Magol
One of the most interesting things about Bolg is of course his name, which is neither Norse (like the dwarves’) nor Sindarin/Noldorin (like most of the other personal and place names within The Hobbit). Instead, it comes from one of Tolkien’s minor invented languages, called Mago or Magol, about which little is known other than that at one point Tolkien considered making it the Orkish language, only to reject this idea. In that tongue, bolg is an adjective meaning ‘strong’ (Magol document, page 3) – an eminently suitable name for a great goblin-chief.3
However, it may be significant that another similar name, later identified as Noldorin, is given to an Orc leader in ‘The Lay of Leithian’ and the 1930 Quenta. This Boldog4 was a captain whom Morgoth sent to raid Doriath to capture Lúthien; his importance may be guessed not just from the fact that he is one of only two orcs (the other being Bolg) named in the legendarium before The Lord of the Rings. Even more significantly, originally Morgoth had ordered Thû (the Necromancer; the later Sauron) to undertake that mission (‘The Lay of the Children of Húrin’, HME III.16 [lines 391–394] & 117 [lines 763–766]), which in slightly later parts of the legendarium was reassigned to Boldog instead:
A captain dire,
Boldog, he sent with sword and fire
to Doriath’s march; but battle fell
sudden upon him: news to tell
never one returned of Boldog’s host,
and Thingol humbled Morgoth’s boast.
—‘The Lay of Leithian’, lines 3670b–3675
– HME III.288.
In fact, Beren and his elven companions, trying to enter the Dark Lord’s land disguised as orcs, claim to be part of Boldog’s host when captured and questioned by Thû (ibid., lines 2121–2136; HME III.229). That Boldog’s raid was no minor skirmish but a major battle is indicated by the account in the 1930 Quenta:
Assaults . . . there were on Doriath’s borders, for rumours that Lúthien was astray had reached Angband. Boldog captain of the Orcs was there slain in battle by Thingol, and his great warriors Beleg the Bowman and Mablung Heavyhand were with Thingol in that battle.
—HME IV.113.
A synopsis for the unwritten cantos of ‘The Lay of Leithian’ adds still more details:
Thingol’s army meets with the host of Boldog on the borders of Doriath. Morgoth has heard of the beauty of Lúthien, and the rumour of her wandering. He has ordered Thú and the Orcs to capture her. A battle is fought and Thingol is victorious. The Orcs are driven into Taur-na-Fuin† or slain. Thingol himself slays Boldog. Mablung Heavyhand was Thingol’s chief warrior and fought at his side; Beleg was the chief of his scouts. Though victorious Thingol is filled with still more disquiet at Morgoth’s hunt for Lúthien.
— HME III.311.
† Mirkwood; cf. page 20.
Obviously, Bolg in The Hobbit cannot be the same character as Boldog in the Silmarillion stories contemporary with its drafting (since the latter is killed by Thingol), but the parallel is interesting. Perhaps significant in this context is a late note [circa 1960] Tolkien wrote on the name ‘Boldog’ in which he stated that ‘it is possible that Boldog was not a personal name, and either a title, or else the name of a kind of creature: the Orc-formed Maiar, only less formidable than the Balrogs’ (X.418). That is, according to this line of thought, evil Maiar in Morgoth’s service sometimes incarnated themselves into orcish form in order to command orc troops, and ‘boldog’ was the generic term for these, no more individualized than, say, Nazgúl. For more on Maiar incarnating themselves as super-orcs (‘orcs of the worst description’, perhaps?), see commentary on page 138.
