Tolkien’s debt to Beowulf, and the way he drew on (and played off of) the older work when making something new, are best revealed in three specific details. First, the cup which Bilbo steals from Smaug’s lair (page 506) is a precise match for the cup (Old English wæge) which a thief steals from the dragon’s lair in Beowulf (line 2216). Just as in The Hobbit, the thief in Beowulf manages to enter the dragon’s lair stealthily, steal the jeweled cup, and escape. Second, whereas Bilbo is ‘Mr. Lucky Number’, included in the quest specifically so that Thorin and Company will not number thirteen (page 9), Beowulf chooses to confront the dragon with eleven picked warriors, forcing the nameless thief who had stolen the maðþum-fæt (‘treasure-cup’) to guide them to the spot as the thirteenth of their company. Third and perhaps most significantly, Tolkien felt that dragons in medieval literature suffered from being too abstract and not individual enough: ‘draconitas rather than draco’, as he put it in his Beowulf essay (page 15) – i.e., representing ‘dragon-ness’ in an allegorical sense rather than just being a ‘plain pure fairy-story dragon’ (ibid., page 14). Leslie Kordecki, in Tradition and Development of the Medieval English Dragon [dissertation, 1980], notes that early medieval stories concerning dragons tend to portray them as living, breathing creatures, whereas later stories often reduce them to mere symbols vanquished by the sign of the cross, and Tolkien himself distinguished in his dragon lecture between ‘the symbolic dragon’, such as the one fought by St. George, and ‘the legendary dragon’, which he greatly preferred. Tolkien’s allegiance and approval are wholly reserved for ‘dragon [as] real worm, with a bestial life and thought of his own’ (Beowulf essay, pages 14–15), albeit being willing to allow him to be invested with a certain amount of symbolism as an embodiment of ‘malice, greed, destruction’ (ibid., page 15). His most significant change that transforms Beowulf’s bane into Smaug is granting the latter individuality, indeed a ‘rather overwhelming personality’. Unlike the Beowulf dragon but like Fafnir, Smaug speaks; indeed, he has a highly individualistic turn of phrase that combines sarcasm with arrogance (‘You have nice manners, for a thief and a liar’); his manner of speaking establishes him as an even more striking character than Glorund, one of the most vivid in The Hobbit despite the fact that he only appears in two chapters out of nineteen. It’s hard to disagree with Christensen’s judgment, made nearly four decades ago, that in Smaug Tolkien creates ‘a “real” dragon unsurpassed in medieval or modern literature’ (Christensen, page 121).
For the present, I defer discussion of Smaug’s death until the commentary following Chapter XIII and a look at his hoard until Chapter XIV.
(iii)
‘The Only Philological Remark’
In his comments on the proposed blurbs for the dust-jacket of The Hobbit that accompanied his 31st August 1937 letter to Allen & Unwin, Tolkien remarked that
The only philological remark (I think) in The Hobbit is on p. 221 (lines 6–7 from end): an odd mythological way of referring to linguistic philosophy, and a point that will (happily) be missed by any who have not read Barfield (few have) and probably by those who have.
—Letters p. 22.14
In the original manuscript, the specific passage in question reads
To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is to say too little. There are no words to express his staggerment. (page 506)
However, in the First Typescript this has been expanded:
To say that Bilbo’s breath was taken away is no description at all. There are no words to express his staggerment, not even in the language of the pithecanthropes which consisted (we are told) largely of exclamations.
—typescript page 117, Marq. 1/1/62:3; italics mine.
This reading was preserved in the Second Typescript and represents the text as it was originally submitted to Allen & Unwin. However, the passage changed again in the page proofs, when ‘left’ was added to the first part of the second sentence to fill up a shortfall in the typeset line and the rest of that sentence cancelled and replaced:
. . . no words left to express his staggerment, since Men changed the language that they learned of elves in the days when all the world was wonderful.
—1/2/2: page 221; italics mine.
This achieves the reading of the first edition (page 221), which has remained unaltered ever since (cf. DAA.271).
