The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  On the other hand, if I am correct in reading this final, nearly illegible series of ligatures as ‘Gondobar’, then we have here another reference to the city more commonly known as Gondolin, one of the great elven kingdoms of the legendarium, which had already been mentioned by Elrond in Chapter III. At first glance its reappearance here might seem rather unlikely, but this variant of the name was particularly associated with Tolkien’s poetry about voyaging to the Undying Land and glimpsing Tol Eressëa, as in the revised version of ‘The Nameless Land’ retitled ‘The Song of Ælfwine’, the two texts of which seem to date from circa 1936 and circa 1945, respectively:

  O! Haven where my heart would be!

  the waves that beat upon thy bar

  For ever echo endlessly,

  when longing leads my thoughts afar,

  And rising west of West I see

  beyond the world the wayward Star,

  Than beacons bright in Gondobar

  more clear and keen, more fair and high . . .

  —‘The Song of Ælfwine’, 1936 version,

  lines 51–58; emphasis mine†

  and the later version of ‘The Happy Mariners’ [circa 1940]:

  O happy mariners upon a journey far,

  beyond the grey islands and past Gondobar,

  to those great portals on the final shores . . .

  —lines 23–25; HME II.275.††

  † See HME V.100–104.

  †† See also Christopher Tolkien’s commentary HME II.274 and HME V.104.

  24 This line was partially cancelled and replaced by ‘And [terror >] horror in the halls of stone’, written at the end of the poem and marked for insertion at this point.

  25 The text of this poem, which is given the pencilled title ‘Bilbo’s first poem’, appears on a separate piece of paper (1/1/31) meant to be inserted into the final chapter somewhere around page 690; Tolkien wrote ‘41’ in pencil in the upper right corner, making this the third ‘page 41’ in the Third Phase manuscript.† Its actual placement wavered; first Tolkien thought to insert it just before Bilbo’s departure from Rivendell (see Text Note 9), then instead to give it on Bilbo’s doorstep (see Text Note 13). Ultimately it is given its final placement, just as Bilbo glimpses ‘his own Hill in the distance’, in the first typescript (1/1/69:4); cf. DAA.359. Given his uncertainty, I have thought it best to offer it here as an appropriate coda for the story as a whole.

  † The others being in the main Third Phase text just before the middle of the final chapter (numbered ‘40 > 41’; 1/1/20:3) and also the page bearing the inserted poem ‘Sing All Ye Joyful’ (numbered ‘<?top> 39 > 40 > 41’).

  26 Griffiths’ (oral) account was initially broadcast as part of Ann Bonsor’s 1974 Radio BBC Oxford tribute to Tolkien (produced by Humphrey Carpenter), along with other memoirs of Tolkien by friends (e.g., Nevill Coghill) and family; a transcription of Griffiths’ contribution is reprinted in The Annotated Hobbit (DAA.12) and the original audiotrack was incorporated into Brian Sibley’s J.R.R. Tolkien: An Audio Portrait (BBC [2001]) as part of CD 1, track 12.

  27 Not to be confused with Clark Hall’s ‘Metrical’ (verse) translation, published in 1914 and again in 1926 by Cambridge University Press.

  28 That Allen & Unwin would contact an author they had never worked with before out of the blue like this to see if he was interested in undertaking a project for them was not unprecedented; coming across E. R. Eddison’s translation of Egil’s Saga (Cambridge University Press, [1930]), Stanley Unwin wrote to him asking if he would be interested in translating more sagas for Allen & Unwin. Engrossed in his own creative work, Eddison declined, but the episode shows Unwin’s willingness to seek out potential authors and scholars rather than wait for them to come to him. This correspondence is now in the Bodleian (Ms. Eng. Misc. e 456/1, fol. 123 & 124).

  (i)

  Dain son of Nain

  One of the most appealing of all Tolkien’s dwarven characters, Dain of the Iron Hills plays a small but crucial role in The Hobbit, essentially stepping in to fulfill Thorin’s role after Thorin is no longer capable of doing so himself, first because he succumbed to dragon-sickness and then because of his death. That Thorin was to die was a late development, not present at all in the Second Phase: there is no hint of it in any of the Plot Notes, and clear indication to the contrary as late as Bilbo’s discussion with Thorin after the battle in Plot Notes D. Even when Tolkien concluded that Bilbo would be unable to resolve the crisis and lift the siege without a battle (Plot Notes F), the idea of bringing a dwarven army to the scene was one of the last plot-points to emerge: no such army is described as playing a part in the Plot Notes B/C/D sequence or Plot Notes E, and their listing among the seven forces present in Plot Notes F could mean just the thirteen members of Thorin & Company; in any case the word ‘dwarves’ on that list is circled in pencil, as if for removal or further development: Dain himself nowhere appears until the Third Phase. Like Bard (or, later, Arwen in The Lord of the Rings), Dain is a character Tolkien introduces abruptly to fill a specific plot-function – in this case, to bring a dwarven army to the fight at the Mountain – but with his usual keen eye to potentialities, once the character is present Tolkien makes good use of him. Nothing in fact anticipates Thorin’s death scene in the original manuscript until Gandalf actually ushers Bilbo into the dying dwarvenking’s tent, but once Tolkien had made the surprising decision to drive home the cost of victory with the tragic but heroic death of the second most important character in the book,1 he needed someone else to fill Thorin’s role as the new King under the Mountain, dealing out treasure and restoring the lost realm so that the prophecies could come true.