Orcs
Finally, there is the question of whether Bolg was a normal goblin, despite his rank as leader of the goblin-horde, or something more. The original Third Phase text offers no clues on this point, but the account of the Battle of Five Armies as developed in the typescript that followed does, and suggests that he was in fact an Orc, not merely a goblin (cf. in a later account the contrast between the rather puny goblins of the Misty Mountains against the much more dangerous Orcs of Mordor – not to mention Saruman’s Uruk-hai – in LotR.467–8, 472, 473–4). Thus in the typescript and published book, the core of the goblin army around which it rallies after the elf-dwarf-human alliance stems the first onslaught is ‘the bodyguard of Bolg, goblins of huge size with scimitars of steel’ (typescript 1/1/67:6, DAA.343; contrast page 671 of this book). Similarly, Thorin’s charge fails when he comes up against Bolg’s honour guard: ‘Thorin drove right against the bodyguard of Bolg. But he could not pierce their ranks . . . The bodyguard of Bolg came howling against them, and drove in upon their ranks like waves upon cliffs of sand’ (DAA.344). Later Bilbo learns that after Thorin fell, presumably because of injuries inflicted by Bolg’s guard if not Bolg himself, Beorn arrives and attacks like an unstoppable force: ‘He scattered the bodyguard, and pulled down Bolg himself and crushed him. Then dismay fell on the Goblins and they fled in all directions’ (typescript 1/1/68:2–3, DAA.349–50; contrast pp. 679–80 in this book).
The clear distinction between Bolg and his guard on the one hand and the average goblin of the horde on the other certainly carries over into the description of the Battle of Moria in Appendix A of The Lord of the Rings, where it is said of his father that Azog ‘was a great Orc with a huge iron-clad head, and yet agile and strong. With him came many like him, the fighters of his guard’ (LotR.1112). Thus the preponderance of evidence, though indirect, shows that Bolg in The Hobbit is far more than a mere goblin – in fact an Orc in all but name.
(iii)
The Battle of Five Armies
As we have seen in the various Plot Notes, Tolkien’s original idea was to have the Lonely Mountain chapters end with the Siege of the Mountain, where Thorin & Company (aided by the ravens) would be besieged by the wood-elves and lake-men until Bilbo and Gandalf could negotiate a peaceful ending to the impasse. This would then have been followed on Bilbo’s return journey by the unnamed battle I have dubbed for ease of reference ‘the Battle of Anduin Vale’, which did not involve the dwarves but ‘goblins of the Misty Mountains’ and their allies the wargs, versus the wood-elves (with whom Bilbo goes to battle, armed in his elven mail), ‘the men of the woods’ (e.g., the wood-men dwelling on the western side of Mirkwood, described back in Chapter VI), ‘men . . . from the south’ (presumably the kin of the wood-men, who are said to have moved into the area from the south – page 205), and ‘Beorn Medwed’ leading ‘a troop of bears’.1 Conspicuous by their absence are the Eagles; more startling to readers familiar with the published story is the absence of any mention of the dwarves, Thorin and Company having remained in the east and Dain not yet having entered the story. Since this battle is said to take place ‘in the west’, it is no surprise that most of the participants are those associated with what later came to be known as the Vale of the Anduin: goblins, wargs, wood-men, and Beorn-Medwed (from Chapters IV, VI, & VII), plus the wood-elves from deeper in Mirkwood (Chapters VIII–IX). Hence the great climactic battle in the original conception (maintained throughout the Second Phase manuscript)2 did not take place at the Lonely Mountain at all but somewhere between the Misty Mountains and Mirkwood; only with the advent of the Third Phase did Tolkien reach the decision to transform the stand-off at the Mountain into a dramatic all-out battle, which in turn necessitated the addition of Dain’s five hundred dwarves.
Having ultimately decided upon a battle at the Lonely Mountain, initially Tolkien was in great uncertainty as to just who its participants would be. The name ‘Battle of Five Armies’ first appears in Plot Notes F, along with a marginal addition that seems to represent Tolkien’s attempt to decide on which of the forces present counted as an ‘army’:
1
2
3
4
5
woodelves,
dwarves, TN3
eagles,
men,
bears,
goblins
wolv
es
6
7
From this, it seems rather that seven armies actually took part and the battle took its name from the five allies who oppose the forces of darkness (perhaps a distant precursor of the later Five Free Peoples who oppose Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: ents, elves, dwarves, men, and hobbits). We do not know for sure that ‘men’ here means only the Lake-men nor that ‘dwarves’ means Dain’s army and not just Thorin & Company’s heroic charge, but both seem likely. The plural in ‘bears’ implies that the idea of Beorn-Medwed’s troop of bears is still present, but by the time Tolkien came to write the Third Phase text describing Beorn’s role in the battle (which is then expanded upon in the typescript) the great were-bear had become solitary, as he remained in the published text. Neither the bats nor the sole hobbit are taken into account, apparently having negligible effect on the outcome; rather more surprisingly, the wizard is also omitted, while the ravens of the mountain (whom we might expect to battle the bats) make no appearance in any account of the battle, whether draft or outline.
