They saw him sooner than he saw them. Yes they saw him. Whether it was an accident or a last trick of the ring before it took a new master, it was not on his finger! With yells of delight the goblins rushed upon him.TN44
A pang of fear and loss, like an echo of Gollum’s,TN45 smote Bilbo, and forgetting even to draw his sword he stuck his hand[s] in his pocket[s], And there was the ring still, in his left pocket, and it slipped on his finger. The goblins stopped short. They could not see a sign of him. [The >] He had vanished! They yelled twice as loud as before, but not so delightedly.
p.100 l.14 in three goes.] So I said what about your promise? Show me the way out! But he came at me to kill me, and I ran [added: & fell over] and he missed me in the dark. Then I followed him, because I heard him talking to himself. He thought I really knew the way out, and so he was making for it. And then he sat down in the entrance and I couldn’t get by. So I jumped over him and escaped, and ran on down to the gate.TN46
l.26 respect, when he talked] about jumping over Gollum, [dodging guards . . .TN47
p.101 l.6 from bottom Gandalf knew all about] the back-door as the goblins called the lower gate [where Bilbo
This marks the end of the new Gollum-story Tolkien drafted in 1944 and sent to Allen & Unwin in 1947. Accompanying the typescript pages of new text was a sheet (Ad.Ms.H.76–7) listing errata Tolkien had discovered and wished for them to fix in the next printing, as was their usual practice. To distinguish it from the ‘Proposed correction of Hobbit’ (see page 732) of the next six sheets, this sheet is given its own title, ‘Errors in “The Hobbit”’; see page 749 below.
Note that close comparison of this fair copy and typescript with Tolkien’s spirited reading of the entire encounter with Gollum, recorded in July 1952 at George Sayer’s home, reveals that Tolkien used a copy of the newly published book as his text on that occasion.
TEXT NOTES
1 These pages are neatly written with a minimum of cancellations and revisions (at least until the last three paragraphs, which are ink over pencil drafting and seem to have been added slightly later; see Text Note 46 below). They are written on the back of torn half-pages that were once mimeographs detailing the language of the C-scribe of The Owl and the Nightingale; Christopher Tolkien notes that this paper was ‘extensively used in the later chapters of The Two Towers’ [annotation to Ad.Ms.H.34]. He also points out, in his introduction to The Notion Club Papers, that his father borrowed the name ‘Nicholas Guildford’ for one of the prominent members of the pseudo-Inklings ‘Notion Club’ from a character in this early Middle English dialogue [circa 1200] (HME IX.150).
2 This replaced ‘before the goblins came, and he was cut off from his friends far under under the mountains’
3 In the typescript, ‘If it asks us, and we doesn’t answer, then we does what it wants, eh? We shows it the way out, yes!’ replaces ‘If it asks us, and we doesn’t answer, we gives it a present, gollum!’ from the first edition.
4 The typescript introduces this extended passage with ‘For the passage from page 91, l. 15 beginning But funnily enough and ending with not so delightedly on page 95, l. 8 substitute the following account’. For the text thus replaced, see page 160 & ff of this book, the parallel-text presentation in Bonniejean Christensen’s ‘Gollum’s Character Transformation in The Hobbit’ in A Tolkien Compass, ed. Jared Lobdell [1975, abridged edition 2003], and the textual marginalia in Douglas Anderson’s The Annotated Hobbit (rev. ed.) pages 128–31.
5 The typescript replaces ‘the ancient rules’ with ‘the ancient laws’.
6 Here and on all but one subsequent occurrences the word ‘baggins’ was written in lowercase in the manuscript but was carefully hand-corrected to ‘Baggins’ in ink in the typescript; only in Gollum’s parting curse was it typed ‘Baggins’ from the start.
7 The words ‘cross’ and ‘impatient’ were reversed in the typescript.
8 This passage originally read
‘Well, hurry up!’ said Bilbo, relieved to think of Gollum going away at least. He thought this was just an excuse, and did not mean to come back, but
9 The typescript reads ‘endless dark days’; the original image perhaps more strongly captured the horrific eternal present in which the unaging Gollum has become trapped by the Ring.
