(iv)
‘The Halls of Waiting’
‘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. Since I leave now all gold and silver and go where it is of little worth, I wish to part in friendship with you, and would take back my words and deeds at the Gate.’
— page 679; cf. DAA.348.
This passage, with its interesting glimpse into the dwarven afterlife (or at least the dwarves’ beliefs about what would happen to them after death), was completely without parallel in the legendarium when it was first written. Nothing so marks the distance between Tolkien’s initial conception of the dwarves as set down in The Book of Lost Tales1 and dwarves as presented in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as this disagreement over their fate. From very early on in the legendarium the divergent fates of Men and Elves were a key part in the story: humans who die depart from the world and do not return; their souls leave Arda (Creation) altogether, whereas elves travel to the Halls of Mandos in Valinor to wait until they can be re-incarnated. Dwarves initially fit into neither of these categories – the occasional references in The Hobbit to ‘Mortal Men’ and the extremely long lifespans indicated for dwarves (Thrain having gone away a hundred years ago, many of Dain’s band being hale and hearty veterans of a war that took place well before that, Thorin and Balin remembering events that the 153-year-old raven is too young to have experienced first-hand, the elvenking’s threat to imprison Gandalf/Thorin for a hundred years before questioning him again) show they are not exactly mortal, or at least have a lifespan far, far beyond human years. As all readers of The Lord of the Rings know, Tolkien had his own definitions of mortal and immortal: ‘Mortal Men’ are ‘doomed to die’ (LotR ring-verse) because they have a finite lifespan and eventually die of sheer old age, unlike dragons (who ‘live . . . practically for ever, unless they are killed’ – DAA.55; cf. page 72) and elves (on the battlefield ‘lay . . . many a fair elf that should have lived yet long ages merrily in the wood’ – DAA.344; cf. page 672). Tolkien’s elves are ‘immortal’ in that they do not die of age, disease, or natural causes, although they can be killed; as Tolkien says in his 1965 radio interview with Denys Gueroult, their life-spans extend to the habitability of this planet and ‘longeval’ might have been a better choice than ‘immortal’ as most understand the term.2 And even if killed, elves are re-incarnated with the same memories, personalities, and (apparently) appearance, so that death is for them a temporary state, an interruption of their ‘serial longevity’ (Letters p. 267).
With the dwarves, in The Hobbit and subsequent works Tolkien created a third alternative. The early legendarium texts, in which dwarves play a relatively minor part, do not address the question of what happens after dwarves die, making Thorin’s dying words (written in December 1932 or January 1933) the first time this issue had been addressed. Oddly enough, several years later (circa 1937), when Tolkien inserted several references to the dwarves’ fate in various component texts that he hoped would go together to make up The Silmarillion (cf. HME V.167 & 202 and HME IV.284), his comments flatly contradict what had already been stated in The Hobbit and instead harken back to the Book of Lost Tales and 1930 Quenta. These new legendarium texts, written from an elvish point of view, suggest that dwarves are soulless and simply cease to exist upon death:
Dwarves have no spirit indwelling, as have the Children of the Creator [i.e., elves and men], and they have skill but not art; and they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made.
—‘(Later) Annals of Beleriand’, HME V.129.
Similar comments are made in the Lhammas (HME V.178), and the 1937 Quenta Silmarillion agrees that dwarves ‘return unto the earth and the stone of the hills of which they were fashioned’ (HME V.273). This is clearly an allusion back to Old Norse lore which we have already touched on back in the commentary following Chapter II (see Note 9 on page 109), particularly the fate of the dwarf Alvis in the Elder Edda, who is turned to stone at the end of the Alvíssmál. It also clearly cannot be reconciled with Thorin’s dying words, and it was not long before the Quenta Silmarillion text was altered to bring it into accord with the concept alluded to in The Hobbit. The revised QS text reads
the Noldor believed that the Dwarves have no spirit indwelling . . . and that they go back into the stone of the mountains of which they were made. Yet others say that Aulë cares for them, and that Ilúvatar will accept from him the work of his desire, so that the Dwarves shall not perish.
—HME V.146; emphasis mine.