Eventually Tolkien would determine that the five armies who gave the battle its name were the elves, the dwarves, the men, the goblins, and the wargs; the eagles and Beorn, while significant, did not really qualify as an ‘army’ per se.3 Still, it is interesting that between the forces listed in the last page of Plot Notes B, in Plot Notes F, and in the Third Phase draft, almost all those Bilbo had encountered on his journey out were projected to be caught up in the grand climactic battle: only the trolls (who had been turned to stone), the storm-giants (who luckily for all concerned – cf. Farmer Giles of Ham – seem to have few dealings with others or to come down from their mountains), Gollum (who, according to the sequel, actually belatedly did make the journey seeking ‘Baggins’ in hopes of recovering his Ring; cf. LotR.70–71), and the spiders of Mirkwood (who clearly never range far from their own territory) are absent.
Herefugolas & Wœlceasega
The idea of re-introducing some of the races and creatures who had appeared earlier in the story into the battle at the end (whether that battle took place at Erebor or west of Mirkwood), specifically the wolves and the eagles, may have a philological inspiration; if so it would be just another example of elements in The Hobbit arising out of Tolkien’s professional work as an Anglo-Saxon scholar (he was, after all, at the time holder of the Rawlinson and Bosworth chair as Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, one of the most prestigious academic posts in Old English in the world). In his edition of the Old English Exodus, a spirited retelling in heroic alliterative verse of the Biblical story, Tolkien includes notes on the words herefugolas (literally, ‘battle-birds’) and wælceasega (‘chooser of the slain’ i.e. carrion-picker).4 He notes the ancient and pervasive association in Old English heroic verse of wolves, ravens, and eagles (The Old English Exodus [1981], page 49), all eaters of carrion who are attracted to battlefields and all of whom he believed to be present in the scene thus described.5 In these notes, he is careful to distinguish the carrion-pickers (wælceasega – a kenning for ravens) from the closely related wælcyrige, a word better known in its Old Norse form, valkyrie, ‘derived partly from the actual carrion-birds of battle, transformed in mythological imagination; partly from the necromantic practices of female followers of Odinic magicians’ (ibid., page 50). There are certainly no such followers at the Battle of Five Armies (but see below), but the association of ravens with wolves and with eagles may have turned Tolkien’s mind back to earlier parts of the story and made him decide that rather than defusing one conflict only to follow it up with another, he could bring that traditional cluster of creatures together, along with others Bilbo had faced on his journey as enemies or allies to the Mountain itself, elevating the Siege into the great climactic battle of the book and expanding its scope beyond a merely local squabble into a great regional conflict that will decide the fate of that part of the world for years to come.
Bats as ‘Children of Morgoth’
Finally, there are the bats, whose presence adds a note of horror to the proceedings. Indeed, the verbal image of them darkening the sky ‘like a sea of locusts’ was so vivid that Tolkien began a black, white, and red drawing of the scene (Plate XII [bottom]), although he did not complete it. That these are no ordinary bats is clear – for one thing, real-world bats are shy around people and only bite when grabbed and panic-strickened (in fact, they act exactly like the bats inside Smaug’s lair, seen in Plate XI [top], who rather than swarming the solitary hobbit only bother him by accidentally making him drop his torch when he startles one). And of course blood-drinking ‘vampire’ bats are a very small sub-group (only three out of the eleven hundred known species of bats drink blood; two of those prey on birds, not mammals, and all three lap blood oozing from wounds rather than suck it) found only in Central and South America, certainly not part of the fauna of England (past and present) upon which Tolkien based almost all the other animals appearing in The Hobbit. Like the spiders of Mirkwood, the other conspicuous exception to Tolkien’s general practice, these are clearly not natural animals but evil creatures in animal form, corresponding to real-world bats as wargs do to wolves. They are in fact yet another of the Children of Morgoth, who nowhere else take center stage but had lurked around the edges of the legendarium from ‘The Lay of Leithian’ onward.6 For example, when Lúthien casts down Thû’s tower,
bats unclean
went skimming dark through the cold airs
shrieking thinly to find new lairs
in Deadly Nightshade’s branches dread.
