The History of the Hobbit

by John D. Rateliff

  3 The absence of any mention of Thrym Thistlebeard from the 1950 Prefatory Note probably indicates that Tolkien had forgotten about him at this point, but in any case it would have been awkward to bring up a point hinging on a detail in an illustration in the introduction to a printing of the book that did not contain that picture.

  The Fortunate Misunderstanding

  In the end, Allen & Unwin’s failure to recognize that although the two batches of material Tolkien sent them on 21st September 1947 were similar in appearance they were different in kind, each having its own title or subtitle, proved to be a fortunate misunderstanding. Eager to please one of their authors when they could, especially at a time when Tolkien was becoming increasingly distressed over the length of the as-yet-unpublished Lord of the Rings in a time of paper shortages and by their lack of interest in The Silmarillion, they scrupulously incorporated all his changes into the next printing, even to the extent of replacing a five-page section of the old edition with a ten-page section in the new. As Christopher Tolkien points out (letter to Taum Santoski, 3rd March 1989), when Tolkien wrote in his cover letter of 21st September 1947 that he was sending Allen & Unwin ‘. . . some notes on The Hobbit; and (for the possible amusement of yourself and Rayner) a specimen of re-writing of Chapter V . . .’ (Letters p. 124; emphasis mine),1 the publisher failed to grasp that the ‘and’ linked two entirely distinct categories of material. When Stanley Unwin informed Tolkien on 27th September that he was ‘passing on The Hobbit corrections to our Production Department’, Tolkien naturally assumed he meant the first sheet – that is, parts (ii) and (iii) above and further assumed, since Unwin said nothing further about the ‘specimen of re-writing’, that its inclusion had proved impossible. Not until Unwin sent him the proofs of the revised sections the next time the book was up for reprint on 26th July 1950 did Tolkien discover that (i), (ii), and (iii) had all been accepted and, although surprised, he quickly decided to make any necessary changes in The Lord of the Rings manuscript to match this change:

  . . . I have now made up my mind to accept the change and its consequences. The thing is now old enough for me to take a fairly impartial view, and it seems to me that the revised version is in itself better, in motive and narrative – and certainly would make the sequel (if ever published) much more natural.

  —JRRT to SU, 1st August 1950; Letters p. 141.

  He further noted that

  Such people as I have consulted think that the alteration is in itself an improvement . . .

  —ibid., 10th September 1950; Letters p. 142.

  He had now begun work on the prefatory note requested by Allen & Unwin to explain the difference between the first and second editions, sending them one version of it with his 10th September letter – being careful to specify that this was

  . . . a specimen of the kind of thing that I should want to insert . . . This is not intended as copy; but if you would return it, with any comment you like, it would be helpful.

  —ibid., italics mine.

  This was probably the ‘long version’ – i.e., (A) or (B) – which was replaced by the ‘short version’ a few days later:

  I enclose . . . a copy of the briefest form of the prefatory note: which is intended as copy, if you should think it well to use it in the reprint.

  —JRRT to SU, 14th September 1950; Letters p. 142.

  Thus, the original first edition text was replaced by a new and improved text which so overwhelmed its predecessor in sales that the existence of the earlier version of the Gollum chapter soon came to be known only through references to it in the editions that supplanted it. The experience also showed Tolkien that he could revisit the book more than a decade later (1944 vs. 1930–33) and improve it while also binding it more closely to what had become his masterwork: The Lord of the Rings. This discovery would in turn lead first to ‘The Quest of Erebor’ in 1954 and ultimately to the Fifth Phase, the abortive third edition now known as the 1960 Hobbit.

