The History of the Hobbit
Page 69
(though they may not deserve it).
— Plot Notes C (page 497, italics mine).
But the introduction of survivors from Dale changes this: it gives those who like Bard are descended from the Dale-folk a rightful claim to at least part of the hoard – albeit probably a relatively small part: it is after all the gold of the King under the Mountain that has lived on in Lake-folk song and legend and likewise ‘the legend of the hoard of Thror’ that brings the Elvenking marching at top speed, not any legacy of Girion. Now Thorin faces a rightful claimant to any wealth of Girion’s mixed into Smaug’s treasure, and one who furthermore also legitimately serves as spokesman for the Lake-folk’s claim for aid in time of need to reciprocate their own earlier generosity, plus a hero who by preventing Smaug’s return has done the new King under the Mountain a great service and deserves his own reward as the dragon-slayer (cf. Bilbo’s recognition of the essential fairness of Bard’s presentation of his three-part claim in the latter part of Chapter XV, the first new text in the Third Phase drafting, on page 648 & DAA.323). Significantly enough, it was just at the point where Tolkien would either have to reject some of these new elements, particularly Bard, because of the complications they introduced into his projected conclusion, or else have to find a way to incorporate them by changing that conclusion, that he broke off the Second Phase of composition, just as Bilbo and the dwarves learn of the approaching elven and human armies (see page 620).
Bard is an important figure for another reason: he represents a turning point in Tolkien’s legendarium. He is not the first of Tolkien’s human heroes, having been preceded a decade and a half before by Beren, Húrin, Túrin, and Tuor, but unlike these tragic and rather remote figures, his is a fortunate fate. A dispossessed heir, he lives to achieve unexpected victory over the surpassingly strong hereditary foe who had destroyed his homeland, re-establishes the kingship, and founds a dynasty that renews alliances with nonhuman neighbors and helps bring renewed prosperity to the region.5 In short, he is a precursor of Strider (Aragorn), who through his own efforts and the great deeds of others claims his ancestor’s throne and re-establishes his kingdom; all that is lacking is the love story (a relatively late element of Aragorn’s story; cf. HME VIII–IX). Bard is thus a pivotal figure, a turning point between the tragic figures of the First Age and the triumphant returning king of Volume III of The Lord of the Rings.
The sudden emergence of the unlikely hero, the one who dares to undertake some task or challenge which his apparent ‘betters’ shirk – as in, for example, the farmer who (twice) goes dragon-hunting in Farmer Giles of Ham or indeed Bilbo’s exploration of Smaug’s lair when Durin’s heir dares not enter – is of course a traditional fairy-tale motif, frequently matched with the subsequent discovery that the new hero is in fact a lost prince or noble heir. However, the primary external influence for Bard’s sudden emergence, aside from sheer narrative necessity, probably lies not in fairy tales but (as so often the case in the Smaug chapters) in Beowulf. When King Beowulf sets forth to fight the dragon that has burned down his royal hall, he brings along as companions eleven picked warriors but forbids them to take part in the battle, ordering them to stand back at a safe distance and serve as witnesses. But when it becomes clear that Beowulf is losing the fight, one of his companions springs into action. Heretofore merely one of eleven unnamed warriors, Wiglaf disobeys his king’s orders and rushes to the old man’s side; with his help, Beowulf is able to kill the dragon but is mortally wounded in turn. The dying king names Wiglaf as his heir, and it is he who takes charge of the disposition of the treasure and directs the construction of Beowulf’s barrow. The differences from The Hobbit are considerable, but the essential points are the same: (1) an anonymous guard is first named when he shows the courage to fight a dragon, (2) all his fellows lack the courage to do likewise and abandon their duty (either by deserting their posts in The Hobbit or in Beowulf by failing to fulfill their oaths to defend the king, as Wiglaf angrily upbraids his fellows), (3) the newly named hero turns out to be of royal lineage (Bard being the descendant of Girion king of Dale and Wiglaf the last of the Wægmundings, Beowulf’s kin; cf. Beowulf lines 2813–2816), and lastly (4) each becomes king as a direct result of his role in the dragon-slaying.