—lines 2805b–2807; HME III.254
and Thû himself flees in bat-form:
A vampire shape with pinions vast
screeching leaped from the ground, and passed,
its dark blood dripping on the trees;
. . . for Thû had flown
to Taur-na-Fuin, a new throne
and darker stronghold there to build.7
—lines 2816–2818, 2820b–2822; HME III. 254–5.
Not long afterwards Lúthien herself assumes bat-form in order to sneak into Thangorodrim in disguise:
a batlike garb
with mighty fingered wings, a barb
like iron nail at each joint’s end –
such wings as their dark cloud extend
against the moon, when in the sky
from Deadly Nightshade screeching fly
Thû’s messengers.
—lines 3402–3408a; HME III.278–9.
These references to Thû’s taking bat-form and Lúthien adopting the disguise of a great bat (specifically alluded to as an ‘evil fay’) also appear in the 1930 Quenta (HME IV.111–12), the form of the legendarium most closely associated with the original Hobbit, and were retained into the published Silmarillion (Silm.175, 178–9), in a text largely derived from the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion (HME V.295).
Within The Hobbit itself, the unnatural behavior of the bats (who although they do sometimes flock in great numbers are not carrion-eaters and thus would not follow an army as crows or ravens often did) was accentuated. Not only do they blot out the sun when they descend into the valley but ‘swirled about the heads and ears of elves and men’, adding to the chaos and confusion of the scene. Tolkien later (in the typescript, 1/1/67:5–6) added details that make the bats much more sinister, such as the bat-cloud’s ‘filling them with dread’ as it whirls above the defenders, or most notably later in the battle when the bats ‘fastened vampire-like on the stricken’.
One other example of bats allying with goblins to stage an attack very slightly postdates The Hobbit, having been written in December 1933, but is so nearly contemporaneous and so striking that it deserves special mention here. In the 1933 Father Christmas Letter, Fr. Christmas awakes to see a goblin looking in his window, despite the fact that that window faces out above a cliff several hundred feet high. He realizes that this ‘meant there were bat-riding Goblins about – which we haven’t seen since the goblin-war in 1453’. The goblins of t
he Father Christmas Letters are smaller than human-size (as are the elves whom we see in combat with them in this same letter’s illustrations), but still these must have been extremely large bats, larger than any existing in the real world. The bat-messengers of Morgoth in the legendarium, such as Thuringwethil (‘the messenger of Sauron’, whose name means ‘Woman of Secret Shadow’; Silm.178), were clearly of more or less human size, but these might have been were-bats rather than actual animals however enhanced since Lúthien can assume Thuringwethil’s form and flying ability by putting on her ‘bat-fell’ (literally a bat-skin or bat-hide). We cannot tell exactly how large the bats accompanying Bolg’s army were, but between the manuscript and the published book Tolkien did change the description of the bats in western Mirkwood from ‘big’ to ‘huge’ (Chapter VIII) and those fastening on the fallen became not merely bats but ‘great’ bats (Chapter XVII). At any rate, they were certainly not large enough for goblins to ride or to combat eagles (in either of which cases they would have counted as an ‘army’ in themselves), and mainly served to darken the sky (thus providing cover for the sun-shy goblins), to prevent effective arrow-fire from the elves (who are, after all, legendary archers), and disconcert and dismay the defenders – at all of which they succeeded all too well.
The History of the Hobbit Page 88