  The Fifth Phase

  The 1960 Hobbit

  The second edition Hobbit showed Tolkien that he could revisit Bilbo’s story, even after a gap of years, and improve upon the original, while at the same time binding the story and its sequel more closely together. Roughly a decade after drafting that material, and several years after its publication, he returned to the story of the Unexpected Party and wrote ‘The Quest of Erebor’ [1954] – not a replacement for the opening chapter but in effect a complement to (and commentary on) it, retelling the story from Gandalf’s and the dwarves’ point of view. Focusing on the events that led Gandalf with Thorin & Company to Bilbo’s doorstep, it places Bilbo’s adventure in a larger – what we may call ‘strategic’ – context, as Gandalf considers how to counter the threat of Smaug in a war against Sauron, which he already foresees as impending some eighty years before the event. Fascinating though it is, ‘The Quest of Erebor’ does set one unfortunate precedent: it diminishes Bilbo in the reader’s eyes, casting him very much as a silly fellow puffing and bobbing on the mat. Gandalf, after describing Bilbo as ‘rather greedy and fat’, says the hobbit ‘made a complete fool of himself’ and ‘did not realize . . . how fatuous the Dwarves thought him . . . Thorin was much more . . . contemptuous than he perceived’ (UT.323–4).

  Ultimately, only a few paragraphs of ‘The Quest of Erebor’ made their way into the published Lord of the Rings (LotR.1115 & 1116), but clearly Tolkien did not so much reject this material as merely find himself forced to cut it for reasons of space. When, around 1960, he decided to undertake a detailed revision of The Hobbit and fully reconcile it to the later story in chronology, geography, and style, he drew upon this unpublished material when recasting The Hobbit into The Lord of the Rings’ image. This is not to say that he inserted passages from the alternative opener into the earlier book, or even that he had the 1954 material before him as he worked, but rather that he approached Bilbo’s story from the point of view of the rejected Appendix material, very much to Bilbo’s disadvantage.

  It has long been known that the last work Tolkien did on The Hobbit, the third edition of 1966, came about at his publisher’s request, since the appearance of the unauthorized Ace paperbacks of The Lord of the Rings in the summer of 1965 meant that Houghton Mifflin and now Ballantine Books needed him to produce a revised authorized text in order to belatedly assert the American copyright. Humphrey Carpenter describes how Tolkien began, and

  spent many hours searching for some revision notes that he had already made, but he could not find them . . . When the next day he did get down to The Hobbit he found a good deal of it ‘very poor’ and had to restrain himself from rewriting the entire book.

  — Tolkien: A Biography, pages 227–8.

  These ‘revision notes’, the Fifth Phase or 1960 Hobbit, are far more extensive than Carpenter’s account indicates, in fact nothing less than a wholesale recasting of the book into the mold of its sequel. Aside from this passing mention in Carpenter’s book, this material remained wholly unknown until Christopher Tolkien read a substantial section from it as his Guest of Honor presentation at the 1987 Marquette Tolkien Conference (Mythcon XVIII). It is here published, in its entirety, for the first time.

  The 1960 Hobbit does not form a continuous text, but rather a series of passages, some brief and some extensive, intended to replace their second edition equivalents – very much as the Fourth Phase replaced superseded passages from the first edition. As with that material (see page 732), I have retained Tolkien’s page and line numbers, on the theory that these chapters of The Hobbit are so familiar, and the range of pages so short, that it is easy for readers with any edition to locate the specific passage Tolkien means for comparison. Like the 1947 Hobbit, the Fifth Phase greatly expands upon the original in some places. Most of the material exists only in a single typescript, and it seems to have been composed on the typewriter. Although there are extensive plot-notes associated with the timeline and phases of the moon, very little rough drafting of the actual chapters survive
s; I give the few exceptions at the end of this chapter. I have divided the typescript and associated material into three groups:

  • New Chapter I, which consists of fourteen pages of typescript [Ad.Ms.H.62–75], numbered 1 through 14 in the center at the top of each page; the first eight pages are double-spaced, the last six single-spaced. Appended to this I give excerpts from the two isolated sheets [Ad.Ms.H.12 & Ad.Ms.H.18] which contain very rough drafting for a few individual lines.

  • New Chapter II, eight crowded single-spaced pages of typescript [Ad.Ms.H.25–32], numbered ‘II 1’, ‘II 2’, and the like in the upper right corner. This is immediately followed by about a single page’s worth of text (single-spaced typescript) for New Chapter III, starting in the middle of the last page of New Chapter II and halting about a third of the way down the next page [Ad.Ms.H.32–3] but given its own pagination (‘III 1’ and ‘III 2’, respectively). I follow this with the text of a single sheet of notes [Ad.Ms.H.11] which contains a few queries or reminders of points that need addressing in the preceding New Chapters.