  In a sense, Dain is to Thorin as Faramir is to Boromir in The Lord of the Rings: the close kinsman who avoids the fall from grace of his elder. Even Gandalf at one point describes himself after his return as Gandalf the White as being Saruman as he was supposed to be (‘The White Rider’, LotR.516). It is easy, in retrospect, to forget Thorin’s or Boromir’s virtues even after their heroic deaths and dying renunciations of their misdeeds, but an unprejudiced reading of the First Phase and Second Phase Hobbit (and indeed the bulk of the published book, right up to the dwarves’ discussion of the treasure at the end of Chapter XII) shows Thorin as a capable leader, fair in his judgments, determined to leave none behind, and courageous (although not to the point of being willing to beard the dragon who destroyed his people in its lair). Dain is all this and more: Thorin as he is meant to be, who either because of the example of Thorin’s fall before him or more likely because of an unshakable bedrock of good sense and a lack of ofermod (again, cf. Faramir’s ability to avoid repeating Boromir’s mistakes) is able to resist the dragon-sickness. Dain deals out the treasure fairly, keeps his bargains, and establishes good relations with his neighbors – all the things Thorin should have done and that we like Bilbo expected him to do based on our experience of him prior to his glimpsing the dragon-gold. The good effects of King Dain’s reign are already apparent by the time of the Epilogue – a brief glance ahead ten years that enables us to see the fulfillment of Thorin’s dream to re-establish the Kingdom under the Mountain as a thriving dwarven haven for Durin’s Folk at peace with its neighbors and no longer surrounded by desolation – and Glóin in ‘Many Meetings’ (LotR Bk II Ch. I) gives a glowing report of their progress in the decades since.

  That Thorin’s heir proves to be a new character, Dain, and not one of Thorin’s companions – say, his second-in-command Balin or perhaps Fili and Kili, already established as his great-nephews – might have surprised some readers among whom Tolkien circulated the original version of the story (e.g., C. S. Lewis), especially since Beowulf, which had a marked influence on the closing chapters, provided the parallel of an old king dying and being succeeded by a relatively unknown much younger kinsman. But the two young dwarves’ descent is through the female line, being the grandsons of Thorin’s sister (the sons of his sister in the published text and later family trees), whereas t
he patriarchal dwarves obviously trace the kingship through the male line; it is indeed possible that the deaths of Fili and Kili were added to the story during the typescript stage precisely to avoid such confusion. Then too whereas strict patrilineal descent became the norm during feudalism (with sometimes disastrous results when a small child inherited the throne and left a country with a decade or two of regencies while he grew up), in the ‘heroic’ cultures that preceded feudalism a closely-related capable adult male (brother, uncle, nephew) often succeeded instead of a son.2 As Thorin’s first cousin,3 the battle-hardened Dain, who proved himself a loyal kinsman by coming at once to Thorin’s aid and who had already accomplished heroic deeds in killing Bolg’s father in the goblin war, is obviously an eminently suitable candidate to re-establish the Kingdom under the Mountain.

