The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  Suddenly out of the dark something fluttered to his shoulder – he started, but it was an old thrush and it perched by his shoulder and it brought him news. Marvelling he found he could understand its tongue – for he was of the Dale race. ‘Wait wait’ it said ‘the moon is rising. Look for the hollow of the left breast as he flies and turns above you.’ The[n] Bard drew his last arrow from his quiver. The dragon was circling back, and the moon rose above the eastern shore and silvered his great wings.

  This addition clearly dates from the same time as the extended rider (manuscript page 151b) given on page 513, inserted into the end of the preceding chapter, where the old thrush is given a larger role in the story than simply being a passive signifier that they have found the right snail-stone marking the Secret Door.

  The next page following the death of Smaug (manuscript page 156; Marq. 1/1/14:4) is marked by somewhat neater writing and also slightly more yellowed paper, indicating that the next thirteen pages probably came from a similar but slightly different batch of unused students’ papers. Tolkien also starts further down the page than usual on this new sheet, leaving roughly enough room blank to have written another paragraph there, though in the end all he wrote were the words ‘A great fog’, which seem to have been partially erased. In both typescripts and the published book a blank line is skipped here to mark the break in the action.

  A great fog

  The moon [rises >] rose higher and higher, and the North wind grew loud and cold. It twisted the white fog upon the lake into bending pillars and hurrying clouds, and drove it off to the West to scatter in tattered wisps over the marshes before Mirkwood. Then the many boats could be seen dotted on the surface of the lake, and down the wind came the sound of the voices of the people of Esgaroth lamenting their lost town and goods and ruined homes. But they had really much to be thankful for, had they thought of it – which perhaps it was asking too much to expect them to do: [the dragon’s was at end, >] three quarters of the people of the town had escaped at least alive, and their woods, fields, pastures and cattle, and most of their boats remained undamaged; and the Dragon was dead, and at an end. What that meant they had not yet realized.

  They gathered in sorry crowds upon the western shores, shivering in the cold wind. The first grumbles were for the Master who had left the town so soon, while still [defenders were >] some were willing to defend it.

  ‘He may have a good head for business – especially his own business – ’ some murmured, ‘but he is no good in a crisis!’ And th praised and lamented Bard and his courage.

  ‘If only he were not slain we would make him a king’ they said ‘Bard, [ >] the Dragon-shooter, of the line of Girion. Alas that he is lost!’

  And in the very midst of their talk a tall figure stepped from the shadows. He was drenchedTN12 with water, his black hair hung wet over his face and shoulders; a fierce light was in his eyes.

  ‘Bard is not lost’ he cried. ‘I am Bard the dragon-piercer of the race of Girion. I dived from Esgaroth only when none else was left, only when the enemy was slain. I will be your king!’

  ‘King Bard, King Bard’ they shouted, and the master ground his chattering teeth, as he sat upon the ground.

  ‘Girion was Lord of Dale not King of Esgaroth’ he said. ‘In this lake town we have ever had masters elected from the old and the wise, and not endured the rough rule of mere fighting men. Let King Bard win [> take] back his own Kingdom – Dale is free, nor is more ruined now than Esgaroth. He has slain the slayer of his fathers and nothing hinders him. And those that like may go with him, though wise men will stay here and rebuild our town, and enjoy its richness and peace’.

  ‘We will have king Bard’ the people shouted. ‘We have had enough of the old men & money-counters’.

  ‘I am the last one to underpraise [> undervalue] Bard the Bowman’ said the Master warily, for Bard was standing near him fierce and grim, ‘and indeed his bravery tonight has made him the greatest benefactor the men of the Lake have known since the coming of the Smaug the unceasing Threat. But I don’t quite see why I get all the blame. Who stirred up the dragon, I might ask? Who got rich gifts of us and ample help, and led us to believe that old songs would come true? What sort of gold have they sent down the river? To whom should we send a claim for the repair of all our damages and the help [added: & comfort] of widows and widowers and orphans?’

