‘It will not be long’ thought Bilbo ‘before they win the gate; and then goodness knows what will happen. I would rather old Smaug had all the [gold >] treasure tha[n] these
[cancelled: Suddenly high and far off he saw]
The clouds were torn by the wind and a red sunset slashed the west. Suddenly high and far off B saw a sight that made his heart leap: dark shapes small yet majestic against the distant glow.TN24 ‘The Eagles the Eagles’ he cried – he was among elves up Ravenhill ‘ – the Eagles the Eagles are coming.’ And happily his eyes were seldom wrong. The Eagles were coming.
The Very rumour of them changed the day. The Goblins on the mountain wavered and hesitated.TN25
‘The Eagles are coming’ he cried again [> shouted] and the elves took up the cry and it echoed across the valley. [Even the Goblins looked up, but it >] and
TEXT NOTES
1 That is, the Arkenstone casts enough light that even in the full daylight it can be seen to shine brightly. This passage was emended to read ‘bright & white in the morning’.
2 The apostrophe indicating singular possessive (father’s rather than fathers’) is clear here (Third Phase manuscript page 21; Marq. 1/1/18:2), and also in both typescripts (1/1/67:1 and 1/1/48:1). See the discussion of Thrain and Thror following Chapter X.
3 See Text Note I following Chapter VII (page 245) for Shippey’s claim that this line and others like it show that Tolkien associated hobbits with rabbits. While Shippey’s argument is intriguing, it does not take into account the fact that the majority of references to rabbits in the final book (eleven out of sixteen) do not refer to Bilbo, or that Bilbo is also compared to other animals (e.g., ‘descendant of rats!’).
4 The alternative spelling here of Durinn rather than the more usual Durin is perhaps in order to more closely reproduce the Old Norse original. Dronke, for example, gives Durinn in her edition of Völuspá (The Poetic Edda, Vol II: Mythological Poems [1997], page 9), while Young gives Durin in her edition of Snorri’s The Prose Edda (page 41), for reasons given in her foreword (ibid., page 19). The typescript (1/1/67:1) reverts to the familiar Durin.
5 This sentence was cancelled and replaced by the following:
‘I wish I had Gandalf here. I will [> would] have words for him and his choice. But I will throw you on the rocks first [> But now I will throw you on the rocks],’ he said, and lifted B. in his arms.
The idea that Thorin might actually attempt to murder Bilbo in a fit of rage, which would have been unthinkable in the Second Phase text, has been carefully prepared for over the last two chapters; cf. Text Notes 1 & 3 for Chapter XVI and Text Notes 23, 25, 28, 32, & 33 for Chapter XVb, as well as Text Notes 14 & 18 for the fair copy and typescript revisions to Chapter XIV.
6 Added in pencil: ‘. . . his tall hood & long cloak’.
7 Tolkien initially wrote ‘please don’t h[arm] . . .’; shifting the word choice to damage casts Bilbo in the role of Gandalf’s property (‘my burglar’), thus subtly enhancing his value in the treasure-smitten dwarf’s eyes. Perhaps the implication is that Thorin might have killed a traitor, but in the grip of the dragon-sickness he would be unable to destroy anything of (monetary) value.
8 This sentence was altered slightly so that Thorin’s words became parallel with Bilbo’s: ‘And I will let you go at that.’ The added clause ‘ – and may we never meet again!’ first appears in the extended typescript (1/1/67:2).
9 The last two sentences of this paragraph were cancelled and the words ‘What will you have for it > What price will you have for it? > What price will you set upon for it?’ written below them. This was then cancelled in turn and the word ‘stet.’ written next to the paragraph to indicate that the cancellation of those sentences was rescinded. Later, in pencil, Tolkien added ‘. . . he shall depart; and you can divide it as you wish. I will give him to you . . .’
10 An earlier draft of both this paragraph and the first paragraph on the following page (Third Phase ms. page 24; Marq. 1/1/18:6) can also be found on this page’s unnumbered verso (1/1/18:5):
‘Not so hasty’ said Gandalf. ‘Tomorrow the elf-host will prepare to depart as you desire. But at noon we will return with the stone, and by that time you must have ready [within >] outside the wall or near within all the gold and silver that is its price.’