  For all his importance to the resolution of the story, however, Dain remains almost entirely in the background, his words and deeds reported at second hand. Despite this, like so many of Tolkien’s ‘minor’ characters his personality and character come across clearly, revealing him as the most sensible and ultimately quite possibly the most fortunate of all Tolkien’s dwarves (with the exception of the legendary Durin and possibly also of Gimli Glóinson in his later career as described in the Appendices of The Lord of the Rings). We know he proves to be an excellent king and have already noted his fairness in sharing out treasure (the sine qua non for being a great king or ‘ring-giver’ according to the Anglo-Saxon heroic code – at least according to the surviving poetry);4 that his generosity and sense of fair-play go beyond merely keeping his word or fulfilling Thorin’s bargains is shown by his giving Bard the Necklace of Girion, clearly a fabulous treasure, above and beyond the one-fourteenth share that was supposed to settle Bard’s claim on the treasure. His chief defining characteristics seem to have been an unshakable practicality, a keen appreciation of his own limits, and willingness to aggressively defend a good cause. In the later story (‘Durin’s Folk’, LotR Appendix A part iii) he answers Thrain’s call to avenge Thror’s murder and fights heroically at Moria, killing Bolg’s father (clearly a great feat, even within the context of the original Hobbit, since Gandalf has heard of it) but stops short of over-reaching and prevents Thrain from re-claiming Moria since the peril that originally drove them from Durin’s halls remains (i.e., the Balrog). Similarly, within The Hobbit he comes at once to aid Thorin but does not hesitate to ally with the Elvenking and Bard when the goblins arrive, nor to drop old grudges and negotiate a fair peace after the battle. Later (LotR.257–8) he allows Balin to found his own dwarf-colony, despite his personal misgivings, which prove to have been fully justified. At one point Tolkien even considered making him the keeper of one of the dwarven Rings of Power (HME VI.398); although this proved to be only a passing thought it shows his high regard for the character. And Dain is wise enough to resist temptation when Sauron sends messengers with promises of Rings of Power and, unlike his ally King Brand, to realize that attempts to appease the Dark Lord are useless; instead he sends warnings to Bilbo and representatives to the Council of Elrond. One could argue that Gimli goes with the Fellowship not just as a representative of dwarves in general but as one of Dain’s folk, the people of Durin, in particular.

  As Tolkien eventually developed him, Dain thus plays a large role in the history of his people throughout the last two and a half centuries of the Third Age, contributing in no small part to their survival into the Fourth Age through a remarkable career on a par with those of Thorin and Balin: fighting heroically at Moria when young and killing the leader of the goblin army, thus personally avenging Thror’s murder (‘held a great feat, for Dáin was then only a stripling in the reckoning of the Dwarves’ – LotR.1112), leading one of the namesake armies in The Battle of Five Armies (where victory enables him to re-establish the Kingdom under the Mountain with the survivors), and finally dying heroically in the War of the Ring fighting over the body of his fallen friend defending the Front Gate from Sauron’s armies (LotR.1116; ‘The Quest of Erebor’, Unfinished Tales, page 326). Even more important was his maintenance of a safe haven for Durin’s Folk first in the Iron Hills and then later in the Lonely Mountain, since we are told ‘It is because of the fewness of women among them that the kind of the Dwarves increases slowly, and is in peril when they have no secure dwellings’ (LotR.1116), especially when we juxtapose this with Thrain and Thorin’s group in the Blue Hills whose numbers were apparently few and increased only very slowly, a fact directly linked to the statement that ‘They had very few women-folk’ (ibid.1113), Thorin’s sister Dís being a rare exception.

  Since we do not know how old Dain was supposed to be in the original story, we cannot say whether he like Thror, Thrain, Thorin, and Balin was a survivor of Smaug’s attack or whether he was born in the Iron Hills after the event; from the lack of any statement to the contrary it seems probable that in the original conception the Iron Hills settlement was founded by refugees from Erebor, whereas in the later story the colony in the Iron Hills had been founded by Thror’s brother (Grór) at the time the dwarves were driven out of the far North (i.e., the Grey Mountains) long before Dain’s birth (LotR.1109 & 1117), meaning that Dain was certainly born there and was still a small child (only three years old) when Smaug destroyed Thror’s nearby kingdom. In this later story, most of the survivors of the catastrophe join Grór in the Iron Hills (‘It was afterwards learned that more of the Folk under the Mountain had escaped than was at first hoped; but most of these went to the Iron Hills’ – LotR.1110), and it is clear that the Iron Hills settlement was the largest and most thriving community of the Longbeards, much larger than Thorin’s smaller halls in the distant Blue Hills. For example, Thorin dreams in ‘The Quest of Erebor’ (Unfinished Tales, page 322) of raising a dwarven army to reclaim his lost kingdom but is advised by Gandalf to take only a small trustworthy group, whereas in the original story there is nothing to contradict the conclusion that the Heir of Durin can only manage to gather a band of a dozen followers; by contrast Dain at short notice can bring five hundred warriors to the spot.5

  Finally, there is the matter of Dain’s name, nomenclature always being important in Tolkien’s stories. Like the rest of The Hobbit’s dwarves (with the possible exception of Balin, already noted), Dain and his father both take their names from the Dvergatal; although they do not appear in all manuscripts of the Voluspá (see Dronke, pages 10 & 90) they are both in Snorri’s list (Prose Edda page 41). However, unlike most of these dwarf-names, Dain’s name also appears elsewhere, in a variety of different contexts and applications, some rather puzzling. Thus while we are told in Heidreks Saga6 that Tyrfing, a cursed sword which must kill somebody every time it is unsheathed, was made by the dwarfs Durin and Dvalin (i.e., Tolkien’s ‘Dwalin’), Snorri in the Skáldskaparmál tells a very similar story of a sword called Dainslaf (‘Dain’s heirloom’), used in the Endless Battle between Hedin and Högni (Prose Edda page 121);7 the sword’s title implies that ‘Dain’ was recognized in Norse lore as a famous dwarven maker of weapons. Oddly enough, another of the Elder Edda’s poems, the Hávamál,8 tells of another Dain who is the king of elves:

  Odin for the Æsir [gods], Dain for the elves,

  Dvalin for the dwarfs,

  Asvid for the giants . . .