  Cunning words. For the moment people forgot the idea of a new king and [were >] turned their thoughts and anger to Thorin and his company. Their hate flowed up against them, and their words grew ever more wild and bitter. Some of those who had sung the old songs loudest were now [singing parodies of them >] heard loudly to suggest that the dwarves had deliberately sent the Dragon down upon them.

  Added later in the bottom and left margin and intended for insertion at this point: ‘Fools’ said Bard. ‘And why waste hate on those unhappy creatures. They have doubtless perished in fire before Smaug came to us.’ But even as he spoke, the thought of the treasure of the Mountain came into his heart, and he fell silent, thinking of the Master’s words, and dring of Dale rebuilt, if he could find the men.

  It was fortunate they [> that the lakemen] had something to discuss and to occupy their thoughts, for their night under the trees and in such rough shelter as could be contrived was miserable. Many [who >] took ill that night and afterwards died. Even Bard would have had a hard task in the following days to order them, and begin upon the rebuilding of the town, with such tools as were left in the huts upon the shore, if other help had not been at hand.

  The spies of the woodelves had sent tidings of the dragon’s rousing [> dwarves’ north journey and of] to their King, and he was as astonished as the Master had been; but he too expected only a bad end for the dwarves [> yet he did not expect any other ending of their venture than their death in the jaws of Smaug]. When news of the rousing of the Dragon reached him, and of the fire upon the mountain tops, he thought that he had heard the last of Thorin Oakenshield.

  Then came messengers telling him of the fall of Esgaroth and the death of Smaug. He knew then the time had come to move. ‘It is an ill wind that blows no man any good’ he said,TN13 for he too had not forgotten the legend of the hoard of Thror.

  So he led forth all the host he could muster, a great army of [woode >] the bowmen and spearmen of the woodelves. Some he sent North towards the Mountain; some he bid bring all the supplies they could gather down the river to the lake. It was a long march, for he had not rafts enough for all his folk, but in seven days he came upon the shores, and the unhappy men were glad indeed to see him, and ready to make any bargain for his help.

  That is how it happened that while many were left behind with the women and the children, busily felling trees and making huts along the shore, and beginning under the direction of the Master (and with the help of woodelves) the replanning and building of their d town, [all the bravest warriors but those of the king, >] many gathered under Bard and marched away North with the Elven king.

  The chapter comes to an end at the bottom of manuscript page 158 (Marq. 1/1/15:6), as the scene shifts back to the activities of Bilbo and the dwarves at the Mountain; see page 577.

  TEXT NOTES

  1 This paragraph was preceded on the page by a paragraph of drafting. I transcribe this cancelled passage just as it appears in the manuscript, since it offers a good example of Tolkien’s seeking to visualize and properly describe a specific image – in this case, exactly what the people of Lake Town could see of Smaug’s distant attack on the Mountain when he destroyed the Secret Door (cf. page 515).

  Suddenly a great light shone in the North and filled the low place in the hills which screened all but the top [> highest peak] of the lonely M. from the view. Though The highest peak of the Lonely Mountain was lost in dark – that was all they could see of it above the hills at the North end of the lake. Suddenly the low place in those hills through which came the R. Running from the North was filled wi
th a great light, the Northern end

  The Mountain flickered with a glow of light such as

  The gap between the hills at the northernmost point on the Long Lake at the inflow of the River Running out of the Lonely Mountain past Dale mentioned here can just be seen in ‘Esgaroth’ (Plate VIII [bottom]), on the horizon in a direct line above the dwarf popping his head up out of the barrel; it is slightly more evident in the finished version of this drawing (‘Lake Town’; cf. DAA.244 & H-S#127).

  2 ‘from midnight till dawn’: this corresponds exactly with the account in Chapter XII, where it is midnight when Bilbo emerges from the tunnel with the stolen cup (page 507) and Smaug immediately thereafter discovers the theft and flies out ‘[t]o hunt the whole mountain till he caught the thief and burned and trampled him’ (ibid.), scorching the mountain-side with his fiery breath ‘till dawn chilled his wrath and he went back to his golden couch to sleep’ (page 508).

