by John D. Rateliff
He explores all the hall. Peeps through its door into the vast passages above. The dwarves prepare to creep through the old halls.
Thorin is their guide
Dreading at every step to hear Smaug’s return they climb the long stairs and passages dark deserted halls .TN1
At last <?they> reach the outer gate. of bats. A smooth and slimy passage worn by the dragon by the river-side.TN2 They stand in the blessed light of day and see it is early morning in the east.
Crows are fly[ing] South in flocks
<?interprets> their speech.TN3 There is great feasting <?&> a <?there>
[They if <?truly> has been <?destroy[ed]> >]
And armies are on the march. North.
In the evening [the crows >] a raven brings word. Bows to Thorin (now Smaug is dead)TN4 and they learn of the Battle & Smaug’s . The of the Lake men & wood elves are coming to take the gold. The dwarves block the entrance mightily?
The thrush reappearsTN5
[page] 5 (verso and continuation of preceding)
Put this in on p 155? before the part about dwarves?TN6
What happened [<?when> >] at Esgaron ((Lake-town)).TN7 Bard escaped. The anguish of the Lake-men & of the Master. They now hate the dwarves as source of the : some even suggest the <?driving forth> of the dragon against them was deliberate.
go to the wood-elves; and the king’s spies bring him news. He leads forth the soldiers and they join with the lake men Bard. They go north to capture dwarves and the gold.
Tolkien drew a line under this sentence, struck through the top part of the page, and put a check mark in the right margin next to the seven cancelled lines, indicating that this part of his instructions to himself had been carried out. As noted above this suggests that Plot Notes D were written during the pause that followed the destruction of Lake Town, and specifically immediately after the writing of the line ‘the end of Smaug and Esgaroth and Bard [> but not of Bard]’ on manuscript page 155 (page 549 of this edition).
The siege of the mountain.
Bilbo forth at night and comes to the camps. He calls Bard and sits the counsellors. He says the Gem of Girion is his own since he share. If it were all – and the dwarves prize it more dearly than all else – he would give it to Bard the heir of Girion to let his friends go in peace. The woodelves and other counsellors speak ag[ainst] him.
An old man rises from the floor. It is Gandalf!
He speaks to Bard. Prophecies often come true in diff. . Be not a greater fool than the fools who the dragon his wealth. Believe not prophecies less because you yourself have in their fulfilment. The gold is not yours. Prosperity shall reign if the real King under the M. comes back. Be not outdone in generosity by Mr. Baggins who has <?bargained> all his reward for his friends. [Girion >] Dale & Lake Town are to be rebuiltTN8
‘Who are you?’ says the king of the wood elves.
‘I am Gandalf!’
Then he believed at last that Thorin is indeed Thorin son of Thrain son Thror. why did he not say so? [A >] Your own acts <?condemn> you. – because dwarves understood better than all others the of the greed of gold. and fear therefore more to <?extend> it. You owe aid not <?enmity>.
Thus came the peace and pact of the Ruined
Woodelves rich presents
<?sums> of for rebuilding of Esgaron.
Messengers are sent many dwarves from N S E W
has <?decided>TN9 never more western lands.
In the left margin:
dragon was slain beyond hope. <?grieves> at first when he learns of Bilbo’s dealing with the Gem of Girion – but after a while he says ‘There is indeed more you than you know yourself. We as seemed unlikely to be thankful to Gandalf. And yet perhaps you have more to thank him for than all – even though you went hence empty-handed.’ They bid Bilbo take his share over & above the gem. He says he is sick of the sight of gold – yet in the end he accepts TN10 a set of golden dinner service and a silver kettle. With these he sets out home with Gandalf. An escort of wood-elves is found Mirkwood. How Gandalf came here?
TEXT NOTES
1 The illegible phrase following ‘dark deserted halls’ may be ‘?followed his torch’.
2 This detail of a smooth slot worn in the rock derives from the Fafnir story, in which Sigurd knows where to dig his pit-trap because of the groove worn in the stone where the dragon goes to drink; cf. page 493.
