The History of the Hobbit
Page 86
More importantly from the point of view of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings turned out to be quite different from its predecessor, although clearly linked to it in story, style, and characters. And as his ideas developed Tolkien came to reject some of what was said in the original book, particularly in the crucial encounter with Gollum. Once he had established that Bilbo’s ring inspired possessiveness even beyond what the Arkenstone (and, earlier yet, the Silmarils) evoked, the idea that Gollum honestly intended to give Bilbo his ring when he lost the riddle-game became untenable. At first Tolkien decided to reveal in The Lord of the Rings that the account that appeared in The Hobbit was not what actually happened, and he had Gandalf recount the true story in the new book. Eventually, however, he realized that it would be a simpler solution if he could actually alter what was said in the first book, which would have the added benefit of not casting his earlier book into the status of unreliable narrative. Accordingly, in 1944 he drafted replacement text for a large portion of Chapter V: Riddles in the Dark, and in 1947 sent it off to Allen & Unwin to see if they thought inserting it into the next printing would be feasible. Due to a miscommunication (see Hammond, Descriptive Bibliography, pages 22–3, and Letters p. 120–4) Tolkien thought the publisher had decided not to make the change and so was taken by surprise when three years later in 1950 he was sent proofs for the next printing which incorporated his replacement text (Letters p. 141). This of course became the second edition of 1951, the form of the story that has been familiar to readers ever since. For the complete text of this new material Tolkien sent Allen & Unwin in 1947, the Fourth Phase of his work on the book, see the section beginning on page 729.
TEXT NOTES
1 Tolkien’s note to himself here refers to page 28 of the First Typescript (Marq. 1/1/53:3), corresponding to page 113 in Chapter III of this book. This is yet another piece of evidence that the First Typescript for chapters I through XII and part of XIV, replacing the bulk of the Second Phase text, already existed before the Third Phase manuscript was written.
2 Elf-maiden: This is the only reference to female elves within The Hobbit, aside from the (cancelled) mention of (Lúthien) Tinúviel.
3 The poem as we have it here is a fair copy obviously preceded by drafting that does not survive. It strongly resembles the version published in the book, the main variance being, as any comparison soon shows, that the three stanzas appear in reverse order in the manuscript from how they appear in the typescript and published book (the typescript text – 1/1/69:1–2 – being exactly that which saw print). Tolkien later numbered the stanzas from top to bottom ‘3’, ‘2’, and ‘1’ respectively in pencil in the left margin, indicating that the decision to reverse their sequence belongs not to the Third Phase but a somewhat later stage of work on the book, the period of the completion of the typescript (summer-autumn 1936).
Aside from the re-sequencing of the stanzas, Tolkien also made a few other changes. The line ‘Here is yet growing’ near the end I have treated as a miscopying from the lost draft for an intended ‘Here grass is yet growing’, since the line is otherwise short one syllable; in any case, Tolkien altered it in contemporary ink to read ‘Here grass is still growing’. In the final line (sans chorus) of the poem, ‘and elves are all singing’, he underlined the words are singing and wrote ‘are yet/ at their’ in the right margin. This I take as offering two variant revisions, so that instead of ‘and elves are yet at their singing’, which is euphonious but metrically irregular, he was weighing the respective merits of ‘and elves are yet singing’ versus ‘and elves at their singing’; comparison with the typescript and published book (DAA.[355]) show he decided upon the former.
In addition to these changes on the manuscript itself, between the fair copy manuscript and the typescript ‘So cease from your roaming’ (line 8 in the middle stanza) became ‘So why go a-roaming?’. The slight indentation of every other line was abandoned, and the chorus elaborated somewhat, especially in the final refrain. So that instead of ‘Come’ being repeated three times we instead get ‘Come! . . .’, ‘O! . . .’, and ‘With . . .’, followed in the last case with an additional flourish of fa-la-las.
4 These last two sentences were cancelled, leaving the second one (an attempt to pick up a loose thread from Plot Notes F) unfinished. The rest of the paragraph was extensively revised and supplemented with marginal additions until it read as follows:
So he learned that Gandalf had been to a council of many magicians and wise and learned men masters of lore and beneficial wizardry [> white wizardry]; and that the Necromancer had at last been driven from his hold in the south of Mirkwood, and had fled to other lands. ‘The North is freed from that horror for many an age’ said G. ‘yet I wish he were banished from the world’.