  3 This unpromising characterization marks the first appearance of Bard,† who will soon emerge as the hero of the coming battle. The description of his voice as ‘surly’ is distinctly unheroic; elsewhere the word is used of Ted Sandyman (‘The Scouring of the Shire’, LotR.1054) and Snaga the orc (‘The Tower of Cirith Ungol’, LotR.940). Within the published Hobbit itself, it appears only to describe the starving dwarves’ attitude when questioned by their elven captors in Mirkwood (page 380) – the same elves who had the night before ignored their pleas for food and left them to the spiders’ tender mercies.

  There is certainly nothing in these paragraphs preceding the battle foretelling the heroic figure this as-yet-unnamed guardsman is about to become. In the First Typescript, surly has been replaced with grim (typescript page 127; Marq. 1/1/64:1), which conveys the same pessimism but leaves open heroic possibilities. Whereas ‘surly’ (which derives from Old French) usually means churlishly ill-humored, ‘grim’ (which comes from Old English) can mean not just fierce, cruel, or harsh but also determined or bold: in Beowulf it is used not just of Grendel (e.g., line 121) but of Wiglaf when he addresses his fellow guardsmen who deserted King Beowulf in his time of need (line 2860b); see commentary pp. 557–8.

  † Unless this guard is the same character as the nameless guard captain who kept such a poor watch back in Chapter X; see Text Note 10 on page 444.

  4 Tolkien originally wrote ‘from a fi’ here but immediately changed it to ‘from floods’, perhaps in order to avoid anticipating the conflagration that erupts a few paragraphs later.

  5 I have added the quotation marks here, since these lines would seem at first to be quoted from the poem in Chapter X (see pp. 439–40 and Text Note 14 on pp. 445–6), but not all of them actually occur there, nor in this sequence, either in the rough draft nor the final poem. We must either imagine that the Lake-men are garbling their own song a few weeks later or, more probably, that this is a part of the song not recorded earlier, where we are told ‘there was a great deal more of it’.

  6 Note that Lake Town still has multiple bridges connecting it to the shore here and also in the accompanying First Typescript (1/1/64:1); cf. Text Notes to Chapter X, page 444.

  7 An additional sentence appears in this passage in the First Typescript:

  You have never failed me and always I have recovered you.

  This addition, along with some polishing, thus achieves in the First Typescript the text that appears in the published book. For more on the rather curious motif of an arrow that is always recovered until one final shot when it fulfills its destiny, see the commentary on page 558.

  8 Added in the left margin and marked for insertion at this point:

  As he turned [added: and dived down] his belly glittered [with >] white with sparkling fire in the moon – but not in one spot.

  For the role of moonlight in this scene, see the commentary on the picture ‘The Death of Smaug’, page 561.

  9 The detail about Smaug’s death cry causing stars to fall from the sky, while striking, disappeared by the time the First Typescript was made, where this passage reads ‘. . . a shriek that deafened men, felled trees, and split stone’ (1/1/64:3). For a precedent elsewhere in Tolkien’s work of falling stars being caused by dramatic earthly events, see the Father Christmas Letters, where in the 1925 letter two stars ‘shot’ (i.e., became shooting stars) when North Polar Bear broke the North Pole, and a third ‘went red when [the] Pole snapped’ (Letters from Father Christmas, 1925 Letter, page 23).

  10 ‘Glede’: a rare (dialectical) word more commonly spelled ‘gleed’ (Middle English glede, Old English gled), meaning a glowing coal or ember. Douglas Anderson notes (DAA.308) that the word occurs both in Beowulf and in Sir Gawain & the Green Knight, as well as in Tolkien’s translation of the latter (where it is once translated ‘coals’ and once left untranslated as ‘gledes’; cf. SGGK line 891 [Tolkien translation page 47] and line 1609 [Tolkien translation page 65]).

  11 This is the first appearance of the name Esgaroth. For the probable meaning of this elven name for Lake Town, see pp. 561–2. Several letters at the beginning and end of the word have been re-written in a darker ink, and it is possible that the original reading here was Esgaron, the form of the name found in Plot Notes D; see page 569 and Text Note 7 on page 571.