3 This line is very difficult to make out, and may actually read ‘Their ?whispered speech.’ In either case, whatever the exact wording the situation is the same, that they overhear conversation among the passing crows that warns them of the coming crisis.
4 The interesting detail of the raven bowing to Thorin ‘now [that] Smaug is dead’ suggests that the birds recognized Smaug’s suzerainty while he lived and only acknowledge Thorin as the new King under the Mountain when the all-powerful usurper is dead. This might account for Smaug’s tolerance of their presence; aside from the furtive creatures who have crept Gollum-like into the outer reaches of his lair (see page 581), the crows and ravens are almost the only living things found within the Desolation of Smaug, a fact that becomes more explicable if he views them as subjects instead of interlopers – fellow birds of prey, as it were, yet posing no threat to his authority.
5 This phrase is scrawled in large letters across the lower right-hand portion of this page, the writing having otherwise stopped some five or six lines short of the bottom of the page.
6 This line, added in the top margin, seems to refer to the Thrush mentioned at the bottom of the preceding page. The manuscript page specified gives the account of Smaug’s death, and in fact Tolkien added to the bottom of that page an account of the thrush appearing and bringing word to Bard of Smaug’s weak point. The ‘part about dwarves’ would seem to be the Master’s turning the townsfolk against the dwarves and blaming them for all their woes; either that or the section where the focus shifts back to the Mountain and what happened to Bilbo and the dwarves there (i.e., Chapter XIV).
7 Esgaron: Both here and again below Tolkien gives this earlier, alternate spelling of the Elven name for Lake Town, which is always Esgaroth in the main text (cf. page 549). The two names clearly have the same meaning (see commentary following Chapter XIII and especially Text Note 11 on page 554), with Esgaron being the Noldorin form (as opposed to Esgaroth, which is Doriathrin; see Note 16 following Chapter XIII on page 566). See below for the probable point Tolkien had reached in the text when he wrote these Plot Notes.
8 This sentence is crammed in at the end of the line and may have been added slightly later.
9 These three words are very difficult to make out, and may instead read ‘Then his ?descendants . . .’
10 The illegible passage may read ‘a bag &’ – that is, a single bag filled with treasure; cf. the small chest of gold and another of silver he winds up accepting in the published book (DAA.351).
The Pact of the Ruined City
These two replacement pages, which form part of the Plot Notes B/C/D sequence,1 are closely tied with changes Tolkien made to Chapters XII (the rider on page 513) and XIII (particularly to the important marginal additions given on pp. 549–50), and clearly preceded Chapter XIV, for which it provided the framework. While by its very nature sketchy and tentative, it is also, with Plot Notes E, the closest we can now come to recovering the details of the Siege of the Mountain as Tolkien originally intended them, before the decisions to retain Bard and introduce the Dragon-sickness complicated the plot and diverted his plans.
It is remarkable that, having come so far, Tolkien still at this stage seems to have kept to his original plan in w
hich there was to be no battle at the Lonely Mountain; the Battle of Five Armies had not yet arisen, its place being filled by ‘the Battle of Anduin Vale’, a quite distinct conflict in which the dwarves were to play no part. Hence there is no need even now for the invention of Dain and his company of dwarven reinforcements: the Siege of the Mountain (elves and lake-men against Thorin & Company) is present, but Tolkien still expected Gandalf to be able to resolve the conflict by diplomacy. The only battle taking place in the east is that of Lake Town, which is already past by this point, and there is still no need to bring goblins, wolves, bears, or eagles out of the west to join the conflict. Tolkien did not yet know that Thorin or any of his companions were to die; instead, the story ended with him restored to his rightful place as King under the Mountain. Whereas in Plot Notes C Bilbo gives ‘A part of his share’ to the Lake-men and wood-elves, he now gives away his entire stake to save his friends. It is important to note that in the published tale Bilbo’s attempt to buy peace fails,2 and the battle between dwarves, wood-elves, and lake-men is averted only by the unexpected arrival of the goblin-warg army on the scene. By contrast, in Plot Notes D Bilbo’s goodwill gesture provides Gandalf the opportunity he needs to reveal himself and talk sense to the dragon-slayer and his treasure-greedy allies, thus avoiding battle entirely.