Tolkien nowhere elucidates just what the underlying ‘point’ to which he refers might be, nor why only those familiar with Barfield’s thought might grasp it, but his use of the nonstandard ‘staggerment’ does draw attention to the passage and suggests the essential point: that Bilbo cannot put what he feels at that moment into words. Quite literally, words fail him, falling short of the reality of the experience.15 Barfield’s theory (perhaps best expressed in his books Poetic Diction [1928] and Unancestral Voice [1965]),16 that the history of language serves as a record of the evolution of human consciousness, is complex and subtle, and its application to Bilbo’s experience here is not immediately obvious. An essential element of Barfield’s theory, however, lies in his belief that nineteenth-century philologists such as Max Müller were entirely in error when they supposed that early humans had simple languages with small vocabularies in which all the words represented simple, concrete things, although they could be applied metaphorically to abstract concepts – for example, that the same word might be used for ‘wind’ and ‘breath’ (cf. Latin spiritus), and by extension figuratively to ‘soul’ or ‘life-force’ (modern ‘spirit’). Barfield completely disagreed, arguing instead that in such languages a single word expressed a concept which we in later days cannot conceive of as a whole: hence in the more modern form of that language the ‘breath of life’ becomes respiration, the feeling of an outside force entering you becomes inspiration, the life-force within becomes spirit, and so forth, all thought of as distinct and separate things, whereas in the earlier language the ancestor-word had meant all these and more. Or, to pick another example, the O.E. word mod (the direct ancestor of our modern word mood) puzzles most students who try to learn Old English, because it seems to mean so many different things: heart, mind, spirit, temper, courage, arrogance, pride (cf. Clark Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary [4th ed., 1962], page 239). Thus in his translation of a passage from ‘The Battle of Maldon’ in The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm’s Son, Tolkien translates mod as ‘spirit’, while in the essay ‘Ofermod’ which accompanies his verse-play he translated the compound ofer-mod not as ‘too much spirit’ but as ‘overmastering pride’ or ‘overboldness’ (the latter a fair approximation of the original meaning of Tolkien’s own surname, we might note, i.e. tollkühn = ‘foolhardy’ [Letters p. 218] or ‘rashbold’ [The Notion Club Papers, HME IX.151]).
While the ‘ancient semantic unity’ Barfield postulates may never have existed – after all, anyone learning a foreign language soon discovers that a similar phenomenon exists whenever we try to translate one language into another; we find some word which can be approximated by a cluster of words in one language but not exactly matched to any one word, since the concept it reflects doesn’t exist as a whole in the other language (hence the popularity of the modern American word ‘okay’, which has been adopted into daily use in a number of unrelated languages around the world, such as Japanese) – Tolkien was wholly sympathetic at any rate to the idea that ancient languages could express more, in fewer words compact with meaning, than modern-day tongues. Such a concept fit in perfectly with his legendarium, where the Elven languages of Sindarin and Quenya are semantically rich despite having a relatively small recorded vocabulary (something already true of them in their earliest forms, as Gnomish and Qenya respectively). Tolkien’s respect and admiration for the past meant he was wholly free of what Lewis called ‘chronological snobbery’;17 he takes pains, for example, in ‘On Fairy-Stories’ to defend so-called ‘primitive’ peoples (footnote to OFS.27; see also OFS.39) and revolutionized Beowulf criticism by preferring and defending the aesthetic choices and literary judgments of t
he author, who had lived a thousand years or more before, above those of the critics of his own day (‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’). Furthermore, from a very early stage of the legendarium the idea was already ensconced that humans were originally without language and learned how to speak from the elves:
At the rising of the first Sun the younger children of earth [= humans] awoke in the far East . . . They meet Ilkorindi [Dark-Elves] and learn speech and other things of them, and become great friends of the Eldalië.
—1926 ‘Sketch of the Mythology’ (HME IV.20).
Similar statements appear in the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.99) and 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME V.246), and there seems little doubt that this is the ‘mythological way’ to which Tolkien refers in his letter to Allen & Unwin: like his later conception of the ents (LotR.489 & 494),18 Tolkien initially conceived of humans as being without speech until they learned language from the elves (whose own name for themselves, Quendi, means simply ‘the Speakers’ – LotR.1171). And that language, once they acquired it, was not halting or primitive but full of meaning, subtlety, and beauty.
Finally, there is Tolkien’s rather surprising use, in the typescript version of this passage, of the precise scientific technical name pithecanthropus. The term was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel, a disciple of Darwin, in 1866, just seven years after the publication of On the Origin of Species [1859]. Haeckel theorized that, if humans and apes truly shared a common ancestor, then there must once have existed an ancestral form which would combine human and ape characteristics, a ‘missing link’ which he called pithecanthropus alulus: ‘speechless ape-man’. Several decades later, when Eugène Dubois discovered fossils of early humans that seemed to match Haeckel’s prediction, he named his discovery pithecanthropus erectus (‘upright ape-man’ [1894]) – more popularly known as ‘Java Man’. Today, Dubois’ discovery is classified with ‘Peking Man’ [discovered in 1928ff] as homo erectus, along with the recently discovered hobbit-sized homo floresiensis. Significantly, not only is Tolkien’s terminology correct in the contemporary usage of the time, but the skepticism expressed by his parenthetical ‘which consisted (we are told) largely of exclamations’ makes it clear that he is well aware of the second part of Haeckel’s proposed name, alulus or without language. Rather than enter into the paleoanthropological debate on just when humans acquired language (cf. for example Johanson & Edgar, From Lucy to Language [1996], page 106), Tolkien provided a mythological answer within his subcreated world, of mankind born mute (alulus) but then acquiring full-fledged language from our forerunners and sibling-race, the Elder Children or elves.