  —Hávamál, stanza 143; Terry, Poems of the Elder Edda, page 31.

  We are also told, in the Gylfaginning, that the World-Tree Yggdrasil has four harts living in its branches, named Dáin, Dvalin, Duneyr, and Durathrór (Prose Edda, page 45). By contrast, I have found no other references to Nain, a name which neither Dronke nor Young translates but which probably means ‘near’ (cf. E. V. Gordon, An Introduction to Old Norse, page 371), although it is certainly a remarkable coincidence that nain is actually the French word for ‘dwarf’ (e.g., cf. Madame D’Aulnoy’s 1698 fairy tale Le Nain Jaune, translated into English as ‘The Yellow Dwarf’). While the scattered references to Dain in the Old Norse sources do not seem to cohere into a single figure, someo
ne who like Tolkien was creating a new mythology out of the incoherent fragments of lost myth9 might well have concluded that the original Dain had once been a figure of some significance, associated in some way with kingship and with those famous dwarves Durin and Dvalin, but whose story had been wholly lost.

  (ii)

  Bolg of the North

  Bolg of the North plays a far less dramatic part in the Third Phase manuscript than will eventually develop in the typescript (see below) and final book. Nonetheless he is remarkable as one of only two goblins to gain the distinction of a name in the original edition of The Hobbit (if we exempt ‘The Great Goblin’ as a title).1 The parallelism between ‘Bolg of the North’ and ‘Gondobad of the North’, when laid alongside Bladorthin’s earlier admonition that the North End of the Misty Mountains was ‘stiff with goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs of the worst description’ (page 244), suggests that Mount Gundabad might have been Bolg’s capital. In any case, like Morgoth’s forces in the earlier tales in the legendarium, the goblins of Bilbo’s time seem clustered in the north; only after their devastating defeat in the Battle of Five Armies do Bilbo and Gandalf, accompanied by Beorn, dare to take the northern route around Mirkwood.

  Also in the Third Phase, we learn more about the famed goblin-dwarf war, although the full story has to wait until ‘Durin’s Folk’ (specifically LotR.1110–13). That it was fought to avenge the death of Thror was already clear from Thorin’s comment in Chapter I that the ‘goblins of Moria have been repaid’ as he considers going after the Necromancer to exact similar vengeance for Thrain (page 73). It is not yet revealed that Moria is an ancestral dwarven city overrun by goblins, and on the whole it seems likely that this idea had not yet arisen when Tolkien was working on The Hobbit; he may have conceived of Moria at this time as simply a goblin stronghold, probably mines worked by those unfortunates who have been captured and made slaves by the goblins (a fate Bilbo and the others narrowly escaped thanks to Bladorthin’s timely intervention). Certainly similar mines were an omnipresent threat to the elves of Beleriand in early versions of the legendarium: Flinding bo-Dhuilin (known in the published Silmarillion as Gwindor of Nargothrond) is one example of the terrible changes wrought by long captivity in ‘the mines of the north’ (cf. ‘Turambar and the Foalókë’ [BLT II.78–79], ‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’ [HME III.36], the 1926 ‘Sketch’ [HME IV.29], the 1930 Quenta [HME IV.124], Silm.207, et al.). All we know for certain is that the goblin-dwarf war took place more than a century ago (page 73), was famous (Bilbo expects Bard and the Elvenking to have heard of it – page 662) and that the Battle of the Mines of Moria was a significant encounter in that campaign, since it was there that Dain killed Bolg’s father (page 670) – although we could probably also have guessed this from the fact that ‘Moria! Moria!’ is one of the battle-cries of Dain’s dwarves when they attack Bolg’s goblins.2 Finally, we can reasonably conclude that the dwarves must have won the war, since Thrain, Thorin, and Dain all survived and Bolg’s father did not; more significantly, Thorin considers that it settled the score over his grandfather’s death (which would not have been the case with a dwarven defeat or even stalemate). In the later development of the Moria story, the battle was made more devastating for both sides (Thorin’s brother, Dain’s father, and Balin’s father all died there, and Thrain was permanently disfigured – LotR.1117 & 1112), and the mortality so high as to make it unlikely that a significant portion of the forces Dain brings with him a century and more later in answer to Thorin’s call could be survivors of that battle (or that many, if any, of the goblins now facing them were veterans of the same combat).