That day passed. Evening was come [> approaching], when sudden there was a cry in the camp. Messengers ran in. ‘A host is marching with speed into Dale’ [he >] they cried. It was the dwarves of Dain, and they were armed with steel. From afar the men of Bard and the elves watched them until they halted about a mile [fr[om] >] to the east. Dusk was deepening, when three dwarves came
11 This is the last mention of Roäc in the book, but we can assume that he survived the upcoming battle, since Tolkien would have told us otherwise.
12 Changed to ‘Their caps and their shoes were of iron’. Hence, no doubt, Dain’s later encomium or epithet ‘Dain Ironfoot’. This name does not however arise within The Hobbit and is never used in the earlier book (or indeed until Tolkien was at work on the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings – cf. HME XII.281 where it first occurs, in a passage apparently not written until 1948–9 or shortly thereafter).
13 Dain’s ancestry, unlike Thorin’s (with the two competing Thror-Thrain-Thorin and Thrain-Thror-Thorin genealogies) or later Balin’s (who briefly went from ‘son of Fundin’ to ‘son of Burin’ and then back again; cf. HME VI.443–4 & 460), never varied: he remained ‘Dain son of Nain’ from this first mention through to the final references in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings. As with Dain, Thorin, and all the other dwarf-names in The Hobbit except Fimbulfambi (and possibly Balin), Nain comes from the Dvergatal or dwarven name-list in the Voluspá, although it does not appear in all manuscripts (cf. Dronke page 90); Snorri also includes it in the Prose Edda (page 41). The pattern of giving brothers rhyming names (Fili/Kili, Balin/Dwalin, Oin/Gloin) is also evident here; since Dain is Thorin’s cousin (page 644), then Thror’s sons were Thrain and Nain. Like ‘Dain’, ‘Nain’ is unusual in that it has a wider meaning and circulation beyond the Dvergatal; see the commentary on ‘Dain son of Nain’ beginning on page 702.
14 This simple statement is replaced in the typescript (1/1/67:3) by a greatly expanded account of what was said at the parley and also of the dwarves’ plans; cf. DAA.337–8.
15 Tolkien originally followed the semicolon with ‘on’ (i.e., on [the dwarves’ side] . . .). This paragraph was recast to read:
Bard refused the Dwarves’ passage to the Mountain until Thorin had exchanged gold for the Arkenstone; but the dwarves muttered angrily and retired.
16 This paragraph was revised, in several layers, to eventually read:
Then still more suddenly a darkness came on with dreadful swiftness. A dark cloud hurried over the sky. [A winter > Winter >] Thunder & a wild wind rolled up and rumbled in the mountain and lightning lit its peaks. Beneath it another blackness could be seen whirling forward; from the North like a cloud of birds so dense that light cd. not be seen between their wings.
17 This is the first appearance of Bolg, whose name remained unchanged thereafter; see the commentary starting on page 708.