10 Here ‘faint and shaky’ was changed to ‘shaky and faint’. The idea that the ring-wearer’s shadow can be seen in strong light is still present in the second and subsequent editions of The Hobbit, although this feature of the Ring came to be altogether ignored in The Lord of the Rings.
11 The opening of this paragraph was recast and supplemented by ink over pencil drafting in the margin to read
‘My birthday-present! It came to me on my birthday, my precious!’ So he had always said to himself, but who knows . . .
12 Although heavily cancelled the word ‘Necromancer’ is clear here, but was struck out at once and replaced with ‘Master’. The typescript includes a second significant change, where made is erased and replaced in ink with ruled. So that instead of ‘the Necromancer [> Master] who made them’ we get ‘the Master who ruled them’. Had the original name survived it would have been the only time in The Hobbit that a specific connection would have been drawn between the sinister Necromancer in his tower and Gollum’s ring. Even the replacement offers a subtle link between the two books, since ‘the Master who ruled them’ is a close synonym of the second book’s title, ‘the lord of the rings’.
13 This is further changed in ink on the typescript to ‘a few hours ago’. The removal of ‘yesterday’ was necessitated by the fact that there was no way of keeping track of the passage of days in the dark beneath the mountains; cf. the ‘endless unmarked days’ on page 738. See also Text Note 28 below.
The ‘small goblin-imp’ captured, throttled, and eaten by Gollum is probably our only encounter in the legendarium with an orc-child. Again, see Text Note 28 for Tolkien’s description of it as not just ‘little’ but ‘young’.
14 There are no skipped lines, such as the one following this paragraph, in the manuscript; all the ones in this chapter I have taken from the typescript, none of which carry over into Allen & Unwin’s page proofs.
15 The last half of this sentence, everything after ‘the last of him,’ was bracketed and then cancelled.
16 In the typescript, the extra sibilant is absent from the first ‘iss’ but an additional one appears in the first ‘Lost’, so that the line now reads ‘Where is it? Where iss it? . . . Losst it is, my precious . . .’ (emphasis mine).
17 Again, the typescript changes ‘lost’ to ‘losst’.
18 This sentence was revised to read ‘anything Gollum wanted so much could hardly be something good.’
19 This last sentence was slightly simplified in the typescript, to ‘It must tell first’.
20 This sentence was only achieved after three attempts. Originally Tolkien wrote:
. . . should not tell – naturally his [<?guessing> >] suspicion awoke slower than Gollum’s, who had brooded on this one thing for ages and ages – Gollum’s mind had jumped to a guess quicker
Then he stopped, cancelled everything between the dashes, and continued:
. . . should not tell – Gollum’s mind had jumped to a guess quicker than Bilbo’s naturally – Gollum had brooded on this one thing for ages and ages
Then again everything after ‘quicker than’ was cancelled, and the text given on page 735 written in the left margin. The typescript, along with some adjustments in punctuation and capitalization, changes the wording and arrangement slightly:
. . . for Gollum had brooded for ages on this one thing, and he was always afraid of its being stolen.
22 This sentence was changed to read ‘Bilbo could not guess what had maddened the wretched creature, but he saw that all was up, and that Gollum meant to murder him after all.’
23 The typescript changes leaped to leapt here, but ‘leaped’ was retained on Ad.Ms.H.48 (Ms) and Ad.Ms.H.81 (Ts). See page 738: ‘as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped’, and contrast DAA.130 (‘Gollum leapt from his boat’) with DAA.133 (‘[Bilbo] leaped. No great leap for a man . . .’).
24 Both of these changes are made in ink over pencil. The phrasing of this sentence is thematically significant: Bilbo does not put on the ring (subject-active verb-object) nor is a passive construction used but rather it slips on his finger (again subject-active verb-object, but with the Ring being the actor and Bilbo the acted upon). See Text Note 44 below.
25 This paragraph was revised in pencil, some of which was overwritten in ink:
In a moment Gollum reached him. But before Bilbo could do anything recover his breath, pick himself up, or wave his sword, Gollum passed on, taking no notice of him, cursing and whispering as he ran.