  • Timelines and Itinerary, which consists of four pages of single-spaced typescript [Ad.Ms.H.21–4] giving a detailed, day-by-day summary of Thorin & Company’s trip from Bag-End to Rivendell; four pages of manuscript notes [Ad.Ms.H.19, 20, 13] covering the same ground in rougher form; and six pages of rough notes [Ad.Ms.H.15–18], not wholly legible, dealing with problems in the tale’s chronology, particularly focusing on the phases of the moon.

  Since this text is wholly unknown, aside from those fortunate enough to have been present at Christopher Tolkien’s reading at Marquette in 1987, I have here reversed my normal procedure. In all the earlier sections of this book I give the earliest recoverable version of a text, striving to record the first glimpses as Tolkien puts words down on the page, since the final polished form of that text is familiar to all his readers from the published book. Here by contrast I give the final text in all cases, with all significant earlier readings given in Text Notes. A number of ellipses or rows of dots are in the original; these are given in closed format as Tolkien typed them (...), to distinguish them from omissions made in the notes or transcriptions by myself as editor (. . .).

  New Chapter I

  A Well-Planned Party

  In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty wet hole, filled with worms and an oozy smell, nor a dry hole, bare and sandy, with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort.

  It had a round door like a porthole, painted green, with a yellow brass knob in the exact middle. The door opened into a long hall, shaped like a tunnel, airy, but dark when the lamps were not lit. Its floor was tiled and carpeted, there were polished chairs against the walls, and rows of pegs for hats and coats – the hobbit was fond of visitors. The tunnel went on a good way into the side of the hill, the Hill of Hobbiton, near the top of which the hobbit lived; and many little round doors opened out of it, first on one side and then on the other. No going upstairs for the hobbit: bedrooms, bathrooms, cellars, pantries, wardrobes (rooms full of clothes), kitchens, breakfast-room, dining-room, drawing room, all were on the same floor. The best rooms were all on the lefthand side as you went in, for only these had windows, deep-set round windows looking over the garden to meadows beyond, sloping down to the river.

  The hobbit was very well-to-do, it was said, and his name was Baggins. The Bagginses had lived in the neighbourhood of Hobbiton for time out of mind, and people considered them very respectable, not only because most of them were rich, but also because they never had any adventures nor did anything unexpected: you could tell what a Baggins would say on any question without the trouble of asking him. But this story tells how a Baggins had an adventure, and found himself saying and doing things altogether unexpected. He got caught up in great events, which he never understood; and he became enormously important, though he never realized it.

  How astonishing this was will be better understood by those who know something about hobbits; and some account of them is really needed nowadays for they are becoming rare, and they avoid the Big People, as they call us. They were a small people, about half our height or less, often smaller than the Dwarves of those days, to whom they were quite unrelated: hobbits never have beards. They loved peace and the quiet of a well-ordered and well-farmed countryside; most of them were in fact farmers in a small way, though many were clever with tools. They had long and skilful fingers and made many useful and well-shaped things, mostly of wood or clay or leather [> glass]. But there were very few shoemakers among them, for they seldom wore either shoes or boots. They did not need them, for their feet had tough leathery soles, and were covered as high as the ankles in thick curling hair, warm and brown like the hair on their heads. They had good-natured faces, broad, bright-eyed and red-cheeked, and mouths shaped for laughter. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily; for they were fond of jests at all times, and liked six meals a day (when they could get them).

  They dressed in bright colours, especially yellow and green, for they delighted in fields and trees. Though they were inclined to grow rather fat, and did not hurry unnecessarily,TN1 they were nimble; and quick of hearing too, and sharp-eyed. They had from the first the art of moving swiftly and silently, disappearing when large folk or beasts that they did not wish to meet came blundering by. To us that might seem magical; but Hobbits have never in fact studied magic of any kind, their skill is a gift improved by long practice and helped by their friendship with the earth and all growing things.