18 For bats as yet another of the ‘Children of Morgoth’, see commentary on pp. 716–18.
19 See Plot Notes F for Tolkien’s earlier hesitation about just who did and did not count as one of the ‘five armies’.
20 The spelling was later changed to Gundobad in pencil (Third Phase manuscript page 27; 1/1/18:9) and this form appears in both typescripts (1/1/67:4 & 1/1/48:5); the published book has Gundabad. This is the only mention of Gondobad in The Hobbit, although ‘
Gundobad’ does appear on the draft Mirkwood map [Plate I (bottom)] and ‘Gundabad’ on the final Wilderland map (DAA.[399]), in both cases at the juncture of the north-south Misty Mountains and the east-west Grey Mountains. The name is Gnomish-Noldorin (i.e., early Sindarin); cf. Gondobar (‘City of Stone’), one of the alternate names for Gondolin in The Book of Lost Tales ([1917–20]; BLT II.158), the unfinished ‘Lay of the Fall of Gondolin’ ([early 1920s]; HME III.145), and the poem ‘The Nameless Land’ ([written 1924, published 1927]; HME V.100 & 104). I can find no place where Tolkien defines Gondobad, but GON-/GOND-/GONDO- means ‘stone’ or ‘of stone’ (Gondo-lin, ‘Song of Stone’; Gon-dor, ‘Stone-land’) and the -BAD element may relate to the Gnomish word bad meaning ‘way, path’ (Gnomish Lexicon, Parma Eldalamberon vol.XI.21; ‘Noldorin Dictionary’ and ‘Noldorin Word-lists’, Parma Eldalamberon vol.XIII.160 & 137). If so, ‘Gondobad’ might mean something like ‘the crossroads of stone’, which would suit its position at the meeting of these two great mountain ranges riddled with dwarven and goblin mines and tunnels, but this is only a guess. Much later [1969 or after] Tolkien decided that Gundabad was a dwarven (Khuzdul) name (HME XII.301), but this clearly could not have been the case at the time The Hobbit was written, since the idea of a dwarven language and nomenclature distinct from Old Norse seems to have first arisen several years after The Hobbit was finished, in the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME V.273–4) and the Lhammas, which dates from about the same period (HME V.178–9). Tolkien also in this late essay created a new backstory for Mount Gundabad, deciding that this was the spot where Durin had woken from sleep and that it was thus, like Moria, originally a revered dwarven stronghold now fallen into orcish hands (HME XII.301). Of all this later development there is of course no trace in The Hobbit, unless its seeds lie in Gandalf/Thorin’s remark that his ancestors first came to the Lonely Mountain when they were ‘driven out of the far north’ (page 71); The Lord of the Rings suggests that Khazad-dûm (Moria), if anywhere, was the stronghold revered for its associations with Durin the Deathless.
21 Fimbulfambi’s Map [see Frontispiece of Part One], the original Mirkwood map (Plate I [bottom]), and the pictorial view of the Lonely Mountain on the Long Lake map (Plate II [top]) – the latter two of which accompanied the ‘home manuscript’ (i.e., the composite First Typescript/Third Phase manuscript) when it was loaned out to Tolkien’s friends – all agree in showing the foothills to the northeast as coming within a short distance of the mountain; these hills can also be seen in the background to the right of the drawing ‘The Lonely Mountain’ (H-S#136).
The typescript alters the account of their approach slightly:
. . . came thus at last on a sudden from the North hard on the heels of Dain. Not even the ravens knew of their coming until they came out in the broken lands which divided the Lonely Mountain from the hills behind. How much Gandalf knew cannot be said, but it is plain that he had not expected this sudden assault. (1/1/67:4)
This account made it into the published book (cf. DAA.340) but unfortunately does not match the final version of the Wilderland Map (DAA.[399]), where the line of hills is to the east, not north-east as in the earlier map. Here the goblins would have been entirely in the open from the time they left the Grey Mountains, a distance much too far to have marched in a single night (it is some four times the distance between the Lonely Mountain and the Long Lake), and their north-to-south march would not have overlapped Dain’s east-to-west march from the Iron Hills.
22 This idea of enemies uniting when faced with a threat from true evil resurfaced a decade later when Tolkien was drafting the early parts of what became Book V of The Lord of the Rings; when King Théoden arrives at Dunharrow to muster his troops for the ride to Minas Tirith, he finds among the forces gathered some of the Dunlendings he has just defeated at Helm’s Deep a few days earlier, men willing to set aside a five-hundred-year feud in the face of the threat of Sauron (HME VIII.249 & 247).
23 The closing parenthesis is lacking in the manuscript; I have supplied it editorially in what seems the appropriate place.
24 For Tolkien’s own depiction of this scene from Bilbo’s point of view, see the unfinished drawing labelled ‘The Coming of the Eagles’ in tengwar (Plate XII [bottom]).
25 This sentence was left unfinished, ending in a semicolon, and the paragraph cancelled.
26 It will be seen that this earliest account of the Battle of Five Armies, while following the same lines as the published version, leaves out many details, especially as relate to the role that Bolg of the North and his bodyguard play in the fight – indeed, there is no indication that Bolg’s forces differ from any other goblins. A few such details are added in pencil to this Third Phase manuscript, but most appear for the first time in the typescript (1/1/67:4–7) with no intermediate drafting (or at least none which survives), and except in typographical details and the spelling of the name ‘Gundobad’ the typescript exactly achieves the text of the published book in its description of the actual battle (although some of the preliminary scenes, such as that describing the parley with Dain’s dwarves, were revised considerably in the page proofs). Of particular note is the fact that Thorin’s charge, which is ambiguously depicted as glorious but perhaps unwise in the published text (cf. DAA.343, where Bard is unable to restrain his men from abandoning their positions to join it), is here unambiguously heroic. For more on this climactic scene, see my commentary beginning on page 713.