It is remarkable to find Tolkien using the word ‘magician’ in a favorable context; cf. his more usual negative associations with the term in On Fairy-Stories (OFS.15 & 49) and Letters (page 200), and indeed the phrase ‘magicians and’ was cancelled in ink. The presence of enough wizards and magicians to form a council is less surprising: Tolkien’s early work was filled with wizards, from The Book of Lost Tales’ Tû the wizard (‘Gilfanon’s Tale’, BLT I.232–3) to the Father Christmas Letters’ Man in the Moon, Father Christmas himself, and presumably Fr. Christmas’s Green Brother as well, to Roverandom’s same Man in the Moon, Psamathos Psamathides the sand-sorcerer, and Artaxerxes the wandering wizard. The idea that Middle-earth in the Third Age had only five wizards (Saruman, Gandalf, Radagast, and the two Blue Wizards of the east), none of whom are human, was like the concept of the Third Age itself a much later development; cf. HME VIII.64 & 67, the essay ‘The Istari’ in Unfinished Tales (UT.388–402), and ‘The Five Wizards’ (HME XII.384–5). Tolkien’s final thoughts on this ‘council of good wizards’ transformed it in The Lord of the Rings into the White Council, composed of three wizards (Saruman the White, Gandalf the Grey, and Radagast the Brown) and the most powerful of the Elves (Galadriel of Lothlórien, Elrond of Rivendell, Círdan of the Havens, and a few others who are not identified but probably included Glorfindel; cf. LotR.61, 267–8, & 376 and ‘Of the Rings of Power and the Third Age’; Silm.299–300).
Thus, while it is clear from the various Plot Notes that mere dramatic necessity required the wizard to leave Thorin and Company to their own devices for most of the second half of the story and that Tolkien had no particular idea of what the wizard was doing in the meantime (cf. Plot Notes A, page 296),† Tolkien’s ultimate decision regarding what Gandalf had been up to evolved from a neat tying up of loose ends in the original Hobbit to have significant ramifications in the sequel. Ultimately, of course, it proved untrue (or at least premature) that ‘the North [was] freed from that horror for many an age’, since during the War of the Ring there was war in Mirkwood (‘long battle under the trees and great ruin of fire’ – LotR.1131), an invasion that occupied Dale (and presumably Esgaroth), and a second deadlier Siege of the Lonely Mountain that ended in the deaths of both the Lord of Dale and the King under the Mountain (ibid.), so it was not until the beginning of the Fourth Age some eighty years later, at the very end of Bilbo’s extraordinarily long life, that Gandalf’s prediction comes true.
† He never does provide any explanation of the means by which Gandalf reaches the far side of Mirkwood; presumably, given his aversion to entering the forest itself (see page 243), he rode not through but around the great forest by the south once Sauron had been defeated.
5 Compare the account of the Cottage of Lost Play, wherein Eriol hears all the stories that were to make up The Book of Lost Tales (BLT I.13ff).
6 Changed in pencil to ‘Many elves were singing clear beside the river below his window’.
7 This earliest surviving text of the poem (‘Sing All Ye Joyful’) is a careful fair copy, clearly preceded by drafting that does not survive. Aside from changes in capitalization, punctuation, and indentation, all its lines are identical to the published version, but the sequence of the last four
was shifted:
Sigh no more Pine, till the wind of the morn!
Fall Moon! Dark be the land!
Hush! Hush! Oak, Ash, and Thorn!
Hushed be all water, till dawn is at hand!
Their re-arrangement was a late change, since the original sequence occurs in both the continuation of the First Typescript (1/1/69:2–3) and the corresponding page from the Second Typescript (1/1/50:3), both made in 1936.
The only other notable feature of this poem is its reference to the moon being ‘in flower’. Rather than a poetical conceit of a piece with the flowering stars, this may be an allusion back to ‘The Tale of the Sun and Moon’, where the Moon was formed from the last blossom of Silpion the Silver Tree (BLT I.191).