This is remarkable as the first instance3 of the older legendarium being altered to match Bilbo’s story; the newly published book clearly has gained an authority over as-yet unpublished material within what had till then been the more venerable main lineage, just as The Lord of the Rings would later gain authority over both, requiring further work on The Hobbit that became the Fourth Phase and Fifth Phase (the 1947 Hobbit and 1960 Hobbit, respectively). Further development of the ideas suggested in Thorin’s dying speech appears in The Lord of the Rings’ Appendix A (‘Durin’s Folk’), where it is noted that ‘strange tales’ of the dwarves’ origins are told ‘both by the Eldar and by the Dwarves themselves’ (LotR.1108), one of which is the idea ‘that there are no dwarf-women, and that the Dwarves “grow out of stone”’ (LotR.1116) – so that what was once an authoritative statement is now dismissed as a ‘foolish opinion’ (ibid.). We also now meet with the story of Durin the Deathless (Durin I), who has been reincarnated five times (Durin II–VI) and has one remaining incarnation yet to come (‘Durin VII & Last’; LotR.1108 & 1117); although each body dies, his time between lives is referred to as ‘sleep’ (‘Till Durin wakes again from sleep’ – LotR.334).
A full explication of Thorin’s words, if any was needed, had to wait until the Later Quenta [circa 1951], which magisterially embraces and places into harmony all the previous discordant thoughts on the subject:
[The Dwarves] live long, far beyond the span of Men, and yet not for ever. Aforetime the Noldor held that dying they returned unto the earth and the stone of which they were made; yet that is not their own belief. For they say that Aulë cares for them and gathers them in Mandos in halls set apart for them, and there they wait, not in idleness but in the practice of crafts and the learning of yet deeper lore. And Aulë, they say, declared to their Fathers of old that Ilúvatar . . . will . . . give them a place among the Children in the End. Then their part shall be to serve Aulë and to aid him in the re-making of Arda after the Last Battle.
—HME XI.204.
With the exception of the passage about the dwarven spirits’ activity during the period after their deaths – which seems to me to harken back to glimpses of the busy swart-álfar in some Norse sources, such as Snorri’s Prose Edda – this corresponds exactly with Thorin’s words, and provides the final clue of what he and the others will be waiting for: a challenge truly worthy of their skill, the chance to rebuild the world (Arda Marred) the way it should have been.4
(v)
Bilbo’s First Poem
The decision to incorporate not one, not two, but three poems into the final pages of the story not only fleshed out the brevity of this part of the book (even with three poems inserted into the text, the final chapter is still one of the shortest) but marked a return to the lighter mood of the early chapters after the sadness of Thorin’s death. We are told that ‘it was very long before [Bilbo] had the heart to make a joke again’ (page 679), and although we are told in passing that Yuletide was ‘warm and merry’ at Beorn’s house (page 682), not until after the elves’ second song are we shown that Bilbo has fully recovered, making ‘many a merry jest and dance’ (page 690). The inclusion of these songs also re-asserts a stylistic feature of the first half of the book: prose interrupted at unpredictable but frequent intervals by verse – a highly characteristic feature of both The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings that sets them apart from all Tolkie
n’s other work. Of the twenty-three poems in the published book, all but four occur in the first ten chapters, and only one of those chapters is altogether without a song (Chapter II).1 The addition of the poems thus helps create a sense of ‘back again’ by paralleling a stylistic reversion with Bilbo’s return to familiar regions.
Of these three poems, the first is more or less a continuation in much the same spirit of the elves’ song in the trees back in Chapter III. The sense that the song has gone on all the time Bilbo has been away juxtaposed with its now incorporating details from Bilbo’s adventures highlights the mix of timelessness and time’s passing that is characteristic of Rivendell throughout The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; it also reinforces the message that life goes on. The next poem is notable chiefly for the exuberance of its opening stanzas (particularly the striking image of the lights in the night sky as ‘windows of Night in her tower’), which segue into the lullaby of the second half. But it is the third poem, ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’, which is most notable: a celebration of both the allure of possibilities of unending travel and the joy of homecoming by someone whose journeys are now ending.
Roads go ever ever on,
Over rock and under tree,
By caves where never sun has shone,
By streams that never find the sea;
Over snow by winter sown,
And through the merry flowers of June,
over grass and over stone,
And under mountains in the moon.
Roads go ever ever on
Under cloud and under star,
Yet feet that wandering have gone
Turn at last to home afar.
Eyes that fire and sword have seen
And horror in the halls of stone
Look at last on meadows green
and trees and hills they long have known.2
Poems about roads and wanderlust and homecoming (‘there and back again’, as it were) are of course not uncommon: the very first line of the very first published poem of the legendarium began ‘I am off down the road’, and the same poem’s second half with ‘I must follow’ (‘Goblin Feet’, in Oxford Poetry 1915, page 64); the same volume contained fellow T.C.B.S. member G. B. Smith’s poem about a Roman road, probably Smith’s best poem and his most Tolkienesque piece:
This is the road the Romans made,
This track half lost in the green hills,
Or fading in a forest-glade
’Mid violets and daffodils.