(ii)
The Black Arrow
The motif of the Black Arrow both harkens back to the alliterative poems of the 1920s and ahead to the Númenórean blades in The Lord of the Rings. In ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’, Beleg the Bowman carries a special arrow named Dailir,6 of which we are told
. . . Dailir he drew, his dart beloved;
howso far fared it, or fell unnoted,
unsought he found it with sound feathers
and barbs unbroken
—lines 1080–1083a (Canto II: ‘Beleg’) HME III.42.
When Beleg stumbles in the dark while rescuing Túrin and breaks this lucky arrow, injuring his hand in the process, the narrator makes clear this is an omen of disaster (ibid., lines 1187–1192; HME III.45), and indeed Túrin murders Beleg only minutes later in a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Bard is more fortunate, in that although his arrow too is ultimately lost, its final act is to exceed all hope by slaying his people’s greatest foe, with a sense that it perishes in the act of fulfilling its destiny. This is hinted at by Bard’s final words before that fateful shot: ‘If ever you came from the forges of the true king of the Mountain go now and speed well’; compare the narrator’s comment when Merry’s blade burns away after helping to slay the Witch-King of Angmar (that is, the Lord of the Nazgûl):
So passed the sword of the Barrow-downs, work of Westernesse [Númenor]. But glad would he have been to know its fate who wrought it slowly long ages ago in the North-kingdom when the Dúnedain were young, and chief among their foes was the dread realm of Angmar and its sorcerer king. No other blade, not though mightier hands had wielded it, would have dealt that foe a wound so bitter, cleaving the undead flesh, breaking the spell that knit his unseen sinews to his will.
—LotR.877–8.
Once again Beowulf may have contributed something to the idea of a weapon that achieves its goal but then perishes: in the battle with Grendel’s dam, Beowulf finds that the sword he has brought cannot harm the monster, but he is able to slay her and to cut off Grendel’s head with an ancient sword he finds within her lair. This ealdsweord eotenisc (Beowulf line 1558a; literally, ‘old entish sword’) then melts away (lines 1606b–1609), leaving only the hilt behind (1614b–1617). In any case, like Bard himself in the original draft, the Black Arrow is no sooner introduced than it fulfills its role in slaying the seemingly invulnerable dragon and leaves the story.
(iii)
The Death of Smaug
The great moment that would at first seem to be the climax of the entire book and the fulfillment of Thorin & Company’s quest is remarkable because when it comes it not only occurs ‘off-stage’ so far as the main point-of-view characters are concerned7 but it comes five-sixths of the way through the book, not in the last or even penultimate chapter, and what follows is far from dénouement. Indeed Smaug’s sudden and permanent removal, while essential to any ‘happy ending’ for the story, immediately complicates the situation and leads to the tangle that takes another six chapters to resolve.
Unlike the traditional methods of dragon-slaying proposed in the Plot Notes but ultimately rejected, which derive primarily from the Sigurd legend and his own Glorund story, so far as I have been able to discover the method Tolkien chose for slaying The Dragon is unprecedented in fairy-tale, English folktale, or Old English/Old Norse lore. The closest parallel seems to be classical: the Eleventh Labour of Hercules, where in some forms of the story the demigod slays Ladon, the Dragon of the Hesperides, with an arrow or arrows in order to gain the Golden Apples it guards. Most stories seem to hold with the author of Job that arrows or darts are no good against a dragon’s armor (Job 41.26–29; see Text Note 33 following Chapter XII), and, a few humorous folkta
les aside, traditionally only hand-to-hand combat has seemed sufficiently heroic for such an epic encounter. Simpson notes that while many dragons are described or depicted as winged, most storytellers and artists ignore this capacity for flight once battle is actually joined:
. . . it is indeed only in literature, in Spenser’s Faerie Queene that one can find a fully thought-out, detailed, visualized, blow-by-blow account of how a duel between an armed knight on horseback and a flying, fire-breathing dragon with claws and a spiked tail might be expected to unfold. In particular, Spenser makes good use of the dragon’s power of flight.8
—British Dragons, page 75.