8 It is perhaps an indicator of the change in Bilbo brought about by his adventures that whereas at the end of Chapter III he goes ‘to see the elves dance and sing’ (page 116), now he joins in with their dancing.
9 Added here in pencil are the words ‘B.’s first poem’. This refers of course to ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’, which Tolkien apparently considered inserting at this point. For more on this, the third interpolated poem in this final chapter, see Text Note 13 below.
10 Added at this point, mostly in the left margin:
Each was on a pony and they led also a third [> another] laden with many things – including Bilbo’s little treasure chests.
This was apparently added to set up a scene a few paragraphs later wherein Bilbo’s treasure would be swept away during a river-crossing; see Text Note 11.
11 The three preceding paragraphs, which would have culminated in Bilbo’s pack pony losing the treasure in the rushing water (see the first line of Plot Notes F: ‘Bilbo’s treasure all lost on the way home’), were all cancelled in the manuscript (Third Phase manuscript page 41 [> 42]; 1/1/20:4). The word ‘pony’ is changed to ‘pack-pony’ in the last line, and there is a cancelled partial word, ‘wh’, after ‘the steep bank’; I suspect that Tolkien began to write ‘where’ – that is, where they had trouble with the ponies just before meeting the trolls on the outward journey. At any rate, this is clearly the same river described in Chapter II, as Tolkien makes explicit in the typescript: ‘They came to the river that marked the very edge of the borderland of the Wild, and to the ford beneath the steep bank, which you may remember’ (Marq. 1/1/69:3; cf. DAA.358). It may be significant that when Tolkien returned to re-envision The Hobbit in 1960, the first new scene he inserted into the story dealt with Bilbo’s troubles at a river-crossing; perhaps the idea of this abandoned scene stayed in his mind for the almost thirty years that intervened.
12 The one-year’s journey of the published book is finally unambiguously in effect, as opposed to the longer time-frame of the original (Second Phase) draft; cf. Bilbo’s remark about may-time a few lines earlier. ‘. . . so long ago’ was later altered to ‘ten
13 At the bottom of this page (Third Phase manuscript page 41 [> 42]; Marq. 1/1/20:4), immediately below this paragraph, Tolkien has added in hasty pencil
and could see the woods upon the Hill. The[n] Bilbo
stopped & said suddenly – the poem
‘Something is the matter with you Bilbo’ said G.
‘You are not the hobbit you were.’
And so they passed
– i.e., ‘passed the bridge and came right back to Bilbo’s own door’. The poem alluded to here (see also Text Note 9 above) is ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’; see part v of the commentary following this chapter, beginning on page 723.
Note that it is still the Mill (clearly to be seen in the foreground of all Tolkien’s versions of the Hobbiton illustration; cf. Plate IV [top]), which is the landmark here and not the Green Man or the Green Dragon Inn.
14 The original name of Bilbo’s cousins, the Allibone Baggins, was altered to Sackville Baggins in pencil here and Sackville-Baggins (that is, with the hyphen) two paragraphs later; this change probably dates to the period of the book’s preparation for publication in 1936, and the latter form appears in the typescript (1/1/69:5). I am unable to explain the exact significance of ‘Allibone’, which probably originated not as part of their surname but in reference to a place (i.e., to distinguish between the Allibone Bagginses and the Bag-End Bagginses). Certainly it seems unlikely that Tolkien here was alluding to any real person with this name, such as Samuel Austin Allibone (a leading figure in the Sunday School movement and compiler of the Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors [1854 & 1871]), journalist and travel/nature writer Thomas Allibone Janvier [d.1913], or physicist T. E. Allibone (a much younger colleague of Rutherford), just as Sackville almost certainly derives not from the Elizabethan poet Thomas Sackville (A Mirror for Magistrates, Gorboduc) nor literary personality V. Sackville-West (a friend of Virginia Woolf’s) but rather is simply as T. A. Shippey points out a comic variant between sack and bag: Sackville vs. Baggins (The Road to Middle-earth, expanded edition [2003], page 72). Rather, I would argue that ‘Allibone’ is a variant of Alboin, the name Tolkien gave one of the two main characters in his time-travel story The Lost Road [circa 1936] in which one of the main characters states ‘at school . . . they call me All-bone’ (HME V.37). If so, its application to Bilbo’s stay-at-home relatives is deeply ironic, for Alboin is the sixth-century Lombardic equivalent of the Old English Ælfwine or ‘Elf-friend’,† and it is Bilbo rather than his cousins who has earned such a title.
