that contained even the imagination of Fáfnir was richer and more beautiful, at whatever cost of peril’ (OFS.40).3 In his 1965 radio interview with Denys Gueroult, he admitted to a fondness for these ‘intelligent lizards’:
[D]ragons always attracted me as a mythological element. They seem to be able to comprise human malice and bestiality together . . . a sort of malicious wisdom and shrewdness. Terrifying creatures.
Writing to Christopher Bretherton a few months earlier [1964], he described how in his youth he had been ‘interested in traditional tales (especially those concerning dragons)’ in addition to philology and metrics, before ‘[t]hese things began to flow together when I was an undergraduate’ (i.e., between 1911 and 1915; Letters, page 345). Indeed, so steeped in thinking about dragons was he that when as a child he found a fossil on the beach at Lyme Regis, he believed he had found a piece of petrified dragon.4 It is no wonder, then, that when he came to write his mythology he filled it with dragons.
The History of the Hobbit Page 65