Chapter XVIII
‘And Back Again’
As usual with the Third Phase manuscript (or indeed with The Hobbit manuscripts as a whole), the text originally continued with no chapter break. In fact, Tolkien at first simply indented and began a new paragraph, but had not even completed the first word (‘Wh[en]’) when he stopped, crossed it out, and drew a squiggle in the middle of the (blank) line that followed, and skipped the line after that. Thus he clearly intended a section break to come at this point. The text for what became the new chapter begins matter-of-factly with its description of the battle’s aftermath, about one-third of the way down the manuscript page (Third Phase manuscript page 31; Marq. 1/1/19:1).
When he came to himself he was lying on the flat rock [> stones] of Ravenhill, and no one was near. Night was fading from the sky. [Dawn >] A cloudless dawn but cold was pale in the East.TN1 He was shaking with cold [> & chilled as stone], but his head burned like fire.
‘Now I wonder what has happened’ he said to himself ‘At any rate I am glad to find that I am not yet one of the glorious dead – but I may be soon enough yet.’
He sat up painfully. Looking into the valley he saw no goblins. After a while as the light grew he thought he saw elves moving in the rocks below; and suddenly he was aware of a great eagle perched upon a mountain just above.
‘Hullo there!’ he called ‘Hail O Eagle, may your wings be ever blessed. I am hurt’.
‘[Who is it that speaks >] What voice is it that speaks unseen among the stones’ said the Eagle,
‘It’s me Bilbo Baggins companion of Thorin’ he said, hurriedly taking off the ring.
‘It is well that I have found you; you are needed and long sought’ said the Eagle: and it was that [> the] very selfsame eagle, as it proved that had borne him from the [> to the] Carrock long before. ‘I will bear you.’TN2
In this way Bilbo was borne swiftly down into the valley, and set down before a tent. Gandalf greeted him [added: at the door].TN3 ‘Baggins!’ he said. ‘Well I never alive after all. [Who >] But come’ he said more gravely. ‘tidings may wait: you are called for;’ and leading the hobbit he took him within.
‘Hail Thorin’ said Gandalf ‘I have brought him.’
There lay Thorin wounded with many wounds, and his rent armour and notched ax
e were cast upon the floor.
‘Farewell o gracious thief’ said Thorin. ‘I go now to the halls of waiting to sit beside my fathers until the world is renewed. The goblins have slain me.TN4 Since I leave now all gold and silver and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship with [> from] you, and would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.’
Bilbo knelt on one knee filled with sorrow. ‘Farewell O king [> my king]’ he said. ‘This is a bitter adventure if it must end so; and not a mountain of gold can amend it. Yet I am glad that I have been of your servants & your company [> shared in your perils] – and that has been more than any Baggins deserves [> might hope for].’
‘Nay’ said Thorin. ‘There is more
Then Bilbo turned away and he went by himself and sat alone in a tent, and whether you believe it or not he wept until his eyes were red and his voice hoarse. He was a kindly little soul. Indeed it was very long before he had the heart to make a joke again.TN5
‘Thank go[odness] > M[ercy] > A mercy it was’ he said to himself at last ‘that I awoke when I did. I [wish] Thorin were living, but I am glad that we parted in kindness’.
All that happened Bilbo learned of course bit by bit, though he was no longer as interested as I hope you are. He was aching in his bones for his homeward journey.
The Eagles [had > in great number >] had had suspicion of the Goblins gathering [> mustering] and they had gathered in great numbers and come down upon the wind in the nick of time. They it was that dislodged the Goblins from the Mountain and cast them over precipices or drove them shrieking down among their foes; [Soon the Elves and men could turn and go to the help of the battle in the valley. >
The History of the Hobbit Page 83