† For more on Alboin the Lombard, a Germanic prince whose people gave their name to Italy’s Lombardy region, see Christopher Tolkien’s commentary on The Lost Road, HME V.53–5.
15 The very first page of the earliest draft of the sequel puts the matter nicely: ‘[Bilbo] had disappeared after breakfast one April 30th and not reappeared until lunchtime on June 22nd in the following year’ (HME VI.13). As an encapsulation of his hobbit neighbors’ point of view, this can hardly be bettered. According to the typescript of this final chapter (1/1/69:5) Bilbo returned home on June 2nd; this was changed to June 22nd in the page proofs (1/2/2: page 306).
16 The statement that among Bilbo’s visitors in later years were wizards (note the plural) remains even in the most recent texts of the published book although the later conception makes it extremely unlikely that Radagast or Saruman, not to mention either of the long-missing Blue Wizards, dropped by during the years following Bilbo’s return.
17 Just as with the ‘lads and lasses’ whom Bladorthin/Gandalf encouraged to go off and have their own adventures, we hear very little about Bilbo’s nieces in the sequel; a few who would probably qualify for the title in the looser sense used in The Lord of the Rings appear or are referred to briefly (Caramella Took,† Angelica Baggins, Melilot Brandybuck, Pearl Took††) but play no role in the main story.
† HME VI.15. fn">†† Cf. Letters page 295.
18 This is the first usage in the manuscript of the phrase that would give its name to the first chapter of the book, but it had already occurred in the First Typescript for Chapter XI:
they used to call the little grassy space between the wall and the opening the ‘doorstep’ in fun, remembering Bilbo’s words long ago at the unexpected party in his hobbit-hole
—typescript page 113; Marq. 1/1/61:4.
19 At this point Tolkien started a new paragraph and wrote ‘It was one of his jokes to put it on and open the door and if’ but left the sentence unfinished and cancelled it. Cf. Bingo’s tricks with Farmer Maggot in early drafts of ‘A Short Cut to Mushrooms’ (HME VI.96–7 & 292–3).
20 This marks the first appearance of the phrase that later became the book’s subtitle.
21 In this final line ‘pushed over’ remained the reading in both typescripts (1/1/69:6 and 1/1/50:7), not being changed to ‘handed him’ until the page proofs (1/2/2: page 310), probably to avoid having readers think that Bilb
o had accidentally knocked the jar over.
22 These four lines were re-sequenced by Tolkien, who wrote the numbers 3, 4, 1, and 2, respectively, in the left margin alongside them, shifting the lines to the order they have in the typescript version of this poem and the published book (DAA.359).
23 These last two lines, which seem to have formed the original conclusion of the poem, were cancelled in ink. The two lines that follow (‘Yet feet . . . to home afar’), which I have bracketed and slightly indented here to set them apart, are written in ink over pencil underwriting, indicating a pause in composition before these replacements were drafted. The final four lines that follow the replacement lines have no such underwriting.
Unfortunately, the two highly interesting cancelled lines – with their parallel of ‘never never gone’ for journeys not taken with the ‘ever ever on’ of those that are now coming to an end – are in parts nearly illegible; the final -h of <?hath> is particularly dubious. Similarly, the word or words that end the next line could also be read ‘find the bar’, which might be an allusion to the old notion of ‘crossing the bar’, made famous by Tennyson’s poem of the same name (‘Crossing the Bar’ [1889]), with its imagery of sailing beyond the world into eternity; Tolkien had already used similar phrasing in the final stanza of his poem ‘The Nameless Land’ [written 1924, published 1927]; cf. Text Note 20 following Chapter XVII (page 675) and HME V.100.