The typescript refines the phrasing slightly:
In a moment Gollum was on him . . . Gollum passed by, taking no notice . . .
26 Later Tolkien added in the margin ‘and sheathed his sword
Originally this action had occurred several paragraphs later; see page 736 and Text Note 29.
27 The change from ‘guess’ to ‘guesses’ was not taken up in the typescript and does not appear in the published second edition. The change from ‘Curse it!’ to ‘Curse the Baggins’ is added above the line in ink over pencil.
28 This ‘yesterday’ escaped Tolkien’s attention (see Text Note 13 above) and thus made its way into the typescript and then the page proofs, where it was corrected to read ‘When we came this way last, when we twisted that nassty young squeaker’ (Ad.Ms.H.56). On the bottom of this page Tolkien explained:
yesterday won’t do. G. knew no days
cf. unmarked days p. 98
This last is a reference to ‘endless unmarked days without light’; see page 738 above.
29 The typescript has ‘sheathed his sword’ rather than the manuscript’s ‘hid his sword’, then all of the sentence after ‘the tunnel wall’ is cancelled (in ink) and the passage entered (in pencil) several paragraphs earlier; see Text Note 26. The original idea that Bilbo kept his sword in hand while following the person who is trying to kill him presents the hobbit as wary in a desperate situation; the revision lays more stress on his wishing to move silently and undetected in dangerous circumstances.
30 These sentences were altered to read
‘But if the baggins has found the present, we shan’t see it. It’ll escape us, gollum! It’ll go away, away with our present, gollum!
‘But it doesn’t know about the present [> precious > present].’
These lines were then bracketed and the word ‘omit’ written beside them; these sentences are indeed absent from the typescript, which merges the rest of this paragraph with the one preceding it (‘. . . and squeezes it. But it doesn’t know what the present can do . . .’).
31 The word I read as ‘leave’ here might also be ‘have’ (‘It’ll just have it in its pocketses’); at any rate, over it Tolkien pencilled ‘keep’, and this became the reading in the typescript.
In a rare case of a dropped sibilant, the typescript and proof read ‘lost’ for the ‘losst’ in the following sentence.
32 Changed to ‘It knows. It knows a way in, it must know a way out, yes. It’s off to the back-door, yes to the back door, that’s it.’
33 The typescript reverses this: ‘Two right, yes, yes. Two left, yes’, probably to avoid the impression that the tunnels fall into a neat unvarying pattern of right, left, right, left, &c.
34 This sentence was changed to read ‘Seven right, yes; six left, yes!’
35 On the typescript, Tolkien marked for these two sentences to be transposed. This direction was not carried out for some reason, for they appear in the original order in the page proofs. He seems to have begun to mark the proof page in pencil requesting this change and then erased his directions.
36 This paragraph was revised, both in ink and pencil, to read
Bilbo crept away from the wall more quietly than a mouse; but Gollum stiffened at once, and sniffed; and his eyes went green. He hissed softly but menacingly. He could not see the hobbit, but now he was on the alert and he had other senses that the darkness had sharpened: hearing and smell. He seemed to be crouched right down with his flat hands splayed on the floor and his head thrust out, nose almost to the stone. Though he was only a black shadow in the gleam of his own eyes, Bilbo could see or feel that he was tense as a bow string, gathered for a spring.
37 I cannot read this cancelled word, but it lacks a descender at the end and thus is not orc-thing; orc-hun[ter] is more probable. The typescript (Ad.Ms.H.81) replaces this with the familiar ‘. . . He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out’.
38 This paragraph was carefully revised, and since it is perhaps the most important in the book from the point of view of the sequel – certainly, at least, the key passage in the second edition revisions – I reproduce the whole paragraph as revised here for comparison with the original in the text.
Bilbo stopped breathing and went stiff himself. He was desperate. He must get away, out of this horrible darkness, while he had any strength left. He must fight. He must stab the foul thing, put its eyes out, kill it. It meant to kill him. But no, not a fair fight. He was invisible now. Gollum had no sword. Gollum had not actually tried to kill him yet. And he was miserable, alone, lost. A sudden understanding, a pity mixed with horror, welled up in Bilbo’s heart; a glimpse of endless unmarked days without light, hard stone, cold fish, sneaking and whispering. All these thoughts passed in a flash of a second. He trembled. And then quite suddenly in another flash, as if lifted by a new strength and resolve, he leaped.