  More could be said, but for the present that is a good enough description of Hobbits, or at least of that kind that in those days lived, as they had done for hundreds of years, in the little land that they called the Shire, away in the North-west of the world.

  The chief family in the Shire were the Tooks, whose lands lay across The Water, the small river that ran at the foot of the Hill. Now that is important, forTN2 the mother of the hobbit of this tale, Bilbo Baggins, was Belladonna Took, eldest of the three remarkable daughters of the Old Took, head of all the Tooks, and famous for having lived to the age of one hundred and thirty. It was often said (in other families) that the Tooks must have some elvish blood in them: which was of course absurd, but there was undoubtedly some thing queer about them, something not quite hobbitlike, according to the manners of the Shire: an outlandish strain maybe from long ago.TN3 Every now and again Tooks would go off on adventures. They disappeared, and the family hushed it up.

  Not that Belladonna Took ever had any adventures after she married Bungo Baggins. Bungo, that was Bilbo’s father, built for her the most commodious hobbit-hole that was to be found in that part of the Shire, always excepting the vast and many-tunneled dwelling of the Tooks. It was meant, of course, to house a large family. But Bilbo was their only son, and they both died young – for hobbits – being still in their early eighties. And there now was Bilbo, in the commodious hole, looking and behaving like a second edition of his solid and comfortable father. But maybe there was something a little peculiar in his make-up coming from the Took side, hidden, but waiting for a chance to come out. The chance never arrived, until Bilbo Baggins was grown up, indeed about fifty years old, and had apparently settled down immovably.

  One morning long ago in the quiet of the world, when the hobbits were still numerous and prosperous, and their green corner of the great lands was still enjoying its long peace,TN4 Bilbo Baggins was standing at his door after breakfast, smoking a long wooden pipe.TN5 At that moment Gandalf appeared. Gandalf!TN6 Those who go in for Ancient History will prick up their ears, though few know all there is to tell about him. Wherever he went strange things happened, and he left behind him marvellous tales. All the same he seemed fond of hobbits, and at one time he had often visited the Shire. But it was now many years since he had appeared there, except for a brief visit when his friend the Old Took died, and that was now at least twenty years ago. So most even of the older folk in Hobbiton had almost forgott
en what he looked like. He had been far away, ‘over the Hill and across the Water’ as they said, on business of his own,TN7 since they were young. To little hobbits he was just a character in fireside tales.

  All that Bilbo saw that morning was an old man with a tall pointed blue hat, a long grey cloak, and a silver scarf, over which his white beard hung down below his waist. He had tall black boots, and leaned on a staff.

  ‘Good morning!’ said Bilbo cheerily. The sun was shining and the grass was very green. But Gandalf looked at him from under his bushy eyebrows that bristled beneath the brim of his hat.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘That it is a fine morning, and you feel pleased with yourself? Perhaps you wish me to feel pleased too. I may. We’ll see’.

  ‘Indeed I hope you will’, said Bilbo. ‘Why not? It is a fine morning anyway for a pipe of tobacco out of doors.TN8 If you have a pipe with you, pray take a seat and try some of my weed: it is “Old Toby”. There is no hurry. All the day’s before us’. Then Bilbo sat down on the bench by his door, crossed his legs, and blew out a beautiful grey ring of smoke that sailed up into the air without breaking and floated away over the Hill.

  ‘Very pretty!’ said Gandalf. ‘But I have no time to blow smoke-rings today. I am looking for someone to share in an adventure that I am arranging, and it is very difficult to find anyone suitable’.

  ‘I should think so – in these parts. We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing things! Make you late for dinner! I can’t think why anybody has them’. With that Mr. Baggins stuck a thumb behind his braces, and blew out another even bigger smoke-ring. Then he took out his morning letters, and began to read, pretending to take no more notice of the old man. He was not the kind of visitor he liked; he made him feel uncomfortable. He wished he would go away. But the old man did not move. He stood leaning on his staff and gazing at the hobbit without saying a word, till Bilbo began to feel annoyed.