Chapter XIII
The Death of Smaug
As before, this chapter break was added at the time Tolkien created the First Typescript and divided the text of the original continuous manuscript into the familiar chapters of the published book. In this particular case, the new chapter began with what had been the third paragraph on Ms. page 153 (Marq. 1/1/15:1); between this and the preceding paragraph Tolkien inserted, in pencil, the directions:
Here insert ‘Not at home’
Ch. Fire and Water
Thus, the decision to flip what are now chapters XIV (‘Fire and Water’) and XIII (‘Not at Home’) – or XIII (‘Death of Smaug’) and XIV (‘While the Dragon’s Away’), respectively, in the original draft and this edition – was made at the same time that Tolkien determined where the chapter breaks would fall.
This chapter also marks the spot where, later, the First Typescript broke off and the point to which Tolkien returned when he began the Third Phase drafting that completed the work; see page 638.
The men of the Lake-town were [sitting on the quays >] mostly indoors for the wind was from the North and chill, but some were walking on the quays, and watching as they were fond of doing the stars shine forth from the smooth patches of Lake as they opened in the sky.
From their town the Lonely Mountain was screened by the low hills at the far end of the lake, through a gap in which the R. Running came down from the North. Only its highest peak could they see and they looked seldom at it, for it was ominous and drear even in the morning light. Now it was lost and gone, blotted in the dark.TN1
Suddenly it flickered back to view, a brief glow touched it and faded. ‘Look!’ said one ‘the lights again. Last night [they > I >] the watchmen saw them start and fade from midnight till dawn.TN2 Something is happening up there.’
‘Perhaps the King under the Mountain is forging gold’ said another. ‘It is long since he went North. It is time the songs began to prove themselves again.’
‘Which king?’ said another with a surly voice.TN3 ‘As like as not it is the marauding fire of the dragon – the only K. under the Mountain we have ever known.’
‘You are always foreboding gloomy things’ said the others ‘from floodsTN4 to poisoned fish’ they said. ‘Think of something cheerful.’
Then suddenly a great light appeared red and golden in the low place in the hills [> the northern end of the lake turned golden]. ‘The king beneath the Mountain’ they shouted. ‘“[The rivers golden run >] His wealth is like the sun, his silver like a fountain. [his gold like rivers run >] his rivers golden run.”TN5 The river is running gold from the mountain’ they cried, and everywhere windows opened and feet were hurrying. There was tremendous excitement and enthusiasm. But the surly fellow ran hot foot to the master. ‘The dragon is coming or I am a fool’ he cried: ‘cut the bridges; to arms to arms!’
[So it was that >] The warning trumpets were sounded and the enthusiasm died away. So it was that the dragon did not find them quite unprepared. Before long they could see him as a spark of fire speeding towards them, and not the most foolish doubted that the prophecies had gone somewhat wrong. Still they had a little time. Every vessel in the town was filled with water; every warrior armed, every arrow ready and the bridgesTN6 to the land were cast down and destroyed before the roar of Smaug’s terrible approach grew loud, [and the trees by the shore were >] and the lake rippled [red as] fire beneath his coming.
Amid the shrieks and wailing and the shouts of men he came over them, swept towards the bridges, and was foiled. The bridges were gone and his enemies were on an island in deep water – too deep and dark and cool for his liking: If he plunged therein a vapour and a steam wd rise enough to cover all the land with a mist for days, but the lake was mightier than he, it would quench him before he could pass through.
Roaring he swept by on the town. A hail of dark arrows swept up and snapped and rattled on his scales and jewels and their shafts fell back burning and hissing in the lake. No fireworks you ever imagined equalled the sight that night. Now the dragon’s wrath blazed to its height till he was blind and mad with it. He circled high in the air lighting all the lake; and the trees by the shore shone like copper and like blood with many [added:
Still a company of archers held their ground. Their captain was the surly man whose friends accused him of prophesying floods an
d poisoned fish. But [his >] Bard was his real name, a descendant as tales said of Girion lord of Dale. He shot with a great bow till all but one arrow was spent. The flames were near him, his companions were fleeing. He bent the bow for the last time.
‘Arrow’ he said ‘ – black arrow I have saved you to the last. I
The text breaks off here, about three-quarters of the way down the page (manuscript page 155; Marq. 1/1/15:3), indicating a pause in the composition. The last two words of this paragraph (‘and Bard’) were cancelled and replaced by ‘but not of Bard’. Probably at the same time, the rest of the manuscript page was filled with the following paragraph, which was marked for insertion before the preceding paragraph (that is, between ‘He bent his bow for the last time’ and ‘“Arrow” he said’):
The History of the Hobbit Page 67