The typescript again revises this slightly but significantly (‘. . . almost stopped breathing . . . No, not a fair fight . . . had not actually threatened to kill him, or tried to yet . . . without light or hope of betterment . . .’), achieving the text of the published second edition (see DAA.133).
Bilbo’s sudden insight into Gollum’s inner life here is on par with the unwitnessed moment outside Shelob’s lair when Gollum briefly appears as ‘an old weary hobbit, shrunken by the years that had carried him far beyond his time, beyond friends and kin, and the fields and streams of youth, an old starved pitiable thing’ (LotR.742) – not surprisingly, because both were written at about the same time (cf. HME VIII.183–184, when Christopher dates this chapter in The Lord of the Rings to May 1944).† Most significant here is the change in the original of his, he to its, it when Bilbo is preparing to kill ‘It’, literally depersonalizing his intended victim, and the shift preserved in the final text back to his using he to describe Gollum, along with once again using his name, once Bilbo begins to treat Gollum as a fellow creature again and therefore is unable to murder him, even in self-defense.
† Assuming, of course, that this scene was in the original manuscript of that chapter, which is now lacking that section – cf. HME VIII.192.
39 Several small abridgments and some re-arrangement produced the familiar final version of this paragraph (cf. DAA.133).
40 The manuscript here (page 8, Ad.Ms.H.48) clearly reads ‘fled over’, while the typescript (page 5, Ad.Ms.H.81) has ‘fled over him’. The proof
s (page 98, Ad.Ms.H.58) give instead ‘flew over him’. Tolkien marked for this to be changed to fled, but for some reason the change was not made and the printer’s reading persisted into the published book (second edition page 98; DAA.133).
The typescript of this paragraph includes one very minor departure from the fair copy: the replacement of ‘a hissing and a cursing’ with ‘a hissing and cursing’.
41 This marks the spot at which Tolkien’s 1952 audio recording of the Gollum chapter ends.
42 Once again the paragraph underwent minor changes for the typescript: ‘Goblins’ became ‘goblins’ (lower-cased), part of the cancelled passage was restored so that it was once more ‘nasty jagged stones in the floor’ that Bilbo stubbed his toes on, and the goblins are said to run ‘at a great speed’. More significantly, the use of the word orcs in the fair copy to describe ‘the big ones’ doubles the number of times this Silmarillion and Lord of the Rings term appears in the published Hobbit, †its only appearance in the original edition or manuscript being Bladorthin/ Gandalf’s warnings about trying to travel northward around Mirkwood (see page 244 and DAA.188); it also confirms our guesses about Bolg and his bodyguard (see page 711).
† The third mention, discussed in Text Note 37 above, not having survived into the typescript.
43 Only four minor changes differentiate the typescript from the fair copy in this paragraph: the replacement of glimmer by glimpse, the omission of ordinary (‘a pale out-of-doors sort of light’), the substitution of a proper noun for the pronoun (‘Then Bilbo began to run’), and the omission of along (‘Scuttling as fast as’). See the commentary on ‘The Vanishing People’ (page 402) for connotations of ‘glimmer’ Tolkien may have wished to avoid here.
A single page (Marq. 1/1/21:1) survives among the Lord of the Rings papers that corresponds almost exactly to the last page (page 6) of the typescript, beginning at the exact same point (‘a stone door’) and also stopping at the identical spot (‘. . . the lower gate [where Bilbo’). Comparison reveals that this neat pencil text is an intermediary stage between the manuscript (Ad.Ms.H.52) and typescript (Ad.Ms.H.82), probably drawn up by Tolkien as a guide to the creation of the latter. This page became separated from the rest of the Hobbit revision material, probably because the back of this sheet (1/1/21:2) bears some nearly illegible notes and rough drafting for a passage from The Lord of the Rings, dealing with calculations regarding the time needed for Boromir and the Nazgûl to travel from Gondor or Minas Tirith to Rivendell.
The History of the Hobbit Page 91