Tolkien’s account does not involve an armored knight, but it is complex, combining as it does the traditional motif of a dragon’s weak spot (specifically the soft underbelly of the Sigurd/Fafnir legend, already seen in Glorund) with the Beowulf-dragon’s fiery breath none can withstand (also present in Glorund; cf. BLT II.85, ‘with the power of his breath he drove Túrin from those doors’) and a tactically wily wyrm who uses his power of flight to attack foes on what is essentially a manmade island surrounded by deep water. Furthermore, Smaug has learned from his ancestor’s mistake and armored himself so that a lurking assassin cannot ambush him (as Sigurd did Fafnir and Túrin Glorund). He does not know that there is a fatal weak spot in his ‘jeweled waistcoat’, but even so had he not lost his head to pride (allowing Bilbo to inspect his armaments) and to anger in the heat of battle he could have guarded against even that possibility.9 The description of Smaug’s attack – ‘the dragon’s wrath blazed . . . till he was blind and mad with it . . . taking no heed to turn his scales towards his foes’ (italics mine) – implies he is so sinuous and serpentine (as indeed the illustrations bear out) that he could with care have kept his vulnerable belly turned away from his foes on each strafing pass. After all, he must have done so in his initial assault on Dale and Thror’s halls, since at that time he lacked the embedded gemstones against which presumably even the Black Arrow was of no avail (‘then I was young and tender’ – DAA.282; italics mine).
We are fortunate that Tolkien illustrated this dramatic scene;10 even though he left the picture unfinished it is full of interesting details (see Plate XII [top]), from an alternate view of Lake Town (viewed more from the south rather than in the westerly published view [DAA.244] or in the slightly earlier variant thereof [‘Esgaroth’, Plate VIII bottom]) and the Lonely Mountain looming ominously on the horizon like an erupting volcano (cf. Tolkien’s [earlier] Thangorodrim and [later] Mount Doom in the backgrounds of his pictures of the vale of Sirion [H-S#55] and the Barad-dûr [H-S#145], respectively) to the dragon himself in his death agonies. Smaug is much yellower here than in the companion picture ‘Conversation with Smaug’ (Plate XI [top]) – in the text he is always described as ‘red-golden’ (cf. page 506) – but this may simply be an accident of the picture’s having been left incomplete. Most notably of all, Tolkien annotated this picture, suggesting that he at one point thought of offering it as a guide to another artist, perhaps at the time Houghton Mifflin suggested hiring an American artist to illustrate their edition (cf. Hammond’s Descriptive Bibliography page 18).11 These annotations show that Tolkien drew a scene as he visualized it and only then worried about reconciling it to what he written and also his extreme precision in getting those details right during the revision stage:
left margin: The moon should be a crescent: it was only a few nights after the New Moon on ‘Durin’s Day’.12
lower left corner: Dragon should have a white naked spot where the arrow enters.
bottom margin: Bard the Bowman shd be standing after release of arrow at extreme left point of the piles.
Ultimately this picture did not appear in the first edition of The Hobbit, either redrawn by Tolkien or adapted by another hand, but it was published in Tolkien’s lifetime as the cover of the second British paperback edition of The Hobbit (Unwin Books, trade paperback [1966]). In this publication the bottom of the illustration was trimmed slightly, cutting off those annotations, but the scrawled title ‘Death of Smaug’ did appear in the center of the drawing, along with the annotation concerning the moon to the far left (wrapped around on the back cover); the sharp-eyed could even catch the arrow on the bottom spine indicating where Bard stood, although there’s no way they could have known its significance.13 Tolkien himself was diffident about using this unfinished piece: with typical humility,14 he wrote to Rayner Unwin: ‘I am in your hands, but I am still not very happy about the use of this scrawl as a cover. It seems too much in the modern mode in which those who can draw try to conceal it. But perhaps there is a distinction between their productions and one by a man who obviously cannot draw what he sees’ (JRRT to RU, 15th December 1965, Letters p. 365; italics mine). The final phrase is significant: Tolkien’s chief concern is to capture the inner vision and convey to us in image as well as in words a scene from his story and his subcreated world.