This War for Gold
The anger of the lake-men is understandable enough, although their eagerness to fix blame and demand reparations smacks more of post-Great War politics than wergild. The recalcitrance of the wood-elf king, however, is especially notable; his reluctance in the published book to shed blood over something as trivial as dragon-gold3 represents a complete reversal of his role in these events as Tolkien originally foresaw them in the Plot Notes. With no legitimate claim to the treasure himself, he tries to convince Bard to reject Bilbo’s offer (‘The woodelves and other counsellors speak ag[ainst] him’), probably motivated by the knowledge that if his human allies recover the whole treasure his own share will of course be all the greater. Indeed, as far back as Chapter X, he had decided to seize any treasure the dwarves might gain from Smaug as it passed west through Mirkwood (‘no treasure will come back through Mirkwood without my having to say in the matter’, page 441). His behavior prompts Gandalf to remark ‘Your own acts condemn you,’ a judgment in keeping with Tolkien’s earlier observation that although the wood-elves share in the treasure Bilbo gives to the Lake Men, they ‘may not deserve it’ (Plot Notes C, page 497).4 However, since the woodelves and woodmen were to fight at Bilbo’s side in the Battle of the Anduin Vale outlined in the final page of Plot Notes B/C/D/B, clearly the elvenking was to be given a chance to redeem himself before the story was over, as of course he does in the published book. Indeed, this projected final battle that Tolkien never came to write out would, in its alliance of elves and men against goblins, have been rather like one of the battles described in the early versions of the Silmarillion story (i.e., the wars against Melkor the Morgoth); in the more circumscribed world of The Lord of the Rings such battles are ascribed to the distant past, the last such being in the days of ‘the Last Alliance’ three thousand years before.5
During the Third Phase of composition on The Hobbit that brought the book to its conclusion, Tolkien was to shift this greed from the elvenking to the dwarves, which makes all the more fascinating the idea that can just be glimpsed here that, since dwarves ‘understood better than all others the power of the greed of gold’, for that very reason they try not to expose others to that temptation. This seems to suggest that long association with treasure has to some degree inoculated the dwarven people against dragon-sickness: certainly in the chapter that follows the dwarves are far less giddy and obsessive about the vast treasure, the very sight of which had moved Bilbo beyond words (and to the very uncharacteristic pocketing of the Gem of Girion when he has the chance), than in the published book – and far more practical about pocketing what they can of their temporarily recovered possessions while the opportunity lasts. In support of this, there is also the matter of Thorin’s urging Bilbo to take a full share of the treasure ‘over & above the gem’.6
Under the Mountain
Unfortunately, neither the relevant section of Plot Notes C nor this expansion and replacement of it tells us what the dwarves are doing between their blocking off the Front Gate in preparation of the siege and their deliverance when Bilbo and Gandalf between them break the deadlock. There is a hint of disagreement between Bilbo and the dwarves in the line ‘Bladorthin . . . makes dwarves pay Bilbo’ (Plot Notes C), the fact that Bilbo sneaks out to find Bard, and Thorin’s later grief when he learns that Bilbo has bartered away the Gem of Girion, but this latter may simply be regret that Bilbo has lost the treasure Thorin intended him to take home with him as his reward for all he has done (see Plot Notes B and C for the Gem as Bilbo’s portable payment). Given the lakemen’s stated hatred for the dwarves (page 551) and the wood-elves’ intention to ‘capture’ them and seize the gold (ibid.), Thorin & Company’s failure to negotiate a satisfactory resolution with the besiegers may be due less to dwarvish stubbornness and more to a prudent desire not to surrender themselves to what might be a lynch mob accompanied by traditional enemies who would gladly take all Thror’s treasure and condemn the dwarves to indefinite if not interminable imprisonment. If this is the case, then Bilbo’s attempt to strike a deal may not be going against Thorin’s wishes to circumvent an intractable dwarven king so much as the hobbit’s simply taking the initiative when the dwarves are fearful to, the established pattern of all the hobbit’s dealings with the dwarves from the time they send him off down the newly-opened secret tunnel alone at the beginning of Chapter XII to the end of the Second Phase text. In any case, we have Gandalf’s word for it that their motivation is not unreasoning greed, but a salutary fear of what effect the dragon-sickness might have on the already aroused Lake-men and treasure-hungry elves.