  12 This marks the point at which the First Typescript broke off in the ‘home manuscript’ that Tolkien circulated among his friends; the next page which followed in that composite text was the first page of the Third Phase handwritten manuscript. For an explanation of how these texts fit together, see the headnote at the beginning of Chapter XVb: King Bard on pp. 637–8. Note that when Carpenter says that ‘shortly after he had described the death of the dragon’ Tolkien broke off the story (Tolkien: A Biography, page 179), he is referring to the typescript. In fact, as the next two chapters show, Tolkien continued the story on past Smaug’s death for the rest of that chapter, all the following chapter (which now precedes it in the re-arranged published sequence), and well into the chapter that followed – or, in the published book, for twenty-one out of the remaining sixty-five pages of the story (in the pagination of the first edition, not counting illustrations).

  13 This proverb, while undoubtedly venerable, hardly dates back to the Third Age of Middle-earth. The earliest recorded usage, an yll wynde that blowth no man to good, men saie, appears in Henry VIII’s time in John Heywood’s Proverbs [1546], along with such still-familiar phrases as no fire without some smoke, cart before the horse, more the merrier, penny for your thoughts, and hitteth the nail on the head. Shakespeare uses slightly different forms of it twice (Henry IV, Part II, Act V, scene iii, line 87; Henry VI, Part III, Act II, scene v, line 55), and it has remained in use down to the present day. The most familiar form today is the eighteenth-century one, ’tis an ill wind which blows nobody any good (cf. Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey [1768]).

  (i)

  Bard the Dragon-Slayer

  As we have seen in Plot Notes C, the idea that Smaug would die during the attack on Lake Town rather than be stabbed by Bilbo while he slept on his bed of gold emerged suddenly. Since Bilbo was no longer to be the dragon-slayer, Tolkien had to either re-assign the role to an already existing character within the book, such as Thorin or Gandalf, or create a new one with very little preamble.1 Designating any other character already present as Smaug’s bane would simply shift the problem without solving it, since all the dwarves were at the mountain with Bilbo and no other character who had appeared so far on their journey could be re-introduced to fill the role without usurping too large a part in the story and taking attention away from the main characters.2

  Tolkien’s solution was to introduce a new character to fill the necessary narrative role. Initially he planned to kill off this character as soon as his role of dragon-slayer was achieved: only two pages of manuscript separate his first appearance (manuscript page 153)3 and his death in the ruin of Esgaroth (manuscript page 155), crushed beneath the dragon’s fall. Before proceeding any further, however, Tolkien thought b
etter of it and changed the line ‘And that was the end of Smaug and Esgaroth and Bard’ to ‘. . . the end of Smaug and Esgaroth but not of Bard’ (italics mine) – as significant a change within such a small space of words as he achieved anywhere within the book.

  Having decided to keep Bard alive was a crucial decision that greatly affected the concluding section of the book. The chapters immediately following the death of Smaug (Chapters XIV-XVIII in this edition, XIII and XV-XVIII in the published book) have long been noted as strikingly different in tone from all that had come before.4 Initially, as we shall see, Tolkien’s sympathies in the next several chapters were to remain with Thorin and the dwarves and no rift between Bilbo and his companions had been contemplated (see especially the ‘little bird’ outline, i.e. Plot Notes E), with the elves and their allies being cast in a much more hostile light (capturing and wounding Fili, pursing Kili, shooting arrows at the friendly ravens bringing food to enable the besieged dwarves and hobbit to hold out, etc.). Before the introduction of Bard, none of the outsiders described in the Plot Notes who descend upon the mountain after Smaug’s death have any legitimate claim on the treasure there: certainly not the Elvenking who imprisoned the dwarves for months in solitary confinement merely for trespassing. Nor are the men of Lake Town, although certainly due generous recompense for all their aid in the dwarves’ time of need (much of their sorry state having been due to the elves’ mistreatment, it must be said), entitled thereby to any significant portion of Thorin’s inheritance. That the elves and Lake-men were in the wrong in their attempts to steal or extort Thror’s treasure and besiege his heir when he finally comes back into his own is shown by Bladorthin’s words and actions when the wizard finally reappears:

  Blad[orthin] rebukes the besiegers . . .

  A share of his part [Bilbo] gives to Lake-men, and to wood-elves