The years have fallen like dead leaves,
Unwept, uncounted, and unstayed
(Such as the autumn tempest thieves)
Since first this road the Romans made.’3
A much closer parallel, however, to Bilbo’s poem is E. F. A. Geach’s ‘Romance’, which appeared in the same book as a reprint of ‘Goblin Feet’ (in fact, on the very next page following Tolkien’s poem):
Round the next corner and in the next street
Adventure lies in wait for you.
Oh, who can tell what you may meet
Round the next corner and in the next street!
Could life be anything but sweet
When all is hazardous and new
Round the next corner and in the next street?
Adventure lies in wait for you.4
Geach’s poem, while different in expression from Bilbo’s, nonetheless nicely anticipates its spirit and also that of two similar poems in the sequel, ‘The Road Goes Ever On’ (see below) and the hobbits’ walking song:
Still round the corner there may wait
A new road or a secret gate,
And though we pass them by today,
Tomorrow we may come this way
And take the hidden paths that run
Towards the Moon or to the Sun.
—The Lord of the Rings, page 91.
Similarly, Martin Simonson has pointed out how another of Tolkien’s fellow Georgian poets, Edward Thomas (sometimes known as ‘the English Frost’ from his friendship and affinities with his American contemporary, poet Robert Frost, who outlived him by almost half a century) seems to anticipate Tolkien’s poems in his own aptly-titled ‘Roads’:
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone
The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal
Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary
Though long and steep and dreary
As it winds on forever5
In the end, whatever his inspirations for ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’, once it was in existence it offered a prime example of Tolkien once again being his own most important source through creative recycling of earlier material. For the most significant poem that resembles ‘Roads Go Ever Ever On’ is of course Tolkien’s own ‘The Road Goes Ever On’, which essentially provides a third and final stanza to the earlier poem, recited by Bilbo when he finally takes to the road again (LotR.48) and also by Frodo when he at length sets off on his own adventure (LotR.86–7):
The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.6
The Fourth Phase
The 1947 Hobbit
The 1947 Hobbit – that is, the material Tolkien created around 1944 while working on The Lord of the Rings and sent to Allen & Unwin in 1947 as a way to bring the earlier book into harmony with its sequel – marks the first of a sequence of revisionings that led first to the second edition of The Hobbit [1951], then to ‘The Quest of Erebor’ [1954], and then finally to the 1960 Hobbit (the never-before published Fifth Phase). The first of these made adjustments within the original book to make it better match the sequel, the second retold a small portion of Bilbo’s story within the new book (or would have, had it been published as part of Appendix A as Tolkien originally intended), while the third re-envisioned a complete recasting of the old book to agree with the new in minute detail. Unlike these three, the ‘third edition’ Hobbit of 1966 was imposed upon him by outside circumstance (that is, the need to quickly produce an ‘authorized’ edition to belatedly assert the American copyright); by contrast, the others had all arisen from Tolkien’s internal compulsion to bring the old story of Bilbo’s adventure more strongly into accord with the new one of Frodo’s quest.
The Fourth Phase material exists in three states: ten sheets of fair copy manuscript numbered 1 to 10 in the upper right corner (Ad.Ms.H.34–53),TN1 followed by six pages of single-spaced typescript numbered 1 through 6 in the upper right corner (Ad.Ms.H.77–82), followed by eight typeset sheets (sixteen pages) from Allen & Unwin showing how the new material looked when typeset and allowing Tolkien to proofread the changes (Ad.Ms.H.54–61). The first of these dates from 1944; the second either from 1944 or 1947; the third from 1950. They represent, respectively, Tolkien’s manuscript of the rewritten passages; his ‘home copy’ of the typescript of this material that he sent to Allen & Unwin; and Allen & Unwin’s page proofs of the changed sections returned to Tolkien for proofing.
Aside from a few ink-over-pencil additions, no drafting survives for these changes, though the fair copy text is far too neatly written to have been spontaneously generated without careful preparation – for one thing, as was his usual practice when revising material already set in type, Tolkien has taken great pains to keep many of his changes as localized as possible, so that only that specific line or lines would have to be re-set without affecting the rest of the page (and thus upsetting the layout of every subsequent page). Although the greatly expanded encounter with Gollum did add five extra pages to the book’s length, it add
ed exactly five pages, so that for instance where page 99 in the first edition began with the words ‘“You would have dropped him,” said Dori’, page 104 in the second edition now began with those exact words; everything from the beginning of Chapter VI on has simply shifted five pages.
The History of the Hobbit Page 89