The Gem of Girion
As in the earlier stages in this sequence of Plot Notes, the Gem of Girion continues to play a significant role in the events of these final chapters. Earlier it had served as a motivator for Bilbo to kill the dragon, his promised reward for delivering the treasure into Thorin & Company’s hands. Now that the role of dragon-slayer has been split off and assigned to a new character, Bard, the Gem becomes a bargaining chip with which Bilbo hopes to satisfy Bard’s claim for his rightful share of the treasure (what better way than with Girion’s own Gem to Girion’s heir?). Thus it has moved into the role it will play in the final story, although the events which followed in the Third Phase text (Bard’s attempt to ransom it back to Thorin for a one-fourteenth share of the treasure, a transaction eventually completed by Dain) have not yet emerged. Instead of Bilbo bringing it home with him as his chief memento of his eventful journey, it has now become the peace-price he is willing to pay to save his friends, and the idea that Bilbo comes home with only a few token treasures to show for all his troubles, present since the earliest layer of Plot Notes B, nears its final form.
True, After a Fashion
In keeping with the general interest in dreams and prophecies in the latter section of the book, for the first time the ‘pleasant fable’ mentioned casually in an addition to Chapter X – ‘Thror and Thrain would come back one day and gold would flow in rivers through the northern falls, and all that land would be filled with new song and new laughter’ – has now been elevated to the dignity of a prophecy. But unlike in the final book here it is Bard, not Bilbo, who is surprised to find himself its fulfiller, and Gandalf’s pointing out of this fact comes much earlier (‘Believe not prophecies less because you yourself have aided in their fulfilment’), as part of the negotiations to resolve the conflict (the pact we might call ‘the Peace of the Ruined City’).
In any case, primed by the writing of these Plot Notes, Tolkien soon resumed the story and brought it within what he must have thought a chapter or two of the ending, not foreseeing the tangle that would require him to break off and reconside
r the events of the climax.
Chapter XIV
While the Dragon’s Away . . .
This chapter start is one of the very few marked as such in the original manuscript, with ‘Chapter XIV.’ written in ink at the top of manuscript page 159 (Marq. 1/1/15:7). This forms the verso of manuscript page 158: for the few remaining pages of the Second Phase manuscript (manuscript pages 158–167), Tolkien writes on both the front and back of each sheet, as he had done in the original Pryftan Fragment and the earlier parts of the Second Phase but unlike his practice from manuscript page 119 (the capture by wood-elves) onward, where he had written only on the front of each sheet.
This chapter underwent considerable revision and expansion when it was recast (as new Chapter XIII: Not at Home) to better fit its new place preceding the chapter describing Smaug’s death (original Chapter XIII, which now swapped places with it to become the new Chapter XIV: Fire and Water). Remarkably enough, a fair copy in manuscript exists of this chapter, titled ‘(Smaug is) Not at home’ (manuscript pages ‘a’–‘m’; Marq. 1/1/14:1–14), which serves as an intermediate text between the original Second Phase manuscript draft of this chapter (manuscript pages 159–65; Marq. 1/1/15) and the First Typescript version of the chapter (typescript pages 127–34; Marq. 1/1/63). I have not reproduced this fair copy manuscript, which belongs to the early part of Tolkien’s work on the Third Phase, because for most of its length it closely resembles the text of the First Typescript and thus of the published book, but in the Text Notes that follow I have noted the most significant changes between the manuscript and the fair copy, between the fair copy and the First Typescript, or between the typescript and the published book.