(iv)
The Name ‘Esgaroth’
This name is clearly Elvish, either Sindarin (Noldorin) or a dialect thereof; cf. Esgalduin (originally Esgaduin),15 the river that flowed past the door of Menegroth (‘the Thousand Caves’), King Thingol’s halls in Doriath. The simplest explanation is to assume that ‘Esgaroth’ and ‘Lake Town’ essentially say the same thing in different languages, and there is some support for this if we take the –roth element,16 whose primary meaning is ‘cave’ (generally in the context of fortified cave-dwelling or underground city), as also having the more general meaning of ‘dwelling’ and could thus plausibly be extended to mean ‘town’. Unfortunately, no such simple equivalence can be found for esga-. The river-name is not translated within the alliterative poems, and the only gloss I can find that Tolkien ever offered for it comes in ‘The Etymologies’ [1937–8, written to accompany the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion]. Under the root ESEK- comes the following entry:
Ilk. esg sedge,17 esgar reed-bed. Cf. Esgaroth Reedlake, because of reed-banks in west.
—HME V, page 356.
This gloss is straightforward and clear, but unfortunately it is also certainly an afterthought. For one thing, Esgaroth is clearly not the name of the Lake, as this entry would indicate, but of the town itself: cf. the label on the published version of Thror’s Map: ‘In Esgaroth upon the Long Lake dwell Men’ (DAA.97; emphasis mine); perhaps Tolkien might have been misled by glancing at the final Wilderland Map (DAA.[399]), where the name ‘Esgaroth’ appears directly below the name ‘Long Lake’, and momentarily become confused and taken this to be another name for the same feature. Furthermore, this translation offers no explanation at all relating –roth to ‘lake’. Finally, the Esga- element is clearly the same element that had appeared long before [circa 1918] in the river Esga(l)duin. In the Noldorin Word-lists, the oldest of which is contemporary with the name’s first appearance (Parma Eldalamberon XIII [2001] page 133), esk, esg appears (ibid., page 143) and is glossed ‘sharp upstanding rock in water’ (e.g., a carrock – see page 265), apparently deriving from the esc/aisc (meaning ‘sharp point, sharp edge’) of the still earlier Gnomish Lexicon [circa 1917]; Parma Eldalamberon XI page 31. Combined with our earlier hypothesis that –roth could mean city, this provides a hypothetical but satisfactory gloss for ‘Esgaroth’: city standing in or rising up out of the water, perhaps with a suggestion of pilings like reeds.18
Finally, as already noted during our discussion of the name ‘Dorwinion’ (see page 418), years later Tolkien wrote regarding Elven names in The Hobbit that ‘Esgaroth . . . [is] not Sindarin (though perhaps “Sindarized” in shape) or . . . not recorded in Sindarin’. Given its obvious affinities to Gnomish and Noldorin (the earlier forms of Sindarin within the real-world sequence of Tolkien’s invented languages), I take this to mean that the name no longer fit Sindarin as he saw it at this late date and hence had to be relegated to a dialectical or aberrant form. But just as he clearly changed his mind several times regarding the name’s meaning (see above), there seems little doubt
that Esgaroth was Sindarin (i.e., Noldorin) when the name was created, like all the other Elven names in The Hobbit, although some were later disowned or orphaned, like Esgaroth and Girion. Unfortunately, Tolkien does not translate the name in this passage, in the end leaving us with no acceptable authorized gloss.
Plot Notes D
The following sheet (Marq. 1/1/10:5–6) replaced the fourth page or latter half of Plot Notes C (1/1/10:4; see page 497). It is difficult to date exactly when this occurred, but it seems to have been written immediately following the death of the dragon on manuscript page 155 (see page 549) and before the rider on manuscript page 151b and marginal addition on manuscript page 155 (see pages 512–13 & 549–50). A few elements from the cancelled page of Plot Notes C, particularly the last few lines (from ‘The men of the lake and Woodelves come up and besiege the dwarves’ through ‘[the wood-elves] escort Blad[orthin] & B[ilbo] back through Mirkwood’; see page 497), were incorporated into the new outline but expanded and developed in the process.
[page] 4
The Dwarves and Bilbo sit and <?quake>. Unable to tell passage of time. The silence goes on and on. and still they dare not move. They doze and wake and still the silence. The next day and next night and no sign of the dragon. They try to open the door – no good of course.
We are trapped they said and grumble at Bilbo.
[Only >] In desperation they go down the tunnel.
Bilbo slips on his ring. Absolute dark in the hall. no sign or